We have made more updates to the Developer Library. The updates are as follows:

• Font sizes in different Harmattan releases is a chapter about the Harmattan default font Nokia Pure Text, and the differences in the font between software releases.
• Example of updating event feed with a D-Bus call is a chapter on enabling communication between Events View and your application over D-Bus.

Remember that the Developer Library is also available for downloading in HTML and as a QCH file, which you can integrate into your Qt SDK.

FOSDEM in 2012 was an exciting (and naturally, exhaustive) conference again. It's great to have so many relevant people who are all active in the free software world together in one place. It's also a great opportunity to discuss radical new ideas, ideally while experimenting with Belgium beer. Which is what we usually did when we weren't at the conference site.

It was nice to see Jarno and Esko at the conference, too. We even stayed in the same hotel. I hope they enjoyed the Ethiopian lunch as much as I did. And perhaps they're not too angry any more that we lead them to drink Absinthe ;-)

Jon and I gave two talks. Jon's talk (slides) was about Maliit as a project, explaining what Maliit is (and what it is not), combined with a short history lesson about the project. I tried to outline the difficulties of mobile text input in general (slides), picking some use-cases that are known from the desktop world and showing why simply copying the use-cases and their known interaction models does not work very well. I honestly liked Jon's talk more though.

Neither of us two actually managed to visit other talks, even though we wanted to. We had to ask Jarno, Esko and others about what great talks we missed. Apparently there were quite a few :-(

Our Maliit T-Shirts were well received, though we usually only handed them out when someone listened to our Maliit ramblings long enough.

We were asked about accessibility several times, which is currently not within the scope of Maliit but perhaps something to think about in the future.

We also got to talk with the people working on (text) input in Redhat and Intel, mostly in the context of Wayland. There are some interesting opportunities to get things (more) right this time around.

Thanks to our employer, Openismus, for sending us there!

Qt Innovation Challenge winners announced

Winners of the most popular N9 apps have walked away with $10,000 and, in the case of PhoneTorch, $50,000 as part of Nokia's "Qt Innovation Challenge". Participants were invited to enter the competition with: "We are looking for new and innovative content for use on this high-end, Qt-powered smartphone, and in particular we are looking for apps that match the sophisticated style and capabilities of the Nokia N9. This can include apps for entertainment, luxury and fashion, technology, travel and sport – to name a few. At the same time, maybe you will submit an app that makes innovative use of the front-facing camera on the Nokia N9, or takes advantage of features like NFC that are built-in to the phone."

Not wanting to begrude the winners but the competition failed in its aim: to make innovative, mainstream apps for the Qt platform and Nokia N9. The judging was done on number of downloads, rather than any subjective view of "innovativeness". Your editor didn't enter the competition as his in-train apps didn't meet his own definition of "innovation". However, very few of the winners do either.

This is the biggest problem with Harmattan: not the lack of apps (there are plenty), but the lack of innovative, distinctive apps which make you go "oooh".

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Qt Innovation Challenge winners announced
2. Development
   • Qt SDK 1.2 released
3. Announcements
   • LPMCustomizer in Store for N9
   • Fremantle stack for Mer

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-01-30 through 2012-02-05

CuteSoma (Soma.fm client for Nokia N9) has been available for 4 months now and it’s the right time to publish some interesting statistics about downloads. First of all I didn’t expect so much interest and I wasn’t sure to have so many downloads, due to the fact that Nokia never advertised this device properly. But luckly lot of people don’t care about advertising and buy a product anyway if they know it’s one of the best available on the smartphone market.

I’m really happy to notice that the number of downloads is growing each month, this motivates me to continue with development (well… when my N950 comes back from Nokia, since I had to send it because it was broken).

I want to thank all the 3658 people that downloaded CuteSoma until now and all the people that are sending me their feedback, ideas and patches (yes Cornelius Hald, I’m talking about you

A few Openismus people will be at FOSDEM In Brussels this weekend. FOSDEM is always a great conference, but I can’t be there myself as my travel is generally limited by the need to take care of my kids.

Michael Hasselmann and Jon Nordby are both giving talks about the Maliit input method framework, as seen on the N9. We are eager to find customers who need our help to integrate and improve this only real choice for an open-source on-screen keyboard. So we hope that some people of influence take the opportunity to get to know the project and its excellent developers.

Jens Georg is also giving a talk about Rygel, used in the N9 to support UPnP and DLNA. For German speakers, there are already video and slides online of a recent talk that Jens did about Rygel in Berlin for Deutsche Telekom’s Developer Garden. I was amused to discover that DLNA had specified themselves into a situation where a minimum certified server and a minimum certified receiver were only able to share a small resolution JPEG format. Apparently it’s getting better, and Rygel can deal with it all.

As mentioned in the earlier call for presentations, we're running a track on Open Mobile Linux in FOSDEM this Saturday. Room AW1.120 at the ULB campus in Brussels. From the CfP:

Our primary goal is to facilitate meetups, collaboration and awareness between different projects and communities within Open Mobile Linux and provide a place to present directions, ideas and your projects themselves.

By Open Mobile Linux we mean any open source projects revolving around typical non-desktop/server Linux, such as handsets, tablets, netbooks or other creative uses. Examples of such projects could be Qt5, Mer, MeeGo, Android, webOS, Plasma Active, Tizen, Boot to Gecko, SHR and other related efforts.

There are several exciting things happening in this space, including the recently announced Spark tablet, open sourcing of webOS's Enyo framework and continuing interest in the Maemo platform. Saturday's program includes:

• Mer ... and what you can do with it (David Greaves, 11:30-12:00)
• Openmoko Freerunner - Present and Future (Niels Heyvaert, 12:00-12:30)
• Towards Accelerated UI's on Mobile Linux With Power of Qt5 (Saija Eteläniemi, 12:30-13:00)
• Intro to Tizen and the Future of the Community (Dawn Foster, 13:00-13:30)
• buildroot: flexible building of a custom embedded system (Arnout Vandecappelle, 13:30-14:00)
• Deep Dive into KDE Mobile development on N9/N950 (Laszlo Papp, 14:00-14:30)
• Community Qt apps repository - way forward (Jukka Eklund, 14:30-15:00)
• Maliit - the open mobile text input project (Jon Nordby, 15:00-15:30)
• Nemo Mobile - How to contribute to the project (Marko Saukko, 15:30-16:00)
• Introduction to the QtOnPi project (Rajiv Ranganath, 16:00-16:30)
• An update on PIM storage and sync: SyncEvolution (Patrick Ohly, 16:30-17:00)
• OS in the Mobile App Stores (Thomas Bonte, 17:00-17:30)
• Rygel: Free and Open Mobile DLNA (Jens Georg, 17:30-18:00)

If there are any last-minute announcements or happenings that people want to discuss, we may be a ble to squeeze in a talk or two. Contact Carsten about this.

Also, if you want to chat other things (like PHPCR or CreateJS), I'll be around the whole weekend including the beer event. Drop me an SMS.

Looking forward to seeing as many of you there as possible!

Today, on 1.2, we have released an updated MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan target for Qt SDK 1.2. The target supports the forthcoming PR1.2 update of Harmattan. Any more "1.2"s in an announcement would probably cause a spontaneous rift in the space/time continuum, so it is better to stop milking this joke for any more laughs. 

Indeed, Qt SDK 1.2 is released today, and it includes a Harmattan target.

The changes in this version are far smaller than in the previous Harmattan target update (in 1.1.4 the Harmattan target got de-experimentalized), they are described in the release notes.

This time around the most visible changes are outside the Harmattan target. The installer now works without additional trickery on Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot. Qt Creator is updated to updated to version 2.4.1. Within the target, the QML debugging works again on the Harmattan 1.2 release (available only to N950 owners right now).

Happy Hacking!

Harmattan PR1.2 beta now available for N950

A beta release of the Harmattan 1.2 firmware has been released as a one-click flasher (OCF) for the N950 containing many bug fixes and some new features. Nokia's N9 Developer blog provides more details: "Harmattan 1.2 comes with a number of user experience improvements making it appealing for consumers. Five new supported languages, face recognition, enhanced copy-paste, software update notifications for applications and games in Nokia Store, folders in application view just to name a few."

"We have listed the most significant bug fixes in release notes and marked the fixed items in bugzilla. We excluded a long list of fixes e.g. on localization / terminology. Also, we put together information about known issues, limitations and differences between Nokia N950 developer Device and Nokia N9 for your convenience in the Release Notes. Suggest you read it carefully."

It should be noted that you cannot downgrade from 1.2 to 1.1 after install, and the default OCF installation wipes out all user data (music, photos, applications, etc). The actual new features and fixes are too numerous to list here, but the new font metrics will be of interest to most developers, and your editor's personal favourite is the colour schemes available in QML now.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Harmattan PR1.2 beta now available for N950
2. Development
   • Version numbering of Harmattan explained
3. Devices
   • Nokia N9 "may have sold 1.4m units last quarter"
4. In the Wild
   • Nokia N9 up for People's Choice Award at Interaction Awards for its swipe UI
5. Announcements
   • Widget system UI framework for N9 Harmattan
   • lpsmagic - system information on N9's standby screen

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-01-23 through 2012-01-29