I use IRC and I want to be able to share photos there easily. For n900 I had implemented a sharing plugin and that worked nicely. When I got the n950 I of course wanted to do the same with that but it turned out to be a difficult task.

I started to implement webupload and SSO plugins but I never got them to work. The biggest show stopper was lacking documentation for the SSO part. Finally Mika Suonpää pointed me to Share UI plugins and now, only a few days later, I have the first version of it working for n950 :)

For some reason I don’t get my icons visible, they are always shown as a red square. All hints about that are most welcome. As is testing and feedback of the plugin. The plugin settings are in Settings -> Applications -> Command-line Share, and from there you need to enable the plugin and set the command to be run. After that the sharing plugin is visible in the Gallery -> share.

The source code can be found here and the corresponding forum thread here.

We finally published a video about Maliit - an input method framework including a virtual keyboard - and 3rd party plugins. Kudos goes to Jon for making time for that.

This video highlights one of Maliit's key features: pluggable input methods which come with their very own user interfaces. The Chinese input methods show how Maliit offers support for composed characters. The video is proof that 3rd party development for Maliit (open-source and proprietary) is not only possible but also happening.

maliit.org states that "it should be easy to customize existing input methods or develop powerful new input methods, whether for profit, research or fun", we actually mean it.

The harder question is of course how to motivate others to actually get started on input method development with Maliit. For that, we have a multipronged strategy:

1. Provide sufficiently polished reference plugins that can show off Maliit capabilities but also serve as inspiration for new plugins (hence the BSD license for reference plugins). Our reference plugins are currently using Qt/C++ (Maliit Keyboard) and QML (Nemo Keyboard). We also have PySide support, but no one contributed a reference plugin yet. This gives choice to interested input method developers, and we think that's important. The reference plugins serve another role when it comes to designing new API: They become our testbed, allowing us to verify our API proposals.

2. Ship Maliit with a bunch of example plugins and example applications. None of them try to be complete. They are all self-contained though and usually show one feature at a time. This can be tedious to maintain, but we believe that examples need to stay small and focused, otherwise developers won't look at them.

3. Documentation that is easy to consume. Our documentation is not as concise and clear as we'd like it to be, but it's slowly improving. We also experiment with videos that can serve as an introduction to more in-depth (text) documentation.

4. Packages for most common Linux distributions. This one seems obvious, but sadly, it's quite a lot of work for us to keep up with it (and we already use automated services such as Launchpad and OpenSuse Build Service). In the hope to attract dedicated packagers we wrote down some packaging guidelines

5. An architecture that had 3rd party plugins and multiple toolkit support in mind from the start. The plugin developer facing API needs to be easy to use and clearly documented. This will be the focus of the upcoming 0.9x series.

We will demo Maliit @ FOSDEM 2012, hope to see you there!

A new version of gPodder - a podcast and video manager - has been released today. In addition to improvements to the existing YouTube support, this version adds support for downloading videos from Vimeo (so if you wanted to get ahold of ye olde Maemo 5 "Getting Started" video from two years ago, subscribe to metalab on Vimeo, but I'm pretty confident that you can come up with better uses of the Vimeo support ;).

Anyway, the new king of Harmattan repos is Apps For MeeGo, as everyone knows, and so start your Community QA engines and review gPodder 3.0.3 in Apps For MeeGo Testing. If you don't have the Apps For MeeGo Client on your N950 or N9, click here to download the enabler. It has also been uploaded to Ovi Publish, but if and when it appears there is anyone's guess. Don't hold your breath and switch to Apps For MeeGo for downloading (and publishing if you do!) your open source Harmattan apps.

The 3.0.3 version of gPodder packs some long overdue improvements to the Harmattan QML UI (for example, the toolbar has been cleaned up, an about box has been added and you can now check for new episodes from the toolbar) with more to come in the future. In general, 3.0.3 should provide you with a more Harmattan-esque user experience. You can always get your wishes and problems heard at the gPodder bug tracker - make use of it! :)

Front Page

Apps for MeeGo - how to use, submit & help evaluate applications

Niels Breet has posted an introduction to "Apps for MeeGo" for users, developers and people willing to test apps:

"We have been working on apps.formeego.org for a while. The idea is to have a community driven Apps catalog for open source applications. Created by the people who also contributed to maemo.org Downloads (More than 100M downloads and counting!), many of the concepts born there were brought along."

"This site includes a community driven QA part, where you can test apps and fill in a simple score card about the app. Once a certain amount of positive reports have been made, the app will automatically go to the stable Apps site. Apps will also go through some automated tests, so we can prevent broken applications from entering the repositories."

Unfortunately, the site and processes weren't in place for the N9 launch. This has meant the Nokia Store has become the default place for developers wishing to ship applications for the N9 (and N950). Discoverability of applications is also easier with Nokia Store for users; with no central Application Manager on Harmattan, users have to go to a specific client to see the apps available to them.

As touched upon by Thomas Perl last week, fragmentation of the N9 experience is a big problem for a niche platform - one it can ill afford. The extra overhead for developers of targetting the mainstream Store, updating meta-data sites like n9-apps and also dealing with OBS for Apps for MeeGo is something your editor, as a developer, does not look forward to. Metrics such as download counts will also be fragmented, giving developers - and users - inconclusive statistics.

Hopefully, Apps for MeeGo will succeed - but your editor can't help feeling it might be too late. Especially since there won't be any other MeeGo devices for which it could host content.

Read more (communitizer.blogspot.com)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Apps for MeeGo - how to use, submit & help evaluate applications
2. Applications
   • mplayer for Harmattan
3. Development
   • Font metrics change in Harmattan part 3 - designing truly flexible UI layouts
4. Devices
   • Maemo devices in movies

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-01-02 through 2012-01-08

Jukka just posted "No such thing as silver N950 except for Transformers 3 ;)", which reminded me of the movie appearances of the Nokia 770. But first to the silver N950 appearance which I somehow missed: A quick TMO "site:"-search reveals the obligatory thread for the N950-in-Transformers 3 appearance with a frame grab by ro25anav:

As for the 770, it starred in a Harold and Kumar movie, in a Fantastic Four movie and in a Die Hard movie, but you probably already knew that. The 770 appearances are well documented (with screencaps) over at starringthecomputer.com if you don't have the time to watch all three movies. Any other movies in which Maemo devices appear? What about the N800, N810 and N900? Googling doesn't really yield any useful results, with most hits being about "watching movies on device so and so".

Happy New Year everybody! Wow it has been a long time since I blogged :)

A new year and we got new things to announce. We have been working on apps.formeego.org for a while. The idea is to have a community driven Apps catalog for open source applications. Created by the people who also contributed to maemo.org Downloads (More than 100M downloads and counting!), many of the concepts born there were brought along.

This site includes a community driven QA part, where you can test apps and fill in a simple score card about the app. Once a certain amount of positive reports have been made, the app will automatically go to the stable Apps site. Apps will also go through some automated tests, so we can prevent broken applications from entering the repositories.

With the N9 device now in the market, the community needs a central place to publish their applications. If your application needs special security capabilities, like sending text messages etc, you need to publish your application in a place that is 'trusted' by the device. Nokia has now granted Apps the same credentials as Nokia Store. This means that we can now let the community publish applications which need more than the default credentials.

We have a very nice Apps client for use on your N9. This makes it very easy to browse through the available apps and install them on your N9.


Most of the infrastructure and processes are in place, what we need now is help from you! Whether you are a developer (submit your app) or an enthusiast (help us test new apps), there is always a way you can help making it more attractive to end users. Make sure we are getting more new applications more quickly available for everybody!

The current setup of Apps for MeeGo is so that you can't have any external dependencies for your application, other than what is provided in the SDK and the Nokia Apps repository. I'll post a proposal on the wiki about how to allow these dependencies while trying to prevent a mess :)

A last thing to add:  We see that MeeGo.com is going away at some point and we have a maemo.org heritage, so we are planning to move our authentication, OBS and wiki to maemo.org in the coming months.

Some of you might have heard about Google's Android team proposal to introduce wakelocks (aka suspend-blockers) to the Linux kernel. While there was a real issue being solved in the kernel side, the benefits on the user-space side were dubious at best, and after a huge discussion, they finally didn't get in. During this discussions … Continue reading Android vs. Maemo power management: static vs. dynamic

While the official Maemo platform (led by Nokia) is not actively developed anymore, some 3rd party Extras and the Maemo Community Updates project (which welcomes helping hands) are quite alive.
MeeGo never managed to fulfil its own expectations with regard to openness and transparency and is also more or less dead.
Tizen (MeeGo’s successor) is still vaporware plus membership is mostly invite-only while I prefer transparency.

What is left and to recommend in this area is Mer, a community-driven project based on MeeGo with real open governance and trustworthy maintainers that know how to communicate.

Consequently I have removed my admin flag for MeeGo’s bugtracker (it feels unmaintained anyway) and unsubscribed from nearly all MeeGo and Tizen mailing lists.
I will continue to stick around in the Maemo and Mer communities (mailing lists, IRC, bugtrackers) as they currently feel like the places to be. Cheers!

After a successful N9 Hackathon in October (where projects like Rodrigo's Forever Alone Hack were started), it's once again time for the local Maemo/MeeGo users to get together and do some hacking in person, so here's the official announcement so you can't say you didn't know ;)

• Event: Hack-A-N9
• Location: Metalab Vienna
• Date/Time: 2012-01-10, 18:00

Among other things, we'll try to get some locally-relevant apps (like kelvan's gotoVienna) in shape for apps.formeego.org, see how far we get with open mode and Christian of Maemo 5 Community SSU fame will probably be hacking on some NFC stuff. If you have time, stop by and say hi :)