(This is part III, please check also parts I and II)

Front Page

Nominations over for Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council

Last week, Michael Demetriou announced the closure of the nominations for Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council: "The nomination period for candidates for the upcoming Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council has ended on the 23rd of the current month of April. The voting begins on Tuesday the 30th of April. We are happy to see more than enough candidates to hold an election this time. The candidates are as follows: Rüdiger Schiller (chemist), Joerg Reisenweber (joerg_rw/DocScrutinizer), Edoardo Spadolini (kerio), Christian Ratzenhofer (merlin1991), Aakash Sadh (Kash), Michael Demetriou (qwazix), and sixwheeledbeast (sixwheeledbeast)."

Read more (talk.maemo.org)

Voting for Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council begins on 2013-04-30 at 23:59 UTC

The election for Maemo Community Council and the Hildon Foundation Council will be opening this week on 2013-04-30 at 23:59 UTC. The election should run through Tuesday 2013-05-07 at 23:59 UTC.

The election will be for both the Maemo Community Council and a Hildon Foundation Council. Unfortunately, this situation arose by happenings that seem primarily rooted in political motivations. These motivations prevented the current Maemo Community Council from taking on the mantle and responsibilities of the Hildon Foundation Council to provide for a smooth transition.

The compromise reached has left the electorate voting on one set of candidates for two bodies, with the idea being that voters can voice their opinion about whether the Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council should be two separate bodies or a single one by the composition of their ballots for each body (identical ballots indicating desire for a single body).

Editorially speaking, this publication is in favor of a single body. This being the only sensible interpretation of the intentions of the by-laws in providing for a Hildon Foundation Council, as a Maemo Community Council without Nokia and with a nearly-duplicate body in the Hildon Foundation Council would serve very little purpose. If you prefer to see a single council body, cast both ballots identically.

Read more (talk.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Nominations over for Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council
   • Voting for Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council begins on 2013-04-30 at 23:59 UTC
2. Community
   • Voting on the Maemo Community Council election rules refendum closes

Front Page

This week in Maemo Community politics

Maemo Community politics always get interesting during periods of change. Nokia is in the process of handing over control of maemo.org and its infrastructure to the community, which makes this one of the largest fundamental changes in community history. Big change, lots of politics.

(This is part II, for the introduction see part I)

Overview

Erudite makes it possible to use Amazon’s Cloud Reader on various mobile platforms which aren’t officially supported by Amazon. You can either read books online, or download them for reading offline. Your progress in a book is then also kept synchronised between your phone and other Kindle devices.

Symbian Belle support

Until recently Erudite only supported MeeGo Harmattan and Mer based phones (such as the Nokia N9), but now it’s also available for Symbian Belle phones as well. I’ll try and put together a build for Symbian Anna phones in the near future.

There’s a fairly comprehensive review of Erudite for Symbian over on All About Symbian: Erudite review.

Upcoming features

In the next release for both Symbian and MeeGo I’ll be focusing on orientation switching support, so users can optionally view their books in landscape mode, as well as investigating some apparent issues with very large books.

Download

• Symbian Belle version — Nokia 701, Nokia C6-01, Nokia C7-00, Nokia N8-00, Nokia X7-00, Nokia E6-00, Nokia 808 Pureview, Nokia 603, Nokia Oro, Nokia E7-00, and Nokia 700
• MeeGo Harmattan version — Nokia N9, Nokia N950

Few months ago I wrote a normal mapping series with part I and part II. That was a good experience, so series it is again! This time about implementing dynamic QML components, with an example case being busy&progress indicators. We'll call these specific ones QUItIndicators.

Let's start with obligatory video which demonstrates these components, BusyIndicator and ProgressIndicator, with few examples:



Traditionally indicators like these would be implemented as an animated GIF or a sprite. Cons of that approach are zero customization and memory consumption: 2s animation of 256x256px 32-bit color indicator at 60fps would mean 2*60*256*256*4 = 31.5Mb memory consumption. That's quite a bit for just one indicator, so usually frames are animated slower than 60fps which makes animation less smooth.

Alternative way to implement animated indicator would be using imperative drawing API (QPainter, Cairo, Skia etc.). Drawing freely to a canvas gives a lot of possibilities, but can easily lead to non-optimal performance. Many of these APIs have OpenGL backends which sounds good in theory, but the reality is that they can't take full gains out of modern GPUs. Like wise Tro^H^H^HDigians have said, combining QPainter with OpenGL backend doesn't make a perfect harmony.

So as you probably guessed, our indicators use Qt5+QML+GLSL instead. The pros of this approach compared to sprites or imperative drawing are rendering performance, low memory consumption and customization possibilities. There is also at least one con: Indicator needs to be designed so that required animations can be achieved with vertex & fragment shaders.

Next blog post goes through design thoughts behind these indicators. In the meantime, you can get the sources from here and try yourself!

I recently added initial support for real time collaboration in fontforge. This was followed by the wonderful fortune of presenting the work at the Libre Graphics Meeting last week.  Having collab in fontforge allows you to create and edit glyphs and have other fontforge instances in the collab session see your changes in (near) real time. There is also support for python scripting, so you can have one fontforge instance be a headless scripted one which continually creates new ttf files as you edit a font. Using collab with scripts like this allows for possibilities which didn't exist. For example, the ttf generation can take time, and doing it each time an edit is made in the fontforge process that is editing a glyph would be too slow. Even saving the font to SFD/UFO each edit so you can fork() and create the ttf would be too slow. The Collab support is needed to allow the user experience of editing glyphs not to bog down.

I'm now working out what I'll be hacking on next. If you are looking for a C/C++ programmer with a Bachelors, Masters, and PhD on computer science to do some hacking feel free to contact me. I own the gmail and sf.net email addresses associated with this blog.

I've hacked on Abiword, Calligra, some fringe EFL stuff, fontforge (as one already knows from the top of this post), and many other contributions here and there. My main for fun project is libferris, a metadata handling virtual filesystem with index and search capabilities.

There will be a Board meeting at 14:00 UTC on Friday, April 19. The meeting will be a public conference (video/audio/chat) held on www.concert-oh.com (registration required).

I've been working full time on my Android workstation for over a month now, and it is time to write an update about it. How has it worked out?

There have been some unfortunate rumors and efforts going on with respect to the Hildon Foundation Council. This post will hopefully clarify the current official status of Hildon Foundation Council and Maemo Community Council.