The best foursquare app for Symbian and MeeGo Harmattan devices (N9/N950) has just received an update that brings with it the ability to view photos associated with the venue and read and leave tips. You cannot add photos yet, but hopefully that’s coming in the next version.

Apart from that it now also remembers your search history and adds some UI modifications to make the app look even more pretty. If you are using a N950 or a N9, the 4squick experience should be better for you, although UI is still directly from Symbian^3 build so everything is a bit small due to the higher resolution in Harmattan.

Changelog:

• Venue photos support
• Tips support
  • Read venue tips
  • Add a new tip
  • Share added tip to Twitter and Facebook
  • Mark tips as todo / done
• Search history with top searches
• Multiple fixes and UI modifications
• A bit better Harmattan experience

4squick isn’t available on the Ovi Store yet, but you get get the .sis or .deb file from the download page. If you are new to 4squick, check out the video demo we did last month.

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Hello everyone.

I haven’t posted updates of my work for quite a long time but now I finally have enough time to fulfill your interest by showing you some of the upcoming projects that I’ve been working on. So let’s start with something you’ve been quite familiar with all these years and that got a complete overhaul to step onto Harmattan platform. It’s OMWeather and this time it’s not just a tweak of good ol’ weather widget – it’s a completely redesigned application so we had to choose some more “marketable” name for this OMWeather successor. Let me introduce you: MeeCast.

1. Branding

MeeCast absorbed all key features that you’ve loved in OMWeather like extreme customization, detailed settings, icon sets, GPS tracking and more. But now it has evolved from just a weather widget on your home screen to full featured open source cross-platform solution for developing weather related applications all thanks to Qt and QML. Right now we’re focusing on delivering MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan application as fast as possible but we’re also cooking something really extraordinary for you and I hope we’ll soon be able to show it to the world. But that will happen later this year, right now let me give you a sneak peek on what’s coming up for Nokia N9  (and of course for N950 ninjas too :P)

2. Concept

Since Harmattan got rid of home screen widgets of all sorts ( or is it? ) we’ve decided to mimic the “instant access” experience of the widget in our stand-alone application. So we’ve designed an app that will load as fast as possible and show all necessary info without carpet bombing your eyes with fancy special effects that QML allows us to do. So here’s the home screen:

There’s nothing much to describe, everything looks pretty intuitive (for me at least :P). Your location along with basic but most valuable data right in front of you. Day temperatures are color coded along with the background to give you instant “feel” of the outside conditions. Not so representative with boring Moscow weather but still :)

The “Day details” view shows you all the info available at the moment for chosen day. We’ve decided to use text labels instead of icons for maximum readability in all languages (and we have 8 different locales. If you wish to help with adding your native language – feel free to email us at vlad[at]gas.by). Also day and night parameters are now divided in two tabs for additional comfort.

All for now, but stay tuned, there’s still landscape mode and testing package waiting to be revealed :)

Thanks for reading.

Version 2.0 finally moved to Fremantle stable, so everybody can start using it

It's been six months which have flown by, but the current Maemo Community Council's term is coming to an end and it's time for the next election.

The next election's voting will run from Thursday, 22nd September to Wednesday, 28th September.

What will be decided

COUNCIL MEMBERS - The council is a body of volunteers taken from the Maemo community that acts as a focal point for the community.  Historically, Council's role has been limited to representing developers on, and users of, maemo.org to Nokia (and vice versa). Examples of council activity can be found on the Council homepage or in the blog.  However, the governance referendum in this election may change the role of Council.

GOVERNANCE REFERENDUM - Due to Nokia's announcement that it will stop funding for maemo.org at the end of 2012, there will be a referendum and a vote to on the future of maemo.org.  There will be an opportunity to vote in favor of updating the role of Council so that it can organize a form of governance for the community OR in favor of winding down maemo.org when the funding stops (thus making the 1st option unnecessary).  There have been several related discussions on the forum:

Council Update July 2011
A modest proposal for a direction
Community Governance
The End is Coming

What's next?

Community members should carefully consider the governance referendum at this time.  It must be debated for a minimum of one month prior to the election, and therefore the referendum will not be changed after Monday, 22nd August 2011

Community members should be considering whether they want to stand for Council.  Anyone who has karma of over 100 is eligible to stand, including employees and sub-contractors of Nokia.  When nominations open, you can nominate someone via an email to the maemo-community mailing list (which they must reply to to accept) or you can put your own hat into the ring by emailing the same list. A further announcement will be made when nominations open, with more information.

The election timescale (all times UTC) is:

Nominations open: 00:00, Thursday, 1st September 2011
Nominations close: 23:59, Wednesday, 15th September 2011
Voting opens: 00:00, Thursday, 22nd September 2010 
Voting closes: 23:59, Wednesday, 28th September 2010

How does the vote work?

Each member of maemo.org, who has an account that is more than 3 months old and who has earned over 10 "karma" points on that account, gets an electronic ballot.  The election is a "single transferrable vote". They rank their Council candidates in order of preference; if their top candidate cannot get elected with the votes they receive, the votes are redistributed until all five seats have been allocated.  The governance referendum vote will be taken at the same time as the Council vote.

Somehow, in the flurry of figthing to get N9 out, I missed Adobes latest big thing.

At Tracker (core component of Nokia N9‘s MeeGo Harmattan’s Content Framework) we extract album art out of music files like MP3s, and we do a heuristic scan in the same directory of the music files for files like cover.jpg.

Right now we use the media art storage spec which we at a Boston Summit a few years ago, together with the Banshee guys, came up with. This specification allows for artist + album media art.

This is a bit problematic now on the N9 because (embedded) album art is getting increasingly bigger. We’ve seen music stores with album art of up to 2MB. The storage space for this kind of data isn’t unlimited on the device. In particular is it a problem that for an album with say 20 songs by 20 different artists, with each having embedded album art, 20 times the same album art is stored. Just each time for a different artist-album combination.

To fix this we’re working on a solution that compares the MD5 of the image data of the file album-md5(space)-md5(album).jpg with the MD5 of the image data of the file album-md5(artist)-md5(album).jpg. If the contents are the same we will make a symlink from the latter to the former instead of creating a normal new album art file.

When none exist yet, we first make album-md5(space)-md5(album).jpg and then symlink album-md5(artist)-md5(album).jpg to it. And when the contents aren’t the same we create a normal file called album-md5(artist)-md5(album).jpg.

Consumers of the album art can now choose between using a space for artist if they are only interested in ‘just album’ album art, or filling in both artist and album for artist-album album art.

This is a first idea to solve this issue, we have some other ideas in mind for in case this solution comes with unexpected problems.

I usually blog about unfinished stuff. Also this time. You can find the work in progress here.

Billy Perry, Nokia's global partner manager for imaging, recently made two posts on his personal blog showcasing both the photographic and video capture capabilities of the Nokia N9. The Nokia N9 comes with an 8 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar optics. Importantly for such demonstrations, the content shown was not processed in anyway. Also, Bill notes in his posts that the firmware that produced these images and video is not the final version that will ship with the retail version of the N9. Read on for previews.

In episode of 11 of the All About MeeGo podcast we interview Asri Al Baker. Asri has recently contributed editorials to us about his time testing the Nokia N9 and the N950 developer device. We get in depth about the N9 software, and the pre-production software of the N950. We go on to discuss the developer scene on the N9, and finally we wrap up by seeing which device Asri would chose from a line up of the iPhone 4, Nokia N8, E7, N9, and N950!

Front Page

Linux Foundation statement on apps.meego.com -> apps.formeego.org

Brian Warner, one of the Linux Foundation's few members who are visible within the MeeGo Project, answered questions during the Community Office IRC meeting and followed up with an email statement:

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