Sardine is the development version of Maemo distribution. To keep PyMaemo ready to the future of Maemo its necessary to use this bleeding edge distribution. At moment I'm fixing some issues related to PyHildon and PyGTK. Source tree available at:
https://garage.maemo.org/svn/pymaemo/packages/python-sdk/branches/sardine/

Tip: I've had some problems with theme inside Sardine. To solve this just use the plankton theme as default. I did a backup of '/usr/share/themes/default' and 'cp -r plankton default'.

Just a screenshot of Sardine environment. I've tried to find screenshots but it was impossible. Then I decided to post one here :)

Nokia’s Maemo / Internet Tablet team is hiring in Helsinki.

A couple of positions are open in the Desktop team. We are focused on the development of User Interface and Data Management building blocks and frameworks.
The GNOME Mobile platform and the Hildon Application Framework are the most visible parts of what we work on.

To check out these positions or apply follow the links:

Technical Project Manager - Address Book, Search, Backup,…
Error Manager / Q.A - Lead the way in bug squashing (fixed term August 2007 to April 2008)

I havent' been writing a lot recently, I'll try to improve so stay tuned! I have a rich backlog of entries to update, from the last episode of Luciano's saga to the updates to the tax issue!

Non ho scritto molto recentemente, ma cerchero' di migliorare, state sintonizzati percio'! Ho molti post in carniere, dall'ultimo episodio della saga di Luciano, a aggiornamenti sulla storia delle tasse, senza scordare la Pizza Italians con Severgnini!!!

Non lo sapevo, l'ho scoperto solo adesso, ma e' vergognoso tanto quanto la storia delle tasse pubbliche se non di piu'. Vogliono assassinare la Val di Noto per fare trivellazioni petrolifere!!!!!!
Repubblica ha lanciato una raccolta di firme, anche sponsorizzata da Camilleri, per difendere Ragusa e il resto dei patrimoni mondiali dell'UNESCO e bloccare la concessione.
Se leggete questo blog firmate, per favore. La mia firma e' la numero 22348.
Maggiori dettagli qui.

I didn't know, I found it out only now, but this is as shameful as the issue of public tax records, if not more. They want to murder the "Val di Noto", UNESCO world heritage with its wonderful baroque churches, and of which Ragusa Ibla is one of the most important towns. They want to build a f....g oil drill!!!! A corrupted politician gave permission to an oil company to begin investigation on the site productivity. Let's stop the murder!
If you read this blog please sign the appeal that gathers signatures to oppose to this resolution. It's in Italian I know, but it's possible to manage: only nome (name) and cognome (surname) are requested for the signature.
Mine is the 22348th signature.

Thanks to Lucas comment in the previous post, I've generated a new screenshot. It wasn't a problem with Xephyr version but a broken hildon-desktop upgrade. Now the task navigator area has transparency. Pretty cool.

The WebKit Gtk+/Cairo port has recently had a burst of activity — it’s really starting to shape up. I’ve recently had the opportunity to coordinate my efforts on the port and in the last couple of weeks we’ve provided patches for over a dozen bug reports (often requests for enhancement) . Most importantly, we’ve decided to work with the WebKit team to keep contributions going directly into the upstream SVN repository — no more dead-end forks and “development branches”.

I started working on the port half a year ago after giving up on gtkmozembed in a fit of frustration and was immediately impressed by the competence of the WebKit team and the abstractions they’ve made on top of the browser core to make porting a breeze — WebKit boasts successful and actively maintained “ports” to Qt, Wx, Gtk+, Mac OS X and Windows. These guys know what they’re doing and have rapidly learnt how to lead a successful Open Source project. Porters often work together and each of the ports share various modules and backends — GNOME developers are known to work with qmake, KDE hackers have picked up amounts of Gtk+ knowhow and Apple engineers often provide build fixes and small feature enhancements for the contributed modules.

The engine is incredibly versatile, and, as the name suggests, one of its strong points is seamless integration into existing desktop applications. We are concentrating on the mobile GNOME platform right now, and even without any profiling, the prototype browser is competitive with Opera, particularly for complex interactive sites using AJAX and modern CSS features. Moreover, we see a future for WebKit as a component of new applications like Banter that are blurring the boundaries between rich Web content and the GNOME desktop.

One of our upcoming contributions will add support for WebKit’s KSVG2-based SVG functionality using Cairo:

This is distinct from existing Cairo SVG libraries like librsvg in that JavaScript has full access to the DOM here, much like the current Gecko development trunk.

As pointed out by Carlos in GNOME Mobile mailing list and Quim in his presentation at LinuxTag, Hildon will become an upstream project. The idea from now on is to make Hildon a more independent and community-driven project as it’s going to be used in different contexts other than Maemo (i.e. Ubuntu Mobile). This means that Hildon won’t be a Maemo-specific project anymore and will have its own release schedule, roadmap and community.

As a consequence, we decided to move the full Hildon stack to GNOME infrastructure. This way we can stay closer to GNOME community and stimulate collaboration between both projects. We’ve started the migration process already but it will take some time because we need to first re-organize our internal way of working to make sure everything is fine after the migration. Big thanks to Olav for the great and quick help!

For those who don’t know: what is Hildon?

Hildon introduces a new desktop for handheld devices. It comprises a lightweight desktop, a set of widgets optimized for handheld devices, a set of theming tools and other complementary libraries and applications.

We’ve created a page GNOME wiki. There you can find a brainstorming space for the release schedule and roadmap, a status page for our migration to GNOME, and how to get involved in Hildon. We already have a mailing list in GNOME servers. If you are interested in Hildon development, don’t hesitate to subscribe!

Innanzitutto, inizio con una bella notizia: i texani hanno rinunciato a trivellare la Val di Noto dopo che l'appello lanciato da Camileri attraverso le pagine di Repubblica ha raggiunto le 70.000 firme ed e' stato tradotto in Francia e in Inghilterra!!! Evviva!!

AT&T announced today that it was beginning “Video Share” services in Atlanta, Dallas and San Antonio, with additional markets to come in July and eventually rolling out to 50 cities.

We are planning to launch a new release of PyMaemo next week. Highlights of this new version are: osso-ic and osso-help support and lots of bugfixes.

When I was writing papers, choices of words always cause troubles for me, whose native language is not English. WordNets can help me much.

Of cause, WordNets' use is not limited to this scenario. Many guys love this tool, and if you are one of them, I guess you must like Visuwords

Visuwords presents a flash visual interface to wordnets, which can attract your eyes quickly. Now, we do not need to click the dropdown list many times to see synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms, and holonyms of a word.

If I get more free time in near future, I may try to integrate Visuwords with stardict.

Visit Woot.com, the online retailer that sells one product a day, for Nokia 770 on sale for $129 and $5 shipping:

There we were, idling away a sunny lunch hour on a bench outside Applebee’s, feeling our lunch of deep-fried chicken wads settle comfortably into our gut and browsing the intertubes with our Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. We’d just opened an email with a very lucrative offer from a widow in Cote d’Ivoire when our reveries were interrupted by a visit from a stranger. Obese, panting, the beer-company logo on his t-shirt stretched and distorted, flesh spilling from both the top and bottom of his sweatshorts, the unexpected caller flopped onto the bench. We feared for our safety as the bench trembled under the strain.

Woot : Nokia 770 Internet Tablet
.

If you’ve been waiting to get one… today’s your lucky day as Woot is offering a new 770 for only $129!

Technorati Tags:
Nokia, Internet Tablet, 770, Woot

Hello everyone. Silence means busy – and busy is of course good, in many ways. We’re busy with a lot of new stuff.

Buy.com is selling Nokia 770 Internet tablet for $139.99 plus free shipping. From the description, it doesn’t look like it’s a refurbished product:

Whether you’re relaxing on the sofa or enjoying the moment at your favorite café, if you have broadband access over WI-FI connection the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet gives you instant wireless access to the Web. You can also stream files, tune in to Internet radio, News Reader, or play your favorite videos and music.

A new release of PyMaemo is available. This one includes bugfixes, new packages (osso-help and osso-ic), an updated iPython and lots of PyOsso examples. Thanks to everybody that has contributed!

From day one of the Internet Tablet era*, I’ve been a believer in the WiFi path. As broadband has increased its penetration wildly over the last few years, this has seemed reasonable. And I attribute the failure of the many Linux tablet predecessors of the Nokia 770 in great part to having preceded the era of easy-to-use, cheap wireless routers and widely available broadband.

More tangential thoughts prompted by an iPhone review:

Walt Mossberg, writing for the Wall Street Journal, hit the nail on the head:

[T]he iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. [Emphasis added.] Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well ….

Maybe it’s beginning to sink in that there’s now a category of devices fitting in-between PDA’s and notebooks. They’re computers, and they’re something else. (Not every-thing else.) Apple’s iPhone and the Nokia Internet Tablet are just the first, best exemplars.

The iPhone doesn’t have a hard drive or a keyboard. It commits huge resources to its gorgeous screen and flexible OS. It’s driven largely by realization that we all want a walkaround web.

Same for the Nokia Internet Tablet.

No, they’re not competitors (except for people’s discretionary income). What I see, though, is that — different as they are — each conceptualizes the same insight. That’s why I wrote, back in January, that the iPhone validates the Internet Tablet.

It seems even clearer to me today.

So, since Monday (Jun/25) I've been in São Carlos (São Paulo) in order to get in touch with Marcio Galli (taboca - thanks for the hospitality) and brainstorm about some ideas we have. In resume, what I can say is it was very productive trip.

Marcio has been involved with web technologies and mainly Mozilla stuff since early Netscape times (back to 1997 or so), so his background in his area is notable. Basically, we talked about some general MiniMo issues, like usability and features, as well as ways of pushing it to Linux devices (maybe OpenMoko ?).

In that sense, I could show him MiniMo running on the n800 device, and I asked him about what could be done (UI-wise) to improve n800 users' web surfing experience. I got good input on this, and I hope to be packing them up in minimo 0.21 for maemo soon.

The last day (Jun/27) was the best one. I got some minimo upstream Linux specific bugs under my responsibility, which is great and will take me definitively to the XUL world. Furthermore, Offline Browsering and OS Firefox were subjects of a nice talk we had in taboca's office. I will be blogging about it specifically soon as well. Loooooots of ideas came up .....

Happily, I could also participate to the Mozilla Community Build Brazil, an community effort event which intends to learn more about Internet habits of specific countries and find out local ways to spread and increase market share of Firefox in them. It is been headed by Asa and JT from Mozilla. Here are some pics of it. They realized, for example, the potential of orkut in Brazil, and so why not making "Firefox as an easier Orkut tool" for almost 20 million users here ;).

Btw, I will be working on a Firefox extension for orkut my free time (more about it later on) !!!

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

For me, the promised addition of Skype to the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet has meant the ability to connect to millions of Skype users for free voip calls — a network far larger than Gizmo and Google Talk offer — and, of course, video internet calls.

Maybe I’ve been missing the boat on this.

A forum post here at ITT alerted us to a post at jkontherun with a photo of Skype running on the N800 and a few pieces of information: July. No video yet.

No cam calls? What’s the point? I thought.

And then I wondered why the photo showed a “Buy Skype credit” link in the app. You only use that when you pay for Skype calls, which is only when you’re calling someone who doesn’t have Skype.

Yikes!

Will I be able to call anyone on any landline or cellphone whatsoever from my Internet Tablet? Looks like it to me.

That, I think, is maybe going to ease my unhappiness at having to wait for Skype cam calls. More than a lot, I should say.

(photo from jkontherun)

* * *

Update: Two days a week I work from home, and I tie up the house phone for an hour at a time with weekly conference calls.

The cellphone reception right where we are (at the bottom of a hill) is poor, else I’d consider our cellphones as alternate home phones.

In the past, we’ve had two lines, but we never knew when we needed the second line and the expense has never seemed justified. But what a pain it is sometimes having just one phone line.

My “use Skype for a second line” and “well, use Gizmo then” efforts were abysmal failures. Maybe it was my cheap headset. But things didn’t work out. And I sure didn’t like being tethered to the upstairs computer anytime I wanted to make a call.

I realize now that my N800 and 770 aren’t two new phones. They’re two new phone lines. (Hey, with two children entering precocious years, I might need more than two additional lines.) Low rates, too — $30/year for unlimited calling to regular phones on Skype (eg, $2.50/month) and just 1.9 cents per minute at Gizmo with no minimum monthly.

Could be a very easy way to enable each of us to be able to talk (and wander around the house!) at the same time.

The people watching the logs at Nokia must know my home IP address by now: Every few hours, I've been reloading the firmware update location looking for the latest update that has Skype. With working demos spotted, it's only a matter of time and I want to have a video of it up as soon as it is available.

On a related note, I want to post a public apology to Brian Lam, editor of Gizmodo for erroneously "correcting" one of his blog posts. Gizmodo too picked up the story and posted a photo and I mentioned that Kevin Tofel of JKOnTheRun should be credited for the photo, which they did. Kevin corrected me - it turns out that photo is ever so slightly different in that the number on the display is not identical. As a journalist, I should know better and check these things. "My Bad" guys!

I do owe Kevin a test call on Skype once this thing is ready so he can hear how it sounds like on the other end. I am also going to try to get a Skype conference call open to all my readers just to chat about the Internet Tablets and future/speculation thereof. If it goes well, it'll become a podcast. Go ahead and Skype me (thoughtfix) and if I am available I will answer and we can talk tablets and get used to Skype before it shows up on the N800. Be aware that your call may be recorded and could become a featured call on this blog!

New 770 owners from Woot and Buy.Com - I am going to go through the process of tagging all my posts from the first one on to help you all search for the most interesting stuff to you. This will be my first tagged post, but expect me to dig through the archives and do them ALL sometime this weekend.

A little off-topic, but I suddenly found myself shopping for a new MP3 player.
I outline my thoughts (including the N800 and Canola) here on ultramobilegeek.com
Any suggestions, based on what I want?

I am still staying in S'pore, where Nokia just begin n800 trial session, and the unknown date to sell. Last week, I booked a N800 from Amazon and my wife will goto US to pick up it for me. Interesting, the second day woot promoted Nokia N770 at $130. Wow, what price! So, canceled the 800 and I booked two 770 for my wife and me. What even more interesting is I found online shop all around the world begin to promote the N770, and expansys even deliver to S'pore with lower price. It's OK. The reason I love Nokia internet tablets is they are using Linux as OS, so that I can compile software I am interested in. Although I can only get the 770 next mth, I can not resist to do sth. for it. Due to my native language (Chinese), I think a good dictionary is a good startpoint. Guoyong has write a brief description of how to compile it. It's a great article, however, for a beginner, more details may be better. So, I add several points here.

1. install cross-platform environment (scratchbox): please follow the instruction to install scratchbox (here)
2. adjust auto build tools in scratchbox: please refer to this article to add a exectuable script autogen.sh into scratchbox.
3. download a proper stardict source deb package: the reason to download a PROPER version of stardict is that the latest version need more dependences unsupported on the tablet. It's OK to use older version, as the new eye candy is not very important for me. We can get 2.4.5 from http://packages.ubuntu.com/.
4. unpackage the source deb and apply patch: after download [dsc] [stardict_2.4.5.orig.tar.gz] [stardict_2.4.5-1.1.diff.gz], untar orig.tar.gz and zcat ../stardict_2.4.5-1.1.diff.gz | patch -p1
5. modify configure.in in the source to disable some dependences unsupported on scratchbox
6. modify debian/rules and debian/control in source to help debian package build system work
7. dpkg-buildpackage