Gustavo Barbieri

work and pleasure

2008-11-01 00:48 UTC  by  Gustavo Barbieri
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Today I finished integrating some cool code into Evas: box and table. These utility smart objects are now in Evas for good, we can stop replicating those in many projects and people who just want to use them and not a full featured toolkit like ETK or EWL are now free. More importantly: we can now expose these in Edje, making all layout elements dependent on theme, not having to rely on SWALLOW slots!

The integrated code is very flexible, it make use of the recently introduced “size hints” and also postpone heavy calculations to pre-render time with calculate smart callback. Table has three modes: regular, homogeneous based on table size and homogeneous based on largest minimum item size. Box, since it just represent a sequence of items, is more extensible and allows you to specify a layout function, we provide some like vertical, horizontal, stack, homogeneous based on box, homogeneous based on the largest minimum item size, etc… but you can easily write your “snake layout” and use it. If you need more option details than “size hints”, you can extend the class and implement options_* virtuals.

These code were integrated by me, but not totally written. Gustavo Lima, from ProFUSION, wrote the box for their sequence_box.c (it was relicensed to E’s BSD with permission) and Rasterman wrote table for his elementary “toolkit for mobiles” els_table.c.

On the pleasure and work side, I’ll fly to The Netherlands next Tuesday so I can attend ELC-E 2008 where I’ll present a talk about Rich Graphical User Interfaces on mobile systems, covering Evas, Edje and the new kids on the block Elementary and Guarana.

Last but not least, due trip and other stuff to do I’ll not be able to integrate table and box into Edje soon. If you always wanted to help E17 and EFL, now it’s your chance! :-) See my mail to the list and start hacking, I can reply to you by mail and IRC (when I’m online). We will also need Python bindings for those, so patches to python-evas and python-edje are also welcome!

Categories: C
Dirk-Jan Binnema

i dream in infra red

2008-11-01 12:03 UTC  by  Dirk-Jan Binnema
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I released mu 0.4 (my e-mail indexing/search tool), and as always, I try to learn things from it.
Click to read 1306 more words
Categories: c
penguinbait

Viva La Comunidad!!

2008-11-02 17:40 UTC  by  penguinbait
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( Español ) ( English ) First of all I want to thank the Spanish speaking community for all their support. I see my name “penguinbait” on all kinds of Spanish text websites and often try to translate the pages to see whats being said about me I do not speak [...]
Categories: Internet Tablets
Stephen Gadsby

Maemo Bug Jar #29

2008-11-03 00:00 UTC  by  Stephen Gadsby
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A Quick Look at maemo Bugzilla
2008-10-27 through 2008-11-02

Click to read 4616 more words
Kaj Grönholm

Qt VKB

2008-11-03 14:54 UTC  by  Kaj Grönholm
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Realized last week that what I need (or want, luckily those match quite nicely these days) to do is a virtual keyboard prototype based on Qt... Got the basic UI in there during the weekend, so what we have now:



Works also in N810 but the performance is lacking, it's not totally fluid.

Plans:
- Have to figure out proper layout(s), wouldn't want to copy directly e.g. from iPhone or N810
- Support gestures and other usability tricks
- After this, make more eye candy, animations etc. Not too much, but to help usability
- Supporting word prediction and hit prediction is totally doable but would need more AI & grammar database integration, so not right now for this UI testing

Anyway: If you got good layout & feature ideas, please share!
Categories: Qt
Tim Samoff

Me 'n Maemo...

2008-11-03 15:10 UTC  by  Tim Samoff
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I’m a little late in posting this but, I only just got the the other day.

While at , in Berlin, a few video testimonials were shot of some fellow community members and I. The idea was that the community may be able to share a perspective on what Maemo is that would be useful to corporate.

Here’s one of the videos (of me):

You can view the rest here.

Special thanks to for shooting and assembling the videos!


Tags: , , , ,
Tim Samoff

Me 'n Maemo...

2008-11-03 15:10 UTC  by  Tim Samoff
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I’m a little late in posting this but, I only just got the the other day.

While at , in Berlin, a few video testimonials were shot of some fellow community members and I. The idea was that the community may be able to share a perspective on what Maemo is that would be useful to corporate.

Here’s one of the videos (of me):

You can view the rest here.

Special thanks to for shooting and assembling the videos!


Tags: , , , ,
Enrique Ocaña González

How to interact with an SVG image from an HTML document

2008-11-03 16:30 UTC  by  Enrique Ocaña González
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Did you know that modern browsers already implement builtin support to visualize SVG drawings? And that you can make changes on them from the HTML document and make changes into the document from the SVG? In this post I’m going to explain all that through a simple example.

To create the SVG document you can use Inkscape. This program has a nice feature that allows you to edit attributes of particular nodes. For instance, you can select such a node, open the XML editor (Edit –> XML Editor…) and add a new attribute onclick to the node with the value:

javascript:window.parent.document.form1.bodypart.value='head';

When you’ve finished, just save the document as “plain SVG” to prevent compatibility problems.

Let’s go to the HTML part now. The easiest way to show the SVG in the document is by using an “embed” tag:

<html>
<body>

<h1>Anatomy of a smiley</h1>

<form name="form1">
Body part: <input type="text" name="bodypart" /> <br/>
</form>

<embed id="smiley" src="smiley.svg" width="745" height="1053" />

</body>
</html>

But that’s not enough. If you want to change SVG attributes using javascript, just add this code:

<script type="text/javascript">
   function changeColor(color) {
   var path=document.getElementById("smiley")
      .getSVGDocument()
      .getElementById("path2383");
   path.style.setProperty("fill",color, "");
   }
</script>

[...]

Color: <input type="text" name="color" value="#FFFF00" /> <br/>

<input type="button" value="Change color"
 onclick="javascript:changeColor(this.form.color.value);"/> <br/>

And that’s all. Now you have bidirectional knowledge between your HTML document and your SVG document. Take a look here to see the whole example.

There are still pending issues, like embedding the SVG code as part of the HTML source. That can be done including the proper DTDs and making sure that the document is interpreted as XHTML (that’s the most important think). Here is a modified version of the previous example to illustrate that, but I hadn’t been able to resolve nodes using this kind of embedded drawings.

Categories: Hacking (english)
Daniel Gentleman

An Historic Day

2008-11-04 11:00 UTC  by  Daniel Gentleman
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If you read TabletBlog, you and I hopefully share some things in common:
  • An understanding of existing and future technology.
  • Recognizing the importance of science and thought.
  • Realization that openness and cooperation produce growth.
People of the United States have a decision to make today. They will decide the future course of the strongest economic and military power of the world. I hope that the direction of the United States moves to embrace the inventors, developers, and technologies that all serve to make us globally smarter, better informed, and accessible.

What matters to me: the spirit of openness, understanding, and embracing of future growth. This is why I support Barack Obama as the next president of the United States of America.

Categories: off topic
Ryan Abel

Package Categories and You: What you need to know to do the Right Thing

2008-11-04 15:22 UTC  by  Ryan Abel
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In an effort to improve packager compliance and user experience in the Application Manager, the list of valid package categories for Diablo has been changed. The new list should better cover the different sorts of applications available on the platform:

Key Example English i18n Example apps user/desktop Desktop Home, statusbar and taskbar applets user/development Programming py2deb user/education Education Flashcard apps user/games Games Doom, Duke Nukem 3D user/graphics Graphics Photo apps, GIMP, Inkscape, fonts user/multimedia Multimedia Canola, mplayer, Kagu, UKMP, MediaBox user/navigation Location & Navigation maemo-mapper, Navit user/network Internet & Networking Web browsers, Samba clients, OpenAFS, Transmission user/office Office GPE, Claws, AbiWord user/science Science gnuplot, Octave user/system System rotation-support, enhanced kernels, themes user/utilities Utilities or Accessories Calculators, terminals, text editors

What this means for you

If you're just a user, probably not much. Hopefully in a month or two when both the packages and Application Manager itself are updated, it'll mean you wont have to browse packages by only the "All" category anymore but can enjoy a nice, navigable list of categories. All you need to do is sit back, relax and wait.

Now, if you're a packager, it means it's time to get ready to update your packages with the new categories, but don't push those updates just yet! Part of this change involves changes to the Application Manager's code. It needs a new list of valid categories, its handling of packages with invalid categories needs to be updated and l10n for the new list of categories needs to be put together and shipped. All of which means we need to wait until the Application Manager is updated with the next SSU push until we can start using our pretty new list of categories.

Hopefully this push wont take an inordinate amount of time to come (perhaps we can even convince Nokia to finally start using SSU how it should've been used from the beginning and push a small update for Application Manager before the next big push), but it's likely to take at least a month, so don't go pushing packages with updated categories just yet. That is, unless you really want people to see ugly, un-localized category strings. Watch this space for an update when you can start using the new categories.

Niels Breet

Packaging Policy change proposal

2008-11-04 16:52 UTC  by  Niels Breet
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After long and heated discussions, we finally managed to finish the Better Package Categories task. When I started the discussion in April, I knew it would not be an easy task. It remained on my task lists over a lot of sprints, but now we have a result.

Ryan posted about this and proposed future in his blog.

"So, what's next?"

Now we need to get these proposed changes accepted into the Packaging Policy, so we can start to apply them. I created a wiki page for the proposed changes to the policy. Please see if you would like to see the wording changed. I will push this task for the November 2008 Sprint.

The autobuilder and Extras Assistant will soon start to give warnings when your package is not using one of the official categories. These warnings will not prevent you from uploading your package, but please try to update your package to make it comply with the policy.

As we are going to change the policy, the wiki page might also be a good place to propose other changes you would like to see in the document.
Categories: assistant
timeless

The path to MXR

2008-11-05 11:07 UTC  by  timeless
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There are a couple of ways of doing development work. Hg and DVCS enable some of them, especially private local commits and working on multiple unfinished features. There's a general understanding that you should write code first and optimize later, but you usually try not to ship a version which has a performance regression.
Click to read 1242 more words
Kate Alhola

Google Gadgets for maemo

2008-11-05 15:42 UTC  by  Kate Alhola
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Google Gadgets on maemo 2

 

I was couple of weeks ago in Gnome Asia conference and there was interesting presentation  about Google Gadgets for Linux  by James Su from Google . The google gadgets are javascript widgets that are loaded to your desktop and then they can run offline. At the moment there is least hundreds or even more Google gadgets that you can download. The Google Gadgets for Linux has GTK+, Qt and browser plugin hosts. I just decides to try how much work is needed to get them running in Internet Tablet. Little work was needed to hack autoconf files because it did not have microb-engine as alternative and then some hacks because maemo has g++ 3.4.4 when Ubuntu has 4.2.3 . After these fixes both Qt and GTK+ host compiled and run in N810 or scratchbox x86 mode.

For some reason GTK hosts did not interoperate correctly with matchbox window manager and made matchbox somehow grazy. The Qt version did not have any of these problems. Current Google gadgets is still somehow mouse centric and needs some modifications to work with touchscreen and stylus, least i have not yet found rught button from my stylus ;)  Little fixes to Qt host to work with stylus and packing stuff in a maemo .deb package and i got my alpha port working.

 It is still early alpha, basic funktionality and maemo install package is there but still lot of work is needed.

I did not yet had time to look GTK+ host more and Gadget add window in Qt also needs to be adapted to tablet display geometry.

I will contribute my patches back to Google Gadgets project and i hope that they could least integrate some non platform-specific fixes like adding microb-engine to confugure scripts to mainstream. I set up google gadgets garage.maemo.org project for maemo port. If is there community interest to participate, please join the project.

 

 

 

Categories: Maemo
Thomas Perl

Maemo and me

2008-11-06 21:46 UTC  by  Thomas Perl
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Hi there. I decided to do some postings about my trusty old N800 and some feature wishes/ideas. Maybe also the occassional rant. If you don't know me, have a look at my Maemo.org profile. Enjoy!
Categories: introduction
Andre Klapper

bugs.maemo.org Reorganization

2008-11-07 16:34 UTC  by  Andre Klapper
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Product Reorganization The current organization of Maemo Bugzilla has some flaws. I won't repeat the reasons here, see for example the Getting Nokia involved in bugs.maemo.org wikipage if interested. Quim has come up with a helpful draft for reorganizing the products and components that has received several iterations now after integrating my ...
Enrique Ocaña González

Shell Scripting notes

2008-11-07 16:49 UTC  by  Enrique Ocaña González
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Eight years ago, back in 2000, I was decided to learn shell scripting. I found the Bourne Shell Programming book by Robert P. Sayle a very good way to start, so I began my way through it, reading the concepts, making the exercises and taking advantage the opportunity to write a sort of personal notes (in Spanish) using LyX (a text processor I liked very much at the moment).

Some time later I submitted the notes to the GPUL mailing list and they were posted at the research groups page. Unfortunately, there’s no way to access the notes from there, because a disk failure and the website revamping got them lost. It’s a pity, because not even the Internet Archive preserves a copy of them.

Those notes have a symbolic value for me. They served as a basis for later bash scripting courses I taught and, after many changes and adaptations, are still the main inspiration for the shell scripting slides used in the Caixanova Free Software Master.

For that reason, today I did a bit of computer archaeology and searched through my old backups until I found it. Now that this material is back, I want to share it with all of you:

Enjoy it!




Spanish version / versión en español:

Hace ocho años, allá por el 2000, me decidí a aprender shell scripting. Descubrí que el libro Bourne Shell Programming de Robert P. Sayle era una muy buena forma de empezar, así que inicié mi camino a través de él, leyendo los conceptos, haciendo ejercicios y aprovechando la oportunidad para escribir una especie notas personales (en español) usando LyX (un procesador de textos que me gustaba mucho en aquel momento).

Algún tiempo después envié las notas a la lista de correo de GPUL y fueron publicadas en la página de grupos de investigación. Por desgracia, no hay forma de acceder a las notas desde allí, porque un fallo de disco y la remodelación del sitio web hicieron que se perdieran. Es una pena, porque ni siquiera el Internet Archive guarda una copia de ellas.

Esas notas tienen un valor simbólico para mi. Sirvieron como base para cursos posteriores de scripting bash que impartí y, tras muchos cambios y adaptaciones, son aún la inspiración principal para las transparencias de shell scripting usadas en el Master de Software Libre de Caixanova.

Por esa razón, hoy hice un poco de arqueología informática y estuve buscando en mis viejos backups hasta que lo encontré. Ahora que este material ha reaparecido, quiero compartirlo con todos vosotros:

  • Notas sobre Shell Scripting (versión PDF): bash.pdf
  • Notas sobre Shell Scripting (archivo con versiones LyX, tex, ps y HTML): articulo_scripting.tgz

Disfrutadlo!

Categories: Free Software Master
Gary Birkett

liqbase - faster than paper

2008-11-08 01:19 UTC  by  Gary Birkett
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paper is slow.when I am talking to my friends or sitting in a meeting at work, I like to have a pad and pen so I can doodle and take little notes or reminders for later. When I am going for dinner I write everyone's order. When I am on the phone to a customer I have to take notes.These notes are not intrusive and we go through tonnes of paper with them every single year.How long do we spend searching for that scrap you wrote your dinner order on? or the todo list from the last meeting? What did customerx say when you spoke to him?how many napkin ideas have fallen into the wastebasket never to be seen again?I want to keep them all and let you use them and expand upon them.liqbase is faster than paper.
Categories: science
Gary Birkett

liqbase - faster than paper

2008-11-08 01:19 UTC  by  Gary Birkett
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paper is slow.when I am talking to my friends or sitting in a meeting at work, I like to have a pad and pen so I can doodle and take little notes or reminders for later. When I am going for dinner I write everyone's order. When I am on the phone to a customer I have to take notes.These notes are not intrusive and we go through tonnes of paper with them every single year.How long do we spend searching for that scrap you wrote your dinner order on? or the todo list from the last meeting? What did customerx say when you spoke to him?how many napkin ideas have fallen into the wastebasket never to be seen again?I want to keep them all and let you use them and expand upon them.liqbase is faster than paper.
Categories: science
Thomas Perl

Get Avahi working on Maemo

2008-11-08 09:38 UTC  by  Thomas Perl
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Avahi is a service discovery service (phew!) for local networks (Apple calls this technology Bonjour). Among other things, its most basic functionality is to allow you to have a ".local" domain for your home network managed in a peer-to-peer fashion. This way, you do not have to remember the IP of your N8x0, but can use "threepwood.local" (if your N8x0 is named "threepwood").

The packages that need to be installed are "avahi-daemon" and "avahi-dnsconfd". There are some other avahi packages available (including GUIs) that you might want to try out. After installing, you should be able to ping your N8x0 from your Linux (with Avahi installed) or Mac OS X (works out of the box) machine.

The only problem: Avahi's daemons and D-Bus start in the same order (S20) on startup, and therefore Avahi gets to be first (alphabetical order), so you have to get root on your tablet and rename all S20avahi-* files in /etc/rc2.d/ to S21avahi-*. This way, D-Bus gets started first and after that, Avahi can start successfully (if Avahi is started before D-Bus, it won't work!).

After that, you can disable the HomeIP applet and start reading and typing IPs around your home network, but let Avahi/Bonjour do the hard work and you just type the easy-to-remember ".local" if you want to SSH to your tablet.

You can do even more fun things when you put "ssh.service" into /etc/avahi/services/ and install "service-discovery-applet" on your Gnome Desktop. This way, you can directly connect via SSH/SFTP to your tablet without needing to remember anything.

What are your uses for Avahi?
Categories: service
Philip Van Hoof

Sundayz

2008-11-09 20:25 UTC  by  Philip Van Hoof
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With all the politics I didn’t really report a lot about what I’m doing behind the computarz. I’ll be brief for a change.

While working for my customers during the week I of course can’t spend time on just any subject. So I try to do something useful each Sunday evening.

For the last weeks this has resulted in these proposals and patches for GLib:

The two performance improvements combined together will make a GObject without properties construct almost as fast as a GstMiniObject. I have tested them with the Vala compiler, which uses GObject extensively and all GObject tests in GLib seem to work.

For my customer I’m working on these things:

Categories: Informatics and programming
Stephen Gadsby

Maemo Bug Jar #30

2008-11-10 00:00 UTC  by  Stephen Gadsby
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A Quick Look at maemo Bugzilla
2008-11-03 through 2008-11-09

Click to read 2660 more words
Marius Gedminas

Volume control keys on Ubuntu

2008-11-10 12:42 UTC  by  Marius Gedminas
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Does anybody else think it's retarded that volume control keys do not work if you have a menu open in Ubuntu?

I'm sure people can claim there are good technical reasons for that (the toolkit has to grab the X server to implement popup menus, and then gnome-settings-daemon doesn't see the XF86VolumeUp/Down key events or whatever), but if you take a step back and look at this from the user's perspective, it makes no sense.

Murray Cumming

Openismus wants trainees

2008-11-10 13:23 UTC  by  Murray Cumming
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It has always been difficult to find GNOME developers to employ. So for a while I have wanted to grow some new developers of our own. Now that the Berlin office is established we are ready to start by hiring some junior developers.

If you are smart and enthusiastic but you lack experience then we can provide the opportunity. You would work mostly on existing open source projects instead of customer projects, just to get experience with C, C++, GTK+ and Qt. Our developers would provide technical guidance and encourage you to work and communicate in a structured way, creating software that’s actually usable and useful.

This is also a great opportunity to move to Berlin – a wonderful city for young people.

Categories: Berlin
Daniel Gentleman

Community Highlights

2008-11-10 14:42 UTC  by  Daniel Gentleman
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There are some ups and downs in the community lately:
As for ThoughtFix: Still settling into San Jose. Nothing exciting here.

Categories: community
Daniel Gentleman

Third party extended-life battery for the N810

2008-11-10 16:57 UTC  by  Daniel Gentleman
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It's not pretty, but Mugen decided to make a long-life battery for the Nokia N810. Personally, I'd just carry an emergency USB charger with a Nokia Nseries tip and keep that in the bag - but some of you may want 3600mAh in your pocket. The price on the page is US$82.95 plus shipping and they are currently out of stock.

Thanks to JKK for the tip.

Categories: accessories
Tim Samoff

Hire me...

2008-11-10 18:11 UTC  by  Tim Samoff
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It came as a surprise this morning when I learned that I was laid-off. It’s unfortunate, but with the recent buy-out, understandable. Anyway, if you’re looking to hire a designer/filmmaker/user experience/writer/musician sort of fellow who is creative, innovative, passionate, self-motivated, easily adaptable — someone who makes his bosses look good… Then I am your man. Have a look at my LinkedIn profile, or become friends with me on Facebook. I’ve got over twenty years experience and I still love what I do.

(Also, I understand that this is not -specific, but I wanted to inform the community that I’m available — thanks for understanding.)


Tags:
Tim Samoff

Hire me...

2008-11-10 18:11 UTC  by  Tim Samoff
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It came as a surprise this morning when I learned that I was laid-off. It’s unfortunate, but with the recent buy-out, understandable. Anyway, if you’re looking to hire a designer/filmmaker/user experience/writer/musician sort of fellow who is creative, innovative, passionate, self-motivated, easily adaptable — someone who makes his bosses look good… Then I am your man. Have a look at my LinkedIn profile, or become friends with me on Facebook. I’ve got over twenty years experience and I still love what I do.

(Also, I understand that this is not -specific, but I wanted to inform the community that I’m available — thanks for understanding.)


Tags:
Dirk-Jan Binnema

the test that stumped them all

2008-11-11 19:26 UTC  by  Dirk-Jan Binnema
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Most of us are not Donald Knuth, and indeed need to test our software. That is even true for my hobby projects - when I offer software for use by others, it's a matter of craftmanship to deliver the best software possible. It's very hard to foresee all the possible environments (architecture, compiler, library version, ...) where my software might be run. But at least, I can minimize the number of programming errors by testing things as much as possible.

The trouble with testing, however, is that it is dead boring. I hate doing boring things -- life is just too short. So, I want to do my testing in the least boring way possible -- I'd like to be able to simply run:


$ make test

and have that go through all my test cases, and report any failures. The idea is that if it is so easy to run tests, you might actually do so, and make sure your software is working according to plan. When doing a release, it is so easy to forget something really obvious, for which you get embarrasing bug reports... Running some automated tests gives some peace of mind when doing a release.
Click to read 2274 more words
Categories: c
Thomas Perl

"N900" wishlist: Hardware scrollwheel

2008-11-11 23:16 UTC  by  Thomas Perl
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One of the things I've been thinking about recently is how I would like to have a scroll wheel (like all normal computer mice have) on the right side of my N800, just below the "Nokia N800" text. This way, I could easily scroll web pages and long texts without needing to use my finger on the touchpad. Using the finger on the touchpad has several disadvantages:
  1. You hide parts of the content you are reading with your finger
  2. You might accidentally click a link (in the browser)
  3. Scrolling through long texts means you have to sweep with your finger from the bottom of your screen to the top, several times
Apart from scrolling, this could act as a nice volume control in media players. Maybe even make the scroll wheel pressable, so we have another button (mute in media players?).
If you have an N800, please try this the next time you want to scroll a webpage: Move your finger over the top right side of your N800, between the "Nokia N800" text and the speaker holes. I don' t know if the scroll wheel would fit onto a smaller device like the N810 (or the "N900").
I think a touchscreen is nice, but having hardware buttons makes the device just easier to use in my opinion. I would even try to make touchscreen clicks by pressing the display, like it is done with the new Apple MacBook touchpads (see apple.com for videos). But there may be patent problems with that, so maybe this is the reason why we won't see that on the "N900". But think about it! Wouldn't it be nice?
That said, please also improve the D-Pad and hardware keyboard on the new hardware :)
Categories: touchscreen
Ryan Abel

Calling all translators

2008-11-12 22:01 UTC  by  Ryan Abel
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Some of you may recall my last post where I talked about the new package categories for Diablo. In order to implement these new categories, a few changes need to be made to the Application Manager. In order for Nokia to ship these changes, translations of the categories need to be provided for all of Nokia's supported languages. The appropriate steps have been taken internally to begin translation of the new strings, but this process takes time which may unacceptably delay the shipment of the new Application Manager code.

Fortunately the community can help out here by translating the list of categories. Anybody interested and able should see the wiki page and fill in any missing languages. Once these translations are completed, hopefully the updated Application Manager can be shipped in one of the next few SSU releases, and packagers and users will start benefiting from the new categories.

Categories: council
Jamie Bennett

Ubuntu comes to Maemo

2008-11-13 20:36 UTC  by  Jamie Bennett
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So, its kind of official, Ubuntu is coming to Maemo.

Today, Canonical announced that they are to officially create a ARMv7 version of their most popular software product, Ubuntu Linux, but what does that mean?

read more

Categories: Maemo
everaldo

Mono 2.0.1 for Nokia devices

2008-11-13 20:57 UTC  by  everaldo
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Last weeks lots of people contact me to ask about Mono 2.0 packages for Maemo, I have been working to get it done and I finished it some moments ago (03:02am now). So, instead of I big post what I did is updated the documentation on Mono's website.

For more information about how to get it working check:


you could be also interested to get more information about scratchbox:


And the mandatory screenshots:



Tomboy running on N810 (Mono 2.0.1)


PEditGtkSharp running on N810 (Mono 2.0.1)


Package Manager showing Mono 2.0.1 runtime package

Let me know if you found some problems.
Categories: all
Gustavo Barbieri

ELC-E 2008 was great!

2008-11-13 23:06 UTC  by  Gustavo Barbieri
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Back from The Netherlands after an amazing Embedded Linux Conference (ELC-E 2008) at Ede and then some good days at Amsterdam.

Damien Hirst: For The Love of God

Damien Hirst: For The Love of God

I really liked ELC-E, talked with lots of guys, my presentation was good as well (I hope so! let’s wait for the videos), you can see the slides at: http://palestras.gustavobarbieri.com.br/efl/elce2008/Rich_GUI_without_pain.pdf

After the main conference we had an extra UPnP/DLNA conference, it was really small, but interesting nonetheless.

Then I traveled to Amsterdam, it was my first time there and I really enjoyed the city, the people, the beer… and the museums, of course. There I could see the awesome piece that shows in this post called “For The Love of God”.

Categories: Free Software
Daniel Gentleman

Hey Quim Gil

2008-11-14 15:43 UTC  by  Daniel Gentleman
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Happy Birthday, sir! We thank you for all your leadership and contributions.

Categories: community
Ian Lawrence

Where are the things we were promised?

2008-11-15 07:04 UTC  by  Ian Lawrence
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Education used to be an end in itself, not a means. It wasn't about
having a high-paying career. It was about knowing the world, about
having knowledge and wisdom for its own sake. It was, quite bluntly,
the accumulation of useless knowledge by the elite -- those that could
afford to spend time on such things, knowing that useless knowledge has
a way of becoming useful in the most unexpected of ways. How fortunate
we are to live in an age where the accumulation of useless knowledge is
available to so many, and how sad it is that so few take advantage of
it.

So this came from Planet  Debian and it sort of fits with some things that I have been worrying about recently. We need to solve some big problems in the world and urgently  (global warming, population control, cancer etc) but the innovation which I see around is about putting some beeer on a beer wall or BuddyPoking someone with a ninja kick .

Click to read 802 more words
Categories: I
Stephen Gadsby

Maemo Bug Jar #31

2008-11-17 00:00 UTC  by  Stephen Gadsby
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A Quick Look at maemo Bugzilla
2008-11-10 through 2008-11-16

Click to read 3302 more words
Andrea Grandi

What I expect in the future of Maemo Development

2008-11-17 07:50 UTC  by  Andrea Grandi
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In these days I was thinking about: what could be done to improve Maemo Development and power user experience? There are some points that would need to be improved. This little list pretends to be just a starting point. I hope to get some feedback so we can discuss further in the maemo-developers mailing list.

Documentation: Maemo developers use different libraries and toolkit (GTK, libui, ecc...). There is not a common place where I can look for documentation. I've to visit each library website and get it. It would be great to have a tool just like Qt Assistant, integrating all documentation, including examples and aggregating external articles using a "live RSS aggregator".

Kinetic scrolling: I really love Mauku application because of its kinetic scrolling, thanks to the Miaouw library. It would be great to have this kind of scrolling to be part of Hildon UI. Of course I'd love to have Python bindings too :)

Eclipse Support: I think Eclipse support should be improved. I'd like to have a tool that makes .deb creation easier so developers can spend more time coding and not packaging applications. I'd like to see a GUI designer integrated into Eclipse (for "integrated" I mean something like Visual Studio GUI designer.... not an external tool like Glade).

Qt Creator: Trolltech (Nokia) just released a preview release of their Qt Creator. A very powerfull IDE to develop Qt/C++ applications. It's still in alpha release, but... what about integrating Maemo development into it? (Supporting Python development too).

Maemo SAS hosting: sometimes we (well.. me at least :D ) need to write an application that uses a server part too and need to expose some API. Maemo.org offers hosting for the project, but what about the server part of the application? It would be fine if developers had the possibility to have the server side hosted by Maemo.org or Nokia.

Better GPS support: the GPS unit shipped with N810 is something unusable yet. I've tried using A-GPS too, but position fixing time is still bad, compared to an external GPS/bluetooth receiver. I often have to use my external GPS receiver to use my N810 without problems.

More audio/video codecs: often I'm not able to listen to online radios, streamings ecc... just because of a missing codec for the default Media Player.

These are just some ideas. Please feel free to comment them, I'd like to discuss them together.

Categories: Maemo (EN)
Daniel Gentleman

Ubuntu on the Internet Tablets: Yes. Really.

2008-11-17 19:23 UTC  by  Daniel Gentleman
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Thanks to @corq on Twitter (follow and send me stuff here) for reminding me to post this: Linux UK is reporting that Canonical's "Ubuntu on ARM7" announcement means Ubuntu is coming to Internet Tablets.

Is that definitive? I don't know. Is a full desktop operating system good for Internet Tablets? No. Does this mean the Nokia tablets can choose between the awesome Maemo platform and the awesome Ubuntu Mobile platform? I certainly hope so!

Categories: ubuntu
Ryan Abel

Maemo packaging features you're missing out on

2008-11-17 19:24 UTC  by  Ryan Abel
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Since a lot of you will be changing your packaging once the new categories are added to the Application Manager (which we are still missing a few translations!), now seems like a good time to discuss some of the packaging features many of you are missing out on.

Pretty names in Application Manager

Much like you can specify separate "Unix" and a "pretty" names for your project on Garage, you can specify a "Maemo-Display-Name" to show a "pretty" name for your package in Application Manager. Simply add a line with "XB-Maemo-Display-Name" to your debian/control file with the desired display name of your package, and it will show up as the package name in Application Manager. For instance, "OS2008 Feature upgrade" instead of "osso-software-version-rx34". This makes the package list look much cleaner, and package names much more readable. It's a dead-simple way to improve the user experience for everybody.

Upgrade descriptions

Typically users will either have to refer to a website (assuming you have one) or dig into the changelog in the .deb if they want to know what new things they're getting with an upgrade. Fortunately there's an easy way to provide a user-friendly change log right in the Application Manager. Simply specify an "XB-Maemo-Upgrade-Description" field in your debian/control file with a description of the update (formatted the same as the Description field), and users will see the description in a separate tab in the info dialog during updates.

Package icons

Packages can have icons displayed next to their names in the Application Manager, to have an icon, you simply need to encode a 26x26 pixel image (PNG is a reasonable choice) of your icon into base64 (uuencode -m) and add it to your debian/control file under "XB-Maemo-Icon-26". If you don't provide an icon your package will end up with the drab, ugly default package icon.

Selecting a menu location

Most of you know you can show a dialog to let the user select a menu location for your application by calling "maemo-select-menu-location" from your postinst script, but what many of you may not realize, is that doing just this will show the dialog again during updates even when the user has already selected a location, which can be quite irritating.

Thankfully there's a simple fix. Simply wrap the maemo-select-menu-location with an if statement to get something like this:

oldversion="$2"
if [ -z "$oldversion" ]; then
maemo-select-menu-location your.desktop
fi

Which will check to see if the package has been previously installed and suppress the folder selection dialog if it has.

For more information about these and packaging in general, see the hildon-application-manager packaging guide, the Maemo Packaging Policy, and the Debian Packaging Policy.

Daniel Gentleman

Poll: Where does the Internet start for you?

2008-11-18 10:21 UTC  by  Daniel Gentleman
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After fighting off a Microsoft takeover and watching his stock take a nosedive, Jerry Yang stepped down from Yahoo. For years, Yahoo was a "default homepage" for many people. Times have changed, however. What is your favorite launch pad for browsing the Internet?
  • Yahoo
  • MSN
  • iGoogle
  • Blank page
  • Self-built page
  • Other (in comments)
Voting is on the right side of TabletBlog, as usual. If you have a favorite default page, share! Also - comments are welcome on how mobile-friendly any of these sites are.

Categories: news
mikal

maemo SDK+ Beta-2.5 released

2008-11-18 12:26 UTC  by  mikal
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We are happy to report that the maemo SDK+ Beta-2.5 is released. Click yourself to http://maemo-sdk.garage.maemo.org to learn more how to develop maemo applications without Scratchbox-1. Maemo SDK+ is an alternative (and currently unofficial) way to develop software for Nokia Internet Tablets. This release has lots of bug fixes and much better support for X86 architecture than [...]
Categories: tools
Henri Bergius

Maemo.org goes Ragnaroek

2008-11-18 16:54 UTC  by  Henri Bergius
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Maemo.org, the community site for Nokia's mobile Linux environment has this week been upgraded to 8.09.2 Ragnaroek, the much faster and long-term supported version of the Midgard framework. Thanks to Niels and Piotras for working with me on this!

in October, I spent quite a bit of time optimizing this release, shaving off an estimated 60-70% of queries through some smart caching and removed redundancies. In addition, a new database server is now in place. Together, these should get us quite far in the "Fast Server" agenda.

Maemo on Nov 18th

We're however still not done, and now we will do more optimizations that will be part of 8.09.3, due next week, and will move static files (images and javascript) to a separate lighttpd instance to remove that load from the normal Apache. When all this is done, the Maemo community should have infrastructure that will be able to serve it for a long time.

In addition to optimization, we've been working on some other features related to the website:

Midgard is a big and complex piece of software. If you notice any issues related to this upgrade, please let us know. And if you have any ideas on improving the website, be sure to file those too!

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Categories: midgard
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Tero Kojo

Now the site really feels faster!

2008-11-18 20:14 UTC  by  Tero Kojo
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Bergie beat me to the post A big thank you to everyone involved in the push! Especially X-Fade and Bergie. I was happy when I read my mails this morning, X-Fade telling that the upgrade went well. And I was really smiling when I logged onto the site. The site is just faster. The new Midgard [...]
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags:
Daniel Gentleman

IntoMobile weighs in with an Internet Tablet wish list.

2008-11-20 13:35 UTC  by  Daniel Gentleman
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If you are not already subscribed to IntoMobile, you are missing out on their article titled "Few things I would like to see in the next Nokia Internet Tablet Device."

Some things echo normal community comments and some (1024x600 capacitive touchscreen?) are a little outlandish. Read, comment, and discuss!

By the way: This is tabletblog's 600th post.

Categories: other blogs
Ryan Abel

Canola and Bugzilla: A Beautiful Friendship

2008-11-21 02:58 UTC  by  Ryan Abel
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Today I'd like to announce the beginning of Canola issue tracking on the maemo.org Bugzilla. This marks the beginning of community application tracking in our Bugzilla, and another milestone in maemo.org's transition into a true community website.

Canola's existing tracker on Garage is now closed (anybody familiar with Garage's tracker will know exactly how sweet a thing that is ;)), any remaining valid issues will be migrated to Bugzilla, and the rest of the issues will be closed.

This is only the first step in tracking 3rd-party applications in Bugzilla, as tracking for more than just a few applications will be dependent on significant software upgrades, so we're starting with a small pilot-program with some high-profile applications that are most likely to benefit from quality bug tracking.

Big thanks to Andre and Karsten (our bugmasters) for facilitating this change, and to the Canola team (particularly Marcelo Oliveira and my fellow Council member Eduardo Lima) who worked so hard to get Canola open-sourced (which was really what finally made this happen). The rest of you can show your appreciation by filing some bugs! ;)

Murray Cumming

Trainees Chosen

2008-11-21 10:41 UTC  by  Murray Cumming
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The response to my call for Openismus trainees was excellent. I have now selected two trainees who will start in January 2009 and I really wish we could afford to take a couple more. I’ll announce the names soon. Furthermore, Daniel Elstner will return to Openismus to train them in the Berlin office, starting in December.

I think I’ve replied to everyone personally. If I’ve missed anyone, please do email me again so I can give you a more specific response.

Categories: Berlin
Henri Bergius

Summer of Code works

2008-11-21 11:06 UTC  by  Henri Bergius
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COSS - Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions

Prompted by a recent COSS news release, I thought to write about two Summer of Code success stories:

Not bad!

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Categories: desktop
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Urho Konttori

UKMP 1.80 and Zen of music player

2008-11-22 13:34 UTC  by  Urho Konttori
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Long time in the making bears fruit. I'm publishing ukmp 1.8 now. It's beta, I have worked today six or seven hours on it, which is probably more I've done to it for a few months. I've been doing some testing, but as you can imagine, it needs a bit more tests before I feel confident putting it to maemo extras repositories and download pages.

However, what is there is something I'm pretty proud of. It's now the music player I always wanted it to be. Very easy to use, very smooth and now that it's in portrait mode, it's finally usable with one hand. Mind you, the optimal hand is left hand.
Click to read 964 more words
Categories: maemo
Thomas Perl

App idea for high-def camera: Face warping

2008-11-23 13:38 UTC  by  Thomas Perl
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Here's an idea that's been floating around in my "Maemo ideas" list in Maemopad+, but which I have not yet had time to look into, so I'm publishing it here in case anyone wants to implement it: Make photos with the camera on the internet tablet and then have morphing effects (like Cheese) and also a manual stylus-driven "power goo" (like Kai's Power Goo) mode.

I know, it's pointless, but having seen many people having several minutes of fun with the FaceWarp Java app that comes pre-installed on some Sony Ericsson phones, I can see this being a fun app for showing off the Internet Tablet to friends.

Does this sound like a killer app for the next device that is going to have a "high-def camera"? I don't know. It would be interesting if someone tries to get Cheese running on the tablets and have some fun with it. And of course, add these effects to the videophone app, too!
Categories: face warping
penguinbait

How to use Spanish voices and Directions with Maemo Mapper 2.5.1 and higher

2008-11-23 21:27 UTC  by  penguinbait
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I want to start this post by thanking Gnuite for making the changes to Maemo Mapper to allow this to be possible. I also want to point out that the only reason we did this is because alephito @ ITT asked me. He also helped with testing and tweaking the spanish voice… Download and [...]
Categories: Family and Friends
Stephen Gadsby

Maemo Bug Jar #32

2008-11-24 00:00 UTC  by  Stephen Gadsby
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A Quick Look at maemo Bugzilla
2008-11-17 through 2008-11-23

Click to read 4136 more words
Ryan Abel

Community Highlights for December 2008: Part I

2008-11-25 08:44 UTC  by  Ryan Abel
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When the Council was first formed, one of the things we decided we were going to do was aggregate community activity to this blog. This was to reduce the workload for people who wanted to track what the community was up to, but didn't have the time to monitor every single channel for updates (the list of which is rather sizable, including Internet Tablet Talk, the mailing lists, #maemo, Planet, the wiki, Bugzilla, Jaiku, and others). Unfortunately, due partially to lack of a structured plan and partially to some lazy fellow council members who I wont name :P, this "aggregation" has been limited to posts from me about things I happen to be interested in (or think need highlighting). Which doesn't include those things that I'm not interested in, or fail my entirely arbitrary relevance test. ;)

So, today we start off on a new foot with real (and hopefully useful) aggregation in the form of a bi-monthly "community highlights" column which will come on the first and third weeks of each month (Part I and Part II).

Mer (formerly Maemo Reconstructed)

Mer started out as Maemo Reconstructed, a proof of concept implementation of "Maemo" (i.e., Hildon) on top of a basic Ubuntu release stripped down to fit into about the same amount of space as Maemo occupies. The goal being to move Maemo away from the "proprietary vendor-rolled firmware" mentality to a more general platform for tablet devices, make in more developer-friendly, and improve Maemo's alignment with upstream (to reduce the number of "Maemoisms" and make porting easier).

Mer is effectively the second step in this process (the renaming solved branding conflicts so Mer could be used as a community distribution of Maemo in the short-term while Nokia figures out what direction it wants to take Maemo in in the long term), and lots of progress has already been made, so be sure to keep an eye on it.

maemo.org server improvements

You may have noticed maemo.org running a lot faster, this is thanks to the Midgard upgrade that was pushed last week. The software is now much gentler on the database, and there have been general improvements in practically every area of Midgard. Thanks to Henri, Niels, and piotras for making the push to get it live!

maemo.org design

Dave, Tim, and Andrew have been working with INdT on the maemo.org redesign over the past few weeks. The plan is to have a new design to implement by December, so get ready for a new look in the next couple months.

Canola in Bugzilla

Canola is now a product in Bugzilla, which marks the first non-Nokia software officially tracked in the maemo.org bugzilla and signifies a milestone in maemo.org's new role as the true home of the Maemo Community. So get to filing bugs! ;)

Sanjeev Visvanatha

N800 As A Baby Monitor 'Gizmo'

2008-11-25 13:52 UTC  by  Sanjeev Visvanatha
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Turn your old N800 into a baby monitor, nanny cam, or surveillance device.

The inspiration for this blog post comes from qole's idea to use two tablets as a baby monitor. His idea was to have an application written for the tablets to do this. I clumsily wrote a few responses on ways that this could be achieved with the tablet's existing functionality, but then thought of a simpler way that I'll share with you all.

Required items:

Qty. 2 Nokia Internet Tablets (770, N800, N810, etc). The N800 for this application is ideal due to the swivel feature of the camera.

Qty. 2 Gizmo SIP accounts (let's call the two accounts UserA and UserB).

Optional Items:

Qty. 1 Gizmo Call-In number (to use with one of the advanced monitoring options)


Inital Setup:

1. Setup the 'transmitting tablet - Tablet A'. Place this tablet in the room to be monitored. Setup the Gizmo client with UserA login credentials, and set it to auto-answer incoming calls. Plug the power cord in, put it in a convenient spot, and aim the camera at the area you want to monitor. Don't forget to turn the volume to the mute setting.

2. Set up the 'monitoring tablet - Tablet B'. Set up your Gizmo service using UserB login credentials.


Monitoring:

1. When you want to monitor the room that Tablet A is in, simply use the Internet Call application or Gizmo Client of Tablet B, and call Tablet A by dialing 'UserA' from your contacts list. Tablet A should auto-answer, and you'll be able to see and hear any action going on in that room.

Advanced monitoring:

2. Assuming that you want to remotely monitor what is going on, e.g. while at work while your nanny is taking care of your kids - simply connect to the internet using Tablet B, and repeat Step 1 above.

3. If you do not have access to the internet, but want to eavesdrop (for instance, if your kids are being babysat while you are at a movie), then you can eavesdrop on what's going on by using your cell phone. For this, you need to have a Gizmo Call-In number tied to the UserA account on Tablet A. Simply dial the call-in number from anywhere, and instantly hear what is going on in the house.

That's it. I hope this post is of benefit to someone out there.


Notes:

1. I could not find an option within the Internet Call application to auto-answer incoming calls, therefore Tablet A must use the Gizmo client. If anyone can prove otherwise, please post a comment here.

2. Tablet B can use either the Internet Call application or the Gizmo client.

3. The video usefulness is questionable in low-light conditions.

4. Disclaimer: Use at your own risk - we are not responsible for any outcomes associated with using this how-to!
Categories: Maemo
Tim Samoff

Now Hiring: Maemo Community debmaster

2008-11-26 02:39 UTC  by  Tim Samoff
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This position is now closed.

This position is now closed.

Categories: council
Daniel Gentleman

Chumby hack published in MAKE Vol. 16

2008-11-26 15:06 UTC  by  Daniel Gentleman
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This isn't Internet Tablet related, but I've mentioned Chumby here several times.

A hack I did on my Chumby - specifically the installation of the Chumby into 1980's style bright red phone - got published in MAKE Magazine. It's in MAKE Vol. 16 and here's a digital preview of it. Take a look at the next page to see the guts of the Chumby and the phone. If you're into hardware hacking or tinkering, you'll enjoy the MAKE magazine, blog, and twitter feed.

Categories: other blogs
Dirk-Jan Binnema

it's so easy

2008-11-26 21:55 UTC  by  Dirk-Jan Binnema
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Sometimes, I like to use mathematical notation in webpages, either to impress people or simply for decoration. One way to do that is MathML, which is an XML-based markup language for mathematical notation. However, many browsers do not support MathML at all, or require you to download plugins and/or special fonts. Another problem with MathML is that XML is a really inconvenient format to edit by hand. Practically, you'll need some kind of formula editor.
Click to read 942 more words
Categories: emacs
Marius Vollmer

Minimal debian/rules?

2008-11-27 00:59 UTC  by  Marius Vollmer
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$ ls -l ./debian/rules
lrwxrwxrwx 1 mvo mvo 11 2008-11-27 02:50 ./debian/rules -> /usr/bin/dh

Lintian is not happy.

Actually,

$ cat debian/rules
dh $1

works, too, since everybody seems to run debian/rules via /bin/sh anyway.
Lintian still not happy.


Categories: maemo
Urho Konttori

UKMP 1.83 released to repositories

2008-11-27 10:07 UTC  by  Urho Konttori
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A week of tuneups and I feel confident putting the portrait ukmp to maemo extras. It's there now available as update to previous users of ukmp.Album art downloading was greatly improved on version 1.82, so 1.83 will remove your existing cover art upon install. 1.83 added the final touches like play/pause button to work properly and some layout tuneups. Shuffle logic is still horrible and I really need to revisit that for the next version.



Other known irritations are that only fisrt 35 songs are visible on each album, so if you have e.g. Rolling Stones top 500 songs as one album, you'll be very dissatisfied with ukmp. I'm trying to bridge the gap between what is now and having 500 songs on an album, but it's not going to work on the next release. Also, everyone should be plesed to notice the exit button on top right corner, with me being the most pleased, because perhaps this will stop emails to me asking how to close ukmp. 1.82 also came with proper support for collection albums. Now the song artist is displayed in the song list view for collection albums. It's simple, yet very rewarding feature.

No more words: Click here to install .

Oh, I'll be posting a new video for the next version. Check out my previous post for the 1.80 release video.
Categories: maemo
Tyler Longwell

Even More Maemo Backgrounds

2008-11-28 13:40 UTC  by  Tyler Longwell
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Hello, everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! (And a great day, even if you didn't celebrate it :D ) I spent my holiday away from home and I took some pretty pictures that look wonderful on my tablet, and I wanted to share. Hope you like em! :)

Categories: n810
Tyler Longwell

Even More Maemo Backgrounds

2008-11-28 13:40 UTC  by  Tyler Longwell
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Hello, everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! (And a great day, even if you didn't celebrate it :D ) I spent my holiday away from home and I took some pretty pictures that look wonderful on my tablet, and I wanted to share. Hope you like em! :)

Categories: backgrounds
Karoliina Salminen

New ring tone for your Maemo device or any other mobile device

2008-11-28 16:12 UTC  by  Karoliina Salminen
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I recently created a new song ( these can be found from my music blog from http://karoliinamusic.blogspot.com ) and here is a shortened version of it which I tried to make useful as use as a ring tone for mobile devices. It is a bit more equalized and bit more compressed also than the hifi-version of the song. By all means, you can use also the actual song as a ring tone, but this has been cut to start from the middle to be more useful - ring tones usually play only a short time and long intro part is not very useful on them then.

I have this on my N810 and also in my N95 and I think it works pretty well. You can in principle use it with any mobile device which understands mp3 format and allows you to assign these files as ring tones.

I am planning to do a measurement of the frequency response of the tiny speakers to equalize this better for them (now this has too much mid frequencies maybe for the tiny speakers, because this mix is still "almost hifi"). I haven't done that yet, I should dig my measurement microphone from storage to be able to do that (the Internet tablet / phone mix would be counter-equalized with that). However, this version already works on your device, so feel free to use it.

Download it from here:
Sky Party - ring tone version 1

The file bitrate is 128 kbit/s and the file size is 2188433 bytes which is around 2MB. You can install it by for example reading this with the N810, saving the file and then assigning it as a ring tone for the internet call. Alternatively you can download it with your computer, use the USB cable to connect the computer to the device and then copy the file to the device's file system.

If you are using Mac to download the file (instead of the mentioned Internet tablet for example), you may need to right click the file with CTRL + mouse button or otherwise the Quicktime starts to play it instead of downloading the file.

All feedback is welcome.
Categories: ring tone
jaaksi

Open and Agile -- the Transparent Twins

2008-11-30 14:08 UTC  by  jaaksi
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Component level

Open source adds transparency. It provides a very practical means to access and share code, work together with others, and design and implement software in a collaborative manner. When code is licensed under a copyleft license, there is also a guarantee that nobody can mess it up! Transparency and free access to source code provide very powerful tools for software development.

Commercial system level

However, building complex systems remains challenging. Developers who never worked in a large commercial project easily underestimate challenges outside the source code domain. Creating right user experience is hard. Collecting feedback from users during the development is not simple. Providing accurate project estimations for various stakeholders remains tough. Integrating complex systems from components that originate from different sources is much more difficult than writing the actual components. Testing and stabilizing large systems gets harder and harder as systems grow. Replanning after late and big changes in project conditions is laborious. And, running several software projects concurrently multiplies all the above challenges.


Open and Agile

Open source adds transparency to software development. The code, developers, and design decisions are all visible to everybody. I believe transparency can also be used in other areas of software projects. Agile methods, such as Scrum, can provide such transparency on the system project level.

Our context is challenging, though. Teams cannot be co-located. Non-agile hardware development happens simultaneously with software development. There are tens -- and even hundreads -- of Scrum teams working for a same project. Projects deal with issues ranging from hardware design, driver and OS base port, middleware and application adaptation -- all the way to end user experience and over 40 language variants ... and so forth. In these circumstances a basic idea of a a few agile software teams is hardly a complete solution.

I believe

It is a bit early for me to make any final conclusions of agile methods in practice. But I'm a believer, and we are using Scrum now more and more at Nokia. I believe that what open source has done for software development, agile methonds can do for commercial system and product development. Add visibility, access, and intellectual honesty. Transparency. You cannot hide shit no more.
Felipe Contreras

Collaboration; the most valuable lesson companies should learn from open source

2008-11-30 17:58 UTC  by  Felipe Contreras
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Replying to Ari Jaaksi’s post. I believe that what open source has done for software development, agile methonds can do for commercial system and product development. Add visibility, access, and intellectual honesty. Transparency. You cannot hide shit no more. Indeed, Scrum brings more transparency to the software development in corporate environments, compared to the waterfall process. And [...]
Categories: Development

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