In my last post, I was calling for contributors to write a web canvas using the <canvas> tag. If you don’t know it, <canvas> is a new tag specified in HTML5 which allows you to draw using a Javascript API. It is already supported in Firefox, Opera, Safari and is supported in Internet Explorer through a third-party Javascript.

Since nobody responded to my call (sic), I decided to tackle it by myself. It turns out that it was a nice little project. The canvas Javascript API is very similar to the cairo API so it was easy to use. I also improved my level in Javascript a lot. So far the web canvas supports draw, import (JSON), export (XML), save as an image and replay (stroke by stroke animation).

You can try it by using the online DEMO.

What can it be useful for?

- I’m planning to use it for the handwriting database website that I wrote about some time ago. While it will be possible to contribute your handwriting using a pygtk client (Desktop or Maemo), you will also be able to contribute your handwriting using your browser directly. Not having to install any program should help increase the number of people contributing their handwriting.

- A second way of using it would be to do handwriting recognition directly in the browser. For example, one could install Tomoe (or my recognizer when it’s ready ;-)) on the server side and the web canvas on the client side. Since Tomoe has Python and Ruby bindings, this is fairly easy!

You can reuse the web canvas for your own projects if you like but I would appreciate if you could send me any feature improvement. In particular, the web canvas has a bug under Internet Explorer that I couldn’t figure out…

Source code (GPL) : gitweb

Robert has done a great work again!
Together with Ken Gilmer from Buglabs he created clean OpenEmbedded receipts for Sun’s PhoneME. Now we have nice packages of the VM for OpenMoko and Maemo in our Jalimo repository! Even the JIT works fine. The PhoneME only supports Java CDC, but has a very fast startup: Hello World in 250ms and SWT application in 4 seconds.

For more info read the original posting from robert.

Well...



















Look what's up for pre-order... And it's actually from someone reputable! I love Amazon. And, it says that these babies will be shipping in one to two months.

Think this'll give Nokia enough to roll out those N900s by Christmas? ;) Hm... I wish.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your wallets! (That is, if you live somewhere near some WiMax-y goodness.)

For the lasts 3 months we have been working hard on the QEdje project, a bridge of the Edje declarative language (from the EFL - Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) to the Qt world. In the next week we are going to travel to Belgium, where we will have the opportunity to present, on Tuesday 12/08, this work at Akademy!

Edje has been used on Canola, Carman and various other applications with great success, simplifying the work of designers and developers. So we are really excited about the opportunities of using Edje together with Qt!


below is the abstract of our presentation:


Edje is a declarative language that simplifies the development of complex interfaces separating the UI design from the application logic, by providing animations, layouts and simple scripts in a very small memory footprint.

The main purpose of the QEdje project is to build a bridge among components that proved to have great value for open source developers: Edje and Qt. This will extend the Qt toolkit with the flexibility of a declarative language, such as Edje, and also enable Qt widgets to be embedded into Edje UI design.

This presentation will show more about the QEdje project, current status, future plans and also present some canvas benchmark's and improvement possibilities, taking Evas (which is recognized as a very fast and optimized canvas) as a reference point.

So Glauber’s entry was selected as the new logo for the Maemo.org community. I am of course really proud of his work, and I am also happy to see a lot of people saying that they like it too. But, as anything related to design, there’s the ones who are not satisfied, and they have [...]

OK so I'm late to the party please go easy as I've had to endure a 10 1/2 hour trip back from Disney Land Paris where I took the kids for the last 8 days, 'pooped out' isn't a good enough phrase!

Anyway, I wholeheartedly agree with the final choice of design for the new Maemo logo. It oozes potential for merchandise and is both simple and elegant. I liked a lot of the other designs too but this just stood out as a solution that fitted the problem perfectly.

Congratulations to glaoliver (no Maemo wiki user page to link to unfortunately) and I hope to be proudly parading my new Maemo t-shirt soon.

It came as no shock (to me at least) that a Brazilian has won the Maemo logo competition. What is really cool is that Glauber works with us in Manaus
Designers and programmers are now working closely together @ openbossa and it looks like this approach is starting to pay off here in Manaus. Well done, Glauber.

Also in Manaus we have been running some training courses recently at Fucapi, a sort of Educational Institute like a University. I was asked to run a Python course and as part of it I came across a python library called GASP (Graphics API for Students of Python). This *rocks* !. By the end of the lesson all the students (with little or no python experience) had created and customized a Pong game.

I could not believe how easy it was to explain the graphics API to them. It is a easy step from GASP to Pygame and to the creation of games for mobile devices.

So the seed has been planted and things grow rapidly here in the forest!

The previous mention of Mauku was an unstable version supporting Twitter concurrently with Jaiku. Today though we get a nice update to the official release in .5.1 which seems far more stable and able to handle the volume of connections both services require.

If you participate in either or both Twitter and Jaiku, Mauku is the gold standard for staying in touch. While twitter offers considerably less organization than Jaiku, Mauku makes it easy to stay connected.

Technorati Tags: Mauku maemo twitter jaiku n800 n810

As you may be aware already, the first 100 developers that register to "Developing for Maemo - Talk and Workshops" will be given free Nokia N810 Internet tablet from Nokia.

If you miss the registration and don't fit to the first 100, no problem, we have reserved lots of devices for selected projects. If you have a good project, please describe your project and apply for device from the KDE board or Nokia representatives.

And there is lots of interesting Maemo and Nokia content in Akademy, for example:

Saturday:

13:45 - 14:30 Keynote
Deepening KDE and Qt collaboration
Sebastian Nyström (Nokia)

15:00 - 15:30 Qt on Maemo
Kate Alhola (Nokia), Antonio Aloiso (Nokia)

Tuesday:

 09:00 - 10:00 Developing applications for the maemo platform

Kate Alhola (Nokia), Antonio Aloiso (Nokia)

We also have a meeting place and Maemo open lab and we have technical people from Nokia present. Please come to talk with us.

So, there are lots of good reasons to attend Akademy 2008. See you there!

     

But it was written after, and it’s way clearer and more on the topic than what I was able to express in my 10 minutes writing : http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability If you read the past post, please take your time to go through the items. This is by far some of the most arguments that I agree [...]

This is my first post that is aggregated by planet kde. My name is Artur (a.k.a. MoRpHeUz) and I work for Openbossa (open source stream of INdT- Brazil). We develop solutions for mobile platforms like the Nokia's n8x0 devices and we are responsible for projects like Canola, Carman and Mamona. ...

Vala is awesome

The winner from the long list of entries to the maemo.org contest was chosen. There were 62 people who submitted logos for consideration, and a total of around 120 logos to choose from (excluding variants of the same logo).

In the end, the judge choose this logo from glaolivier:

So, the much anticipated Mozilla Summit 08 has just finished, and regardless some unforeseen, I truly believe that most of the 400 (+-) attendees had an amazing time, as so did I. Follows some of my highlights:

• Dan's team did really well on organization ...
  
• I had chance to see some really nice mozilla guys again including: both the father and grand-pa :) of mozilla mobile, dougt and choffman, respectively; the long term mozilla contributor on linux and always elegant, cblizzard; the mozilla brazil driver mgalli; as well as the nice leoz, romaxa and timeless from the microb project.
  
• From prism (+maemo), I got a fast but good talk to mfinkle: the point was mainly pushing prism forward on maemo and linux, and make it a fennec friend on the platform.
• The new mozilla embedding system is not just promising but real.
  
• I met the famous Stuart ‘Pavlov’ Parmenter and got some nice advices about browser benchmarks, steps toward a rendering server firefox, as well as about some of the huge Javascripts speed up they are about to land in Firefox 3.1 (new JS is going +- 10x faster then the current) ...
  
• Percy and blassey are also nice guys.
• It is great to see fennec and microb joining efforts toward a great mobile user internet experience.

Some not accomplished things after the event:

• I wish I had met Daniel Glazman and John Resig.
• I wish to have had a shorter trip back: 7hs (from whistler to vancouver) + 5 hous waiting + 5 hous from vacouver to toronto + one hour waiting + 12 hours from toronto to são paulo + 12 hours waiting + 4 hours from sp to manaus = 46 !

Long life mozilla ...

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

After a bit of "Mobile Linux is Doomed" ranting, it seems appropriate to ask Nokia Internet Tablet owners how much they'd pay for quality software on their Internet Tablets? The poll is up on the TabletBlog.com main page, as usual. The options posted are:

• Nothing - Software should be free.
• Nothing - I don't use third party software
• Up to US $10. It's only a mobile device.
• Up to US $50 like comparable PC apps.
• As much as it takes to suit my needs.

Before voting, it may be helpful to scan the reader comments from this older article. People already have good thoughts on this subject.

Just pushed my commits to gupnp-media-server SVN trunk. Now we support plugable media providers, which can be written either in Vala or C. Also included in these commits is gstreamer-based metadata-extractor. Still not done (due to lack of time :() is a standalone media provider based on this extractor, GIO and SQLite.

I am very pleased to announce the first alpha-release of the Flickr-Plugin for Canola, current features are the following:

By far the biggest online community for Nokia's internet tablets is the famous Internet Tablet Talk site with almost 20,000 registered members. However, it's got rather a technology-heavy atmosphere and most of the forums on ITT assume a lot of prior knowledge about computing in general. Some people may find it slightly intimidating, especially if they don't understand what people are talking

Great work has been done by the Mozilla and Nokia mobile browser teams. As result we have a working Qt port based on the latest Mozilla trunk 1.9.x.

The port is fully compatible with the official Qt 4.4 release. It is also ready to run Firefox3.x and the TestQEmbed reference UI:

Qt Firefox3.x

TestQEmbed

You can download and try this X86 build

Sources are available for checkout and building from: hg:mozilla-qt branch.

Build instructions available in the Mozilla Wiki.

This port is not official yet, but we are working on it, see: bug 448989.

Additional information is available on Vlad's blog.

Feel free to build and test; if you have problems, please report them in Bugzilla.

Patches are welcome.

Last month, I spend some time trying to learn OpenGL ES[1] and to practice it, I'm been working on new OGRE[2] render backend to mobile devices. In order to test this, I've used some software OpenGL ES simulation like Vincent[3] and PowerVR[4].

At the moment, I've already got the basics OGRE samples running, but there are some things to be fixed, which I intend to fix on the following weeks.

If someone is interested in this code, send me a e-mail and I can send it back, When everything work well, I will send this to OGRE guys.



[1]http://www.khronos.org/opengles/

[2]http://www.ogre3d.org/

[3]http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogl-es

[4]http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/powervr-insider.asp

I love the Nokia Tablet!

The battery life is amazing and the applications I have installed enable a very rich and capable mobile experience. I am currently sitting in the Toronto airport enjoying a beer (or two) while connected to Boingo enabling me to post this while enjoying streaming last.fm, IM and Mauku.

There are few if any MID / UMPC devices with the power to weight ration of the NIT. I chose the power to weight automotive metaphor because that’s really a key variable. I am definitley interested in what’s happening on the MID / UMPC front, but so far none have appeared to deliver more than 2-3 hours of life in a form factor that fits in your pocket. The netbooks are also interesting devices, but I already have a 3lb laptop for work I carry most everywhere and am definitely not looking to double the weight of my existing ear bag for a less capable device.

The Lenovo X61 I use for work can get close to 5 hours of battery in careful use and that’s awesome, but it’s still too big for every day while mobile tasks. The N810 is intantly on, ready to connect to my phone or an available wifi connection and deliverss most of what I need for information consumption – and creation.

I’ve made this point previously here, but it’s worth repeating, the Nokia Tablet truly is an outstanding ultra mobile product. I find it to be the standard by which I compare new things. Additional CPU capabilities seem great on the surface, but to only be able to consider 2 hours battery life is a joke. The main thing I feel it lacks is an independent cellular connection. That would seriously add some flexibility to my connection options and offer that much more power to an already rocking system.

Technorati Tags: Maemo N810 “internet tablet” MID UMPC Nokia Boingo

Hello, tablet junkies!













Currently under development by iTT member, MaemoBox founder, and the creator of TabletOS andrewfblack is a Windows XP theme for the tablets. This is a promising beginning for a completely new look on the NITs.

Right now it is just getting started, but if you head over to this post you can grab a .deb and some more screenshots.

Very well done for what's there! Lets hope everything else added to this theme looks just as good.

(Oh, and by the way, check out MaemoBox and TabletOS, which is still in development. They both look promising from here.)

While the poll on paid-for apps continues, let's look at what is free.

Instead of duplicating work, I'll highlight a fantastic posting on InternetTabletTalk by dkwatts highlighting 20 awesome applications for Nokia Internet Tablets.

Great work on that one, dkwatts! By the comments in the thread, your post is a winner.

Great news for 770 and N8x0 owners alike. A simple guide has been written on how to put quite a bit more pep into your cloned OS or other mmc fun.

The guide that bunanson wrote is perfect for anyone looking to boost the read and write on their memory cards. He tells you how to install Fanoush's 48 mhz kernel and then clone your os.

And, since you have that fancy new kernel installed... Cloning takes less than half the time it normally would ;)

This thing might even breath a whole new life into your 770. Bunanson installed the kernel and cloned his os "and the 770 is running just as peppy as my N810."

Definitely sounds good, bun.

Check it out here at the iTT forums.

Greetings!

It’s been a long time since we released 0.1 (at that time I wasn’t even working at INdT),
so is with pleasure that I’m announcing the official Mamona 0.2-Beta release.

A lot changed since 0.1, we had a couple of goals for 0.2 release, mainly to support
Nokia N770 and to add some highly missing features, like network and virtual keyboard.

Main features already available for the beta release:

• Glibc – 2.5
• GCC – 4.1.2
• Full Python 2.5 support
• Enlightenment Window Manager
• USB Networking
• Bluetooth support
• Noemu Packages
• Mamona SDK
• QEMU (user mode emulation) 0.9.0 for Mamona SDK
• ARM EABI Version 5 (N770) and 6 (N8X0 and Omap)
• Machines Supported:
  • Nokia 770
  • Nokia 800
  • Nokia 810
  • Omap 3430

• Web browsers: Firefox 3 and Midori (recommended)
• Virtual Keyboard
• Xephyr support on SDK
• SystemTap enabled kernels for N800 and N810

Work to be done for the final 0.2 release:

• Network Manager working with dbus API (Open, WEP and WPA)
• Fix Track (documentation)
• Mamona Device Manager
• New and lighter theme for Enlightenment
• MIC
• Full Emulation
• Tests and bug fixing

You can find 0.2-Beta repositories at: http://dev.openbossa.org/mamona/0.2-beta/

The installation instruction is basically the same from 0.1, but we’ll create a whole
new procedure before releasing the final 0.2. The main goal of this beta release is to
officially release the SDK for 0.2. For those who want to play with SDK, just follow
http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/mamona/wiki/Releases/0.2/SDKInstallGuide

For more info please see http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/mamona/wiki/Releases/0.2

Bug reports, as always, should go to Mamona’s Trac; check out
http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/mamona/wiki/Contributing#Bugs for links to posting
and querying bug reports for Mamona.

Thanks a lot for everybody who helped making this beta release possible.

I'm currently in aKademy, the KDE conference, talking about adding the geographical context into the Linux desktop. GeoClue, our solution to this problem is built to be desktop-agnostic service, and therefore the same talk has been held in both GUADEC and aKademy.

Here are some notes from the conference:

• There was quite a good amount of interest in GeoClue. Both Plasma and Marble teams were talking with me, and I also gave an interview for Linux-Magazin Online
• Plasma is interesting tool for integrating widgets into the desktop. Being able to add widgets to the screensaver is also a great idea
• Another interesting Plasma idea is offering user widgets that are relevant for the current location coming from GeoClue. This means that when you land in London, you could be offered an Underground route planner app
• In general it seems the desktops are moving to a more service-oriented paradigm. With D-Bus your instant messaging functionality for instance can be part of any or all applications. This enables making much thinner and experimental applications that still integrate well with the desktop
• Marble is cool! With it, Qt developers can integrate a map widget into any application, making geo-aware tools much more visual
• openSUSE build service is about to get new features that will help generating virtual machine images
• The beer evening in the Het Anker brewery was a lot of fun. Thanks, Nokia!
• Speaking of Nokia, they are here really in force. They are the main event sponsor, and have a big bunch of people attending. Their acquisition of TrollTech has really changed the situation. Hopefully they'll do the right thing about GeoClue and Maemo

More stuff in my Jaiku notes. My GeoClue slides are also available.

Always wanted to make music with your tablet, but had nothing to jam with unless you wanted to use it as a drum stick? Well, no more :)


PyAno 1.0 for Maemo from Tyler Longwell on Vimeo.

PyAno 1.0 is a great update to the past editions. I thought that maybe I should release it.



Updates include:

- Two octaves of notes.
- Octaves can be controlled by hardware or onscreen buttons.
- Fullscreen can be toggled on or off by hardware key.
- N810 owners can now play PyAno with their hardware keyboards.*
- Each note is now in tune with a regular piano.
- Dependencies have been fixed.

Get it HERE while it's hot!

Please leave suggestion here or on the iTT forums.

Until next time... Enjoy!

* N810 owners, "z" is the lowest note, from there you can go across to "m." Next are "a" through "g."

Always wanted to make music with your tablet, but had nothing to jam with unless you wanted to use it as a drum stick? Well, no more :)


PyAno 1.0 for Maemo from Tyler Longwell on Vimeo.

PyAno 1.0 is a great update to the past editions. I thought that maybe I should release it.



Updates include:

- Two octaves of notes.
- Octaves can be controlled by hardware or onscreen buttons.
- Fullscreen can be toggled on or off by hardware key.
- N810 owners can now play PyAno with their hardware keyboards.*
- Each note is now in tune with a regular piano.
- Dependencies have been fixed.

Get it HERE while it's hot!

Please leave suggestion here or on the iTT forums.

Until next time... Enjoy!

* N810 owners, "z" is the lowest note, from there you can go across to "m." Next are "a" through "g."

A Quick Look at maemo Bugzilla
2008-08-04 through 2008-08-10

I arrived at Manaus airport feeling pretty groggy after I fell asleep listening to some old Bossa Nova music on the radio. I was also *still* feeling the effects of some virus I picked up last week which was unfortunately just like Malaria (thankfully this time however without the hallucinations).

After waiting (and waiting) in the queue to check in, when I arrived at the counter I saw that they were writing the tickets out by hand. Apparently the system was 'in maintenance' although this could just have meant that it had crashed given the amount of head shaking and so on which was going on and it left me feeling a bit nervous about the flight to be honest.

The chaos with the airlines in South America shows no signs of improvement and so all the Brazilian flights into Buenos Aires were delayed. This was OK though. Me and Bdale stood around holding a Debian sign and waited for the rest of the developers to show up. We got talking about his hobby of rocket flying and apparently he has launched one up to 14,000 feet which is pretty impressive I reckon. His latest project will use a different fuel mixture based in part on sugar and he hopes he can get to 18000 feet. Good luck with that.

After Uncle Steve's excellent keynote speech (I found out that all of Debian Lenny will be available on a single Blue Ray disk!!) I bumped into Jacob at lunch. The conversation inevitably moved onto Tor and anonymity online and told me about a book that he is reading. Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier by Julian Assange is about the WANK worm crisis in NASA.

Next to the RTM worm, WANK is the most famous worm in the history of computer networks. And it is the first major worm bearing a political message, in this case against nuclear power (WORMS AGAINST NUCLEAR KILLERS).It was a worm that attacked DEC VMS computers over the DECnet in 1989 and written into the source code were instructions not to propagate in DEC area 48 which is New Zealand (at that time New Zealand was a nuclear free zone). It also greeted NASA's Galileo flight engineers with the words "You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war." as they logged in. (Galileo controversially used 24 kg of plutonium as an energy source)
With WANK, life imitated art, since the term computer 'worm' came from John Brunner's sci-fi novel, The Shockwave Rider, which is about a politically motivated worm.

Can't wait for tomorrow!

I’ve changed the name of the maemo group at LinkedIn.com to “maemo.org.” The logo has also been updated with the new one.

mdamt posted a photo:

I spent some time today talking with Junichi Uekawa about how he runs Japanese TV on Debian (the same technology is used in Brazil for digital TV) and the solution seems to be some buggy driver on the MonsterTV HDTV card which we maybe can hack to make work.
 
I also talked some with Joachim Breitner about his work with Debian on the OpenMoko Neo phone. There is a repository which contains the packages until they are included in Debian proper, both for armel and desktop architectures. Add these apt lines:

deb http://pkg-fso.alioth.debian.org/debian unstable main
deb-src http://pkg-fso.alioth.debian.org/debian unstable main

A merge of this repository, Debian experimental and Debian unstable can be used for debootstrap as follows.

Please note that this is a hack and might not work properly

 cdebootstrap --allow-unauthenticated -d sid /mnt/target http://people.debian.org/~nomeata/pkg-fso

You may need to activate experimental in your sources.list

The packages in this repo include:

• zhone: The demo UI
• zhone-session: Init scripts to start zhone on system start.
• frameworkd: System daemon providing most phone features via dbus. 
  
• gsm0710muxd: GSM multiplexer daemon

Akademy 2008 KDE contributors conference part is over and i had there presentation "Qt on maemo" with Antonio Aloisio you can download pdf from maemo_qt.pdf If you like to see presentation as video, look here

There was also many other very interesting presentatios. Some of my favourities was QtWebkit by Simon Hausmann, How Graphics View Works by Andreas Aardal Hanssen andGallium3D - Graphics Done Right. It as also nice to see that porting Qt/KDE applications to maemo is going with good speed. Antonio has Arora webkit based browser running with maemo Qt port, the KDE Plasma has been running in maemo a while.

The embedded and mobile conference day is coming tomorrow, Tuesday I am starting at 9.00 with presentation Developing applications for the Maemo platform. In this presentation I will be handling how to develop Qt applications for maemo platform. After my presentation we are starting to give developer devices to the lucky ones succeeded to become eligible to get one.

In my previous blog entry I told that in addition to the first 100 that register to this maemo presentation will get free device, we have devices to be given out for good and interesting open source projects. The KDE board will decide who will get a devices. I have tried to pass requests that I have got via email to the KDE board. If someone still likes to get a device tomorrow but the name is not in anybody's list, please contact directly the KDE board to apply for a device.

 

Akademy 2008 KDE contributors conference part is over and i had there presentation "Qt on maemo" with Antonio Aloisio you can download pdf from maemo_qt.pdf If you like to see presentation as video, look here

There was also many other very interesting presentatios. Some of my favourities was QtWebkit by Simon Hausmann, How Graphics View Works by Andreas Aardal Hanssen andGallium3D - Graphics Done Right. It as also nice to see that porting Qt/KDE applications to maemo is going with good speed. Antonio has Arora webkit based browser running with maemo Qt port, the KDE Plasma has been running in maemo a while.

The embedded and mobile conference day is coming tomorrow, Tuesday I am starting at 9.00 with presentation Developing applications for the Maemo platform. In this presentation I will be handling how to develop Qt applications for maemo platform. After my presentation we are starting to give developer devices to the lucky ones succeeded to become eligible to get one.

In my previous blog entry I told that in addition to the first 100 that register to this maemo presentation will get free device, we have devices to be given out for good and interesting open source projects. The KDE board will decide who will get a devices. I have tried to pass requests that I have got via email to the KDE board. If someone still likes to get a device tomorrow but the name is not in anybody's list, please contact directly the KDE board to apply for a device.

 

Last night I noticed that there was a new update to OS2008 designed to enhance the email and browser … My last experience with the software update was from a re-flash and I remain very impressed with how this worked as well.

I chose to do a backup (safety first) but had no need to restore. After a required reboot, my system was humming again. I can’t say I am noticing any real changes with this update, but I was not having any problems with the browser or email either …

Doing this without a computer is impressive and something I hope makes it to more mobile devices.

A new update for Nokia Os 2008 is available for Nokia N810 (and I suppose N800 too).

All you have to do is connect to Internet, refresh package list and install the updates.

The main application that have been updated are Mail client and web browser. Map application has been updated too.

The total size to download is about 19 Mb and for the first time, no re-flash is required to update N810 firmware. At the end of the installation you're only required to restart the device.

So Nokia bought Trolltech and brought Qt into the fold. Really surprising to most of us, but also very exciting. I had never used Qt before, though heard lots of nice things about it from my team at the German Aerospace Center. Actually, I have never been much fond of KDE, and 4.0 also didn't make me that excited, though I must say that the same counts for GNOME these days.

Creating a web application involves HTML, CSS, images and usually some type of dynamic scripting language. Occasionally, one person will fulfill all these roles, however once an application reaches a certain scale, the question arises of how best to divide these skills between the people involved in the project.
It is a fairly common workflow for the programmer to be given some mock ups from the designer or even some HTML/CSS and he/she is then tasked with implementing the site functionality. Another question then arises of how the designer can best structure this HTML/CSS for the workflow of the programmer.
Django has a philosophy of loose coupling between objects and this is applied equally to the HTML output. To achieve this Django uses the concept of template inheritance. Template inheritance allows you to build a base 'skeleton' template that contains all the common elements of the site and defines blocks that child templates can override. This means you can literally design an entire site by creating only one HTML file. For example look at the maemo site:

I was just browsing Facebook and ran across this little issue … There is no way to install Flash directly on a mobile device as a browser plugin! Looks like I will have to wait it out for an update to the OS, but since we just got one this week, it may be a while …

Technorati Tags: Maemo diablo N810 Flash Facebook

Boingo Mobile has been updated across platforms. If you use a Nokia Handset (N or E Series), Nokia Tablet or a Windows Mobile Handset it’s worth checking out the new download. If you’ve used Boingo on your tablet I’m sure you’ll agree the auto-connect feature is very slick. I’ve gotten a ton of use from Boingo in my travels and definitely recommend it.

Technorati Tags: boingo, mobile, wifi, travel, nokia

 

  

Tuesday was great day for all of those that got approved to get a N810 developer device. There was long queue after my presentation waiting for devices. Now it is then time to start happy hacking wth N810. I hope to see lot of Qt and KDE applications for maemo in garage soon.

My presentation "developing applications for maemo platform" can be found from maemo_and_sdk_for_qt.pdf. I hope that it gives necessary information to these developers that are already familiar with linux and Qt to start developing applications for maemo.

There is now also video of this presentation online in Vimeo. Credits to Karoliina about editing and music.

Developing Maemo Qt Applications from Karoliina Salminen on Vimeo.

 

I apologize to Akademy participants that the aggregation to planet.maemo.org has been broken due operator moving server to new location.

 

 

 

  

Tuesday was great day for all of those that got approved to get a N810 developer device. There was long queue after my presentation waiting for devices. Now it is then time to start happy hacking wth N810. I hope to see lot of Qt and KDE applications for maemo in garage soon.

My presentation "developing applications for maemo platform" can be found from maemo_and_sdk_for_qt.pdf. I hope that it gives necessary information to these developers that are already familiar with linux and Qt to start developing applications for maemo.

There is now also video of this presentation online in Vimeo. Credits to Karoliina about editing and music.

Developing Maemo Qt Applications from Karoliina Salminen on Vimeo.

 

I apologize to Akademy participants that the aggregation to planet.maemo.org has been broken due operator moving server to new location.

 

 

A new update for Nokia Os 2008 is available for Nokia N810 (and I suppose N800 too).

All you have to do is connect to Internet, refresh package list and install the updates.

The main application that have been updated are Mail client and web browser. Map application has been updated too.

The total size to download is about 19 Mb and for the first time, no re-flash is required to update N810 firmware. At the end of the installation you're only required to restart the device.

N.B: be sure to have at least 19Mb free on the device, else the upgrade will fail.

Peter Robinson had made RPMS for GUPnP package for a while now but it was until recently that someone got a chance to review them. The first (and IIRC the only) issue that came out was that the build was breaking for all our apps. Here is what was happening:

We call g_thread_init() in each of the application because libsoup requires us to do that. If I understand correctly, libsoup needs the threading system to be initialized for locking stuff that is actually a part of glib. While we don't mind putting this call in each of our app, we assumed that libsoup requiring us to make this call will itself link to libgthread-2.0. That assumption is true about libsoup-2.4 built/installed from vanilla release tarballs, subversion repo and debian/ubuntu packages but on Rawhide, it turned out to be false.

I (and a bunch of other developer hanging out on #gnome-hackers) had a chat with Dan Winship about this and in the end he agreed to put gthread-2.0 in libsoup-2.4 pkg-config. He said that it will be a while before he can make a release so we decided that we ourself link the apps to gthread-2.0 until then.

Peter has already put the required patches into his packages. Here is page to track the status of the packages and as of this writing two of the packages have already been approved. A big thanks to Peter for his efforts to make GUPnP easily available to Fedora world.

The Mozilla Prism guys mfinkle and plasticmillion are doing a great job heading to 1.0, and happily we are about to start to get prism changes for maemo upstream.

Below some nice sshots of the current prism maemo port, prism-maemo_0.0.7-1 (which is just out), running on chinook.




Prism on meebo.com


Prism on mibbit.com


--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

We’ve published the repositories of Mamona SDK 0.2Pre-release!!!! Follow the instructions to install and use the SDK. If you have any doubts or bug reports: mail list (mamona-devel <at> garage <dot> maemo <dot> org ) http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/mamona/report #mamona at freenode The following machines are supported: Nokia770, Nokia800, Nokia810 and Omap3430sdp. We divided the work in three [...]

A couple of major things are happening around Maemo just before my holidays (oooh, scary) - first is that we recently rolled out some improvements to Maemo profiles - there are many new fields, including IM and IRC usernames, and the possibility to enter multiple email addresses for karma, and in general we prettied things up.

One new field is the company that people work for - and this is particularly useful in the newly spruced up  profile ranking page - previously this page listed only usernames and karma, it now includes company and real name, allowing you to see at a glance where contributions are coming from. Of course, for this to be really useful, now that the fields are there, we need more people to fill them in

The second big thing is the inaugural Maemo community council election. The entire Maemo community will be electing 5 people from among the most active community participants to represent the community’s interests to Nokia, and to co-ordinate community initiatives.

Nominations are open now - anyone with over 100 karma points can nominate themselves by sending a mail with their name, company affiliation and motivations for running to maemo-community@maemo.org before 23:59 UTC on the 2nd of September. The full list of eligible candidates is in the wiki.

Modern apps are web based but we have no real standardized way to package them. Partly this is because Javascript is still in the 'vote with your feet' stage of standardization but also because of the complexity involved in the client/server exchange (i.e sorry dude, the code runs where again?)
So what best practices do we currently have in Debian?

db-config-common

This package presents a policy and implementation for managing various databases used by applications included in Debian packages. I have just proposed an integration of django evolution into this package. This will allow us to track changes in our Django models over time, and to update the database to reflect those changes.

Javascript Packaging

This is provided in Debian by the package javascript-common and it allows javascript libraries to be installed in

/usr/share/javascript

and makes them automatically available in Apache at

/javascript/${package}/*.js

The Debian Webapps Policy Document

This was first drafted in 2005 and is undergoing revision here @ Debconf.
Web applications should not make any assumption about how the administrator has arranged the file hierarchy on the target machine.

The suggested guidelines for the layout of an application are:

Static and dynamically interpreted content

/usr/share/PACKAGE/www

Dynamically executed content

    A unique subdirectory of either

/usr/lib/cgi-bin/PACKAGE

or

/usr/lib/PACKAGE (architecture-dependant)

or A unique subdirectory of

/usr/share/PACKAGE (architecture-independant)

Application-specific include files

A unique subdirectory of

/usr/share/PACKAGE

Other static data, and helper scripts that don't belong in users' paths

A unique subdirectory of

/usr/share/PACKAGE

Site configuration (settings/passwords)

/etc/PACKAGE

Modifiable and overridable content

A subdirectory of

/etc/PACKAGE

Specific Requirements for Programming Languages

The web application policy divides includable files into two distinct categories:
application-specific and site-wide.

The former includes files not intended for use outside of the particular application in question, and the latter addresses files intended for more general use. As previously mentioned, application-specific include files should exist in a unique subdirectory of /usr/share/PACKAGE. This subdirectory should exist outside of any web-accessible directory, as many security-related problems in poorly written web applications are the direct result of not doing so.

Whilst the Policy Manual has specific requirements for PHP and Perl there is nothing yet for Python. I am currently working on this and it will likely be based closely on the Perl Policy document. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Just a quick fix of the package to get it up and running again on Diablo (and add a larger desktop icon).
mclock-051-1_all
Mid-term target is to get it into the Extras repository one day…

Kate Alhola's and Antonio Aloisio's presentation on Akademy 2008 about how to develop Qt Application on Maemo.


Developing Maemo Qt Applications from Karoliina Salminen on Vimeo.

A Quick Look at maemo Bugzilla
2008-08-11 through 2008-08-17

Thanks to the work of Luis Garcia Rio (who has also been working on the OpenMoko port), we have just released Vagalume 0.6 for MS Windows.

In case you’ve never heard about it before, Vagalume is a Last.fm client designed for the Maemo platform. More info here.

Please note that this is an experimental release and doesn’t contain the complete set of features. It might also be more unstable than the GNU/Linux version. We’d like to hear about your problems with this version in the mailing lists.

Vagalume for Windows has been tested on XP and Vista. Here are screenshots of both versions (click to enlarge):

Installation

To use Vagalume in Windows, you need to install:

• The gtk2 runtime.
• GStreamer including all gst-plugins-* packages (base, good, bad and ugly).

Some important notes:

• When installing GStreamer, you will be asked whether to use the existing GLib installation or to install a new one. Choose no to use the existing installation.
• When installing Vagalume, you will be asked whether to install an icon theme. If in doubt, choose Yes.

Go here to download Vagalume for Windows. There are two different installers, the full and the minimal installer.

Both will ask you to install GTK+ and GStreamer (just choose no if you have already installed them). The difference is that the full version comes with both packages, while the minimal version will point you to their respective web pages.

To uninstall Vagalume, go to the Windows control panel.

As usual, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Regarding Vagalume 0.7, we’re fixing a couple of bugs that we’ve recently found. It will be out soon.

Update: 23 Jan 2009

Vagalume for Windows can now be found here.

Python-EFL packages were uploaded to PyPI, making it possible to install with setuptool’s easy_install.

This release is actually what is in CVS SVN for some time now and is up to date with current EFL code base.

It would be amazing if we could find official Ubuntu packagers for EFL and Python-EFL (see launchpad #259098), we already have one guy working with Fedora, it’s already provided as an overlay for Gentoo, OpenEmbedded has it too, Debian has it in experimental (bit old, but it’s there) and we have some out-of-tree packages for this great distro. Of course Maemo packages are there thanks to Etrunko. If you are willing to package, please contact the developers, we can provide useful hints on which packages are higher priority so you don’t package marginal stuff.

I’ve also updated the Python-EFL API documentation (automatically generated with epydoc).

Yesterday I uploaded version 1.0.1 of maemo-pan to the Diablo extras repository. This new version finally fixes Bluetooth-PAN on Diablo.

Nokia recently uploaded a fix for handling DUMMY network connections in Diablo, which is needed for getting Bluetooth-PAN integrated into the connection dialog. If you install maemo-pan 1.0.1, the dummy-network package from Nokia will be installed as a dependency automatically.

Nokia's networking fix uses a hardcoded name for dummy connections, so you'll have to connect to "Dummy network" instead of "Bluetooth-PAN" (as it was on Chinook).

Apart from fixing the networking issue on Diablo, maemo-pan 1.0.1 is the same as maemo-pan 1.0. New features will be added in a later release.

maemo-pan 1.0.1 is only interesting to Diablo users. If you're running Chinook, maemo-pan 1.0 is fine. There is no version 1.0.1 in the Chinook extras repository because of that.

Competitors in the pocket internet device market are popping up like mad. Smarter smartphones, MIDs, and even existing devices are being pushed to go nose-to-nose with the N810.

Now that the device has been around for some time, we can assume that Nokia is well on the way to a fourth generation tablet. I can tell you what I want:

• Enough horsepower to play Hulu
• A partnership with NetFlix for on-demand movies. (Currently NetFlix On Demand requires Internet Explorer with a special Windows Media Player plug-in)
  
• Integrated Google Maps application on par with the iPhone's local search.
• A better camera for more content generation on-the-go.

There's a wish list. How about you?

The results of the last poll are in: How much would you pay for an application on your Nokia Internet Tablet?
Nothing - Software should be free. 68 (34%) Nothing - I don't use 3rd party software. 4 (2%) Up to US $10. It's only a mobile device. 73 (37%) Up to US $50 like comparable PC apps. 13 (6%) As much as it takes to suit my needs. 38 (19%)
There are good comments on this poll. I highly encourage readers to take a look at a long comment from reader "John." Here's how it starts:

It's unfortunate that free has two very different meanings. i.e., "free as in free beer" and "free as in freedom." The term "free software" was suppose to refer to the latter. That is, software where the source was unencumbered

Very insightful, John.

Thanks to reed, justdave, mrz, and seth (community giving), mxr.mozilla.org and other webtools have their own box (konigsberg.mozilla.org) for testing.

landfill was getting too crowded:

For the time being, the major user of the box will be mxr, which focuses on linking items together.

There is a history to this inspirational mathemetics problem.

For people interested in using, testing, seeing, or helping with mxr-test, you will have to contact me with your ip address, as we had problems with resource loads at our previous location and for the time being, I'm simply whitelisting people.

Quick help:

$ sudo su
$ nano /etc/sysctl.conf

Add line 'vm.vdso_enabled = 0' to the end of file.
Press ctrl-x to exit and save.

Then run 'sysctl -p' (while remaining as root)

In Ubuntu hardy:

Host kernel mmap_min addr value is incompatible with the QEMU version used in scratchbox.

Quick help:

$ sudo su
$ nano /etc/sysctl.conf
edit line which begins 'vm.mmap_min_addr' (search it with CTRL-W) to
'vm.mmap_min_addr = 4096'
CTRL-X for save & quit
$ sysctl -p

So it has been some time since I have blogged as I had a long well deserved vacation. Some time before going on vacation I spend some days with the Manona guys, helping them implement keyboard support, a long missing feature in Mamona, and a quite important one :-)

Happily I found out today that the guys succedeed in adapting my code to their needs. Details is outlined in Aloiso's blog, which can be found here.

Cool work guys, Manona is rocking even more now!

This is my first post. Most probably I will be talking here about WLAN, Maemo and Linux in general.

ARM (and Movial) has published a new site that provides Open Source components, middleware and utilities used to build a Linux Mobile software stack on ARM.

All components (applications, libraries, etc) are in GIT repositories. The build tool is called Matrix. Matrix clones all components under one directory and compiles them with a single command. With another command you get JFFS2 image although that’s not as simple as it should be.

ARM would like to get all contributions directly to upstream instead of providing large code dumps and states that developers are encouraged to participate in discussion forums and developer community of respective components used on this site. That’s why there are no new mailing lists nor forums available for the platform. There is #matrixhelp (#matrix was taken) on irc.ipv6.oftc.net for Matrix related issues though. Developing the components is convenient if you are familiar with GIT. It’s easy to test if your patch works and send it to the upstream project.

One of the supported hardware platforms is n8×0 which is nice as it’s commonly available. The downside is the closed source nature of it. There are two projects, example-project and Kaze that has n8×0 configured as one target platform. Kaze has XFCE desktop instead of Matchbox desktop that the example-project uses.

Kaze boots but most features need still work. WLAN works without encryption but WEP and WPA encryptions need to be fixed. ALSA works with alsa plugins through the DSP but the closed source DSP tasks need to be copied to the build system. Kaze has normal X.Org instead of Xomap, so there’s no XV extension, only stubs.

The Maemo Bugsquad is now in place. For triagers we have a Triage guide, general and product generic Stock answers that can be copied & pasted into bug reports, and for reporters an updated (maemo'fied & and shortened) Bugwriting How-to. We also decided on a policy when to close ...

The big picture

I just sent the OpenGL ES OGRE render system patch to OGRE Patch Tracking System. The code is also available at openbossa git repository.


Ideas and comment are really welcome.



Some features are still missing, like:

* Support to "GL_IMG_vertex_program" extension.

* Support to compressed textures.

Wow, a year already!Believe it or not, it's been one whole year since the first article appeared on the Internet Tablet School.Since then we've seen the launch of OS2008 and the N810, and we have a feeling that something even more exciting in the Nokia tablet world should be appearing by the end of the year.In the last twelve months the Internet Tablet School's text tutorials have been read

Akademy was really great! It was awesome to give faces to nicknames and to chat, have dinner, learn and talk with a lot of people...just awesome! My first plasmoid is done, right now. It took some time to take care about details and I had to wait before we could publish ...

Netspeed is a GNOME panel applet that shows your current upload/download speed in bytes (or bits) per second. I love it. Except... you have to manually say which network device to monitor. If you're switching between wireless and wired, this gets old really quickly. There's an option, Always monitor a connected device, but it is buggy and usually gets stuck monitoring some stupid network interface like wmaster0 or vmnet8.

Today I spent a couple of hours fiddling with netspeed's source code and fixed the bug! Patches attached to the bug report and tested with netspeed-0.14 on Ubuntu Hardy.

While doing this I created a local Bazaar branch for playing with the source code. Sadly, Bazaar decided to hurt me again: bzr viz, instead of letting me look at my commits in a nice GUI window, barfs AttributeError: 'KnitPackRepository' object has no attribute 'get_revision_graph' and stops. Apparently the latest version of bzr-gtk (trunk from launchpad) is not compatible with the latest version of bzr (1.6rc2 from the Hardy PPA).

It's becoming a pattern: every couple of months I give Bazaar a try, and I hit a new bug that prevents me from doing whatever I wanted to do. Why do I even keep trying?

Hello!


AirX 0.3 from Tyler Longwell on Vimeo.

AirX is a GUI for X Forwarding. What that means is that it enables you to use any program you have on your Linux PC on your tablet. Nice, hm? There are some nice improvements in 0.3.



The original AirX was just an introduction to programming for myself, but I wanted to make something useful out of it now.



The ease of administrating my home server from anywhere without the need of a command line is wonderful.

I don't have to type in my user name, password, IP address, or anything else. AirX remembers it for me and lets me run whatever I need easily and simply.

You can grab AirX HERE and try it out. (Pexpect must be installed, too. It is on that page.

Please post any bugs, explosions, or suggestions here!

Oh, and you're really awesome if you can name the background music in the video... ;)

Hello!


AirX 0.3 from Tyler Longwell on Vimeo.

AirX is a GUI for X Forwarding. What that means is that it enables you to use any program you have on your Linux PC on your tablet. Nice, hm? There are some nice improvements in 0.3.



The original AirX was just an introduction to programming for myself, but I wanted to make something useful out of it now.



The ease of administrating my home server from anywhere without the need of a command line is wonderful.

I don't have to type in my user name, password, IP address, or anything else. AirX remembers it for me and lets me run whatever I need easily and simply.

You can grab AirX HERE and try it out. (Pexpect must be installed, too. It is on that page.

Please post any bugs, explosions, or suggestions here!

Oh, and you're really awesome if you can name the background music in the video... ;)

While we are talking in the Qt4maemo ML about how some things should be implemented and improved in Qt for maemo, some interesting posts have appeared in KDE planet.

There Lorn Potter, a Trolltech hacker, is happy to see one of his applications, GutenBrowser, running in maemo without any effort: “All it took was a recompile!”.

Ariya Hidaya, another Trolltech hacker, and Adam Treat (Manyoso) a KDE hacker and Member of the KDE e.V. tested and investigated the low graphic performance of Qt 4.4 on the N8x00 devices.

Looking forward to seeing new blogs of KDE people aggregated in Planet Maemo, I´ll continue working on Qt 4.4.1 packages.

A Quick Look at maemo Bugzilla
2008-08-18 through 2008-08-24

Again, the FrosCon in St Augustin, near Bonn (Germany) was a great event! Like in the past, the FrosCon team did a great job to achieve a very high standard in their service and smooth organisation! The most important thing for me was the discussion with much smart people.

I had a talk about ‘mobile development platforms’ from the free software developers view point. The talk had a very good resonance and much people agreed with me about the big need for more standards between the platforms and for more cross platform development solutions. See my slides: PDF version

Ever since I started to IRC from my Linux machine, not only I had been a happy (almost) user of XChat for years but also I wrote an XChat plugin for Guile. All that changed when I moved to Finland three years ago and was educated about the benefits of the combination of irssi+screen+ssh, the biggest (perhaps the only one) of them being the persistence connection to IRC. Since then I had been using that combination. After three years, I am having doubts about the choice I made at that time.

XChat might not be able to provide me with a persistent connection to the IRC world but it still provides lots of small features that irssi does not (and in some cases can not) provide that really does matter in the end and one would expect in a modern IRC client, e.g hard-to-miss notifications when I get new messages, saving of logs and DCC-sent-files directly on my local-machine etc.

I switched to back to XChat a few days ago. I mostly feel good about coming back to it but still miss the persistent connection to IRC. Especially when I suspend/resume my laptop. After resuming, XChat happily assumes that everything is exactly how it was before I suspended the laptop and it takes a while in realizing that it needs to re-connect to all networks. In most cases the network connection doesn't take long but in case of very busy networks like ircnet, it takes a lot of time and is therefore a source of annoyance.

The reason I am discussing this here and not doing anything about it is that I currently don't have time do anything about it and if someone has already solved this problem somehow, I would like to know.

We haven't heard much about the Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition or WiMAX at all lately. Though the FCC decided to release the Nokia N810 WME manual (link is a pdf, though it will appear as .cgi) there is still no knowledge of when it will be available and to whom.

Here's a curiousity: Take a look at the Google trends graph here. While it is more searched-for than LTE or HSDPA, the interest has been going down for a several months.

The hot new Apple iPhone 3G is now sitting in a box and will remain there until Apple does some serious work on the software or issues a recall/replacement for the defective design. I had a phone call drop at the worst time (read: unemployed Linux systems admin talking to a potential employer) and decided that I have had enough.

AT&T was nice enough: They walked me through changing my plan back to what I had previously on the N95-3 and registered my SIM to my IMEI. My plan is $15/mo cheaper and I have no penalty since I am still in the same contract.

There are several ways that Nokia can learn from Apple in terms of design and appealing to developers - but there are far too many fatal flaws in the iPhone 3G. There is one thing that Nokia has that Apple does not: Humility.

Excuse me - I'm going to go have some quality time with my N95 and N810 now.

The beta is done and the results are good: The HAVA client is now available for public download. Live TV is now available on your tablet. Here's a video of it in action:


Thanks to the people at Monsoon Multimedia, I am testing another HAVA box. This time, it's the Hava Wireless HD. The integrated tuner means I can watch my analog cable channels without having to patch the box to a cable tuner or DVR. It's live and all in one box.

Installation: So easy a kitten can do it.

The HAVA Wireless HD device (I see it's $179 this week with a coupon code) was easy to set up. There is a photo set in my Flickr stream showing several of the steps: Download, run the installer, detect the HAVA, and scan for channels. Then the HAVA gets a "friendly" name that registers the player on the network. All you have to remember is the friendly name of your tuner/streamer and can configure your player on any machine. That's nice: No IP addresses to fiddle with.

After it is configured and viewable on the PC (sorry - no Mac or Linux options for initial set-up) Internet Tablet users can download the HAVA player .deb directly. After setting up the HAVA box name and password in the player, the rest is shown in the video above. One thing the video does not show: Full screen mode. The player uses the maximize button to go into fullscreen and has an option to disable backlight dimming while streaming. Well done, Monsoon!

The call for nominations for the first maemo.org Community Council elections has been open for a couple of weeks now. But I wonder if the wider maemo.org is aware of just how important this could be for the future of the platform.

So, this post'll be syndicated on planet.maemo.org in the hope that we get more candidates putting themselves forward, and interest drummed up in the wider community in terms of asking the candidates more probing questions. Hopefully we can avoid the nastiness associated with the US presidential election :-)

Of course, I'm biased. I've thrown my hat into the ring: my candidature announcement has been sent to maemo-community. I recommend you subscribe if you're interested in shaping the future of Maemo, rather than "just" developing with it.

The call for nominations for the first maemo.org Community Council elections has been open for a couple of weeks now. But I wonder if the wider maemo.org is aware of just how important this could be for the future of the platform.

So, this post'll be syndicated on planet.maemo.org in the hope that we get more candidates putting themselves forward, and interest drummed up in the wider community in terms of asking the candidates more probing questions. Hopefully we can avoid the nastiness associated with the US presidential election :-)

Of course, I'm biased. I've thrown my hat into the ring: my candidature announcement has been sent to maemo-community. I recommend you subscribe if you're interested in shaping the future of Maemo, rather than "just" developing with it.

Last December, we were asking what effects Nokia's purchase of NAVTEQ would have on Internet Tablet owners. Today, we get a partial answer:

Wayfinder decided to expand use of NAVTEQ maps. With an even closer relationship between Wayfinder and NAVTEQ (now Nokia) we can hope to get all the latest map data and Wayfinder software on our tablets.

On a related note: NAVTEQ is working with Loopt to develop social map applications as well. I wonder if this means they can leverage the Nokia name on their compatible products page. Not a single Nokia phone appears there!

Tablet owners are thrilled about Nokia's new Ntropic (pronounced 'entropic' - a concept of thermodynamics) software product for Nokia Internet Tablets running OS2008 "Diablo" and Nseries S60 phones. The open-source, exstensible software is currently available as a free download for Internet Tablet and Nseries phone owners.

Ntropic's features are exciting:

• Ntropic Sync: Message, address book, and media synchronization between tablet and phone.
  
• Ntropic Connect: Automatic wireless managent on the tablet (switching to HSDPA when WiFi is unavailable)
• Ntropic Awareness: Enhanced mapping features with location awareness, allowing users to find local businesses based on their location. Locations with phone numbers available will have the option to call the business.
  
• Ntropic Location: GPS assist, allowing N800 users to use their phone's GPS for map software or allowing N810 users to extend the accuracy and speed up satellite locks.
• Ntropic Image: Lightweight photo editor for downloading photos from the phone, minor editing (cropping, rotating, annotating) and automatic upload to major photo sharing sites.

This new software finally puts Internet Tablets in the spotlight as the premiere Mobile Internet Device and raises the bar on what competing companies must offer. The only reported flaw with the software is that it simply doesn't exist beyond this blog post. Ntropic is a piece of wishful thinking -- but maybe it will be reality one day. We can hope.

Apparently, Sprint has more planned for XOHM than just WiMAX internet access. They're working with partners to send location-specific data to XOHM customers through the WiMAX network. This includes Google, uLocate, and NAVTEQ.

Thanks to cashless in InternetTabletTalk forums for sharing the Mobile Tech Today article. Here's a quote from that article:

John Polivka, spokesperson at Sprint, explained the difference between the XOHM user experience and using the Internet. "With Internet access you could go to each vendor now as a separate interaction; but with XOHM, the services are aggregated into a service package that correlates them due to the intelligence in the network; for example, plotting friend locations on a map, identifying a restaurant or entertainment venue from local search, and sharing plans to convene with the benefit of weather, traffic or ticket-purchase convenience."

On one hand, this could be a boon to a specific user and partner set. On the other hand, it would have to be implemented just right or else face backlash in reliability, privacy, and usefulness. It also needs to be translated from "marketing jibber-jabber" to real application demonstrations before the high-tech population can overcome the current cynicism with wireless providers.

As I sit here chomping on leftovers from last night’s dinner, I wonder why I’ve never blogged about El Rancho, a relatively new Mexican restaurant here in midtown Kansas City, MO. Not only is El Rancho probably the best Mexican restaurant in Kansas City (easily beating any joint on Southwest Boulevard), but I’d wager that it’s one of the best Mexican restaurants I’ve ever been to (and that includes growing up in Southern California, trips to Mexico, time spent in many Southwestern states, etc.). I mean, it…is…good.

But, not only that. The people who own and operate El Rancho are amazing people — in fact, last night I joked that I wished they were my family. They are very nice, fun, and always remember us. It really is incredible.

So, if you’re in the Kansas City area, do yourself a favor and go to El Rancho. Order anything on the menu. Enjoy.

Inspired by our own need and other's, a couple of friends (André, Roberto and Tomaz) and I decided to increment Firefox' default find feature.

Story

If you use Firefox, you had probably used the Firefox' findBar already. It is the simple and intuitive way users have to search for words in a web page. The main thing we "miss" is that it requires the user to type the exact (set of) word(s) he searches for to actually find it. Sometimes, however, lazy enough users *like us* want to just give the findbar a "clue" of what we want to find in the page, and even often just do not know. The result of that was the SmartFind addon for Firefox 3.x. From its site we have some usecases of SmartFind:

1. "Schwarzenegger". This looks easy when you are looking at the word, but what if you do not have any idea what to write? Then you wonder "I would like to write something like "chuazenger" and for it to find similar words in the page".
2. As another example, when you are on a page where accents are used and your keyboard is not configured to type such accents (~^`), the traditional find method will not be able to match with any word.
3. You are just lazy like us and terrible in orthography :)
   

HOW

Smartfind ranks how similar each word in the page (yeah, that might take time depending on the webpage ... heuristics exists to speed it up, but new ones are welcome) is to the given word (input by the user). For such, we are implementing the levenshtein distance metric. The "how similar" can be trigged by the user through the Edit->SmartFind menu, to be more or less restrictive.

Well, in practical terms, whenever Firefox' original find method does not find something, SmartFind takes place and hitting a aditional "enter" fires its actition ...

If it is still not clear, see sshots bellow:




User is not from Austria and does not know how to spell this-big-name-above.

SmartFind finds it for him.

Disclaimer: This is just the first and quickly implemented public release, so there are some known problems:

• Improve the way it gets text content from the webpage (better xpath expression, which ignores "object" , "style" , "script" tags' text content).
• Fix problems with line break (lack of "br" tag) .
• Implement an user-intuitive way to walk through the list of most similar items found: currently we are static to the top of the list.
• Implement a fuzzy third state (similars ?) while comparing chars that could make SmartFind work much better: "for example, consider 'ë' as not completely different from 'e' or 'é' but similar". That done, the Finnish word "päivää" would be more similar to "paivaa" and so on ...
  
• Port it to Fennec (Firefox-Mobile) browser.
• Make it work with other Firefox addons, including FindInTabs.
• Implement SoundEx into it (?).

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

And now, something a bit more theoretical -- or is it?

Jorn made minor releases of GSSDP and GUPnP today. The main purpose of which is to fix the build on Rawhide. Here is the release announcement:

GSSDP 0.6.2
===========

- Reannounce resources after max_age / 2 - 1 instead of after max_age.
 [Peter Christensen, Jorn Baayen]
- Remove unnecessary call to g_thread_init(). [Zeeshan Ali]


GUPnP 0.12.2
============

- Support returning actions outside of the 'action-invoked' signal handler
 in service implementations. [Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen]
- Add explicit dependency on gthread. [Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen]

Fennec is a particular version of Mozilla, designed for handled devices and internet tablets. With the latest development version, stability has been improved, but the application is still a bit slow and "memory hungry". Speed an memory improvements are scheduled for the next release (Alpha1 - September 9, 2008).

Latest available version, Fennec M7, has the following improvements:

• Initial Add-on Manager support has landed. Tap "+" button in the sidebar to display the Add-on Manager. Use it to install, view and remove add-ons. Use the application menu button to dismiss the panel. Clicking on an add-on XPI in a webpage will also display the manager. The current UX design is not final.
• The top URL bar has been changed to work as designed: The bar will scroll into view at the top of the web content or will float over content otherwise.
• Support for kinetic scrolling has been added to the web content.
• Support for non-modal Password Manager UI was added.
• Some tabbed browsing fixes.
• Some zooming fixes.
• Some stability fixes.

To install it on your tablet, you've to configure Application Manager with the following parameters:

• Web Address: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mobile/
• Distribution: chinook (Note: The chinook builds work on diablo as well.)
• Components: release

If you're not sure or if you want further instructions about installing Fennec, you can find a step by step guide on Mozilla website.

Note: M7 supports the Maemo chinook & diablo distributions.