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Someone may have noticed that WiMAX was falling off the press radar, making it a convenient time to leak some documents on the upcoming service. The N810 WiMAX Edition is featured throughout, so vaporware is not an option. Read all about it on Engadget Mobile. We still need prices and coverage maps, Sprint!

Nokia Thanks to Nokia I had the opportunity to spend a few days at Helsinki last week, having talks, discussions and meetings with several people, especially in Maemo error management. As I interact with Nokia's error management by discussing/forwarding bug reports, and as there have been some confusion and misunderstandings already (Karsten's ...

Or, is just the xml cache?

Anyway, sorry for the non-Maemo-related post (although, you should go to El Rancho if you’re ever in Kansas City). I updated my RSS feed (to exclude the post) a few days ago, yet it’s still showing up on Planet Maemo. Drat that aggregator! I just love getting all of those burries (ahem).

"Prestwick" of InternetTabletTalk forums (the best place for Internet Tablet users) asked other forum members to post photos. The conversation goes on for a number of pages and truly shows the diversity, humor, and good-hearted nature of the Internet Tablet community. I asked "wazd" (who also has the maemo UI Improvements blog) for permission to re-post the photo above. That's Moscow!

How many times must I say it? The Internet Tablet community is - by far - the most interesting, fun, insightful, and colorful bunch of people I've ever had the honor of knowing.

As KOffice is supposed to be a lightweight office suite, I figured it would be nice to see how well it would run on maemo based devices. Thanks to Thomas Zander who replaced a lot of the double usage in koffice with qreals it was quite straightforward to get koffice to compile and packaged. Well, for the most part that is, I didn't manage to get kspread to link as apparently the old gcc version I'm using has some problems with inner classes in templated classes and duplicate symbols. After fixing some trivial issues, I could install koffice on maemo and run it:

As you see in these screenshots there are some clear user-interface problems; the dockers use way too much space for such a small screen, and somehow the toolbar is at the bottom instead of the top of the window (I have seen this earlier also with for example konqueror, so perhaps there is some general kde/qt mainwindow bug on maemo, but I haven't looked into that any further). So while the UI is far from suitable for these devices, drawing stuff with karbon actually works remarkably well. I think it is very realistic to create a slimmed-down UI for koffice applications to make a very usable office suite for maemo using a lot of the existing koffice code.

If anyone else want to try running koffice, maemo package are available in my repository.

KDE Project:

• KOffice
• Maemo

As KOffice is supposed to be a lightweight office suite, I figured it would be nice to see how well it would run on maemo based devices. Thanks to Thomas Zander who replaced a lot of the double usage in koffice with qreals it was quite straightforward to get koffice to compile and packaged. Well, for the most part that is, I didn't manage to get kspread to link as apparently the old gcc version I'm using has some problems with inner classes in templated classes and duplicate symbols. After fixing some trivial issues, I could install koffice on maemo and run it:

As you see in these screenshots there are some clear user-interface problems; the dockers use way too much space for such a small screen, and somehow the toolbar is at the bottom instead of the top of the window (I have seen this earlier also with for example konqueror, so perhaps there is some general kde/qt mainwindow bug on maemo, but I haven't looked into that any further). So while the UI is far from suitable for these devices, drawing stuff with karbon actually works remarkably well. I think it is very realistic to create a slimmed-down UI for koffice applications to make a very usable office suite for maemo using a lot of the existing koffice code.

If anyone else want to try running koffice, maemo package are available in my repository.

Karoliina just E-mailed me to tell me that she just finished her new song.

This one sounds more like Vangelis than I have ever done before. It combines some symphonic elements (some (sampled) instruments from symphonic orchestra were used) with synthetic sounds.

– Karoliina Salminen

The song

A video with the song as background showing the cathedral in Mechelen (filmed by Karoliina and Kate during Akademy)

I like it!

The above screenshot is from Nseries.com. I decided to take a look at the latest official marketing materials, drool over the new Nokia N96, and cry on the inside for the continued lack of US 3G version of the Nokia N82. In that site visit, I realized how heavily "mouseover" effects are used in navigation.

This isn't the first time I've noticed growing extensive use of information that pops up on mouseover. A good number of sites I visit regularly have "info-boxes" that pull up extended information on a highlighted word.

On the tablet, however, the site navigation is quite different. There are no popping info boxes, automatically expanding menus, or smooth mouse-following effects. This is because the tablet does not know where a non-clicking cursor is hovering at any given time. Since active digitizers (the ones on high-end tablet PCs with the special hover-aware stylus) are not an option on this device, perhaps an emulation of "hover mode" will help. For example: holding down the Fn key while moving the stylus around the screen could behave as normal mouse movement instead of the click-and-drag default.

Food for thought.

In few days (September, 10th) we will finally know who will be the members of the maemo.org community council.Please note the ".org", the council will help us (the community) make our voice be heard at Nokia and, vice versa, will help Nokia in listening to the Maemo community.This is going to be really helpful and the candidates seem to be really good.This also marks the first of this kind of

People who know me probably saw this blog item coming. Here it is!

When I wrote GUPnP Network Light, I thought of it as just a simple example application that demonstrates how easy it is to implement UPnP devices and services using GUPnP. However there is one man, Mr. Hugo Baldasano Calleja who being an electrical engineer is very much interested in light bulbs and has recently been writing control point for Network Light.

While discussing about his code with him on IRC, I started to wonder how would a simple control point GUI for Network Light look like. I realized that it would look exactly the same as the Network Light itself. Since Hugo had already made it possible for multiple instances of Network Light to co-exist happily on the same network/machine, I decided to turn Network Light GUI to be a Control Point that controls all the Lights on the network, not just itself. The change is already in the trunk and will be released soon. Here is a screenshot:

I have always wondered why are there so many advanced technologies to learn to create the GUI for a software application. GUI is what we see, then if we want to design or customize it, then it should be as simple as editing an image in an Image editor. This becomes more important with the next-gen handheld devices, where the GUIs will be handled more intuitively - by fingers - rather than keyboards or mice. However the problem and its solution wasn't very apparent to me.

A Quick Look at maemo Bugzilla
2008-09-01 through 2008-09-07

Last week I visited Berlin to look at offices and found one that’s perfect. I’m signing the contract now. It’s in Kastanienallee (recent Flickr photos), a lively main street in hip Prenzlauerberg. I’m excited. The location and office couldn’t be better.

There are 5 large offices, plus a beautiful large central area, with bare brick, stone tiles, and lots of light, and even a patio for summer meetings. It’s peaceful and secure in a building to the rear beyond the inner courtyard.

I’m now ordering lots of furniture and equipment. Hopefully we’ll have it mostly set up before the Maemo summit on the 19th/20th September so we can proudly show it to our friends. I’m even thinking of having a little GNOME/Maemo party there before we have moved in properly.

I hope that Berlin, and this amazing part of Berlin, and this wonderful office will help to attract new employees, maybe from outside of Germany.

Theme maker now includes support for icons. Sure, it used to have the support earlier on as well, but now the support is proper and the icons are actually made into an icon gtk theme and the theme is then referred in the actual theme as the themes icon theme.

Confusing? Well the good thing is that no-one needs to care. Just open theme maker, set your theme name (no spaces), set your name, select bg file, select template file, select icon file, set theme version, top bar height (I recommend 60 - remind myself to put that as default, now it's 45), then set font sizes, font names, add a .ttf font if you want to install new font to the system. Click on the build theme and again on build theme on the next page and POW! You are done. Your own theme with your own font and your own icons. Currently only the home screens four icons are supported, I'll add the rest on later versions. Anyway, you still need to make the theme look your own, but to do that, all you need is photoshop (or any other similar tool) and a little patience. I've myself been especially using the fonts to get some sweet new fonts for my fbreader sessions.

Link to download: Download at garage

As you can see, I forgot to change the version number on the theme maker view. Will be fixed for 1.1.8. ;)

Please note that the icon template seems to be mandatory in this version. Looks like 1.1.8 is coming sooner than I thought! ;)

The Maemo community council election has been running for 5 days now, and voting closes at midnight Wednesday - I’ll be announcing the new council (subject to any contestations, protests, etc) on Thursday the 11th, one week before the Maemo community gets to meet in person in Berlin for the Maemo Summit.

If you think you should have a ballot, and you haven’t received one last Wednesday, please drop me a line.

If you have received a ballot and haven’t voted yet, please do so - there is only a little more than 2 days left to the election closing.

While I’m talking about the election, I’d like to thank GNOME for the election software we stole^Wborrowed and got working^W^Ware using for the election. I hope that the instructions which I wrote for the module are useful, and end up getting included in the foundation-web module.

Thanks also to Henri Bergius from Nemein, who got the software installed and has been my hands and eyes for the past few days on  a server to which I don’t have access.

So, in little over a week I will be travelling to Berlin to attend the OSiM conference and then the first ever Maemo summit. In true community fashion, I decided that rather than be a bystander to these events, I my as well help out as much as I can.

At OSiM I will be trying to coordinate the community presence on the Nokia booth. We still need volunteers to help answer questions from the public and showcase the many cool apps that we have available to us as tablet users. If your attending OSiM and would like to help, please edit the wiki page with details of when your available. Hopefully we can capitalise on all the excitement building due to Ari Jaaksi talk on the future of the Maemo platform and the Nokia dev session.

This years Mameo summit will be held at c-base in Berlin. I will be charged with video recording as much of the event as possible and distributing it afterwards. The plan is to make available audio recordings of most, if not all talks. In addition to this there will be video recordings of the main talks along with interviews and 'behind the scenes' footage.

I will be meeting with the c-base guys on the Tuesday night before the event to view a music concert they're hosting and have a chat about how the event will best be recorded. Over the two days I will be using a Panasonic HDC-SD5 high definition camcorder to capture as much as possible and Tim Samoff with be snapping away with his trusty Canon 5d.

All in all there should be good coverage of the two days (and nights) so for those people who can't make the event, you can at least experience it in digital form.

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Since I totally agree with last two blog entries of Havoc, I originally started to write this entry to get them to the planets I am on and he is not (yes, there are some) but then I couldn't resist adding my own thoughts. :)

Regarding "embeddable" scripting languages, I came-up with the exact same conclusion 4-5 year ago. When I looked around at that time, I realized that GNU had realized that long time ago and had a nice embeddable implementation of the easiest yet powerful language, Scheme. Guile was the name of that implementation. I soon became a firm believer of "Most of the implementation in C, while the highest-level (only) logic written in Scheme/Guile". While I was acting on my belief, I couldn't help but notice that the only other person in the whole GNOME community that had similar vision was Andy Wingo. Many (if not most) had been going for Python. Some of them even took this scripting language as far as coding complete frameworks in it.

As I mentioned in my previous blog entries, I did hack in Python for a while but the more I coded in it, the more I hated it. Now that I think back on that experience I realize that I wouldn't have hated it so much if the projects I had worked on where not completely written in it and it had used Python as what it is, a scripting language.

But lets not make this yet another anti-Python rant and agree with the conclusions drawn by Havoc for us. :)

It’s a week and a day since I started as the project manager for maemo.org. It’s been quite interesting to get into the things that are going on in the community. Because that’s basically what this job is about. I need to get a feel for what kind of things would be considered beneficial by the [...]

Maemo Summit is almost here! I leave for Berlin next Tuesday and will arrive just a little late for the beginning of OSiM World. Upon arrival in Berlin, Eric Warnke (aka Brontide) and I are going to try to meet up at the airport so that we can share a cab to our hotels… This is pretty exciting!

I’m almost finished with my presentation for“Saturday”:http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2008#Saturday_20 , at 1:30p. I’ve been using the Google Docs Presentation app, with the expectation that’d I’d later export it as a PDF for use at the summit. Admittedly, this application still has many issues…

• Text editing is far from perfect
  • Sometimes old typographical information is retained within a text element unless you clear the style before changing it (or, sometimes a text element must be recreated from scratch of you can’t get new style to take)
• Serif-ized text (i.e., setting a text element to “Normal/Serif”) is not retained when saving the presentation
• Image manipulation is nearly impossible (one example is that there is no way to numerically resize a graphic)
• Placing elements on the screen is tricky
  • It’s difficult to see the black element marques on dark backgrounds
  • Element placement doesn’t seem to be pixel-perfect
  • Graphical elements can be moved with the arrow buttons, but textual elements cannot
• Exporting to PDF introduces all sorts of placement errors (i.e., elements in the PDF are placed in different locations as they are in Google Docs)
• Duplicated slides sometimes retain elements from the original slide, even after deleting all of the elements on the slide (even if you can’t see the element on the duplicated slide, it can show up when you view the presentation or export it to PDF)

• The drag-and-drop functionality for organizing slides is helpful, but sometimes gets mixed-up when the section’s scroll bar is dragged and released (e.g., releasing the scroll bar can auto-select a slide, as if the slide was clicked and dragged)

Anyway, I could go on… But, overall, I’m happy that I used this method for creating the presentation. Not only was I able to keep everything online — for editing anywhere — but it creates a document that will eventually be accessible by anyone who wants to see it.

As a side note, it’s important to say that Google Docs Presentation does an amazing job of importing PowerPoint documents. I just wish it could import ODP files!

I’m looking forward to my short time in Berlin. I’m looking forward to Maemo Summit even more.

Maemo SW is setting up a site in Mountain View - which means that there are some positions currently opened that might be of interest to some of you. This site will deal with third-party and partner management with a special focus on the Internet services and technologies. We are looking for people with very different background- some product management and UI positions for instance. I am in particular looking for somebody to manage the site. (go to the careers link on http://www.nokia.com/ site and search for the "Maemo SW, US site manager and Head of third-party and partner development" position). This is a quite interesting position, and we are looking for somebody who would have both the technical and open source background as well as some insight on product management and partnering
As far as RD is concerned, there are several positions available: architect, project manager, lead developer. Hope to hear from you.

Midgard follows Ubuntu's synchronized release schedule, and releases packages for that platform, but otherwise we have little to do with the distribution. Still, I found the following in Mark Shuttleworth's Jaunty Jackalope announcement interesting:

Another goal is the the blurring of web services and desktop applications. "Is it a deer? Is it a bunny? Or is it a weblication - a desktop application that seamlessly integrates the web!" This hare has legs - and horns - and we'll be exploring it in much more detail for Jaunty.

This echos quite well with our plans to take Midgard much further than just the web. As Everaldo often reminds me, Midgard may soon become very interesting to developers of desktop and mobile applications. What we provide to them is:

• A simple object-oriented persistent storage library
• Bindings for Python and Mono in addition to the C library
• Ability to use either SQLite or a "proper database" thanks to libgda
• Replication capability, with XMPP support on its way
• D-Bus signals for inter-process notifications of I/O events

And on top of all this, Midgard comes with a pretty efficient MVC framework for PHP. This means that the desktop applications can be coupled with a nice social web service, all built using same storage and replication mechanisms. Replicated, peer-to-peer applications could be a free software answer to the risk of cloud taking control of your data.

Until now I've always been using my own built Qt packages when building KDE packages for maemo. Initially because the Qt packages in extras-devel where missing some vital parts for KDE (mainly SSL support I think) but after that because I just had them installed, and it worked. But now I wanted to change this, and use the extras-devel provided Qt, as in theory that shouldn't matter, after all they are build from the same sources, with nearly identical configuration. As it turned out, this was actually quite a bit harder than I thought it would be.

KDE Project:

• Maemo

Until now I've always been using my own built Qt packages when building KDE packages for maemo. Initially because the Qt packages in extras-devel where missing some vital parts for KDE (mainly SSL support I think) but after that because I just had them installed, and it worked. But now I wanted to change this, and use the extras-devel provided Qt, as in theory that shouldn't matter, after all they are build from the same sources, with nearly identical configuration. As it turned out, this was actually quite a bit harder than I thought it would be.

I finally compiled ogg-support for Diablo too. It’s available through the maemo downloads page.

I don’t know why the Chinook version didn’t work in Diablo any more. And I didn’t really want to start debugging why the Maemo’s mime libraries and the closed source Metalayer Crawler don’t want to work with the mimetypes copied from a desktop system. So, now there’s only one mimetype: audio/x-vorbis and no support for speex or theora anymore. On the good side, e.g. File Manager can now start OGGs to Media Player.

New feature is a Control Panel plugin to ignore the OGGs from the Maps application. After installing ogg-support wait several minutes for the Metalayer Crawler to finish and then start the CP plugin. Metalayer Crawler seems to be much much slower if you have the Media Player open while it indexes the files.

With the Maemo community council elections over, I’d like to congratulate the newly elected council. Good luck to Eduardo Lima, Andrew Flegg, Ryan Abel, Simon Pickering and Tim Samoff, who will make up the inaugural community council.

The council serves for a six month term, so they have a big job in front of them to define its role, and ensure it’s relevant to the Maemo community for years to come.

There will be a smallish beer-crate and pizza party at the Openismus Berlin office on the Saturday night (20th September) after the Maemo summit. That will be an opportunity to introduce our new location to our employees, customers, and other Maemo/GNOME people. I think we can get Nokia to pay for the beer and pizza.

Lots of Maemo summit people will have left Berlin already by Saturday, so hopefully it won’t be the full 200 people. We can probably handle around 80. How about you add your name in the comments if you’ll be there. That will help us to plan, and will tell us whether we need to limit the numbers.

It’s Kastanienallee 88 (Google maps). The name’s on the doorbell outside, and we are in the building at the back.

I will be in Berlin from Tuesday, taking delivery of some furniture and other stuff, including a Wii plus projector, which should be nice for one of our extra rooms, and a fancy coffee machine. But in general the space will still be quite empty, with no secret stuff, so it seems like the right time to have a party there. It looks like we’ll have Internet and some Wi-Fi.

My baby son and girlfriend will be there, so we will probably dedicate one quiet room as the baby room. Finally Liam will get to meet Mathias’ Marc Andre.

As a newly elected Maemo Community Council member, I’d like you to head over and read the results here. I’m just one among an incredible group intelligent, passionate, and overall very cool individuals.

Thanks to all of those who voted for me. I promise to always strive to communicate our community’s best interests to the Nokia Maemo team.

I recently acquired an 3G iPhone just to check it out and write some software. I must say I'm already totally addicted to it. I'm sorry to say that but the N810 is no real competition. Stuff that really get me excited: really mobile email, very fast GPS (and maps), excellent connectivity (WLAN + 3G). The N810 has all these features too but just not in the same quality. Maybe I would be less impressed if the N810 had GSM/UMTS connectivity. The I only have to carry one device and have connectivity in most places factor just kicks ass.

Some points where the N810 still is slightly ahead: web browsing (big screen, flash), the hardware keyboard (nothing beats this on a shell), and of course the open source platform.

I'm sure that I will continue using my N810 for specific tasks once in awhile.


Befreiphone

It has passed a while since my last post here, but nothing better than great news to get back to write.

I’m so proud to announce the Mamona 0.2 release.

The entire team has been doing a great job spending efforts to make it usable and stable, providing new installer scripts and new packages; supporting new machines; writing a better documentation and many other features.

Please, read the complete feature list at Mamona 0.2 Release Notes.

Mamona Logo

I’m really happy to announce the final release of Mamona 0.2!

We’ve been working very hard to accomplish what we wanted for the final release, since the 0.2-Beta release.

We could not delivery everything we wanted, but this is a major improvement from the latest release.

Some of the main highlights for 0.2:

• Improved SDK
• Xephyr support on SDK
• Full Emulation
• Virtual Keyboard
• Wireless Network with Network Manager API
• Command line interface for Network Manager
• Web browser: Midori
• New installer, with our own Qemu (don’t need to mess up with your system anymore

After reading/watching Stuart's nice slides on Closures in the context of JavaScript, I have started to like JavaScript. Personally, I don't accept any language as a high-level scripting language if it doesn't support closures. Python is therefore straight out of my window. Although Vala isn't a scripting language, it would be nice to have such support in there as well. It already supports lambda functions with no restrictions and Jürg has concrete plans to support closures, it's more a matter of when rather than why or how. When that support is there, just try and stop me from loving Vala. :)

UPDATE: Thanks to Anonymous, I now stand corrected that Python does fully support closures. Although I still don't like the fact that it restricts lambda functions to be one-liner but at least it's not straight out of the window anymore. :)

UPDATE#2: Andy Wingo informs me that python doesn't really fully support closures. He even put up a small code fragment to make his point. So I hereby throw python out the window, again. :)

INdT has got me some space for my personal stuff, including prism-maemo port. So, please if you are interested in Prism-Maemo, use THIS REPOSITORY for newer updates. Obviously, the two previous repositories won't be updated any further (due to technical problems w/ the server).

Sorry about that.

--Antonio Gomes

Welcome to the Maemo Community Council's new blog! This is where we will be keeping the community abreast of current community issues, and posting important notices and announcements.

To get started, I'd like to thank everybody who helped get this off the ground: Henri Bergius, for doing the grunt work getting the GNOME voting software up and running on maemo.org and for fixing bugs during the election; Andrew Flegg, for thinking up and pushing the idea; and, of course Dave Neary for coordinating the whole thing and giving it the last push over the top it needed to happen.

As its first order of business, the council elected a chair to oversee administrative duties and chase down reticent council members for input: me, Ryan Abel. I'd thank them for it, but I suspect it'll involve few perks and a lot of extra work. ;)

Now comes the time to start fleshing out an administrative structure, draft a mission statement, and maybe take on our first community issue.

More will be coming soon, so watch this space (or subscribe to maemo-community and join #maemo if you're interested in getting involved)!

A Quick Look at maemo Bugzilla
2008-09-08 through 2008-09-14

This week ProFUSION released Evas DirectFB engine, adding it back to SVN. While engine is functional, it’s not as fast as it could be and Denis Oliver Kropp is looking at this, that seems to be related to pre-allocated surfaces not being accelerated by DirectFB. You can work around this by using Evas software engine, that is very fast, just define DFB_USE_EVAS_IMAGE_DRAW.

Announcements:

• http://www.mail-archive.com/enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg18943.html
• http://www.mail-archive.com/directfb-users@directfb.org/msg07833.html

Next steps are to provide EWL and ETK engines, just need some time to work on them.

We noticed that many people are giving up to try Mamona due to 2 reasons: We were requesting the user to install a qemu compatible version.  Of course this can bother people that use Scratchbox or another emulated system. Even Scratchbox has its own qemu you need to register the right interpreter on kernel through [...]

On Thursday I’ll be participating in a panel at OSIM World - “Effectively Building and Maintaining an Open Source Community”. It was a happy coincidence when I saw Matt Asay writing about the issue on Friday, and again today - it gives me a chance to think a bit more about the issues involved, and provides a data point which is very close to the experience that I have repeatedly seen when companies decide to use free software, be it peripherally or strategically.

My presentation is finished (will be posted after Maemo Summit) and loaded onto a thumb drive, I’ve got the camera batteries all charged up, I’m almost packed… All I have to do now is get on the plane. Which doesn’t happen until about 1:20p tomorrow.

A few people have already begun their trips. I wish them all safe travels!

Just a few more preparations and then a horrendously long flight to Germany…

See you all there!

A quick tip I’ve recalled today about: The slides written for all the subjects of the Free Software Master were released under a free license and are currently published. You can find them at this URL:

http://www.slideshare.net/tag/freeswmaster

A lot of useful information set free. Just have a look and… who knows, maybe you learn something new there.

Khertan was kind enough to package the cairoclock and put it to extras repository. Now we can all easily install the magnificent clock on diablo/chinook.

What makes it so great? Well, it's much better looking than the default clock. You can resize it as you see fit. It's simplistic and looks good.

Take a look at the screenshots below.




Also, what is truly great on that is that it's a python applet and has a very nice and clean code to serve as an example to anyone interested in making cairo based applets for the device. I do encourage giving it a go. You'll get good control over the content and cairo seems to be drawing quite fast even on larger surfaces.

As some sort of future update, the clock could be setup to have option to not to include the seconds.

Link to install is at maemo.org downloads

I had a presentation at the OSiM conference in Berlin today. I discussed about the future of the Maemo software.

Bringing open source to consumer mainstream

Nokia operates in two worlds:
a) in a product and business world manufacturing and selling devices and services
b) in an open source –even in a free software world—participating in many projects and peer development groups

One of the most boring work while doing Edje is having to measure all the parts and write them on your EDC files. It’s also very error prone. So why not make it automatic?

This idea is not new and at INdT we did that, for Gimp, where designers handle developers PSD (Photoshop) files and they open these in Gimp, outputting as edc using this script by Renato Chencarek.

Now at ProFUSION we’re finishing the UI of Enjoy, a music player to demo the power of Guarana framework (to be released soon!). I did the design using Inkscape, so I was wondering that I could join Renato and write an Inkscape-to-EDC converter, and here it is! Both files are now in E SVN under edje/utils.

If you like screenshots, here they are. You can also have a glimpse of Enjoy look (hey, I’m a developer, not a designer, so don’t shoot me! however suggestions are appreciated):

inkscape2edc: inkscape with original file

inkscape2edc: edje_editor with resulting file

I hope this can help other EFL developers out there. I know some Maemo, OpenMoko and even aMSN guys are using it now.

Update#1: You need both inkscape and/or gimp to use the scripts.

Update#2: Scripts are written in Python, so you need it too.

I'll be having my part of fun later this week as I'm also attending to Maemo Summit! Together with Timo we'll arrive in Berlin on Thursday evening and leave on Saturday evening, so we should experience most of the scheduled sessions. By looking at the attendee list, there will be "long-time-no-see" -moments with many originals, but plenty of new faces have also appeared since my Ruoholahti-days. So waiting to meet you all!

Major changes are on the way for the Nokia Internet Tablet line. Here's the partial scoop: The "Internet Tablet" line may be ending in name but the maemo platform is going strong. Wait a few hours, watch this space, and there will be more.

Dr. Ari Jaaksi just started talking.
News to follow.

No 5th generation DEVICE announced, but here are platform announcements:

• Enabling cellular connectivity over HSPA. (!!!)
• Higher speed Ti OMAP3.
• High definition cameras for content creation.

Software:

• Gold sponsor of The Linux Foundation
• 3G code already contributed this morning.
• Stay tuned for more.

Answers to the Q/A:

• Long-term commitment to maemo: "Yes"
• Enhancements to software: They're working on it.
• 5th Gen device: Will announce when they're ready to announce it.
• Primary focus: Create great devices, but contribute code upstream.
• Role of Trolltech in maemo: Eventual plans to support Qt AND GTK - Working to fight against fragmentation.
  

We don’t want to offend or look like a nerdy-ugly-only-boy-band So Me, Etrunko, Aloisio, Glaubert and Marcio are almost Berlin, excited for this week’s agenda: Osim and Maemo summit. Our main goal there will be of course the Summit, and I personally expect to not only know a couple of virtual buddies out there, but [...]

Hi, I hate when I need to excuse myself. Specially when it’s about delays. It happened in the first release of Canola2, and it is happening now. Canola should be out in august and we are reading to a middle sep. release that I am not confortable with. Reasons (I also hate justifying, but people [...]

At nearly 40,000 feet and almost 600 miles per hour, the N810, my faithful traveling companion, did not let me down.

From Kansas City to Berlin, music (Canola and MediaBox), movies (Canola and MPlayer), games (too many to list) — and a lot more — even kept up with the slightly oldeg than middle-aged German woman sitting across the aisle from me, never seeming to tire of listening to music piped through the airline-supplied headphones, clapping and undulating her way across the Atlantic. (I can only imagine what she would do with an Internet Tablet in her hand.)

Even after being a tablet owner for a couple of years now, it still amazes me how fun, usable, and powerful these little gadgets are. As I looked around at my fellow travelers, I spotted several iPods, one or two qiPhones, and countless other cell- and smartphones (e.g., a plethora of PDAs). Of course, other than the iPods, most of the devices were shut off early into the trip. I’ll have to admit that quite a bit of pride comes with being a tablet user; not just because they’re still pretty unique.

Before my wonderful black 60GB iPod was stolen (with my car), I would have never thought of owning another kind of portable media device. To be honest, I use and love Macs — and even [tt:iTunes:apple.com/itunes] — and I’ll probably own an iPod again one day. My wife is a die-hard iPod user herself and only just recently found her trusty, pink, second-generation iPod broken and in need of replacement. (What can I say? They are slick little PMPs.)

But, when my stolen car was recovered, sans iPod, I was faced with a question: where was my money going to go? I thought about it and researched it for quite some time — close to the duration between the release of 770 and the N800. In fact, I was very close to buying another non-Apple PMP. Although, when I finally began to understand exactly what Nokia was trying to accomplish, as well as the N800’s feature-set, the choice was easy.

Now, a little under two years later, I’m in Germany of all places, currently attending OSiM World community. I’ll soon be presenting at the first Maemo Summit. I’m a newly elected member of the inaugural Maemo Community Council.

It really is an incredible story. Thanks to this little device in my hand (yes, I’ve written all of this on my handy tablet), I’ve made friends, I’ve gotten to participate in something that I dearly believe in, and now I’m in Berlin and I still have enough battery-power to talk about it.

The Maemo Summit is upon us!

Wow, just got back from recording Ari Jaaksi's keynote speech at OSiM and he managed to drop a couple of bombs including:

Maemo 5 will have an OMAP3 based CPU (no surprise there).

It will have high definition camera support but no mention on whether this is video or stills.

HSPA support built in!

More emphasis on multi-media content.

More storage space (figures talked about in terms of gigabytes).

More information will be made available at the developer session tomorrow and over the course of the Maemo Summit on Friday and Saturday.

On another positive note, Nokia dumped a whole lot of patches to the Linux kernel early today to enable HSPA support on OMAP3 processors. Well done Nokia.

The last post was insanely popular and I thank you all. The InternetTabletTalk thread is FAR more interesting than the actual announcement. Here's something that has come from discussion so far:

The developers are going to have to release software compatible with the new abilities of the platform. It's up to Nokia to provide an SDK where developers can write one code base and export it to go to all tablets.

The new CPU, HSPA radio, and camera will add cost. There will be users who want to pay less for a device without the HSPA radio. Will they have that option? Is the market big enough to support two tablets?

How will carriers interact with this new device?

Head to the forums to talk about these in depth. Expect me to pin down some of the developers and community members here for interviews.

I mentioned earlier that the Internet Tablet line may be over as we know it. Given the faster CPU, always-connected HSPA, and higher-definition camera support pledged, the "internet tablet" name doesn't exactly describe it well enough.

With a keyboard, GPS, camera (hopefully with video capture support) and CPU boost, it seems to be a portable everything/creative device. In a session this morning, Erkko mentioned that there are three high focus points:

Internet: The CPU and platform improvements are geared to deliver the best and most diverse Internet experience of any mobile device - both for consuming and creating content.

Multimedia: Faster CPU means sharper video and more stable streaming. HSPA means the ability to take that on the go.

Computer: The base platform improvements and hardware boosts make the experience more like a computer than like a mobile phone or previous internet tablets. They also make it easier for developers to take "computer" applications and port them to this platform.

So what's in the cards? The Nokia N900 Internet Multimedia Computer? Perhap - It's a little clunky of a name and doesn't show how small it is. We'll see.

At least we know now what was meant by "the last Internet Tablet" in yesterday's post.

Last night, “the Roaming Gnomes”, a team I put together, participated in the ACCESS pub quiz at OSiM World, organised by Lefty Schlesinger.

Lefty ran a Jeopardy-type quiz which was raucous, fun, energetic, competitive, and replete with a Windows Vista crash and a Flock bug. A bunch of teams had a go at questions in categories that included “Open source personalities”, “Comics and Movies”, “Mobile industry history”, “History of computing” and some general knowledge categories. And in the end, the best team won.Us! (Update: Now includes a photo of the winning team - Bdale and Jim got shy, and Niels had to leave early, and I think it’s Heikki who also missed the photo).

The Roaming GNOMEs

So here’s the role call of the Roaming Gnomes heros who helped bring the huge trophy to GNOME.

• Dave Neary
• Stormy Peters
• Paul Cooper (a two-time winner!)
• Alejandro, Alberto and Juanjo of Igalia
• Thomas Jansson
• Richard Rojfors
• Heikki Paajaken
• Bdale Garbee (our resident computing historian)
• Jim Zemlin
• Niels Breet (special mention for knowing the answer to which country has a wife-carrying race)

Congratulations to Lefty on running a very successful quiz - it was a good range of questions, and the rules change mid-game definitely contributed to the animation of the competition. And thanks once more to all the members of the team.

Five minutes, that’s all the time I have for my presentation and talk about Elisator. And I sure that during that five minutes, I’ll be thinking about my early presentations about Linux in embedded devices:

• like the one on 16th November 2002 in Madrid. Easy to remember because it was my birthday and my friends gave me a cap signed by people like Miguel de Icaza or Juan Tomas. I can still remember Miguel’s face when I showed him an iPAQ 3130 with GPE inside
• or like the one during “2006 Free Software in Asturias Congress” presenting Maemo platform, with the help of a friend, a friend that already in 2002 was impressed about what Linux could do in a small iPAQ. I still remember the first time I talked to him about Maemo platform and convinced him to start developing for it,… Do yo know where do this friend works now?

So, yes, this Maemo Summit could be an interesting experience…

The Maemo developer session at OSiM 2008 served to show Nokia's stance on the future of openness on the internet tablets. They have signalled their intentions by today open sourcing many components that were once closed including the wifi and low level hardware monitoring drivers.

read more

Just in time for the Summit, according to plan — I am pleased to blog about another round of custom features and tweaks for the maemo.org Bugzilla. Finally managed to push them live yesterday with our über-busy sys admins. Aside from quite a few almost-invisible stuff behind the scenes, general minor polishing, re-phrasing and branding, there are highly visible and useful features, to make Bugzilla a more pleasant experience for all of us.

Just like Nokia employees, active Maemo community members now are labeled as such on comments, generally giving a hint to their commitment and knowledge about the Maemo platform. You deserve it! We’ve started to add this bit to a few members already — if you spot one we’ve missed but should have this, please don’t hesitate to ping Andre or me.

A long-standing request is being added automatically to the Cc list when commenting on bugs. This now is a user preference, by default adding you to any bug sufficiently interesting to you to comment on. If you prefer the previous behavior (hey Ryan), getting it back is just two clicks away. Of course, this still can be set on a case-by-case basis.

Another convenient enhancement are visually highlighted quotes, making it easy to distinguish between the new information and what it refers to. Enjoy, I hope you like it!

Recently added task: Custom hacks to Bugzilla to provide IRC bot interoperability. Working on it with jott, this will be a nice feature for the IRC channel.

On a related note — already half way in Berlin. I’m excited to see you there!

Ari Jaaksi is giving the opening speech at the maemo summit. His first point is that we should all ask the tough questions and facilitate discussion that can lead to solutions. Following that, he talked about how different the S60 and phone platforms are different from maemo: maemo is not just about making the device great, but it's about making the future great as well.

TONS of photos will come.

One topic that is very important and recurring in Berlin is "fragmentation." This is the concern that too many players in the open source mobile market will hurt everyone in the future.

Nokia is highlighting the fact that they do as much as possible to take existing open-source software, improve it, then submit the improvements back to the code base.

Expect an editorial on fragmentation, what it is, how it is important, and what it will do.

The proposed Fremantle user interfaces look nothing like existing maemo / Internet Tablet 2008 Diablo interface. The left side bar is gone. The top full bar is gone. It looks far more organic.

The disclaimer here, of course, is that none of them are reality. They're PROPOSED UI designs. I'll post the pictures here when available.

Harri Kiljander, the UI director of the maemo team, just gave a fantastic discussion about the user interface on the maemo platform. It showed actual metrics on the amount of time between touch and feedback plus metrics between screen area and accuracy.

In the Q/A, he was asked if multi-touch or accelerometers are being considered since they are such hot-button items in 2007-2009 consumer devices. The answer: he jumped back a number of slides to show one with several fingers on a panel. That's no confirmation that multi-touch WILL be in future devices, but it is certainly being considered heavily by UI developers.

No answer about accelerometers, but the demand may be just too low to need it.

Reggie Suplido of InternetTabletTalk is now talking about what users of Internet Tablets want. First, info on itT:

• Reggie has done a number of forum sites and user sites in the past. itT started in July of 2005.
  
• Currently there are 19,000 new members/day and about 416 posts/day.
• So far, the discussion about the latest platform announcement two days ago has over 200 replies.
  
• New product announcements spike user growth to the site.
• Over 1,000,000 unique visitors and 39% are new visitors.
• Tablet Scene: Created more geared for new users of Internet Tablets.
• maemo apps: a section of itT for software downloads
• Beginner's Guide Book: Intro to Internet Tablets

Now on to "What maemo users want?"

• Current tablet users are using it for web surfing, instant messaging, social networking, Skype, and a personal media player.
• There is a divide between 'one device' and 'multi-device' people.
• Great out-of-box experience
• A good balance between features and experience
• Focus of user experience over just design
• Software availability and ease
• Software updates (especially OTA updates)
• Provide feedback easily

On specific applications, he's giving examples of how to make things faster with predictive notifications, fewer taps to navigate, widgets, and more. My words won't do it justice, so I will wait for him to post his slides.

Fremantle (maemo 5) is coming. There is a great deal of information about how it will help developers (SDK, maemo.org, online training, and the Nokia Forum.) On the consumer side, this includes the announcements in Ari Jaaksi's keynote.

The bullet point for multimedia said "encode and decode video at DVD resolutions" under the OMAP3 support. Looks like the new camera will support high-res video capture.

Here's a big announcement:
Hardware accelerated graphics with OpenGL ES 2.0 and Clutter.

Expect a full editorial on what all this means later.

The so-far-nonexistant http://maemo.nokia.com will also be a way to bridge from developers to Nokia. I'll link Nokia's official explanation of that in the near future.

Long time no blog, and this is not even a proper blog post yet. It will come once I’m back from this Maemo intensive week in Berlin. OSiM World 2008 is now history, here you have the slides Erkko Anttila (Fremantle product manager) and me presented yesterday (PDF). Good news to Meta Tracker, PulseAudio, gUPnP, Ohm [...]

I started uploading into my maemo summot 2008 photo stream. Here's the link to the set and all subsequent photos will be added there.

I opened up the permissions on these so anyone with a Flickr account can add tags and labels. Please label the people you know and add comments to the photos. Humor is welcome in the comments and labels!

I really hope to decommission the 770 we use to run the site.

Yes, summit has started and Ari's opening speech was promising, meaning the future of more open maemo and nokia! (..and that we should trust Yannick even though he is French and appeared late here.. ;-)

Greetings from the Maemo Summit here at c-base. Quim found us a cool place to have the Summit. You who didn't come -- you missed a lot! We are all here. Over 200!



A few new announcements about the current plans with Fremantle:
-WLAN / power management to open source-Fremantle to support OpenGL-Clutter -- altough there is a roadblock now ... but we're hopeful
We just had a nice lighting sessions. Alan ran OpenOffice in a Debian bubble within Maemo. Sebastian showed how Maemo devices can be used in police cars. Eduardo showed new Canola stuff on Qt. And so forth. Cool stuff. More here.

Coming to the end of the first day of the Maemo Summit in C-Base in Berlin. From just outside, you have a view of the antenna of the space station that the C-Base group have been mapping out for the past few years. For those who don’t know, this is the terraforming space station which brought life to earth, and which crashed in what is now Berlin 4.5 billion years ago. Only the central tower, now in use as a television tower, is visible above ground.

As people have blogged (e.g. here & here), maemo will get Clutter support! On related news, haven't had time to really hack clutteroad forward but last time I left it looking this:

Will maemo5 run on n8×0? Based on what I’ve read from blog posts from OSiM and Maemo Summit there’s no straight answer from Nokia so far. We’ve learned that the interface for Fremantle will be Clutter based though.

Now, Clutter needs OpenGL (ES). Hardware support on n8×0 has some issues and software rendering leaves something to be desired. So will maemo5 run on current hardware? I don’t know, but I see few options:

• yes – Fremantle comes with GLES driver for n8×0, everything is peachy.
• yes-ish – Clutter is optional on n8×0 like Compiz in Ubuntu. That wouldn’t be exactly “Clutter based” though.
• yes-as-in-no – Clutter with software rendering. Right…
• no – simple as that. Get a new n9xx or whatever it’s called when it’s out.
• Kanada – nevermind
• maybe – well, we’ll just have to wait and see.

So when Fremantle is out as seamless software upgrade for your n8×0, then you know. Otherwise it’s a definitive “maybe” until Nokia figures out how to break the news.

Nokia kindly sponsored my trip to Maemo Summit in Berlin.

Unexpectedly was asked to give my LinuxTag presentation during the lightning talks. It did not go very well. Note to self: advance preparation helps, at least if you know you're going to present something.

Met PyPy folks (Maciej and Holger). Had a mutual "what on Earth are you doing here?" reaction. Learned a new quirk in the Python language (try: ... finally: does not set sys.exc_info()).

Impressed by one guy (sorry, but I'm really bad with names) giving a presentation from the N810, with OpenOffice.org Impress in a Debian chroot, over a SIS USB2VGA dongle. Apparently he created the whole setup in half an hour before the actual talk.

No free wireless at the hotel. Paid wifi options include 25 EUR for 24 hours or 30 EUR for 30 days. Can I have just the 29 days for the 5 EUR? No.

The WiFi at c-base was fast and almost flawless. Missed half of the talks while checking my email and blogs. I'm addicted to the Internet. :(

Still able to get up before 6 AM. The US trip has done wonders with my daily schedule.

Nokia kindly sponsored my trip to Maemo Summit in Berlin.

Unexpectedly was asked to give my LinuxTag presentation during the lightning talks. It did not go very well. Note to self: advance preparation helps, at least if you know you're going to present something.

Met PyPy folks (Maciej and Holger). Had a mutual "what on Earth are you doing here?" reaction. Learned a new quirk in the Python language (try: ... finally: does not set sys.exc_info()).

Impressed by one guy (sorry, but I'm really bad with names) giving a presentation from the N810, with OpenOffice.org Impress in a Debian chroot, over a SIS USB2VGA dongle. Apparently he created the whole setup in half an hour before the actual talk.

No free wireless at the hotel. Paid wifi options include 25 EUR for 24 hours or 30 EUR for 30 days. Can I have just the 29 days for the 5 EUR? No.

The WiFi at c-base was fast and almost flawless. Missed half of the talks while checking my email and blogs. I'm addicted to the Internet. :(

Still able to get up before 6 AM. The US trip has done wonders with my daily schedule.

In my last post, I was writing about this impressive Chinese character recognition demo using AJAX on the client side and Support Vector Machines (SVM) on the server side, for the recognition process. Well, I don’t know if it’s just a coincidence (this demo was from 2 years ago) but Taku Kudo released last week the backend he’s using as free software. Needless to say that this was awesome news for me! I know the basic principle of SVM but time to learn more about it I guess…

Hi, just a quick upload from the Maemo Summit. Quite many people made it to the session that started the day, actually. Everybody seems happy about the summit and of course about Berlin’s night life… How Maemo Approaches Open Source (PDF)

I have been in Berlin since Monday, setting up everything in the new office to be ready for the party this evening. We built lots of IKEA furniture, we have wireless internet, we have a fancy coffee machine, music, a Wii games room, several crates of beer, and a source of regular pizza. It’s still a little primitive.

The party starts at 8pm. We will probably shut things down at midnight, to avoid annoying the neighbors. But we are in a wonderful neighborhood with an insane amount of cafes and bars, so you’ll have no problem partying on until the morning. I am a little worried that we’ll have 200 people there, instead of the planned 80. Let’s see.

We are at Kastanienallee 88. To get there from the Maemo summit, take the U2 U-Bahn to Eberswald Strasse from Märkisches Museum, or take the S-Bahn from Janowitzbrucke and switch to the U2. Alternatively, take the M1 tram and get off at Schwedter Strasse. See Google Maps.

One recurring theme that I noticed during the Maemo Summit was people apologising for not being developers. A running joke during some of the talks on the first day was people describing themselves as disabled because they were not, themselves, developers.

That's just wrong. Users should not be ashamed for being users!

I'm a developer, but I often want to be just a user. I want software to just work. I wish there was no need for bug trackers. I wish users did not need to know about source packages or patches. I want to hack because I want to, not because I need to.

Until that becomes reality (if ever), I prefer the ability to make use of my developer experience to make things better. Hence my enthusiasm for open source, bug trackers, source packages and patches.

One recurring theme that I noticed during the Maemo Summit was people apologising for not being developers. A running joke during some of the talks on the first day was people describing themselves as disabled because they were not, themselves, developers.

That's just wrong. Users should not be ashamed for being users!

I'm a developer, but I often want to be just a user. I want software to just work. I wish there was no need for bug trackers. I wish users did not need to know about source packages or patches. I want to hack because I want to, not because I need to.

Until that becomes reality (if ever), I prefer the ability to make use of my developer experience to make things better. Hence my enthusiasm for open source, bug trackers, source packages and patches.

Today is second day of Maemo Summit 2008. I had the presentation about running Maemo in QEMU’s N8×0 emulation.

From what people told me after it was made fine. I think that this is good as this was my first presentation in English :)

All materials are of course available to download:

• presentation itself
• patch to get Diablo booting in N810 emulation
• kill debugs patch

---

Copyright © 2008 by Marcin Juszkiewicz
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
The use of content from that feed on other websites may breach copyright.
(66.150.96.121)

Related posts:

1. Nokia N8×0 emulation part II
2. Nokia N800 emulation
3. The curse of Maemo — closed source components

Today is second day of Maemo Summit 2008. I had the presentation about running Maemo in QEMU’s N8×0 emulation.

From what people told me after it was made fine. I think that this is good as this was my first presentation in English :)

All materials are of course available to download:

• presentation itself
• patch to get Diablo booting in N810 emulation
• kill debugs patch

Related posts:

1. Nokia N8×0 emulation part II
2. Nokia N800 emulation
3. Polish locale for OS2008

First proper day of desktop search hackfest behind. We had good progress on the most important areas already and we are making now similar progress on the second day. The biggest one was that we agreed on the ontology changes that have been raised with variable solution candidates now for a year. The solution is clean and simple. It is future oriented by allowing proper object relations in the ontology, but still retaining the possibility to be efficient on the cases where you are only interested in a lablel-like property of the relationship rather than the actual object in the relation.

Check out mikkels post on the subject

Today we have also been able to extend the query api to reflect this ontological change. We also agreed to add proper support of nested queries that truly makes the search api powerful. Biggest issues remaining currently are in the area of live queries. Here is a very good example of a real world ;) use case. By the way, using Gobby (gnome application) makes document collaboration astonishingly easy.

<!--
Maybe we could try to draft a spec as well? Maybe just some notes?
Because it's still not really clear what everyone up to because everyone is up to slightly different things.
-->

<!--
  Match all documents with keyword "biology" which author comes from the
  same country as any person with name Jim.
-->
<query content="xesam:Document" hitFields="xesam:title, xesam:author/xesam:givenName">

  <and>
    
    <equals>
      <field name="xesam:keyword"/>
      <string>biology</string>
    </equals>
    
    <equals>
      <field name="xesam:author/xesam:country"/>
      <field name="xesam:author/xesam:birthdate"/>
      <query content="xesam:Person" hitFields="xesam:country, xesam:birthdate">
        <and>
          <equals>
            <field name="xesam:givenName"/>
            <string>Kim</string>
          </equals>
          <equals>
            <field name="xesam:gender"/>
            <string>male</string>
          </equals>
          <greaterThan>
            <field name="xesam:birthdate"/>
            <date>1979-12-24</date>
          </greaterThan>
        </and>
      </query>
    </equals>
  
  </and>

</query>

More photos were posted to the flikr feed mentioned in my last post, but tagging, video, and articles will have to wait. The plane from Berlin to Heathrow was delayed and I missed my connection. The options were to take a three leg flight with long layovers or to take my same flight tomorrow.

What is fun in London on a Sunday night?

So as I sit by the river in Berlin, sipping a cappuccino, I can't help but reflect over the last 5 days.

I arrived in Berlin in time for OSiM where I pretty much manned the Nokia booth constantly for the two days. I got to meet lots of new and old faces alike and the traffic to the booth was constant. People as diverse as students from a UK university to key people in multi-national companies were asking questions and showing a genuine interest in what the Maemo platform has to offer, now, and in the future.

On Thursday a well attended Maemo dev session was held. The new technologies that will be used in Fremantle were discussed (the video will be online soon) and it seemed to generate quite a bit excitement, especially when Nokia committed to opening up former closed sourced components.

Then on Friday it was time for the Summit.

read more

It seems that it was yesterday when we started this company, and look at us now (not all Igalians are in the photo, unfortunately) …

These years have been an amazing experience to us. We’ve tried to do our best in our work and I honestly think that the results haven’t been bad, but I’m sure that the best is yet to come. Thanks to everyone who supported us during all this time.

On another note, we’ve just arrived from Berlin. The city is lovely and while OSiM was good, I have to say that Maemo Summit was really great (look how happy we are in the photo, courtesy of Daniel Gentleman).

Congratulations to all the people that made it possible, including of course the c-base crew for maintaining such an unique place. I’m looking forward to repeating the experience next year. I’ll try to blog a bit about it soon. But now I need to rest !

The Summit ended yesterday, We are waiting a couple of minutes to get the taxi to the airport. Tired but incredible satisfied. These days were the perfect opportunity to get to know a lot of people that I only knew through the web, and man… having a face on the nickname really improves the communication [...]

Ian and I have been working on a new release of our LCARS packages, featuring a number of bug fixes as well as a new theme called “Okuda”:

If all goes well, we should be ready to release this within the next 48 hours. All four of our themes now include icon templates, which we’re slicing with hildon-theme-slicer (the same way that the main theme template is processed). This is what the icon template for the Okuda theme looks like:

Anyone else wishing to create a hildon-theme-tools (and ThemeMaker) compatible layout definition might find this Python script helpful:

#!/usr/bin/python2.5
"""Generate a hildon-theme-tools layout from variously sized images.
Edit script to specify desired margin, width, and origin (dx,dy).
usage: hildon-theme-layout-grid-generator.py `find icons|sort|grep png`
"""

__author__ = "Leif Ryge <leif @synthesize.us>"
__license__ = "no rights reserved / public domain"

from sys import argv
from PIL import Image

margin, width, dx,dy = 10, 600, 0,0 # margin, output width, starting coords
sizes = {}

for f in argv[1:]: sizes.setdefault(Image.open(f).size,[]).append(f)

print "[Main]\nTemplateWidth=%s\nTemplateHeight=%s\n\n[Elements]" % (width, \
    sum((h+margin)*(len(sizes[w,h])/(width/(w+margin))+1) for w,h in sizes) )

for w,h in sorted(sizes):
    column = width / (w+margin)
    row = 1 + len(sizes[w,h]) / column
    print "# %s images are %sx%s (%sx%s grid)" % (len(sizes[w,h]),w,h,column,row)
    for i, f in enumerate(sizes[w,h]):
        print "%s=%s,%s,%s,%s" % (f, dx+(i%column)*(w+margin),
                                     dy+(i/column)*(h+margin),w,h)
    dy = dy+row*(h+margin)

The actual template can then be created from existing images using Nokia’s hildon-theme-regenerator tool.

Maemo Summit is over, but the community has just get stronger. The lighting talks idea was great and we could see some interesting projects. I’ll post during next days about things we have seen and those that have been announced, but some remarkable points for me after these days:

• there are real passionate hackers working in Maemo and not just talking about the Nokia guys but also about the people from third parties
• new device is comming, but, one of the real improvements for Maemo platform will be the set of tools (SDK, docs, help mechanisms,…) that will be released
• The community and the open philosophy behind it could make Maemo the best open environment for mobile world, but it could also be the major challenge for Nokia to achieve the success they are expecting with these devices
• Many demos about how to run a complete Debian based distribution in actual hardware, but hey guys, do you expect OpenOffice.org to be usable in your device? But it could be useful…
• One last thing for developers, you will be able to do nice things with 3D animations, but don’t use it for the gallery but for user experience improvement

Finally I was able to announce my pet project, stlc45xx. It’s an Open Source WLAN driver for Nokia N800/N810. Read the announcement for more information and the web page for the details.

I have made available the stlc45xx presentation from Maemo Summit 2008. The talk went ok, I hope. I tried to be quick so that we would have time for discussion. And we did have good discussion.

Lesson learned: don’t write too many slides. Better to have a proper discussion than just reading the slides.

The gathering of everybody Maemo has ended yesterday. 2 days filled with very interesting or even amazing meetings, talks and gossip. There was a very sharp contrast with the days before that at OSiM. I want to bet that the Maemo community was able to achieve more at the summit than all projects at OSiM together.

I've met a lot of people and it was very good to see the faces behind the email addresses or IRC nicks. We should not forget the benefit of meeting people in real life. Going to a bar or a restaurant together to have a nice dinner and have some German beers even adds more to this of course.

I'm glad that some of our rockstar hackers had a chance to meet the Nokia people involved in their favourite subjects. A lot of the explanations, about why something was decided this way, are better explained in a personal conversation.

Special props for lardman doing a talk on dsp programming in 30 minutes. The amount of information he managed to put in one talk was mind boggling.

As a maemo.org guy, I have had the opportunity to discuss a many plans and this will likely be more than enough work for me for the coming 10 years ;) Ed and Sasha(Wii tennis king!) had some valuable ideas for managing the repositories and reporting problems. I really hope we can implement those as soon as possible.

Next blog post will be about my talks and I will make the slides available there.

See you at a next meeting?

[Edit: Somehow this didn't get posted while I was at Tegel Airport yesterday]

What a beautiful country. The people were very nice and the food was just amazing.

I had always been hearing that GObjects are slow and it's not always a good idea to use/write them but I never saw any evidence to support that. I had this desire to write a test application to get this evidence but felt too lazy to do it in C. I realized a few days ago that I can write such an app very easily in Vala without giving up much on my laziness. :) So here is an app that I wrote last evening after returning from vacation. Here are the results on my laptop:

$ ./test-perf
0.000182 seconds taken in creating 10000 structs.
0.001598 seconds taken in creating 10000 instances (compact).
0.003522 seconds taken in creating 10000 instances.
0.090455 seconds taken in creating 10000 instances (GObject).

The ranking is exactly how I expected it to be but didn't expect such a big difference between them all.

Why should I make my flickr feed for my own photos only? I created a flickr pool open for everyone to join and contribute. Maemo Nokians or Community Council Members: Contact me via Email with your Flickr user name and I'll make you administrators.

Regarding additional content from the Summit: Fate conspires against me. I've made it to Phoenix, but my luggage is still in London.

Private: Finally been able to attend a concert of Vypsaná fixa at a festival. Feeling happy for the rest of the day (not only because of that one band). Watched Prague's local icehockey derby Slavia vs. Sparta (2:1). Could have been more exciting. Security checks like at an airport. Same as the ...

( Español ) ( English ) Built for Diablo on 810 (800 works not tested on 770 2008HE) KDE358 PBv4 Codename ZELDA - DEB (for boot from SD) THIS IS FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE ALREADY BOOTING FROM SD CARDS For those not yet booting from SD, please see Boot from SD installer < thread > NOTE, this works [...]

We just published at ProFUSION news (shameless plug!) that we finished the port and packaging of Enlightenment DR17 on Freescale’s i.MX31 development board. Packages were sent to LTIB mail list and are pending inclusion into official repository.

Hardware is very similar to Nokia N810, but with a smaller screen. Software runs smooth, but it’s not usable out-of-the-box, with dialogs being too big and general hit areas too small (border buttons, etc), that’s why we plan to port Illume soon, as well as Python-EFL so maybe someone can try to run Canola on it

Clone OS to SD Deb!! Boot from SD made EASY!! How to clone your currently running OS on your Internet Tablet to an internal or external SD/MMC card.

The first of many OSiM and Maemo Summit recordings have been put online. This one is of Dr Ari Jaaksi's keynote speech at OSiM World 2008 where he discusses the future of the Maemo Platform.

read more

How to install Window Maker on Nokia 810

Today I read on Trolltech Labs Blogs a great post from Samuel Rødal about how to get translucent widgets on X11 with Qt’s newest snapshot. Then I thought that if people find it cool to have such thing, why not say how to do the same in EFL?

EFL here is just Evas, Ecore and Edje. Evas does support rendering to semi-transparent buffers, including ARGB windows. Ecore and it’s sub-libraries Ecore-X and Ecore-Evas know how to create ARGB windows since a long time, just use ecore_evas_alpha_set(ee, 1) if you have composite manager or ecore_evas_shaped_set(ee, 1) if you don’t (it will be the best you can achieve on low end hardwares). Edje is just used to provide fancy button-like object without trouble, if you like Qt, then try QEdje.

My code is available at http://barbieri-playground.googlecode.com/svn/efl-tests/transp-bg/ and it requires a recent version of Ecore, not because of alpha/translucent support, but because I just added the helper ecore_evas_new(). If you have an older version, try to replace it with ecore_evas_software_x11_new(NULL, 0, 0, 0, 320, 240). Why I did used that function? First because I wanted to blog about it, second because it will make the same effect work elsewhere, like Windows and DirectFB

Here is another photo and a screenshot of our new theme, Okuda:

 

The changelog has details on what else is new. To install or upgrade, just use this .install file. After installing, select a theme and a background and then reboot for everything to be properly reloaded.

The install process is unfortunately rather slow, usually taking between 1 and 3 minutes, due to the numerous cache files which must be updated post-install. Starting with this release, the themes’ postinst scripts now run gtk-update-icon-cache on the icon themes’ directories, and lcars-extras runs it on the hicolor icon theme in postinst and postrm. The Okuda theme includes a font, so it runs fc-cache. And, as before, all of the themes run hildon-theme-cacher (which is the slowest of the three types of cache). I’m not sure why hildon-theme-cacher needs to be run on the device; it seems like it would make more sense (and be quicker for users) to pre-generate those gtkrc cache files as part of the themes’ build process. Oh well.

Enjoy the new themes, and please let us know if you make modified versions! :)

Apparently there’s renewed discussion regarding Nokia’s support for Ogg Vorbis on the next platform. I can only comment on the technical side of things. We will be using the OMAP3 chip, which has an ARM Cortex A8 processor, which has NEON technology. This allows for many optimizations of multimedia software, so audio decoders can run on [...]

Today we released PyQt4 for Maemo. It is port based on Qt4 for Maemo libraries. Instructions on how to install can be found at project's webpage. Hope all you enjoy it!

At the Maemo Summit, I had a talk about the Extras repositories and the plans for the future. The slides can be found on Slideshare: The huge number of external repositories makes it increasingly hard to have a flawless experience for the user when it comes to package selection and installation. The proplems we currently face is:

• Users are unable to easily find packages
• Users experience conflicts between repositories
• Unable to do quality testing on huge amount of repositories
• maemo.nokia.com – Is not able to hand pick packages from external repositories
  

One of the many things announced by Nokia was the creation of maemo.nokia.com, where the best community made applications will be featured. I guess there will be more posts from Nokia on that topic later.

Back to the external repositories problem:
We started to retrieve all source packages from all know repositories found on Gronmayer. These packages are fed to the autobuilder to see if they would build. The status page looks like this:

Our plan to reduce the number of external repositories:

• Build all source packages available in external repositories
• Show status of builds
  
• Try to discover missing sources (a lot of packages have no source available in the repo)
  
• Help developers to fix build problems
• Convince developers to move their packages into Extras
• Convince teams inside Nokia to do the same
  

We hope to get visible results for this effort. Help with this effort would be very appreciated. Please try to convince developers to move their packages into Extras, when they haven't done so yet.

Together with Dave Neary, I did another talk. This one was about the history of the Maemo community and the changes we went through in the last few months. The slides for this talk are also available:

I have lots of stuff spread all over the place.  This is my attempt to make some of it more readily accessible.  ———————————————————————————— FDISK / PARTED  Hate sfdisk?  Me to so here is fdisk and parted DOWNLOAD FDISK HERE Install Instructions Download fdisk.tgz Open xterm on your tablet Become root ( sudo gainroot / sudo su - ) or whatever method is handy cd [...]

...bit late here, but summing up visually what I really learned during the Maemo summit trip.

Watch out, there are bears also in Berlin! Although they seemed a bit more friendly and colorful than the ones living in our forests.







If (when) aliens attack, c-base is the place to go to locate suitable guns. GYR1 is reserved for me!








There are actually beer (ok, "beer") that I can drink!!










Shopping and eating should be handled in public side of Berlin airport, as opposite to Helsinki where most of the shops appear after checking in. Doing this prevents situations where all you eat whole day is bread-based...









Thanks to everybody attending and especially the ones who helped to organize the event!

Maemo Summit

The Maemo summit in Berlin was much better than expected, though mostly for the meetings outside of the talks, where the NDAed people could whisper obscurely to other NDAed people. Many thanks to the summit organizers, to Nokia, and to C-Base.

Nokia announced some big hints about the next version of Maemo, including a major focus on finger and thumb usage rather than a stylus, better CPU and graphics, and the (unspecified) use of the clutter toolkit. For us NDAed people it took extra effort to remember what stuff was now public and what stuff was secret. To ease that problem, and to get valuable feedback, it looks like there will be early SDK releases with ongoing public work in svn, but I will believe that when I see it. I want to believe.

Listeners to Rodrigo Novo’s charming accent could be forgiven for hearing that it would be a tongeable interface rather than a thumbable interface. Maemo 5 will be great, but that’s an exaggeration.

Openismus Party

We hosted a party on the last evening of the Maemo summit, in our beautiful new offices, with Maemo/Nokia sponsoring the drinks and pizza. The numbers of people were just right, and the atmosphere was very positive and friendly. I saw many of my favorite people and met some new favorites too. People seemed to enjoy the place.

I took a few quick shots with my narrow-angle low-light lens, but the results are kind of abstract and fuzzy.

Apparently an upstairs neighbour poured a bucket of water on Philip Van Hoof, possibly annoyed at the noise at 11 o’clock. But I think that’s too early to be plausible, so it must be someone who doesn’t know that Philip is much nicer in person than online. Philip took it with good humor.

During the 100 Days brainstorm, two of the biggest issues discussed were cleaning up the maemo.org content to remove cruft and keep everything high-quality, and redesigning the look and layout of the site to be lightweight, attractive and usable.

The design and layout discussion is ongoing, but we've already seen mockups from Bundyo and fms, and Quim has asked the INdT folks responsible for the new logo to try their hand at a design, too.

Before we tackle design issues, the first step is to start cleaning up existing content. Dave has outlined most of the types of use-cases that the content should cater to. So we need to figure out any additional use-cases, and get down to setting up the site to be usable for all of them.

To help kick off the discussion (and since it worked so well for Bugzilla), we're holding an IRC meeting on Freenode in #maemo-meeting on Saturday this week at 19:00 UTC. Be there!

Moments ago, another Internet Tablet enthusiast said he was "calling me out" for being secret market research for Nokia. His evidence was that the new internet tablet features are directly in line with polls I have posted on TabletBlog.

This is news to me! If I had some sort of secret "in" at Nokia, I'd like to know who it is. Maybe I can talk them into making that North American 3G version of the N82 I've been wanting all this time.

The real secret agent is the community itself. The questions I posted for the polls are taken directly from community discussions InternetTabletTalk forums and other places. The potential replies were the standard deductive answers to those questions. The Nokia announcement means that they, too, are listening to the community desires.

I have to admit: this move by Nokia shows a big brass pair that we haven't seen in the Internet Tablet line so far. The N800 hardware improvements were a surprise and the developers knew about them at the same time the users did. The N810 confirmed a keyboard and GPS when (but not before) it was announced. This time, however, the developers were the first to know about the hardware improvements.

This is not ony for the benefit of the developers. Someone else at the Maemo summit (please take credit for it - I forgot who said it) mentioned that this was because the Internet Tablets now have competitors that were not there before. The onslaught of MIDs and netbooks are competing to be a portable, non-phone cloud computing/communications device in the $400 to $650 range. I assume the fourth Nokia Internet Tablet will fall in that price. They had to announce improvements now to keep people from hopping on the netbook and MID bandwagon.

What happens now? We wait.

Why do we need thumbnailing to be a service?

For user interface applications it makes relatively few sense to run the task of creating a thumbnail in the same context as the mainloop that draws the user interface. On the other hand if each desktop application starts creating either processes or worker threads that will be armed with thumbnailing code, then we will have a lot of threads and processes all running the same code;

Most applications link with a user interface toolkit that will happily deal with the vast majority of pixbuf shaped formats. That doesn’t mean that these toolkits will equally enjoy dealing with PDF, Office and video formats. There’s a lot of code involved here and we should try to avoid requiring everybody to load these complex pieces of code into their processes. I can give a few purely technical reasons like not heaving to map-in code that is not relevant for the application, reducing VmSize (although, admittedly, only things like VmRSS are really important). There are also a few political reasons, like patented formats. In the end I’ll just say it the way it is: it’s a bad architecture;

Application developers are really not very interested in developing LIFO queues and worker threads or processes that will handle the task of creating thumbnails;

Finally, application developers are asking for this (for example F-Spot). Creating thumbnails is not at all an exclusive task for the filemanager.

My proposal

Based on those conclusions I decided to write a DBus specification. I also reimplemented Maemo’s Hildon Thumbnail to be conform this specification. This work has been merged with the TRUNK of the project and will be used on Maemo’s Fremantle release.

While rewriting Hildon Thumbnail I decided to make sure that the software compiles and runs on any normal desktop. This way the software can serve as a proof of concept and working prototype for the DBus specification. Special care was taken to make sure it feels as desktop neutral as possible.

I opened a bug to officially request a freedesktop.org project for this specification. I hope this organization will offer a platform for further development of this DBus specification. Hildon Thumbnailer can serve as a prototype and will be adapted whenever the specification improves.

To follow on from various discussions and the unfortunately short BOF we had on this subject in Berlin, Ryan Abel (who couldn’t make it to the summit) suggested holding an informal IRC meeting to talk about the next steps in the maemo.org revamp.

The IRC meeting will be at 19:00 UTC on Saturday the 27th of September, on the #maemo-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net.

After the Summit, I believe that the basic elements of the changes we want to make are now well understood. Our dual goal is to reorganise existing information to provide the most relevant information to people who are coming to the site from outside the community, while catering to the different needs of people who are long-time members of the community. We’re going to do this by reorganising existing content where possible, rather than attempt to completely redesign the site.

Part 1 of the Maemo developer session that was held as OSiM World can now be found online.

In this talk, Nokia discuss the future of the Maemo platform. Its 57 minutes long but its well worth watching. Part 2 will follow tomorrow.

I will also be releasing the high definition versions of all the talks (once they have been transcoded) via bittorrent so if you want to watch in lovely high-def, you will have to wait a while.

As of today, Openismus welcomes Daniel Borgmann, of Clearlooks and UbuntuLooks theme/theme-engine fame. But his office in Berlin must remain empty for at least three months because we are sending him north to Helsinki. He’ll experience the dark frozen winter, which is probably quite interesting when you know you will come home eventually.

Daniel will be working on theming for the new Maemo platform. We brought him to the Maemo summit in Berlin at the weekend and I hope that was a positive introduction to Maemo.

At the end of Episode 816 of Buzz Out Loud from CNET, the Buzz Brigade responded to a voicemail that took issue with the massive mistakes on the T-Mobile G1 "Android" phone. The caller mentioned that the G1 actually makes calls so succeeds in the primary function of a phone. Tom Merritt asks "Is a phone really the base function of a phone?" and they mentioned a study that Californians now text more than they talk. After a bit of conversation along those lines, Merritt went on to say:

"Look at the Nokia N810. It doesn't even have a phone and it's the best phone ever!"

Hear it here. Start at 32:15 minutes in.

They still haven't mentioned anything about last week's announced platform advancements. They don't know how cool the Nokia Internet Tablet non-phone-phone-like-phones are going to be.

When the Nokia 770 was released, it had a US $359 MSRP.
The Nokia N800 slipped out at US $399 and added more memory, a faster CPU, a webcam, dual card slots, stereo speakers, and an FM radio.
The Nokia N810 released at US $479 and included a GPS, sliding keyboard, 2GB on-board memory (at the cost of one of the card slots) and a sunlight readable display. A car kit was boxed in with it as well.

We know that next-generation maemo handhelds will have HSPA data, a faster CPU, and a higher quality camera. What will that do to the cost of the device? Since the 770 launch, laptop prices have hit record lows and this new netbook class device runs between $300 and $600. There are three challenges that must be overcome:

1. Consumers need to be convinced that they want a device with these features
2. Once that is done, they need to be convinced that THIS device is the right one
3. Finally, they need to be offered a device that fits the right cost for these features

They could, of course, go a wholly different direction on it. Like other "Nseries" devices, they could make the "sun shine from the battery hatch" on it (so to speak) and spare no expense in features. This would naturally come at a premium cost to consumers. With a fast CPU, lots of memory and storage, a multi-megapixel camera with video, a GPS, a keyboard, and an HSPA modem, this thing could easily reach past US $800. A mid-range laptop can be purchased for that amount.

For me: I'd pay $500 for the features I mentioned above - but would have a HARD time justifying more than that when the price point puts it in competition with full laptops.

The main maemo.org pages are finally on the new hardware.

( Español ) ( English ) This seems to be a common question, so I thought I would try to show some of its features. The swf files did not come out great, but they let you see it, although a little choppy. Click on each picture below to see the demo’s!! KDE Menu KDE Printing KDE USB mode [...]

My last blog post managed to attract the attention of some of our beloved GNOME developers, especially the ones working on/with embedded systems. That made me realize that I am not (at least completely) on crack and decided to file a nice big bug for addition of something similar to GstMiniObject to core gobject library. Lets see what happens next. :)

Maemo summit 2008 was great success, good "hacker spirit" conference in plce that exactly fits to this, c-base in Berlin. Karoliina made exellent video composition about maemo spirit 2008.

If you like to see video in better quality, check following Vimeo link Maemo Summit 2008 from Karoliina Salminen on Vimeo.

I think that Nokia announced there two most wanted new features to next generation maemo Fremantle, the Cellular HSPA support and OpenGL-ES 2.0 support.

For animated GUI Fremantle will have Clutter toolkit, http://www.clutter-project.org .
Clutter may be best mobile optimized graphics animation toolkit at the moment. Clutter has been designed from beginning to work in mobile devices without need for fast floating point and utilize OpenGL-ES . You can find many nice video examples about clutter from project web site. Clutter is Glib based but it has bindings to many languages including Python, C++ and Vala.

The clutter is not either user interface toolkit or just drawing canvas. Clutter itself does not provide any widgets for UI construction but it has small widget library called Tidy (which is not fully featured toolkit, but rather an example implementation about how to make your own toolkit based on Clutter). Clutter differs from ordinary drawing canvas that it is based on dynamically behaving objects, stage and actors. Actors are display objects that are shown in stage. Actors can be transformed, moved, rotated, scaled or opacity changed. All actor transformations can be controlled by dynamic timelines, paths and they can react to events. For example actor can move via predefined path with speed profile when it receives mouse click event. Actors can contain texture, as example image or even a gstreamer video as a texture. Using these features, it is relativelly easy to make really cool looking animated GUI. 

There was also announced that we will have Qt port for Fremantle in SDK beta release in May-June 2008. Our intention is to have Qt 4.5 version ported for it. Qt graphicsview provides lot of similar functionality than Clutter. Graphicswiew has similar objects, QGraphicScene and QGraphicsItem and QGraphicsItemAnimation and QTimeline for dynamic animation.  Qt software is doing a lot of optimization for Qt 4.5, let's see how it performs in Fremantle. You can read some related stories from

http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/09/22/sorry-guys/
and http://akademy.kde.org/conference/slides/aKademy2008-HowGraphicsViewWorks.odp

I had a presentation at Maemo Summit about maemo heldon Qt port Qt-Hildon-MaemoSummit08.pdf with Antonio Aloisio and maemo tutorial  "Introduction to maemo hacking". The tutorial material will be here soon.

 

Imagine meeting a distant family member — one whom you may have known something about, but never actually had the chance to meet. The feeling must be extraordinary: seeing a stark resemblance (if not with you, with someone else in your family), sharing similar likes and dislikes (maybe even common paths taken or avoided throughout life), reminiscing about completely disconnected times, but having an odd sense that the two of you are not as different as you might have expected… Now, imagine doing this with almost three hundred people.

Next week Ulisses, Luis Felipe and I will be at “Semana da Mobilidade” (Mobility Week), to be held at USP São Carlos, Brazil.

This is a great thing because we’ll be able to talk about Maemo and Python to undergrad students and try to show there is life (and paid jobs/work) beyond Windows and Java, .Net and Delphi. We already did a talk similar to that for UNICAMP students (although it was an informal talk) and attendees liked it.

I’ll present both a talk and a training. I plan to show how GNU/Linux development happens on desktop, how it needs to be changed for manual cross-compiling and how Maemo (mostly scratchbox) helps with that, then cover other changes, like Hildon-ization and hints on how to change user interface to make it usable for high-dpi but small screens, then say how Python can cut to the chase and avoid most of these troubles. This is a talk, so nothing will be in-depth. As for the training, I plan to go step-by-step scratchbox on the first day, cross compiling and port on the second and Python development on the third (4hours/day). Any ideas or suggestions?

Ulisses will discuss more generally life outside Windows-Java environment, trying to get students willing to work with GNU/Linux and open source in general. I’m not sure about other countries, but here in Brazil lots of students completely reject learning these Free/Open Source technologies because they think there is no opportunity to get paid to do such thing, so they focus on proprietary world, mostly on Windows and Java or .Net.

Luis will run the “Python for s60″ training, a hands-on training, covering the basics, how to send and run scripts on the phone, then go through some API to demo capabilities, then some real development.

Last but not least, this mark the start of a great partnership between INdT and ProFUSION.

It's been a while since my last blog entry... I haven't done much work on modest lately, but it is in safe hands. I did start a new little hobby project though; it's called mu, and it's a collection of command line tools to index / search e-mails stored in Maildirs. It doesn't run on N8x0 (yet), but I guess it wouldn't be very hard to port it. Of course, this kind of software has been written before - but for a hobby project, that does not really matter. It's all about trying things out.

I am taking notes about the things I learn as I go along... there's a lot of optimization stuff to discuss but unfortunately, it's too much to fit into this blog entry... will write about that later. I am off to Greece now -- to corrupt the youth of Athens. I hope I can understand the people; I taught myself a little bit, but rumours have it that the language has changed quite a bit in the last 2500 years...

And not to forget: happy birthday, GNU. 25 years... I may not always agree with RMS, but he deserves the greatest respect for his accomplishments. A George Bernard Shaw quote comes to mind:

"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.".

So finally I get few minutes to write about Maemo Summit 08. Hopefully (if the crawler hits my blog) this should be my first post aggregated with planet.maemo.org. So hello maemons. At the beginning I wasn't so sure that I would have benefited by going to the summit and I was a bit sceptical about it. Well after that (and after one week passed to recover from it) I have to say: it was great!First

A Quick Look at maemo Bugzilla
2008-09-22 through 2008-09-28

During the weekend I tested briefly QEdje 0.3.0, here are my thoughts:

• QZion canvas which is used for graphics rendering in QEdje has two implementations: QPainter based and QGraphicsView based, former being currently faster in embedded environments lacking FPU power. QZion API is still very light, containing basic canvas objects (rectangle, image, text) with under 2kLOC / implementation.
• QEdje is the real beef, containing parser for Edje theme files. What I like about Edje format is that it's not based on XML and it still gets compiled into binary mode when deploying, which should minimize the theming performance hit. I tested now only with provided samples, have to check how QEdje handles more complicated Edje themes.
• Thinking why Edje, Evas, E17 etc. haven't become more popular, is the reason technical, just (lack of) community or what?
• My ideas for QEdje developers would be to concentrate more on QGraphicsView backend as it offers more features and should get nice boost with performance improvements in Qt 4.5. Think if inheriting QGraphicsWidgets as QZion objects would offer more than current QGraphicsItems, like layouts and native QWidgets with QGraphicsProxyWidget. IMO Clutter API is currently a good compromize between features and simplicity, so analyze it and copy all suitable ideas into QZion ;-)

I have to study some more Edje format and whether QZion is already providing "enough" features for it, please comment if I have missed something obvious here.

Part 2 of the two part series recorded at the OSiM conference in Berlin is now online. Dave Neary starts by giving a history of Maemo and continues on talking about the community and its way forward. Niels Breet highlights some of the issues the Maemo website is facing and proposes future changes.

This time the video is in 720p (click the full screen button). I'm still experimenting with video hosting sites; this one is on blip.tv. It would of been uploaded to vimeo but it constantly failed on upload for some reason. Maybe next time.

Install > K3B DEB < 24 mb installed Then you need to enable USB Host mode. Click on the USB icon on the taskbar to enable Host mode (click on picture to see demo) Now that its installed and Host mode is enabled, you need to connect your cdrom/dvd burner. In order to do this [...]

Many thanks to Olivier Crête, we now have a nice small library for firing holes through firewalls using a part of UPnP IGD API. This library also provides a convenient way to do all that without having to use a gmainloop. While Olivier will most probably use it in his farsight2, I am sure this will be useful for other projects (I did not say Ekiga :)) as well.