One of the things that really bothered me about the earlier Tablets, such as the N800 and N810 was the lack of ability to communicate with my PC. Sure, I can connect the device via USB and have it show up as a mass storage device, but there’s no ability to synchronize photos, videos, or music, nor is there an ability to store a backup of my device’s memory on my computer.

Luckily, there’s a group of Maemo enthusiasts who feel the same way, and have started work on a new ‘Tablet-Suite’ application, currently for Linux-powered computers, that aims to do some of these things.

The current version of Tablet-Suite is quite unstable, but serves as a way to manage device backups on your PC. You can initiate a backup, and then store the resulting file safely on your computer, as well as make other copies and restore the backup.

It’s quite limited, obviously, but the team has high hopes for this much-needed application. They’re taking suggestions/requests for v0.2 of Tablet-Suite, so if you’ve got something you’d like to see this application do, you definitely want to swing over and chime in. You can also check it out at the Maemo Garage.

Related Posts

• Qt Comes To Maemo
• Maemo Summit 2009 Is A Wrap
• Maemo Summit 2009 Kicks Off Today!
• Hermes Syncs Your N900 Contacts With Twitter And Facebook
• How Would You Use The N900 In Portrait Mode?

As some of you may know, our friend lcuk (elsie UK) has recently lost his job. He is actively seeking employment, but has ended up a little short, and will not be able to attend the Maemo Summit 2009. lcuk is the creator of Liqbase and an active supporter of the Maemo community. There is [...]

Ricky at Maemo-Guru brings news of Hermes, a piece of software which, by pulling information from Twitter and Facebook, allows you to automatically add photos to your contacts. The software works by matching the names between the N900's contact list and your friends list on Facebook and Twitter. The software has been developed by Andrew Flegg, known as jaffa to the maemo.org community.

Need more info on the Nokia N900? The English and Spanish Nokia N900 User Guide (in PDF) is now up at Nokia USA. It’s about 111 pages.

Direct link to the Nokia N900 User Guide (in PDF).
Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

The user guide for the N900, in English and Spanish, is now available on the Nokia USA website. The guide offers a basic introduction to the operation of the hardware and software, and runs through the key functionality of the device. It's a good way of getting a handle of the capabilities of the device. The N900 should go on sale in the second half of October, although this will vary by geographic market.

Coming hard on the heels of the news that our mug shots have thankfully been removed from the front cover of the 'Professional Ubuntu Mobile Development' book to be replaced with a Formula 1 racing car (WTF!) comes the news that the Ubuntu MID distribution will have a community release codenamed Ubuntu Liquid Remix during the Lucid Lynx cycle.

We are still fleshing out the goals and the work plan for the Liquid Remix and I expect that this will gain more traction at the Ubuntu Developer Summit this November. We have had a discussion with the Mer guys about maybe using the Open Build System for packaging although we will continue to use the Ubuntu infrastructure and seeds to actually germinate our image.

It seems that there is a great opportunity for collaboration and synergy between Mer and Liquid Remix so I am looking forward to the next 6 months of working together.

Konttori, posting on the Thoughts (Nokia Internet Tablet Development) Blog, shared a video (embedded below) showing a SNES emulator (DrNokSnes) running on the Nokia N900. The video also includes a demo of controlling the SNES via Nintendo Wiimote controller (over Bluetooth) and using the TV-Out functionality to play on a big screen. It's a nice example of the flexibility and power sitting underneath the first Maemo 5 device.

About a month ago, I left Collabora in order to bring new, different challenges in my life.  Today, I am announcing publicly that I have founded Novopia Solutions, a new player in free software.  Novopia’s long term goal will be to bring free and open source solutions to market that have yet to be penetrated by free software solutions.

While this is a field where there are plenty of FOSS solutions, the primary focus in the upcoming weeks will be on improving the geolocation solutions in GNOME.  Commercial support for libchamplain is of course on the list.

More to be announced later.

MaemoNews.com has published an interesting interview with the developer of OM Weather. OM Weather is a weather forecast application and is one of the most popular Maemo applications (150,000+ downloads and counting). The application supports widget / applet mode, which means it can be shown on the desktop. It is also one of the applications featured in Maemo Select.

After Tokamak III I was not able to work that much on netbook stuff because we’re reaching the 4.6 release and we have a lot of work to be done on anchor layouts. We’re fixing the last bugs (that we know of course ) so we can provide a really nice new layout for everybody using Qt. By the release of 4.6, Qt will be one step closer to make it easier to create rich UIs.

This week, Marco showed you how fast the netbook stuff is going on, it’s really awesome. It’s also very good to see how the netbook shell benefits from all the work being done on libplasma as well, like the integration with remote widgets. I had some nice ideas regarding integration with open Desktop stuff, let’s see if I can work on it during the weekend. I’m really looking forward the “social aspect” of KDE and how we can improve this. However, no spoilers before I get something done .

By the end of the month (22-24 of October) I’ll give a talk on Latinoware about netbooks. I’ll use a lot of stuff from my GCDS talk but now I’ll have a lot of stuff to show off too, so I must change some bits of the presentation. On the other hand I think that this one will be much fancier and nicer to watch than the GCDS one that was more “theoretical” because all the work was at the very beginning. To show the power of remote widgets I’m planning to show a remote widget running on my netbook and also on a N900! This is not hard to achieve but I must have some time to put my hands on it.

This is the first time that I blog through an application instead of doing through the web editor. Blogilo just arrived on svn (at least for me ) and I decided to give it a try. It’s really nice! It has all the features that the web editor gave to me like a visual editor, HTML editor and even a post preview. It supports categories (couldn’t find support for tags yet the tag support is just below it hehe) and also something like an auto configure based on the URL of your blog…really nice! I’m just missing it as a plugin for Kontact that is the place where I keep all my PIM stuff. Ah, talking about PIM I learned some nice stuff from Akonadi that I didn’t know with the series of blog posts on planet KDE about it.

Ah, and before I forget: congrats to Amarok team for the release this week! I’m a “trunk user” but I know how good and stable the release is!

It was very nice that many people were insterested in the Tablet-Suite application. As I told in the previous post, we are already working in a synchronization tool for maemo called “Synchro”. I decided to show the designed UI here so people could become interested as well. Some alpha version is intended to be released still this year. Comments, suggestions and feature requests are really welcome.

Synchro

The features planned here are:

• Manage PC media (playlists, musics, images and videos)
• Manage device media
• Synchronize media
• Play PC and device media
• Temporary list for instant playback
• Several views

Garage project and mailing lists have been created:

• https://garage.maemo.org/projects/synchro
• synchro-devel@garage.maemo.org

After I read the post of Urho about Wiimote+DrNokSnes+TVout I couldn't help trying it out right away (except the Wiimote thing that I don't have). That was a funny jump back in time to when I was young and passed the evenings at a friend's apartment trying to finish the (amazing at that time) Super Mario bros on the NES (I didn't have a NES myself).Besides that I tried out for the first time in

It’s the beginning of October and one year ago I started working fulltime as maemo.org Bugmaster (after I had started together with Karsten in May 2008).Where are we and what are the plans? Stats On 29 Sep 2008 there were 1076 open tickets (including Website). Now there are 658 open tickets (including Websites, excluding Extras). That of [...]

I always forget to announce the micro releases here. Here it is now:

Brief summary of changes since 0.4.1:

- Ability to specify verbosity of console messages by a number between 0 to 5.
- Be able to survive unavailability of D-Bus session bus. This should make it easier to setup Rygel on headless NAS machines.
- MediaExport:
 - Provide duration and date of media.
 - Improved guessing for type (UPnP class) of media.
 - Re-harvest metadata when a file/directory is modified.
 - Speed-up browsing (twice as before).
- rygel-preferences:
 - Fix enabling/disabling of widgets.
 - Copy the desktop file from correct location.
- Mediathek and GstLaunch disabled by default in the user configuration.
- Add GstLaunch to maemo configuration (disabled by default though).
- Put dbus-glib-1 to the list of vala API dependencies.
- Fix seek headers.
- Be more verbose at the end of configure.

Bugs fixed in this release:

596500 - Mpeg TS video files are mistaken for audio files
596213 - Wrong state for checkboxes
596327 - Enables some weird plugins by default
596330 - Missing some metadata

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg 

Download source tarball from here

No, that’s not a typo– I don’t mean packaging.  I’m getting ready for the Maemo Summit 2009 in Amsterdam and thought I’d share some experiences and ideas for fellow travelers.

We have been talking about browser integration for all RSS-based apps before, and the initial standalone adaption of Canola's feedhandler (in canola-tuning) was nice, but it was written in Python and therefore startup time was not as fast as it could get (startup time is important for the feed handler, which usually only runs for some seconds, and to the user does not look as if it is a separate application, but rather a "feature" of the browser).

If you need the performance of applications written in C combined with the comfort of higher-level languages, use Vala :) That's what I have done, and feedparser 2.0 is the feedparser re-implemented in Vala.

Done so far: Reported a Vala D-Bus bug (thanks to Jürg Billeter for fixing this very quickly), registered a garage project, committed some source code, created a package (in Extras-Devel) and created a product page on Maemo.org Downloads.

As you can see, the UI still needs much love, but at least the infrastructure and feed handling is there for Diablo and Fremantle already, and some initial links to applications are there, too (shameless plug for gPodder, which has arrived in Fremantle Extras this week - yay!).

Plans for the next release:

• Add a mechanism to register and display other RSS-based apps (the current list is hardcoded)
• Contact authors of RSS readers and ask them to add feedhandler support to their apps
• Add more web-based services (tell me the ones you would like to see)
• Wait for Fremantle Widgets support in Vala (Philipp Zabel is working on this)
• Fremantleize and Diabloize the UI
• Integration with other browsers (Tear?)

Feel free to try out the "Feed Handler" from Extras-Devel and send some feedback.

So, Maemo Summit 2009 is coming up - and many people who are contributing to Mer are going to this event.

In my last post I asked for a wish list of features for the Ogg Support. I started the integration work based on those comments and now the 1.0.5 version for n900 has been promoted to Fremantle Extras repository.

The support for Vorbis audio is good: tags work, File Manager shows them too and knows how to launch Vorbis files in Media Player, etc. Flacs are missing tags but no magic is needed for that, just a new GStreamer element. Theora support is also included. I haven’t tested it much but at least the basic features seem to work.

I’ll tell more about the details at the Maemo Summit.

To be a Rubens, is to make paintings

Code177 has set up a web site for wallpapers for the Nokia N900. The wallpapers, which can be used as background images on the N900's desktop, are 800x480 pixels in resolution. Some of the wallpapers are available in sets, containing four images, catering for the multiple desktops, which are part of the N900's 'panorama desktop' feature.

So codeswarm.rb has now been renamed to ripary and got some project hosting.

In order to celebrate I created a visualization of linux 2.6.31 development.

Here it is:

Next step is to figure out a way to render videos that don’t look so crappy on YouTube

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-09-28 through 2009-10-04

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-09-28 through 2009-10-04

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-09-28 through 2009-10-04

One of the most amazing, yet largely untapped avenues in maemo.org is Brainstorm. That is the place to dream up ideas, propose solutions, and shape the future of Maemo applications. Recently, Community Member zerojay, dreamed up a dataplan monitor widget for Maemo 5. Soon after, a Brainstorm idea was filed, and work began. With fiferboy (of Personal Menu and Personal Launcher fame) doing coding, and joshua.maverick helping with graphic design, it was a truly Canadian solution. The result is an awesome dataplan monitor widget for Maemo 5 - see for yourself:


It is fitting that a dataplan widget for Maemo 5 is brought to our community by a bunch of Canadians - have you looked at the price of our data plans recently! Congrats guys! I am looking forward to using this when I get a Maemo 5 device. When will that be? Hopefully soon.

For those that don’t follow regularly the maemo.org forums, here are some information relevant to Maemo Summit speakers.

• You are encouraged to use the Maemo Summit 2009 template for presentations, available as odp and ppt.
• The best format for the presentations is 16×9 since this is the proportion of the screens in use. Presentations with 3×4 format might get black strips on the sides or get slightly squeezed.
• There are Windows laptops with Internet connection for speakers in the N900, N810 and N800 rooms. They are equipped with OpenOffice.org, MS Office, Adobe Acrobat and Firefox.
• Bring your presentation to your session room in a USB stick around 9:30, 13:30 (Friday) or 14:30 (Saturday). Have copies in our laptop or online just in case.
• You can use your own laptop if you really need to. At your own risk, we won’t change the schedule if you have problems. Definitely not recommended for lightning sessions.
• There will be N900 devices for speakers willing to demo their software. These devices can be connected to the projector with TV-Out.
• The N810 room will have 2 independent projectors. You can use them to have e.g. slides and a device demo in parallel.

Question and more useful information in this discussion thread.

We don’t see many products running an OS based on Linux and GNOME advertised on bus stops around here, but look at this one … :-)

Nokia Conversations has published two new videos, embedded below, which showcase the Maemo browser running on the Nokia N900. The first, a slick promotional video, shows a marketing-type overview of the key features of the browser and demonstrates a number of interface 'tricks', which help improve the user experience of the browser. The second video covers a similar area, but shows the demos running on a real device in real-world usage.

Nokia just released a new walkthrough video of the Nokia N900 browser. Mikko Korpelainen, Senior Product Manager at Nokia and Martin Shüle, Principal Designer of the User Interface team, demo the different features of the browser.

New in this video are the ‘hover and manipulation mode’ that pops-up a contextual menu on flash items (1:55), swiping gesture from the right (edge of the screen) to left to show the browsing history (3:50), selecting text and using copy (Ctrl-C) & paste (Ctrl-V) (4:23), and creating a bookmark to the desktop (5:15).

Full Video:

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

Welcome to All About Maemo (AAM), an independent, online source for news and information about the Maemo platform and Maemo devices, such as Nokia's recently announced N900. Our aim is to inform, educate and entertain, through the provision of unique content, from a team of experienced and knowledgeable writers. We hope to deliver a range of objective content targeted at a wide audience, from consumers to developers and those in the mobile industry.

We're soft launching AAM (in beta if you prefer), ahead of the upcoming Maemo Summit in Amsterdam and the market release of the N900, and we want to hear your feedback. Read on for more details.

The Nokia Conversations blog, Nokia’s official blog, has posted a nice 6-minute video showing off the browser on the Nokia N900, which should hit the market sometime this month. The Nokia N900 uses a new version of the MicroB browser that previous Maemo-powered Tablets have used. This includes a Mozilla-based engine and full Flash support, among other things.

It’s not an earth-shattering video, but it definitely does a great job of highlighting the browser -- which was one thing that I actually hated about previous Internet Tablets. We already know that the new browser has no trouble rendering Maemo-Guru.com. What do you think?

Related Posts

• Nokia N900 Meetups Taking Place Soon
• Qt Comes To Maemo
• Blogging From The Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 Easter Egg -- FM Radio!
• Maemo Summit 2009 Is A Wrap

While most of us have already placed our pre-order for the Nokia N900 (click here if you haven’t), we’re still waiting for those orders to actually ship. In the meantime, Nokia has graciously posted the full user manual for the Nokia N900, so that you can already know how to use this new smartphone before you even get it.

The full manual – all 111 pages of it, is available here in PDF format. There’s also a quite active discussion about the findings within taking place on this thread at Talk.Maemo.org, so you can join in there if you have any questions.

Related Posts

• 10 Awesome Features Of Maemo5
• How To Customize Your N900
• Nokia N900 Meetups Taking Place Soon
• Qt Comes To Maemo
• Blogging From The Nokia N900

maemo.gitorious.org just went live!

maemo.gitorious.org will be the place where Maemo devices develops the Maemo platform in the open.

Naturally the upstream projects that are used by Maemo Devices will be developed at the upstream sources, while everything else Maemo Devices  develops in the open will move to maemo.gitorious.org as time goes by.

The idea of having a single location is to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for and to have a simple way to contribute back.

See you at maemo.gitorious.org !

The Maemo 5 Final SDK has been released containing everything a developer needs to get their software ready for N900 users. Check the Maemo development landing page in Forum Nokia for the SDK download, the release notes and other technical details.

This SDK release delivers the latest, stable Maemo 5 code base, which is a reason good enough for any Maemo developer to install it an leave behind previous versions. But there is more:

• If you are new to this check the modest yet beautiful Discover Maemo 5 SDK wiki page.
• Windows / Mac / Eclipse users: you can start with the VMWare based Maemo Virtual SDK. The new release has the same content than the official Maemo 5 Final SDK. DIRECT LINK
• After clear and continuous developer feedback the SDK offers now the possibility to install Nokia applications needed for proper testing of add-ons, plugins and web services.
• A new Sharing Plug-in API has been released to help you integrate web services for sharing files. Users can install these plug-ins in one click and have new web services just as integrated as the ones that come out of the box.

Also don’t forget the Maemo 5 UI Guidelines published recently, specially the Hildon 2.2 UI Style Guide, the Maemo 5 Desktop Widget UI Guidelines and the document about Redesigning from Maemo 4 to Maemo 5.

You can check the maemo.org Development section for an exhaustive list of Maemo 5 developer resources including the community supported runtimes.

Last but not least: your questions about Qt development and the N900 developer device program will be answered this Friday in the Maemo Summit.

Tagged: Fremantle, GTK+, Hildon, maemo, N900, SDK, UI

Forum Nokia has released the Maemo 5 final SDK. The SDK enables developers to create applications for Nokia devices based on Maemo 5, such as the Nokia N900. New in the final SDK release are the complete UI framework (including multiple desktops and task switching), Nokia applications with related API, new Sharing plugin API, Scatchbox package updates, and open source for hildon-status-menu and librtcom-telepathy-glib.

Didn’t I foretell you there’d be more announcements?  Here’s one: Emerillon.  It is pronounced Ey-may-ree-yon. It is destined to be GNOME’s Map Viewer.  You will quickly recognize its sister apps: Eye of Gnome, Evince and GEdit. After all, they share a lot of design concepts.

Why another map application do you say? Simply because none of them is free AND targeted at the Gnome desktop AND has ease of use in its (visible) goals.  This project should be easy to use for anyone, not only for mapping geeks.

Emerillon is an application designed to be extended.  There is a number of small specialized map applications that were created in the last year, I have hope this one will be the catalyst of the development efforts.  Out of the box, Emerillon comes with 2 plugins: a search and a placemark plugin.  There are numerous plugins ideas : a GPX viewer, GPS integration, Telepathy integration (both to share the app and to display your friends location), a plugin to display the position under the mouse cursor, a plugin to display personal markers and I have two special ideas that I want to keep for myself to implement Other ideas are welcomed too!

Emerillon is a project originally started by Marco Barisione in October 2008.  Due to various reasons, it remained dormant for almost a year, until I decided to take over and push it forward.   Turns out, Marco had laid out very good UI base on which I built upon.

Visit http://www.novopia.com/emerillon/ for more screenshots and details.

Kudos to be given

Emerillon is built of code inspired by other projects and very cool libraries.  Early on, Marco borrowed Evince’s sidebar.  This sidebar is so nice and clean that it should be part of Gtk+! The problem is that this code is GPL but Gtk+ is not.

Another quite common widget in Gnome apps is Epiphany’s spinning throbber.  Again, it is GPL’d and the code has to be copied from apps to apps.

I am not going to kudo libchamplain Lets say I have found API omissions that will need to be addressed for Emerillon to work perfectly. Who needs a “selected” signal after all? Still, libchamplain was quite necessary to build this app.

Emerillon’s plugin system was faster to implement than I expected when I got this idea.  But thanks to Ethos, it was a simpler task.  Ethos is a complete (Gedit/EOG alike) plugin architecture in a library.  It even provides UI widgets to manage the plugins.

Emerillon’s search plugin uses librest to fetch its data from geonames.org.  Rob Bradford was right: it is now fun again to parse XML.  I mean really.  This library makes fetching web service data an easy task.

Fetch Emerillon from Gnome’s git today and give it a try!

In the early development phase of AAM, we did a number of articles to test the site which have now fallen off the news page but which can still be accessed through our features section. They cover a wide range of topics including an interview with Nokia's Ari Jaaksi, a brief editorial about the evolution of Maemo, speculation about what kind of form factors Maemo devices could take, and a review of the Nokia N810.

Well, it's important if you arrive for the Summit on Thursday and want to meet up for a beer (or, if Copenhagen was anything to go by... an ice-cream) in the evening.

More details here:
  http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2009/Schedule

Meet up at 19:00 (so after early registration closes).

There will be free beer available













if someone offers to buy it ;)

It’s been a while since I wrote my last post but I guess this one will compensate.

Ogg Vorbis is an alternative open source music format that supporters claim has a lower bitrate and superior sound quality than the standard MP3 format. Most of today’s popular desktop music players either directly support Ogg Vorbis or do so through the use of a plugin that is readily available. Unfortunately, by default, the Nokia N900 does not natively support Ogg Vorbis, but Tuomas Kulve is working to change that.

Tuomas recently announced that Ogg Support for the Nokia N900’s Maemo 5 operating system has been added to the ‘Extras’ repository, which will enable the N900 to play Ogg Vorbis music files easily. Currently, v1.0.5 of Ogg Support includes support for tags and correctly connects them to the built-in music player, but there are still other features that Tuomas wants to add.

You can read more about Ogg Vorbis on Wikipedia, and you can get more info about Ogg Support at Tuomas’ site.

Related Posts

• Nokia N900 Meetups Taking Place Soon
• Qt Comes To Maemo
• Blogging From The Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 Easter Egg – FM Radio!
• Maemo Summit 2009 Is A Wrap

My friend Mohammad made this amazing camera hack on his N900 and I had to try it too - works great for nice effect... It's very simple actually - basically take a piece of dark cardboard, make a small hole in the middle and try to position it in the center of the lens and place the back cover in, which locks it in place. Simple, but effective fun - one of those simple things that makes me smile... Thanks for sharing!

Mohammad in test shot (low light = lots of  noise)

The Amazing Vignette Filter separated

Filter in place..

Anyone else done something like this? I started to ponder 3M magic tape for "haze" effect already...

I have been learning Qt at Openismus for a while, and recently started playing with the Maemo port. The result so far is Qlom, a Glom database viewer:


While Glom is a Gtkmm application, it has a non-UI library component called libglom, which I have used from within Qt to deal with all the Glom document-parsing. It was interesting to find out that Qt uses the Glib main loop, which made everything a lot easier. I had to use Qt built from git in order to get the Maemo theming shown above, and some widgets are still not themed correctly, but hopefully this will improve with future releases against the final SDK.

I will be presenting a talk at the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam on Saturday, at 12:00 in the N800 room. The talk is titled "Maemomm: Maemo with C++ and a Gtkmm flavour", where I will discuss the C++ bindings for Maemo Fremantle, which I have also worked on at Openismus. There will even be some comparisons with Qt…

Forum Nokia are giving hosting a training event in Copenhagen about Maemo and Qt.

The topics are centered around Maemo and Qt, and the target audience is developers interested in those areas. Commercial development will also be a topic in the event.

The registration is free, but needs to be done in advance.

Hi all,

We have had an issue with updating the autobuiler used for the maemo.org repository queues to use the final SDK.

As some libraries have been moved out from the SDK repository, it has taken a while to  figure out how to provide the necessary libraries to the builder in a future-proof way. It looks like we now have a good solution for the issue.

Really sorry for the inconvenience, hope you all understand the situation. This definitely was an “oops” from our side.

Tero

At the MAX 2009 conference Adobe demonstrated a new version of Flash, 10.1, running on the Nokia N900. Flash 10.1 is important because it is the first realisation of the Open Screen Project, which looks to create a consistent runtime environment, across multiple platforms, for creating rich multimedia experiences. Key features of Flash 10.1 include support for HD video and hardware accelerated graphics and video.

GUPnP 0.13.1 is out!

Release log:

Changes since 0.13:

- Use unix context manager if NetworkManager service is not available.
- Fix some minor leaks.

All contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Ross Burton 

Download source tarballs from here

The Maemo 5 UI Team have created a YouTube channel, which they will use to "showcase the interaction design found in Maemo 5". The first video they have uploaded, starring Vilja and Veli (members of the Maemo 5 UI Team), gives a brief introduction to the calendar application on Maemo 5. It demonstrates basic calendar functionality, adding a new calendar entry and a real world example of the potential the benefits of multi tasking.

Tomorrow in the afternoon i flight to Amsterdam for the Maemo Summit 2009. On saturday i’ll talk about Tracker in a shared session with Iridian.  I’ll give big overview about the recently released 0.7 and its role in Harmattan, and he will present our brand new library to use Tracker in QT-based programs: libqttracker.

We have only 25 minutes and too much to explain. If you are curious about Tracker, what can it does (and what not), how to use it in your application, or how you application can get advantage of it, you have 3 regular contributors (Iridian,  Philip , and me) in the conference; feel free to come and talk with us. We are always happy to explain to the world what this triplets, ontologies, RDF mess is all about.

For Maemo 5 applications which managed to reach the Extras repository through the community QA testing queue, maemo.org Downloads now has a home.

The Download catalog automatically imports all information for applications in Fremantle Extras. The only thing you need to add is a nice screenshot. (Or more if you want.)

There are quite some applications in the QA testing queue which are almost ready for promotion to Extras. We should see more entries after the Summit.

If you are coming to the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam, see you there!

Downloads for Maemo 5, as used in the Nokia N900, are now available from maemo.org. The listings are applications that are in the Extras repository and have passed the community QA testing queue. Each download is listed with a short description and screenshot. The applications available include OM Weather (developer interview), gPodder, a Countdown widget, Tuner and Rfk.

Here is a quick video (youtube,or .ogv on murrayc.com) showing the initial port of Glom for Maemo 5 as I navigate through the simple Music Collection example. Remember,  viewing and navigation are just a tiny part of Glom’s functionality. More imporantly, remember that the database designer would have implemented this little system (structure and UI) with no code and no SQL.

I wanted to get this much done so I could talk more confidently about Glom during my presentation at the Maemo Summit on Sunday.

This is also a more extensive test of the maemomm C++ bindings, which David King will do a talk about on Saturday. Maemomm is somewhere between Hildon (C, GTK+, extras) and Harmattan (C++, Qt, extras) in the current sea of programming languages and toolkits.

(Sorry if some planet’s are showing HTML code here instead of the video. I don’t know why. Try the links above instead.)

This is not a complete port, of course. There are some obvious problems. For instance, the + button in the list view should be a button in the main AppMenu. And on the details views:

• The window title should show the table title, just as it does for list views.
• Combo boxes should be HildonPicker buttons.
• The “Songs” frame label has some strange new format. I must investigate if that’s now normal in Maemo 5.
• Hiding the group titles makes the lack of alignment across groups even more obvious.
• I must find out if we can use PannableArea while still allowing the widgets to be edited, instead of using a ScrolledWindow. At the least, we should use a wide scrollbar.
• The + button should go into the AppMenu. There would be one “Add *” button for each related records portal on the layout.
• The AppMenu should also have a Delete button when showing Details.
• The spacing should be fixed now that the Mameo UI guide has been published.

I should do some videos for the regular desktop version of Glom to give people an idea of what it can do.

In a few hours I’ll be flying to Amsterdam in order to attend the Maemo Summit 2009.

I’m also giving a talk about Porting GNOME Applications to Maemo Fremantle where I’ll talk about some common practices and decisions regarding the adaptation to Fremantle of applications that were designed to be used in the GNOME desktop. For these, I’ll use the experience of porting EOG and OCRFeeder to Fremantle.
I hope that it will help developers who are thinking on porting they’re favorite desktop applications.

If you want to discuss matters like “how do I adapt this behavior to Fremantle”, OCR, EOG or OCRFeeder for Maemo, just let me know and I’ll be glad to talk about these topics.

Hope to see you there!

With the Nokia N900 getting closer and closer to being available to consumers, it’s no surprise that Maemo.org is beefing up its offerings, as well. In the past few days, we’ve seen the final release of the full Maemo 5 SDK, which actually includes all of the Nokia applications that will be installed on the N900 when it is released. This is a big deal for application developers who want to get an idea of how their application will run or look on an actual device. The SDK has been moved from Maemo.org to Forum Nokia, so you can pick it up there.

Also, Maemo.org has finally added a Maemo 5 downloads section, showing off those applications that have been added to the Extras repository and passed through the QA tests. As of right now, there are only 9 applications listed, including Ogg Support and OMWeather, though there will no doubt be more coming very soon.

What applications are you looking forward to?

Related Posts

• Ogg Vorbis Support Now Available For Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 Meetups Taking Place Soon
• Qt Comes To Maemo
• Blogging From The Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 Easter Egg – FM Radio!

I'm doing live coverage of the Maemo Summit in collaboration with Reggie, from Maemo Talk, and Mark, from The Nokia Blog. We're using Cover It Live, which is embedded below, and lets you read the latest updates, view pictures, vote in polls and add your own comments and questions. This news story contains the coverage from day one. More in the full story.

I am fortunate enough to be able to attend Maemo Summit 2009 as a sponsored attendee. I am an ordinary community member, like a lot of you out there. As such, I am hoping to share as much as I can with you all via Twitter and my blog.

To see my tweets: http://twitter.com/maemo_minute

For all tweets from Maemo Summit, follow the #maesum hashtag, or look at http://twitter.com/search?q=%23maesum

It is an exciting time for Maemo, and I am excited to be a part of it.

I’m in Amsterdam at Maemo Summit for the next few days. I am teaming up with Rafe from All About Maemo and Reggie from Maemo Talk to provide you live info, photos, and videos. You’ll be able to comment, ask questions, and vote on polls. The first day’s coverage starts Friday October 9th at 09:00 CEST.

You should see the embedded collaborative live content below.

Maemo Summit 2009 – Day 1

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Amsterdam

Dr. Ari Jaaksi opened his keynote of the second Maemo Summit by by noting that he had been working with Maemo “before Maemo was cool.”

When his group’s second Maemo devicce acquired the “n” at the beginning of its name, the n800, indicating it was part of the crown jewel, top of the line Nseries — that was a sign of things to come.

The forthoming n900 is designated the Nseries flagship phone (along with the N97). Whatever feature it has should be the best Nokia offers.

What Ari didn’t have to say,  because it is implicit in tha t designation, is that today Maemo is cool.

I'm just getting ready to fly away to Boston for the Gnome Summit. I'm looking forward to meeting people and seeing MIT, as well as getting the chance to spend more than a few hours in Boston (unlike every other time I've been there).

Inevitably, I haven't been organised enough to propose a Telepathy- or Empathy-related session, but Rob McQueen, Sjoerd Simons, Andres Salomon, Dafydd Harries, Shaun McCance (when he's not busy running a pair of interesting-sounding documentation sessions!) and myself will be around if people are interested; maybe something will coalesce. If window manager theming is more your kind of bag, Thomas Thurman's running a session on CSS in Metacity/Mutter. It'd be great to talk about integrating IM with the Gnome Shell; Moblin's people panel and many parts of Maemo make interesting use of Telepathy, and it'd be nice to have something similar on the desktop.

Speaking of Maemo, going to Boston means I'm not at the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam, which is a real shame: I'd love to meet more of the Maemo community, hear what people have up their sleeves for the N900, and discuss how Telepathy could help. Happily, Marco Barisione's giving a talk about how Telepathy's used on Maemo, and how you can use it too; relatedly, Travis Reitter and Mathias Hasselmann will speak about the address book, one of the heaviest users of Telepathy. Also, Marc Ordinas i Llopis is hosting a BoF on extending the (frankly stunning) Hildon desktop, and Ian Monroe is giving a talk with Sergiy Dubovik about preparing Qt4 applications for Fremantle and Harmattan. I hear Philippe Kalaf is also floating around somewhere. ☺

See you in (the wrong) Cambridge!

You can follow what’s going on at Day 1 of the Maemo Summit 2009:
Maemo Summit 2009 – Day 1

I’m just getting ready to fly away to Boston for the Gnome Summit. I’m looking forward to meeting people and seeing MIT, as well as getting the chance to spend more than a few hours in Boston (unlike every other time I’ve been there).

Inevitably, I haven’t been organised enough to propose a Telepathy- or Empathy-related session, but Rob McQueen, Sjoerd Simons, Andres Salomon, Dafydd Harries, Shaun McCance (when he’s not busy running a pair of interesting-sounding documentation sessions!) and myself will be around if people are interested; maybe something will coalesce. If window manager theming is more your kind of bag, Thomas Thurman‘s running a session on CSS in Metacity/Mutter. It’d be great to talk about integrating IM with the Gnome Shell; Moblin’s people panel and many parts of Maemo make interesting use of Telepathy, and it’d be nice to have something similar on the desktop.

Speaking of Maemo, going to Boston means I’m not at the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam, which is a real shame: I’d love to meet more of the Maemo community, hear what people have up their sleeves for the N900, and discuss how Telepathy could help. Happily, Marco Barisione‘s giving a talk about how Telepathy’s used on Maemo, and how you can use it too; relatedly, Travis Reitter and Mathias Hasselmann will speak about the address book, one of the heaviest users of Telepathy. Also, Marc Ordinas i Llopis is hosting a BoF on extending the (frankly stunning) Hildon desktop, and Ian Monroe is giving a talk with Sergiy Dubovik about preparing Qt4 applications for Fremantle and Harmattan. I hear Philippe Kalaf is also floating around somewhere.

See you in (the wrong) Cambridge!

Today in Amsterdam, the second annual Maemo Summit is kicking off! The Maemo Summit includes 3 days of nothing but Maemo -- the first day is organized by Nokia, while the second two days consist of community-planned events and presentations. You can check out the full schedule online at the Maemo Wiki, and no doubt we’ll have some updates along the way, as well.

The tag for the event is ‘maesum‘, so you can search Twitter or Flickr or YouTube to find updates, pictures, or videos from the event, which should help to make things easier to follow, as well. If you’re one for live coverage, our friends at the newly launched AllAboutMaemo.com have put together a liveblog, which will be updated periodically from various keynote speeches.

It also appears as though all of the attendees have received their very own Nokia N900 for review for 6 months, which is awesome! Our very own Texrat is on-site at the Nokia Maemo Summit, so we’ll have our own review posted shortly. Here’s an unboxing video in the meantime, from UMPCportal.com

Related Posts

• Qt Comes To Maemo
• Maemo Summit 2009 Is A Wrap
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• Hermes Syncs Your N900 Contacts With Twitter And Facebook
• How Would You Use The N900 In Portrait Mode?

The brand new http://maemo.gitorious.org/ has been getting new content at a good rate!
That trend should continue in the future too.

A really interesting addition to the different Maemo projects is the technical preview of the Maemo 6 UI. And that is hosted o the Qt side

Go see http://qt.gitorious.org/maemo-6-ui-framework !

I'm continuing the live coverage of the Maemo Summit in collaboration with Reggie, from Maemo Talk, and Mark, from The Nokia Blog. We're using Cover It Live, which is embedded below, and lets you read the latest updates, view pictures, vote in polls and add your own comments and questions. This news story contains the coverage from day two. More in the full story.

The popular NIT media center MediaBox is coming to the N900. Thanks to lots of user feedback the UI has been further simplified and optmized and of course "fremantlized". :)





The upcoming release for the N900 will be the first version to provide suport for portrait and landscape orientations. Browsing your music feels great in portrait mode!





MediaBox will support playing FM radio on the N900 as well (the N900 device specs don't list the FM radio, but there is one, on the Bluetooth chip).

Media indexing is now driven by tracker, the native indexer of the Fremantle OS. And if you don't like indexing you can of course browse the file system as before.

When you start MediaBox you will see the dashboard. This is where you can access your playlists, browse the device and your UPnP/DLNA servers, and access your indexed music, videos, and pictures. You can even put shortcuts to your stuff onto the dashboard for quick access, e.g. songs or albums you like, or folders with photos. No matter how deep within folders and subfolders you are, the dashboard is only one finger-tap away.

Another new feature is the folder history where you can see the folders where you recently were and go back.

If you have Tuomas Kulve's ogg-support installed, you will also be able to play Ogg Vorbis and FLAC music.

MediaBox still uses its own lightweight UPnP subsystem instead of gupnp that comes with Fremantle. My experience shows that the UPnP subsystem of MediaBox is still more compatible with the servers out there than gupnp is right now.

MediaBox is currently in the extras-devel repository for Fremantle and it's marked as an incomplete beta version. I expect to upload the full release later this month, after which it moves on to the extras-testing repository for community Q&A. Then it should only be a matter of time until it will appear in the extras repository.
The beta version in extras-devel is now updated frequently.

The new version will also be available for Diablo after the release for Fremantle. Portrait mode will be supported on Diablo, too, if you have rotation-support installed.

You can follow what’s going on at Day 2 of the Maemo Summit 2009:
Maemo Summit 2009 – Day 2

I’m in Amsterdam at Maemo Summit for the next few days. I am teaming up with Rafe from All About Maemo and Reggie from Maemo Talk to provide you live info, photos, and videos. You’ll be able to comment, ask questions, and vote on polls. The second day’s coverage starts Saturday October 10th at 09:00 CEST.

Maemo Summit 2009 – Day 2

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Earlier today I gave a lightning talk on giving great presentations at the Maemo Summit. The response has been great, and here are the notes I wrote for the presentation, so that people can refer back tol the advice when the time comes.

I'm continuing the live coverage of the Maemo Summit in collaboration with Reggie, from Maemo Talk, and Mark, from The Nokia Blog. We're using Cover It Live, which is embedded below, and lets you read the latest updates, view pictures, vote in polls and add your own comments and questions. This news story contains the coverage from day three. More in the full story.

Yesterday nokia gave away 300 pre-production n900 devices to all attendants of this years Maemo summit in Amsterdam (in the form of a six months loan, after that they'll have to go back to Nokia). I'm also attending, so I also got one. Deciding what the first thing to port to a new device is is always hard, but in the end I figured that something with plasma might be nice. As maemo5 makes it possible for home-screen widgets to be part of separate processes, I figured it might be possible to adapt plasmoidviewer to act as a simple program to put any type of plasma applet on the normal maemo desktop (actually, I think it was somebody else that suggested this, I just don't remember who it was). So after several hours of hacking (and a lot more hours of compiling Qt and various parts of kde (btw, the just released Qt 4.6 maemo5 technology preview is missing some essential bits like for example qdbuscpp2xml), I managed to figure out just exactly how to get the window to appear on the normal desktop as a widget. At first this didn't look to pretty as you can see in this screenshot:

But after several more hours of hacking and trying to figure out how transparency works in X11, I even managed to get nice translucent applets. Also I figured out how to hook up the normal maemo5 widget configuration system to display the correct configuration dialog when you click on the configure button on one of these plasmoids. So with in the end maybe 20 lines of code, I got a rather good working implementation that makes it basically possible to have any plasmoid you might have on your normal kde desktop, also on your maemo5 home screen. One (somewhat major) problem with the current implementation is that it is not possible to resize widgets, but as far as I can tell that is mostly a limitation of the maemo5 desktop widget system, so I'm not sure if there is anything I can do about it from my side.

KDE Project:

• Conferences / Meetings
• Maemo

Yesterday nokia gave away 300 pre-production n900 devices to all attendants of this years Maemo summit in Amsterdam (in the form of a six months loan, after that they'll have to go back to Nokia). I'm also attending, so I also got one. Deciding what the first thing to port to a new device is is always hard, but in the end I figured that something with plasma might be nice. As maemo5 makes it possible for home-screen widgets to be part of separate processes, I figured it might be possible to adapt plasmoidviewer to act as a simple program to put any type of plasma applet on the normal maemo desktop (actually, I think it was somebody else that suggested this, I just don't remember who it was). So after several hours of hacking (and a lot more hours of compiling Qt and various parts of kde (btw, the just released Qt 4.6 maemo5 technology preview is missing some essential bits like for example qdbuscpp2xml), I managed to figure out just exactly how to get the window to appear on the normal desktop as a widget. At first this didn't look to pretty as you can see in this screenshot:

But after several more hours of hacking and trying to figure out how transparency works in X11, I even managed to get nice translucent applets. Also I figured out how to hook up the normal maemo5 widget configuration system to display the correct configuration dialog when you click on the configure button on one of these plasmoids. So with in the end maybe 20 lines of code, I got a rather good working implementation that makes it basically possible to have any plasmoid you might have on your normal kde desktop, also on your maemo5 home screen. One (somewhat major) problem with the current implementation is that it is not possible to resize widgets, but as far as I can tell that is mostly a limitation of the maemo5 desktop widget system, so I'm not sure if there is anything I can do about it from my side.

You can follow what’s going on at Day 3 of the Maemo Summit 2009:
Maemo Summit 2009 – Day 3

I’m in Amsterdam at Maemo Summit for the third and last day of sessions. I am teaming up with Rafe from All About Maemo and Reggie from Maemo Talk to provide you live info, photos, and videos. You’ll be able to comment, ask questions, and vote on polls. The third day’s coverage starts Sunday October 11th at 09:00 CEST. All my photos will be taken and uploaded directly from the Nokia N900!

Maemo Summit 2009 – Day 3

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So here is the thing, when I was preparing this presentation I thought it would be a good idea to give the audience some actual source code of both source and renderer plugins for MAFW. Yeah, we already have some plugins in MAFW that you can look into but those are full of optimizations and pack quite many features so I thought they might be a bit complicated to understand the basics. So, I devoted a few hours to write a couple of very simple plugins (a source and a renderer), they are really simple, they only provide the most basic stuff, they are not complete,they sure have bugs, etc but the code is simple, easy to read and understand and it is full of comments to guide readers.

Unfortunately, 20 minutes is not a lot of time to explain what MAFW is about and go into the details of the plugins’ source code. So here is the deal, do you prefer to see me showing you the code and explaining how it works, or do you prefer slides covering the basic ideas and leave the source code off the presentation?

In any case, you can get the pluigins’ source code here:

MAFW Filesystem source plugin

MAFW Simple renderer plugin

UPDATE: You can now also check out the slides here:

Writing plugins for MAFW (slides)

So, yesterday I gave my presentation here in Maemo Summit about how you should adapt your GNOME applications to Maemo using the Fremantle guidelines.

I’ve just uploaded the slides for this presentation should you want to review them or in case you missed the talk:

Adapting GNOME Applications to Maemo Fremantle View more documents from Joaquim Rocha.

I booked a stay at a particular hotel because the web page said "Free WiFi". It didn't say "all outgoing ports firewalled except for port 80 and a few other (useless) ones". Not having SSH access is most painful. Luckily, there's a solution.

You need a web server running Apache and SSH. Enable mod_proxy and mod_proxy_connect and add this to the first (i.e. default) virtual host configuration:

<VirtualHost whatever:80>
...

  # allow ssh to localhost over http proxy
  ProxyRequests on
  AllowCONNECT 22
  <Proxy localhost>
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Proxy>

</VirtualHost>

Reload Apache configuration. The setup is done. (Instructions based on Tunneling SSH over HTTP(S) by Dag Wieers.)

On the client side you need proxytunnel. Sadly, it's not packaged for Ubuntu yet, but compiling from sources is trivial. Edit ~/.ssh/config and add an entry for your proxied ssh connection:

Host pmyservername
ProxyCommand proxytunnel -q -p myserver.mydomain.com:80 -d localhost:22

That's it. Now you can ssh pmyservername. (The p prefix is a reminder that I'm using a proxied connection: ssh fridge versus ssh pfridge. Also it reminds me of Terry Pratchett's Pyramids.).

For extra fun (e.g. IRC) use ssh's built-in SOCKS5 proxy: ssh -D 1080 pmyservername. Then tell the apps to use a SOCKS5 proxy on localhost. Since telling each app to use a proxy (and then, later, telling it to stop using it) is a big *pain*, and some apps (e.g. ssh) don't support proxies directly, a wrapper like tsocks is handy. Edit /etc/tsocks.conf and set the default socks server to 127.0.0.1, then use it to run apps:

$ tsocks xchat-gnome
$ tsocks bzr push lp:myprojectname

tsocks is packaged for Ubuntu.

If your hotel doesn't have free WiFi, a prepaid SIM card with 3G access could be cheaper than roaming charges. Apparently you can get one with a virtually unlimited (for a short stay, anyway) data plan for 27 EUR in Amsterdam.

The second Maemo Summit is over.

Nokia surprised everyone on the first day by handing out 300 pre-release N900s to the participants. I'm so happy now that after a long period of wavering I finally decided to come to the summit! The device is much better than I expected/feared (and I haven't even put a SIM card in yet). We're supposed to provide feedback and will have to send the devices back to Nokia in 6 months. (Nokia insisted on loan contracts signed in blood, kidding, but there are contracts.)

The tiny pixels are beautiful. It's what, 266 pixels per inch? Even older 225 dpi devices spoiled me: both the first generation iPhone and the first generation Kindle displays seemed very coarse and pixellated.

The user interface is very smooth. Having a composition manager improves apparent responsiveness: even if the app is swapped out and not ready to redraw, switching between windows appears to be instant since the picture is cached. And there's no flicker while the apps are redrawing. (Flickering during redraw is one of the main reasons I did not buy a S60 phone and stayed with good old S40.) Speaking of swapping, it's barely noticeable. You can run more apps than fit in RAM without having to suffer. The flash memory is noticeably faster than in a N810. And there's more of it (32 gigs: 28 gig partition for user data, the rest for the system: swap, applications, config files, etc.)

The design and usability of the user interface have improved a lot since the N810. The UI is pretty. Many of the apps are now convenient to use. Pervasive kinetic scrolling is sweet (except when you have really long lists or web pages, then it takes forever to reach the end).

Finally there are PIM-y things people missed in older Maemo releases: calendaring, contacts that can record all kinds of information (such as phone numbers).

All right, enough gushing. There were some irritating things too. For example, Bluetooth support is buggy/incomplete in the pre-release firmware, so it's hard to transfer files. Calendar/contacts sync with S40 phones does not work either. GPS is utterly useless when you're offline (no maps, or at least I haven't found a way to pre-download and cache them; also very long fix times without network assistance). Since I have no desire to pay extortionist roaming charges of my provider (2.5 EUR per megabyte), and haven't had a chance to go look for a prepaid SIM card, I usually have either WiFi or GPS coverage, but not both.

As you can guess, playing the device diverted a part of my attention from the presentations somewhat. I tried to compensate for that by reporting on the talks on IRC (using xchat on the device). I think the strategy backfired; IRC is rather disruptive and the channel is quite busy lately.

The second Maemo Summit is over.

Nokia surprised everyone on the first day by handing out 300 pre-release N900s to the participants. I'm so happy now that after a long period of wavering I finally decided to come to the summit! The device is much better than I expected/feared (and I haven't even put a SIM card in yet). We're supposed to provide feedback and will have to send the devices back to Nokia in 6 months. (Nokia insisted on loan contracts signed in blood, kidding, but there are contracts.)

The tiny pixels are beautiful. It's what, 266 pixels per inch? Even older 225 dpi devices spoiled me: both the first generation iPhone and the first generation Kindle displays seemed very coarse and pixellated.

The user interface is very smooth. Having a composition manager improves apparent responsiveness: even if the app is swapped out and not ready to redraw, switching between windows appears to be instant since the picture is cached. And there's no flicker while the apps are redrawing. (Flickering during redraw is one of the main reasons I did not buy a S60 phone and stayed with good old S40.) Speaking of swapping, it's barely noticeable. You can run more apps than fit in RAM without having to suffer. The flash memory is noticeably faster than in a N810. And there's more of it (32 gigs: 28 gig partition for user data, the rest for the system: swap, applications, config files, etc.)

The design and usability of the user interface have improved a lot since the N810. The UI is pretty. Many of the apps are now convenient to use. Pervasive kinetic scrolling is sweet (except when you have really long lists or web pages, then it takes forever to reach the end).

Finally there are PIM-y things people missed in older Maemo releases: calendaring, contacts that can record all kinds of information (such as phone numbers).

All right, enough gushing. There were some irritating things too. For example, Bluetooth support is buggy/incomplete in the pre-release firmware, so it's hard to transfer files. Calendar/contacts sync with S40 phones does not work either. GPS is utterly useless when you're offline (no maps, or at least I haven't found a way to pre-download and cache them; also very long fix times without network assistance). Since I have no desire to pay extortionist roaming charges of my provider (2.5 EUR per megabyte), and haven't had a chance to go look for a prepaid SIM card, I usually have either WiFi or GPS coverage, but not both.

As you can guess, playing the device diverted a part of my attention from the presentations somewhat. I tried to compensate for that by reporting on the talks on IRC (using xchat on the device). I think the strategy backfired; IRC is rather disruptive and the channel is quite busy lately.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-10-05 through 2009-10-11

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-10-05 through 2009-10-11

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-10-05 through 2009-10-11

Success! We can receive FM radio on the N900 now.

Controlling the FM radio in the N900 is tricky stuff. At first, the hardware is disabled for power saving reasons. Bluetooth has to be powered up, the I2C communication bus has to be powered up, and only then, the FM radio driver will actually load.

I have created a package n900-fmrx-enabler for this task. The FMRX-Enabler is a D-Bus service that takes care about enabling the FM radio hardware on request and powering it down again when no application are using it.

After the driver has been loaded by the FMRX-Enabler, the FM radio provides two interfaces for controlling. A classic Video4Linux2 interface featuring only the basic stuff such as setting the frequency and muting/unmuting it, and a sysfs interface where you can read and write into file-like objects to control the radio.

Another tricky part is getting to hear sound from the radio. Unlike the N800, the FM radio doesn't output to the speakers directly. You have to capture the sound from the PGA line and play it back. A simple GStreamer pipeline such as

gst-launch pulsesrc ! pulsesink

does the job, after enabling PGA line2 and PGA capturing in the mixer.

I have uploaded an application package fmradio for the FM radio to extras-testing. Testers are encouraged to test this, too.

One drawback with the FM radio is that due to constant capturing and replaying, the FM radio is kinda demanding on the battery. There's no safe way around that. The unsafe way around that can damage your speakers, so capturing/replaying is a must.

I'm gonna put up some developer documentation for the FM radio stuff.

So last week, I started writing a maemo fremantle widget in a few spare pockets of time. One thing got me stuck. I could not get the thing to be transparent. I tried looking at other widgets’ code but just couldn’t figure it out. Finally at the Extending Hildon Desktop BoF yesterday at the Maemo Summit, I got my answer: set the colormap of the window to be 32bit rgba.

Here is the code needed in the __init__ in a python widget:

colormap = self.get_screen().get_rgba_colormap()
self.set_colormap (colormap)

In the expose event handler, you have to clear with the cairo context (which I had figured out last week) with code like:

cr = self.window.cairo_create()
cr.set_source_rgba (1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0)
cr.set_operator(cairo.OPERATOR_SOURCE)
cr.paint()

My flickr fremantle tag photoset shows the progression and what runs now is:

There is still a little work to do, like respecting theme colours and more accurate positioning of hour etc before I create a package to push into extras.

Summit is over, a huge thanks to everyone who attended and made the event memorable!

Apologies for the lack of coverage here – as I wasn’t attending, it was tough to keep up with all the photos, videos, and posts about the Maemo Summit. However, if you weren’t there, either, you can catch up on all the news in a few places.

For starters, there’s a massive amount of photos – most taken with the N900 – up on Flickr, tagged with ‘maesum’. The image in this post is actually taken by Mark Guim of The Nokia Blog with his N900, and it looks quite nice.

Also, Peter Schneider has loaded a few of the presentations from the Maemo Summit up on Slideshare, so that you can breeze back through them at your leisure. I definitely recommend that you spend some time here, as there’s some great information about Maemo and the N900 to be found.

You can also view the liveblog from the event, put together as a joint effort by MaemoTalk.com, AllAboutMaemo.com, and TheNokiaBlog.com. There is a separate liveblog for Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

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One of the ‘easter eggs’ hidden on the Nokia N800 was an FM radio receiver. The device shipped without any software to take advantage of the hardware, but the community came through with a solution to allow N800 owners to listen to FM radio through their device. While the Nokia N810 did not have the same little treasure, it appears as though the Nokia N900 does, and there’s already a solution to get it working!

Martin Grimme at Python and More has put together a package called n900-fmrx-enabler which enables the FM antenna when prompted, and then disables it again, to conserve battery. For right now, it’s no easy task, as the sound doesn’t immediately get output to the speakers, so Martin’s come up with a workaround. Unfortunately, this workaround sucks down the battery quite quickly.

If you’re feeling rather daring, you can install fmradio from the extras-testing repository, to give it a go. Is FM radio something you would use often, or do you think it’s rather silly, given the local storage and 3G connectivity that the N900 has?

(Image is from atmasphere.net and shows the FM Radio app on the N800)

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First, I want to congratulate Nokia and the Maemo team on the excellent progression of Maemo over the years. It looks amazing.

Maemo has taken on a totally different direction with the recent release. What started as a hacker-friendly, reasonably priced mobile computer has grown into a high-performance, luxury phone. Maemo tablets have gone from "having no competition in the class" to "taking on the big smartphone market." The Maemo team is proud of what they have created and they should be. From what I have seen and read, the N900 looks like a fantastic phone.

With that, I am retiring from TabletBlog.com. I don't have the time, energy, or money to keep up with the world of luxury smartphone competition. I am seeking new ownership for the TabletBlog.com domain name and will find some way to archive and mirror the content as it is under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

At the Maemo2009 Summit Nokia shared a great deal of information about the security mechanisms that would be available and/or mandated in upcoming platforms.

The concepts outlined include well established favourites in the OSS world (like privilege management) as well as some that are rather less well regarded - such as relatives of the Trusted Computing Platform and DRM.

Inevitably there will be a significant amount of interest and concern about how this affects the open nature of the Maemo platform.

Thanks to the kind folks at Nokia’s press offices, I’ve just taken delivery of a pre-production Nokia N900. I’m told this is final hardware, but the software that I’ve got will be updated a few more times before the units are ready to ship. Fortunately, though, the live device will give me a chance to check out the various features on the phone for you.

I’ve loaded a few applications, including Maemo Wordpy, which is what I’m composing this post from. The keyboard is really fantastic, as is the rest of the phone’s build quality. It is definitely a flagship Nseries device. I’m still baffled as to why it only has a 1320mAh battery, since it’s already proven to be an issue for folks from the Maemo Summit, who’ve had theirs a bit longer than I have.

I’ll be using this baby as my primary device for a while, and will put together a full review soon. Is there anything you would specifically like me to cover?

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Quite some time ago, Nokia paid a pretty penny for Trolltech, which turned into Qt development framework. One of the big things about Qt that got everyone talking is its ability to easily translate to a number of different platforms, including Linux and Windows. Unfortunately, while parts of Qt are currently available for Symbian and Maemo, the entire framework was not integrated into the current version of either operating system, until now.

At Maemo Summit 2009, Nokia announced that Qt 4.6 will be supported on the Nokia N900, which runs Maemo 5. This includes a native look and feel for Qt applications, support for hardware acceleration, and a number of other really nice aspects.

The reason this is a big deal is that it will make creating applications for Maemo much easier, specifically for desktop developers looking to make the leap over to mobile. With a few user interface tweaks, nearly any Qt application will be able to run on the Maemo 5 operating system. As an example, the latest version of Skype is written in Qt, and other companies are sure to follow, given the ease of porting apps across various operating systems.

Here’s a sample video showing Qt running on the Nokia N900. We’ll have more coverage in this space soon.

Links:

Developers can check out http://qt.gitorious.org/, or can visit http://qt.nokia.com/maemo for more info.

http://qt.nokia.com/maemo

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So I am back from Maemo Summit 2009. Great people. Great show. Great talks. Great venue: Enjoyed it quite much to walk arround in the Westerpark, Marc-André loved the petting zoo.

Hotest topic, of course: The N900. Thank you Nokia for lending those devices: Feels so good to finally have one for personal use! Finally got ideas for some private N900 hacking when reflecting responses to Travis' and my talk.

Another hot topic was DRM on Harmattan. Fortunately David Greaves came to similar conclusions like I've reached so far: Maemo Security - Lockdown or Liberation. Could be I'm just a weirdo, but I seriously hope for game developers targeting Maemo: Already called Rover "My next Wii" in jokes for its nice screen and the acceleration sensor.

Well, and then there still was this disappointment about Nokia moving to Qt as their prefered UI toolkit. Actually I wonder why people see this as problem: GTK+ was created without Microsoft or IBM holding our hands, so why does everyone expect Nokia to hold our hands for Maemo? If we really care about this platform, it should be absolutely possible for us to provide a proper GTK+ based toolkit for Maemo 6. Ideally Nokia would publish Layout guides and stuff early, so that we would not have to play catchup too much after device launch. Motivation and specs. More should not be needed. Really.

It took me a lot more than I expected, but I finally managed to get the beagleboard booting and happy with the latest linux kernel (2.6.32-rc3), DSS2, and dsp-bridge driver.

Hi everyone! I know you are all excited with new and glorious Maemo5 and n900, but for the mortals who doesn’t have to privilege to get one, I have just updated Macuco, my Gmail/Google Reader/Orkut client for the Maemo4.

Thanks for Jie Zhang, a very nice fellow from Shangai, the high CPU utilization bug was solved, now everything is much smoother and fast!

Jie also solved the problem with packaging, so now you can launch Macuco from the menu, with a nice icon my wife made for me

I would like to publicly thank the Maemo Community Council and the Maemo Devices team for all their hard work in organizing the Summit at Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. The event was a great success.



Not only were all the arrangements well done (hotel, airfare, food, summit venue, photo/video recording, after hours party), but so were all the presentations by Nokia, Distinguished Guests, and Community Members. Of course, the most tangible thing from the weekend in Amsterdam was the loan of the beautiful N900 from Maemo Devices. Everyone was Ecstatic when Ari announced that all 300 non-Nokia participants would receive a pre-production N900 for 6 months for evaluation. I am still pinching myself ... did that really happen?!



Listening to all the talks on Friday and the Community talks on Saturday and Sunday left me with the feeling that Nokia is building some serious excitement around Maemo 5, and in particular, the N900. With the N900 in stores soon, Nokia can start to shift some attention to Maemo 6 (Harmattan). Indeed, that appears to be the case, as evidenced by the number of Maemo 6 talks that were there. I've said this before, but the future of the Maemo line looks promising - Thank You.

Nokia has been kind enough for lending me an awesome N900. This will allow me to test KOffice on the phone. Document loading, parsing and scrolling speed could do with improvements.

Apart from using the N900 for serious things, I've also done a bit of playing with it. Qt has a famous OpenGL demo that shows the Qt logo in a QGLWidget. Instead of controlling the rotation of the object with the scrollbars, the adapted version uses the accelerometers in the device to move the logo.

This was a simple adaptation: reading the accelerometers is simple:

Nokia-N900-41-10:~# cat /sys/class/i2c-adapter/i2c-3/3-001d/coord
36 -18 -1134

The application source and a debian package for the N900 are now available.

Here is a screenshot of five running instances in the application overview. The five logos all move if you move the phone.

Perhaps a Qt on Maemo guru can adapt this program to be a desktop widget with a transparent background.

Nokia has been kind enough for lending me an awesome N900. This will allow me to test KOffice on the phone. Document loading, parsing and scrolling speed could do with improvements.

Apart from using the N900 for serious things, I've also done a bit of playing with it. Qt has a famous OpenGL demo that shows the Qt logo in a QGLWidget. Instead of controlling the rotation of the object with the scrollbars, the adapted version uses the accelerometers in the device to move the logo.

This was a simple adaptation: reading the accelerometers is simple:

Nokia-N900-41-10:~# cat /sys/class/i2c-adapter/i2c-3/3-001d/coord
36 -18 -1134

The application source and a debian package for the N900 are now available.

Here is a screenshot of five running instances in the application overview. The five logos all move if you move the phone.

Perhaps a Qt on Maemo guru can adapt this program to be a desktop widget with a transparent background.

Unlike Navicore/Wayfinder on previous Maemo devices, Ovi Maps on the N900 downloads maps on demand. This is obviously a problem if you're going somewhere abroad and don't want to pay extortionate data roaming charges.

Fortunately, S60 Ovi Maps users also have the same problem, and the solution is straightforward:

1. Scroll down the above URL and download the maps for the countries you are interested in. Obviously skip the instructions about downloading Ovi Maps - the N900 has Ovi Maps already installed!



2. Unzip the maps into cities/diskcache on the big VFAT partition (mounted under MyDocs) on your N900.

3. That's it!

Some of the files you may already have, I've chosen to overwrite them; YMMV.

However, as far as I can tell, searching for locations still requires a network connection :-(

Unlike Navicore/Wayfinder on previous Maemo devices, Ovi Maps on the N900 downloads maps on demand. This is obviously a problem if you're going somewhere abroad and don't want to pay extortionate data roaming charges.

Fortunately, S60 Ovi Maps users also have the same problem, and the solution is straightforward:

1. Scroll down this post to Direct Links for Ovi Map Version 00.01.25.114 and download the maps for the countries you are interested in. (EDIT: updated to different blog post)
2. Unzip the maps into cities/diskcache on the big VFAT partition (mounted under MyDocs) on your N900.
3. That's it!

Some of the files you may already have, I've chosen to overwrite them; YMMV.

However, as far as I can tell, searching for locations still requires a network connection :-(

With everyone at the Maemo Summit 2009 getting a pre-production N900 on loan till January (mine arrived yesterday), Nokia has smartly decided to host official Nokia N900 Meetups in its Flagship stores around the globe. The only details are that the meetups will take place in October at the stores located in Helsinki, Moscow, London, New York, Dubai, and Chicago.

With so many (there were over 400 attendees at the Maemo Summit) N900’s in the wild, Nokia should have asked for volunteers at the Summit to host their own meetups in their own cities – a true grassroots endeavour. If you were at the Maemo Summit 2009 and have an N900 in your hands, I encourage you to host your own meetup, as well. If you do, let us know the when and where, and we’ll make sure to post it here on the site. We’ll have details on the Dallas/Fort Worth meetup shortly, as well.

If you’re interested, but not sure what exactly a ‘meetup’ is, or consists of, let us know in the comments. I would definitely like to host a conversation here that will hopefully help others feel more comfortable hosting their own.

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Maemo 6, codenamed Harmattan, is the next version of the Maemo platform. With Maemo 6 Nokia aims to deliver 'iconic user experience and integrated Internet services in one aesthetic package'. At last week's Maemo Summit Nokia shared some key information on Harmattan. In the full new story below we've embeded some of the key Maemo 6 presentations, along with a summary of what is essential for you to know.

A key application on any mobile platform, especially for enterprise users, is an office documents viewer and editor. At the Maemo Summit Suresh Chande demoed a Mobile Office application, based on KOffice, running on the Nokia N900. The application support both ODF and Microsoft Office (2003 / 2007) formats. The UI will be open sourced and made available via the extras-devel repository.

Although the primary focus of the Summit was Maemo 5 and the N900, there was some very welcome and long-awaited news for legacy OMAP2 devices. Texas Instruments announced at the Summit on Friday that they would be releasing the graphics drivers for the processors powering the N800, N810 and N810WE in the next 2 weeks. This is great news for the community, as it means that it will be possible to jazz up the UI for Mer and Maemo 4. Classic tablet owners may have some fun in store for them in the near future.

From the Nokia N900 to the HTC HD2, I'm seeing a groundswell of opinion turning against smaller, slightly simpler smartphones - but I contend that what you're seeing and reading isn't even close to being representative of the mass market and that, as usual (and I know because I'm one of them) the geeks are skewing all the analysis towards faster, bigger, flashier...

Using sfr 3G connections with an n900 require that you change some parameters if you have only a ‘Pass Surf’ option in your contract.

First in the connection manager you need to select your mobile connection and change the AP. Instead of websfr use wapsfr.

As wapsfr is restricted to http,https, and dns you can t use all features available on n900 like instant messaging or email.

There is also another restriction using wapsfr means that you also use the wapsfr proxy which doesn’t answer to request from unknow mobile user agent or desktop user agent. For example the proxy deny any request if the user agent contain the word ‘firefox’. So you need to change the user agent for something else by using about:config. For example i use : ‘Nokian95′, but you can also use the iphone user agent.

Maemo Summit 2009

The Maemo Summit was fun and very productive. The organization was excellent, obviously thanks to a generous budget and a dedicated hard-working maemo.org team. I met several interesting new people with whom I hope to work closely in future.

Thanks for all your comments on talk.m.o, Flickr and bugs.m.o and directly at the Summit. The result is a shiny new release with improved UX and automatic feed updating/downloading.

The new version is currently in Extras-Devel (promoted to -Testing, waiting for someone to confirm the promotion). Please take the time to review the new release and rate/comment it on gPodder's maemo.org/packages page.

One thing that did not make it into this release: Direct play/download/delete buttons in the episode shownotes window. I'm thinking of just popping up a list of actions when a episode is clicked and make "display shownotes" one of these actions. What do you think?

Please report bugs, discuss and rate the package. See the complete set of screenshots on Flickr.

Regarding creating users and permissions our beloved Debian Policy [chap. 10.9] tells us:...you must arrange for your package to create the user or group if necessary using adduser in the preinst or postinst script (again, the latter is to be preferred if it is possible). I wanted to stick to the postinst since it's preferrable so I couldn't change the permissions in the rules file.Now the thing

The Maemo Summit 2009 finale video:

Three days of great talks, fifty sponsored participants, three hundred Nokia N900s, four hundred plus enthusiasts, and the best Maemo device to date. What a summit! Thank you Nokia, and thank you Amsterdam!

Would you believe that it’s less than a year before the next summit? Looking forward to that!

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

One cool thing about the Nokia N900 is the ability to customize how it looks. The device features 4 side-scrolling homescreens, each of which can have their own wallpaper. Themes are also supported, which will be able to personalize various other graphical elements, such as icons and that sort of thing. We’ve come across two great resources that should make it easier to do both to your Nokia N900.

First up, we already know that the Theme Maker application for previous tablets has been updated to support the Nokia N900. Andrew Black has also recently posted a great walkthrough to guide you, step-by-step, through the process of building your theme package so that it can be easily distributed to N900 owners through the Extras repository.

Second, for wallpapers, you have a few options. For starters, you can easily create your own. Simply crop your images to 800×480 pixels, and then stick them in the .images directory on your tablet. Alternatively, you can visit N900wallpapers.com, which has an awesome collection of wallpapers for you to choose from – all community-uploaded. The upload process at N900wallpapers.com has been streamlined, and now allows you to upload an image that is 480px tall and a multiple of 800px wide (800, 1600, 2400, 3200), and it will automatically split the image into the appropriate number of parts, based on the width. Definitely cool, and worth bookmarking on your N900.

I’ve gone ahead, for those of you who knew this was coming, and created a 4-pack of beautiful camo backgrounds for the Nokia N900, so that you can easily conceal your device and just look cool at the same time. You can download them at N900wallpapers.com. Alternatively, you can download and unzip Camo into your Images folder, and then choose the ‘Camo’ image set on your device to automatically set all 4 desktops to camo.

Have you already found a bunch of cool wallpapers for your N900? Please share the links in the comments, so we can all check them out! I’m personally really excited to see some themes coming out, specifically from the excellent Symbian themers like TehkSeven and others.

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So I am finally back from the Boston Summit, a unique occasion to get updates on latest developments, and I am releasing Emerillon 0.1 for distributions eager to package.

Mandatory Greyhound rant

With a 3 hour delay on departure (making a total of 5 hours of wait in Boston’s 10 ℃ station), we managed to arrive 5 hours late in Montréal, due to a defective heater in the bus.  Add moving everyone at 5 AM from that defective ’70s bus to a freezing ’90s bus with actually less seats than the previous one, and the fact that there was enough people to fill 3 buses in Boston, but only 54 managed to leave on the first one and you’ve got a complete picture of the fiasco.

I am not going to run in too much details but all this could have been so easily avoided.  The delays were due to the fact that the bus that was supposed to bring us had been delayed at the US border.  Fine, shit happens.  What is not fine is that they waited until our expected departure time to get a replacement driver (since he had busted his legal driving time).  See, it takes about 5 hours from the border to Boston.  Knowing he was going to be late (and therefore busting his hours), the driver should have called his manager, which should have prepared a replacement driver for the next departure in 10 hours! But none of that happened.  And, to top it all, there were no Greyhound dispatcher to be called by the Boston station employees to inform them of a missing departure bus.  Complete utter fail.

Emerillon 0.1.0 release

Now for the fun part.  With all that time on hands, I created 2 new plugins for Emerillon (Copy a link of the current view to online maps, and display map position in statusbar) and cooked a release including all the 5 submitted translations.  Woot! Grab the release here.  This is a preview release with no guaranty on plugin API stability.  See the complete announce email.

Before anyone asks, I am using the gnome-colors Shiki-Wize theme.

For those who missed the original announcement: Emerillon is a map viewer. Aiming at simple user interface, Emerillon is a powerful, extensible application. It features OpenStreetMap based
maps. Use it to browse maps, search the map for places, placemark places for later quick access and more!

There are even packages of this release for Ubuntu Hardy from Mathieu Trudel.  See his blog of the install instructions.

I first heard about Hermes on Twitter and knew that it will be popular. It is still under development, but it basically grabs your Facebook and Twitter friends’ info like photos and birthdays, then sync it with your Nokia N900’s contacts. I asked the developer, Andrew Flegg, to get in front of camera to talk about the app. Check it out.

You can also watch this video in HD on Youtube. Subscribe to the channel to preview the latest videos before they get published on the blog.

If you want to try it out, it can be found in the Extras-testing repository. I don’t suggest installing it yet because of this WARNING. I recommend waiting once it is officially available in Maemo Downloads.

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Maemo Summit 2009 Opening video on Youtube

My computer just finished uploading the opening of 2009 Maemo Summit to Youtube. It features the N900 video and Peter Schneider's welcome. If you see embedded version of this video, please make sure you click the Youtube logo to see it in HD (after clicking HD, you can click full screen to get the most benefit out of it).

The video Peter Schneider plays features my music. The video content is from two Nokia N900 videos that I remixed together. I edited the soundtrack of this video so that the music part mixes sound from the event (same thing but poorer quality) and the original soundtrack so that the music has higher fidelity than what you could record on the N900 hall on Maemo Summit at Westgasfabrik. It was pretty hard to sync the two soundtracks together. I am not so advanced user with Final Cut Pro yet and it involved lots of handwork to do it (zooming and looking the waveforms closely on Soundtrack Pro).

Unfortunately I was kind of busy with releasing this (since people seem to be eager to see the videos now rather than later), so editing and filtering is not best possible and there is for example some visible noise on it. The film was filmed with Canon EOS 5D mark II with ISO setting (automatically turned into that) 25600 (the very high ISO explains why there is some noise in the video - in same conditions my old video camera would have turned almost black and white and greenish and would have produced quite low resolution video). The video was shot in the P-mode that automatically sets the ISO etc. values. I propably should have shot the video in the M-mode instead but I had too little time to set it up with the M-mode before the show started.

I do all filming nowadays with the Canon EOS 5D mark II, and have stopped using video cameras. The lens used was Canon EF 24-105 f 4 L IS USM.

Anyway, have fun with the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqsMAkKrXJ8.

The Nokia N900 is one of the first QWERTY-equipped smartphones from Nokia to come with a junkload of cool keyboard shortcuts. Honestly, there’s so many, you probably won’t remember or use most of them, but there are a few that deserve to be highlighted. Thanks to Matthew Miller at NokiaExperts.com for pulling these out of the manual (and discovering a few others, as well).

For starters, (and this isn’t a keyboard shortcut, but it’s good to know, nonetheless), there’s some quick pointers about the notification LED. When it’s flashing blue, that means some application has triggered a notification of some sort. If it’s orange, that means the battery is currently charging, and is not quite full. If it’s green, that means the battery is fully charged, and you can go ahead and disconnect it.

Now, back to that keyboard. Here’s a big list:

General

• Ctrl + Backspace: From within an application this will take you back out to the visual task manager. (Thanks to Chanse for that one.)
• Ctrl + C: Copy text
• Ctrl + V: Paste text
• Ctrl + X: Cut text
• Ctrl + A: Select all
• Ctrl + O: Open (if available)
• Ctrl + N: Create a new item (if available)
• Ctrl + S: Save (if available)
• Ctrl + Z: Undo (if available)
• Ctrl + Y: Redo (if available)
• Ctrl + F: Open search bar (if available)
• Ctrl + Right arrow: Move the insertion point to the end of the word
• Ctrl + Left arrow: Move the insertion point to the beginning of the word

Web browser

• Ctrl + N: Open a new window
• Ctrl + R: Reload the current page
• Ctrl + B: Open a bookmark
• Ctrl + D: Add a bookmark

Email

• Ctrl + Enter: Send a message
• Ctrl + R: Reply to a message

RSS Reader

• Ctrl + R: Refresh the feed

Screenshots

• Ctrl + Shift + P: Capture a screenshot. Warm up those fingers first to try this out. (Thanks Nokia Experts reader Matti for the tip.)

Quite good stuff. Matthew’s got some other tips and tricks listed out, so click on over to get the full info. What other keyboard shortcuts have you discovered that aren’t listed here?

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I’ve been using the Nokia N900 as my primary device now for a few days, and wanted to put together some first impressions, since I know many of you are desperate to know more about this sweet device. We’ll have a full review/preview up soon, so this is not meant to be a comprehensive review, but rather the things that stick out after only a few days of usage.

I was spoiled by using the 3G connection with the Nokia N900 in Europe that using Edge here in the US is unacceptable. T-mobile is the only provider in the US able to provide 3G data for this device, so I got a SIM card to show you how fast the network is in New York City.

You can also watch this video in HD on Youtube. Subscribe to the channel to preview the latest videos before they get published on the blog.

T-mobile USA was consistent after several tries. Downloads are usually 2.25Mb/s and uploads around 0.35Mb/s. Run your own speed test with your provider and paste your results in the comments below.

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In the screenshot below, you can see that I’m running 24 different applications on the N900 simultaniously. Any decent smartphone should be able to multitask, and it’s clear that the Nokia N900 has no trouble in doing so. You will notice that after yopu have 16 applications open, the task manager screen starts scrolling up and down, which is nice.

The best part is that unlike other systems, I didn’t notice any slowdown when I had all these apps running. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it is. What do you think? I have’t yet tested the full limits, mainly because I ran out of apps to launch, and also because mpore than 24 wouldn’t have all shown up in a single screenshot.

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We got back to Finland last night from our longish Helsinki->Amsterdam->Munich->Helsinki trip! Full load of excellent presentations, nice discussions with people and a strong feeling that things are proceeding into right direction!


Blogging with real content later, now I just want to thank everyone for participating!

I’ve take time to port homeip to fremantle. Currently i haven’t been able to make a transparent background.

It s available in extras-devel but it s could be unstable.
Warning do not use extras-devel repository on a device. You can brick it.

Purpose of the 1.0.5 release was to get a decent feature set to Extras repository before the Maemo Summit. There are still some bigger issues to be fixed in the future releases.

Bugs

There’s a product for Ogg Support at the Maemo Extras Bugzilla. I’ve added the major issues there but do report any other issues you find.

Tags

Media Player and File Manager depend heavily on the open source Tracker for the meta data. Tracker has different meta data extractors for different mime types. GStreamer extractor is used by default for all audio/* and video/* mime types. The gstreamer extractor uses tagreadbin for getting the meta data from the media files.

For better efficiency tagreadbin uses only parsers for getting the meta data. Decoders may need e.g. separate DSP hardware, so using decoders for getting the meta data could be a very slow and heavy process.

Unfortunately Vorbis and Flac tags are not in the container and need a decoder for parsing them. Tracker provides a separate extractor for Vorbis that’s now packaged separately for Maemo by Ivan Frade. That’s not “product quality” and shouldn’t be used, so a proper solution will replace that one. The work for getting a tag parser for Vorbis and Flac to be used with tagreadbin has already been started. Hopefully the patch will be attached to the Gnome bugzilla at some point.

Gstreamer’s playbin(2) element reports tags while playing the media file and this already works with Vorbis and Flac. MP and FM need to know the meta data before they start to play the file but e.g. the Media Widget on the Desktop seems to get the tags from the playbin2 as it shows the tags for Flac as well.

Performance

The Vorbis decoder from xiph.org isn’t as fast as the FFmpeg’s Vorbis decoder on the n900.

There weren’t any GStreamer plugins for the FFmpeg’s Vorbis decoder until Felipe implemented one. The gst-av is still missing some features that need to be implemented before it can be taken into use, mainly tags and streaming.

If you are interested in the topic, I’m sure Felipe would be more than happy to apply patches :)

I’ll report numbers about performance comparisons between MP3 and Ogg later.

Yesterday lunchtime I wrote a simple GStreamer app in python to run on the N900 with the video embedded in a widget inside the app. I committed it inside gst-python git inside the folder examples. It just does videotestsrc ! videoscale ! ximagesink. It could have been videotestsrc ! xvimagesink but I wanted to grab a screenshot.

Code (with comments): http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gst-python/tree/examples/maemogst.py

I use Qt again these days in addition to gtkmm and the rest of the GNOME stuff. Things have improved lots since I last used it seriously, though it’s still a little eccentric.

So I arrived in Brazil again after one great week in Europe, attending the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam and the Qt Developer Days in Munich.

The Maemo Summit was a great event and it was nice to finally meet the community, now that I have worked with Maemo for 3 years.



I did a short presentation (25 min) about QtWebKit, what it is, why we chose WebKit for Qt, and about what we have been working on the last year. It was surprisingly well received, as different people told me that it was one of the best presentations there.

I also got to meet one of the guys from the Nokia Starlight project, which has since when been opensourced (read more here!). Their work is really great and I'm looking forward cooperation more with the guys and getting their changes reviewed and integrated in the upstream WebKit.



As you can probably deduct from the above, I have been working remotely at part of the Qt WebKit team for about a year now. Great gang of people, so it has been a very interesting and productive year.

Qt 4.6 is looking really good and I'm currently thinking much about what we should concentrate on for Qt 4.7. Shortly, I expect to be looking into creating a clean and open backlog on the WebKit wiki.



After the Maemo Summit, I went to Munich to give a more elaborated and detailed WebKit talk. Qt Developer Days is growing! Almost 700 people present, very professional presentations, great oppotunities to meet up with the trolls - something that just has to be experienced.



Personally it was a great oppotunity for me to meet the difference people working on WebKit, such as people from Starlight, a WebKit performance hacker from The University of Szeged, people working on the Nokia Web Runtime etc. and it was also nice to be among many of my friends again :-)

After the Qt Dev Days in San Francisco, I will see if it will be possible to publish the slides online, so watch this space!

As expected, my Glom talk at the Maemo summit was rather under-attended while people went to the security talk next door. I had still hoped to do an entertaining talk for the video cameras, but my mind when blank and it was a bit of a shambles. The slides (or with notes that I forgot) should give you an idea of what I was trying to achieve.

Since then I have made some more simple improvements to the Maemo 5 port of Glom, as you can see in this new video (youtube or .ogv on my site), again using the Sqlite version of the simple Music Collection example.

These are the visible improvements:

• Details views now have “Add Related *” buttons in the AppMenu so you can actually add related records. Again, this uses an extra window.
• The Table name is mentioned on the title of the Details window.
  These last two required me to add the ability for the designer to specify the singular form of table and relationship titles. For instance, “Album” instead of “Albums”. Actually, I guess that’s still not enough for some translations, so we may need to allow designers to specify actual phrases.
• Details views now use HildonPickerButtons for ID fields instead of combo boxes. So they open a separate window to actually choose the value.
• The scrollbar is against the right edge.
• The widget spacing is more correct for Maemo 5, though there’s lots more to do, and it could be made much prettier by aligning widgets even when they are in different groups, particular because the group titles are hidden in the Maemo port.

I will stop coding on this for a while, but I think I’ve shown what’s possible. And I think I’ve shown that Glom is already (or could be) the best base for a simple database-driven application on Maemo – far preferrable to writing code and SQL.

The current code will be packaged in extras-devel soon.

I’m sat in the wonderfully picturesque Grenoble, France, sipping a beer and gazing at the huge mountains around me (but that’s for another post). I’m also reminiscing about the Maemo Summit 2009 so I thought I would put a few comments down.

I’m not going to harp on about how great the summit was, or how cool Nokia are for giving away 300 loan devices to the attendees (although I know at least one person left theirs in the back of a taxi in Amsterdam :() but instead I’ll just commend Nokia for their efforts with the N900. They have worked tirelessly to get a mainstream, Linux based phone to market that is both hugely configurable and extendable. One could harp on about the seeds of Linux based phones being sown with the likes of the LiMo initiative, Open Moko and more recently, Android, but I know of no other company that has advanced many core Linux components with a huge amount of effort and funding than Nokia.

The current device may not be to everyones taste and may not even be ready for mainstream just yet but I raise my glass to you, well done Nokia!

Last Wednesday was the first year anniversary of the Nokia Users Monthly Meetup in New York. As usual, we hung out at the NY flagship store for a couple of hours, then headed out for food and drinks. We went to our original spot, Brother Jimmy’s, and I had the Nokia N900 to take some flash photos. Check it out.

Gallery

The Nokia N900’s flash photos weren’t great, but they were also not horrible. The dual LEDs flash lit up the subjects pretty well, but noise is noticeable in some of the photos. The photos would have been better if there was xenon flash on the N900, but I’m sure Nokia’s engineers had good reasons to leave it out of this device. What do you think of the photos?

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

• How To View Ovi Store Content For Nokia N900 From Your Desktop Computer
• Nokia N900 Firmware Update PR1.1 Sent to Select Few – Still No Portrait Browser
• App Review: TuneWiki for Nokia N900
• Preview: Pixelpipe To Release Single Service Plugins for Nokia N900

Firefox for Mobile Calling all add-on developers! Go big, go mobile! Learn more: http://madhava.com/egotism... October 16 from Twitter - Comment - Like

It has been some time that I had some ideas regarding different devices. My first try was with the so famous “Mysterious Device” that we had during Tokamak 3 and later I played a little bit with my N85 and QtS60.

We will be publishing the occasional podcast, here, on All About Maemo, talking about the Maemo platform and Maemo devices such as the Nokia N900. In our very first podcast Rafe discusses the Maemo Summit with Steve. Topics include the Qt port to Maemo 5, Maemo 5 UI, Maemo 6 concepts, open source as business model, platform security and much more. You can listen to the podcast by the using the embed in the full story, downloading the MP3 file, or subscribing to the RSS feed in a podcactcher. Read on for more details.

The Internet of Things (IOT) is a vision.

Yet it is being built today. The stakeholders are known, the debate has yet to start. The European Commission published its action plan for IOT in June of this year. In hundreds of years our real needs have not changed. We want to be loved, feel safe, have fun, be relevant in work and friendship, be able to support our families and somehow play a role - however small - in the larger scheme of things.

So what will really happen when things, homes and cities become smart? The result will probably be an avalanche of what at first looks like very small steps, small changes.

Currently IOT applications, demos and infrastructure are rolled out from negative arguments only. For logistics, it is anti-theft. For ehealth it is the lack of human personnel that requires the building of smart houses. From a policy view it is the ensuring of safety, control and surveillance of both items and in public spaces. For retail it is shelf space management.

Council thinktank aims to grow into a positively critical counterpart to these negativities in focusing on the quality of interaction and potentialities of IOT for social, communicative and economic (personal fabrication, participatory finance, alternative currencies) connectivity between humans, humans and things and humans and their surroundings.

The wrestling with ambient technologies - the noise - is rapidly going out of corporate memory. A new young generation growing up at ease with 'total' connectivity, will enter IOT territory as simply another layer, another iteration of something they are comfortable with.

Therefore the launch of Council will highlight a personal history of locative media & hybrid spaces, by professionals of the i3 (Intelligent Information Interfaces) days, as well as the latest tools and applications, workshops on key issues, short keynotes and time for debate and discussion.

Where: Imal, Brussels

When: December 4 2009 0930:2200 (public evening from 20:00) Workshop 185 Euros (including lunch and dinner)

Register

The Nokia N900 is probably the hottest new mobile device out there right now. I received my N900 a little over a week ago at the Maemo Summit 2009 in Amsterdam. As you probably already know, Nokia was kind enough to give an N900 for a 6 months loan to every summit attendee so we got our N900s well before anyone else. You can only imagine the amazement in the crowd when Vice President of Maemo Devices in Nokia Mr. Ari Jaaksi announced the news in his key note. Nokia just got 300 very happy community member friends!

Read more on A week with the Nokia N900...

Technorati Tags: Maemo, n900

A new version of theme maker contains a few more icons, fixes bg issue with media player bg, add new bgs for clock, call-ui and app manager, has better example files, now also PSD files are included, of which an example above, showing the cut layers and the example layers for the backgrounds template.

What else. Linux version now is also able to create debs, but seems to need a bit more mem that the shell script gives, so first build your theme, then close theme maker, reopen it, and the click on make debian button. I'll check if I can sort the memory issues at some point on linux as well.

There is a short suggestion text document included on how windows users can develop until I get the debian creation working on windows again.

Oh, link: Garage downloads section

[Edit] Always rebase your theme template, icon and background files on top of the new ones. I have again changed the resolution of the bg template.

This is a tip for the USA readers currently under AT&T contract, but want to enjoy 3G data on the Nokia N900. Since the N900 does not support AT&T’s 3G frequency, you have to use a T-mobile SIM card. Tmo’s Flexpay Monthly plan doesn’t require a long-term contract, so you can just get one at their stores without signing your soul away for the next two years.

After spending three holidays in Amsterdam (rainy but still a wonderful time) we moved from our hotel to the Openismus apartment on the evening before the summit started. Great to see the friends/colleagues again, plus only 5 minutes of walking to the venue. As my laptop had died directly after arriving in Amsterdam this was a [...]

Here are some of the best photos (in my opinion of course) that I have taken with the Nokia N900 during the recent months. I'm pretty amazed with the camera quality and the fact that it's so easy to tag pictures and to post them to flickr and facebook etc.. directly from the device itself. Hope you like them too

It's pretty sweet, especially when you think it's gstreamer and other Gnome technologies under the hood doing the work...

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-10-12 through 2009-10-18

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-10-12 through 2009-10-18

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-10-12 through 2009-10-18

Last week I was pretty busy with various things and I did not have much time to post about Maemo Summit, but here I go:

• The event itself was nice and well organized, probably one of the best events of this kind I have attended in the last years. Thumbs up for those who worked on making it possible. Maybe the N800 and N770 rooms were too small, but other than that it was great.
• Thanks to Nokia for letting us try the N900 before its launch date. So far I am very happy with the experience and I think it represents an impressive step forward from the N810. I’ll make sure to give you my feedback here and also in bugzilla.

I also had a presentation about MAFW there which I hope helped some people with getting started on writing plugins for MAFW. I have to admit that I had thought of giving a very different type of presentation, more based on actual source code than slides, but anyway… I just provided insight on some key ideas around MAFW and its plugins, and then I left the source code examples (which you can grab from previous post) for those willing to get their hands dirty with the details.

The session was nice, I got some interesting questions/feedback during and after the session and I hope all that feedback translates into a better MAFW at some point in the future. Some highlights (in no particular order):

• We need the Python bindings. Andrea Grandi briefed people about this on his lightning talk. There are some parts of MAFW that are not using GObject right now and that is a source of trouble for the PyMaemo team, they could use some help from people with C and/or Python experience to give the bindings a boost, so if you are reading this and think you can help them I am sure they will be pleased to know about you :). Also, I wonder if patching MAFW to be fully GObject based is still an option in Fremantle…
• Canola wants to be more integrated with Fremantle and for that they are considering using tools like Tracker and MAFW. They could get rid of the indexer tool (Tracker would handle that) and they could get access to local content, upnp media bookmarks and radio directories for free using MAFW, they could even use MAFW’s GStreamer renderer. Also, if we get new plugins for MAFW in the future these would be available for Canola too, etc.
• Talking about Canola, I was not able to attend their session because it was scheduled in parallel with mine about MAFW (this is probably my only complaint about the event), but Iván Frade (Tracker) did a good job representing MAFW there, so thanks Iván

On Friday evening I got email from Quim Gil (Nokia) with information that I was selected for [Nokia N900](http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-n900) device discount. Yes, even I got it. Not decided yet will I apply for it or not (need to check cash state).

Photo taken by Tim Samoff, via Flickr

You might have heard the rumors, and it’s true: we’ll be holding a WebKitGTK+ hackfest right before Christmas, from the 15th to the 21st of December, 2009.

A group of core WebKitGTK+ hackers and contributors will meet at the Igalia offices in A Coruña, and we’ll hack for a week on things like GObject DOM bindings, libsoup, a harfbuzz backend, native theming through offscreen widgets, HTML5 video/audio support and many more things.

I’ve put up a wiki page with all the information we have so far, so keep an eye on it if you are interested. Also, we have two sponsors so far, Collabora and Igalia (thanks!), but we can always use a few more of them. If you feel like you could contribute to advance the state of the Web support in our platform, please drop me a line at my email address, xan gnome org, or contact the GNOME foundation directly.

Happy hacking!

While being in Maemo Summit or in Qt Developer Days, did you notice this guy below? Did you ask from him "Have you been working with multitouch-enabled WebKit lately?" Why not? ;-)


Kimi has been working in project called "Starlight" and part of the project is to bring multitouch into WebKit. So while you look at the video below and think "Hmm, just another multitouch photo rotate&scale demo..." please notice that this is all done inside browser with just HTML, CSS & JavaScript! In other words: It's just a normal web page without any black magic.





Starlight has now public website here, more videos available in here, and a developer guide with API & examples here.

Isn't it just convenient that this was published about simultaneously with the information that Maemo 6 will support multitouch... Sure beats my lame N810 multitouch hack! ;-)

Email is a very important feature for me and it works pretty well on the Nokia N900… for the most part. I’ll show you how it looks on the pre-production Nokia N900 from setup, to reading the inbox, replying, and creating emails. In this post, I use my Nokia Messaging account to push my emails from Gmail.

I’m still figuring out how to do the same thing with cmake, but various bloggers and comments appear to be promising that it’ll be even more easy.

But this is a message for probably all Nokia teams who are making Qt-based libraries:

First open your src/src.pro file and add this stuff:

CONFIG += create_pc create_prl
QMAKE_PKGCONFIG_REQUIRES = QtGui
QMAKE_PKGCONFIG_DESTDIR = pkgconfig
INSTALLS += target headers

Now open your debian/$package-dev.install file and add this line:

usr/lib/pkgconfig

You’ll be doing all the autotools people a tremendous favor.

Next, open the README file and document that you need to use qmake-qt4 on Debian or make either qmake-qt3 or qmake-qt4 work flawlessly with your build environment. Perhaps also mention how to set the install prefix, how to make qmake find and install .pc files in another location, stuff like that. I find that this is lacking for almost every Qt-based library.

You’ll be doing everybody who wants to use your software a tremendous favor.

My first chess computer

Years ago, when I was thoroughly fascinated by chess, I always wanted a portable chess computer. When I finally got one (a Novag Piccolo, for the odd chance someone else had the same device) I'd take it with me whenever possible. It got worn out quickly, moving the small plastic figures required more and more pressure to make the computer acknowledge my moves. For each move you first had to "touch" the figure you wanted to move. The computer would beep and show 2 LEDs (one for each row and line), for a lack of better feedback. Then you'd put the figure to its target location and "touch" it again, with the same feedback procedure for a valid move. If the move wasn't valid the error LED was lit. Perhaps this wasn't the best user interface in the world (I yearned for a self-moving Mephisto Phantom which actually was a Fidelity Phantom), but it worked for me and I was happy.

As part of my post Maemo Summit follow up I've been keeping an eye on what people have been saying about the event in blogs and other online media. In this news story you will find twenty or so links featuring a wide range of content an opinions from across the web. For those who were unable to attend the summit it should give you a good flavour of what the event was like.

So, tomorrow 7 people from the Qt Labs Americas at the Brazilian Nokia Technology Institute are going to the biggest South American open source conference, LatinoWare in Foz de Iguaçu.





Jesus Sanchez-Palencia and Anselmo Melo will do a mini introduction-course to most the new features on Qt 4.6, and I will do a more elaborated presentation about what we have done with out WebKit support in 4.6, and where we are heading!

Artus Souza, Caio Marcelo e Eduardo Fleury will also be doing very interesting presentations about the KDE Plama Netbook edition, as well about Qt Anchor Layouts.

So, hope to see many of you there!

BY ROGER SPERBERG

Gary Birkett (aka lcuk) has posted several short single-subject videos and a comprehensive overview of liqbase at YouTube.

The overview is presented in a new liqbase presentation app that has live graphics (instead of screen captures) that he clicks into and uses to demonstrate each app along the way. (Mind-blowing when you see it and think back at the long history of buggy, slow and futile efforts to do this sort of thing before.)

Among other people, I have strongly encouraged Gary to follow his imagination and keep creating the fast, visual, and kinetic apps that constitute liqbase. He’s taken our advice to heart and devoted himself full-time to N900-and-maemo (e.g, liqbase) development.

If you want to see the apps continue to flow, you probably want to visit Gary’s website, liqbase.net, and make a PayPal contribution to enable him to keep going. I have. I hope you will too. This is one developer I want to see keep developing.

Mauku is currently the only real Twitter client for the Nokia N900 and it does a pretty good job of letting tyou interact with your Twitter timeline. Unfortunately, at first glance, it seems as though Mauku only lets you login to one account at a time, which can be frustrating for those of us with multiple accounts. After expressing my frustration with this to the developer, he showed me how to add additional Twitter accounts to Mauku.

To do so, you’ll need to open the ‘Publishers’ dialog, so that you see this screen:

Now, to add a second (or third, or fourth) Twitter account, you’ll need to click that ‘Advanced’ button there on the bottom right, to get this screen:

From here, you’ll need to select the Twitter API from the drop-down list, and give theis publisher profile a unique name, such as Twitter2. You can now go back to the normal account setup screen and assign a Twitter username to it, and repeat as necessary.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t make using Mauku with multiple accounts any easier. You will still need to exit out to the launch screen for Mauku, manually switch accounts, and then wait for the new profile to load. However, it does save you the hassle of having to re-enter your username and password repeatedly.

Hopefully future versions of Mauku will look and operate similar to Gravity, which easily lets you manage several Twitter accounts all at the same time. Do you manage multiple Twitter accounts on your phone?

Related Posts

• How To Use Mauku With Multiple Twitter Accounts
• Hermes Syncs Your N900 Contacts With Twitter And Facebook
• Off To Nokia World 2009
• Multitasking On The Nokia N900 Is Awesome
• Nokia N900 Meetups Taking Place Soon

Mauku is currently the only real Twitter client for the Nokia N900 and it does a pretty good job of letting tyou interact with your Twitter timeline. Unfortunately, at first glance, it seems as though Mauku only lets you login to one account at a time, which can be frustrating for those of us with multiple accounts. After expressing my frustration with this to the developer, he showed me how to add additional Twitter accounts to Mauku.

To do so, you’ll need to open the ‘Publishers’ dialog, so that you see this screen:

Now, to add a second (or third, or fourth) Twitter account, you’ll need to click that ‘Advanced’ button there on the bottom right, to get this screen:

From here, you’ll need to select the Twitter API from the drop-down list, and give theis publisher profile a unique name, such as Twitter2. You can now go back to the normal account setup screen and assign a Twitter username to it, and repeat as necessary.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t make using Mauku with multiple accounts any easier. You will still need to exit out to the launch screen for Mauku, manually switch accounts, and then wait for the new profile to load. However, it does save you the hassle of having to re-enter your username and password repeatedly.

Hopefully future versions of Mauku will look and operate similar to Gravity, which easily lets you manage several Twitter accounts all at the same time. Do you manage multiple Twitter accounts on your phone?

Related Posts

• Hermes Syncs Your N900 Contacts With Twitter And Facebook
• Off To Nokia World 2009
• The Nokia N900 Is Not A Phone
• OMWeather v0.3 Preview Needs Your Donations
• Multitasking On The Nokia N900 Is Awesome

After the Maemo Summit the details on the address book application and framework in Maemo 5 are finally completely public so I can openly talk about what I worked on during the past year and, even better, I actually have a smartphone that runs this software! (Thanks to Nokia that gave out 300 N900s, but I will talk about this in my next post)

Contacts on the N900

Contact details

As you can see from the screenshots, the Contacts application has everything you would expect from a normal phone address book but it also tightly integrates IM. Your local, Jabber/GTalk and Skype contacts will appear in the same address book and, if you have a friend on multiple IM protocols, you can easily merge all the contacts into a single entity.

My main task has been making the component responsible for the IM part of the address book work properly, this component is an evolution-data-server backend (recently released under LGPL) that acts as a bridge between the Telepathy IM framework and evolution-data-server. See the README file for more details.
Sadly the library on top of evolution-data-server that does the magic contact merging and contains the widgets used on Maemo is not open, but there is some hope for it.

Address book components

At the Maemo Summit I also gave a talk on Telepathy and how it’s used on Maemo, both for messaging/VOIP and for the contacts integration. The slides are available in PDF or in OpenOffice.org format (but for some reason colours look wrong in some recent versions of OpenOffice).

Reading Maemo Brainstorm I happened upon a complaint: Mediaplayer and other players do not have an equalizer. Though I don’t use equalizers very often, sometimes I did it, and I find a bit upset not having one in such cool device.

Being a MAFW development, I think MAFW can provide this feature. So I made a fork from mafw-gst-renderer, and I’m pleased to announce mafw-gst-eq-renderer, which can be summarized as mafw-gst-renderer + equalizer. It’s totally open, and you can follow its development from gitorious. It must be clear that this plugin is not part of official MAFW, but a community plugin that I did in my free time.

The main goals for this fork were adding equalizing capabilities to mafw-gst-renderer, and providing a graphical equalizer. I think both were achieved.

Both in Gitorious and Projects Maemo you can find two branches/flavours.

MTR (master branch) is the upstream development: this provides Mafw-Gst-Eq-Renderer-Plugin, which creates a Mafw-Gst-Eq-Renderer source, which is accessed through gsteqrenderer UUID. If you install it in your N900, you’ll have two renderers: the original one (mafw-gst-renderer) and the new one (mafw-gst-eq-renderer).

Unfortunately, Mediaplayer only handles mafw-gst-renderer. If you want to use mafw-gst-eq-renderer instead, you must replace mafw-gst-renderer with the MGR flavour (mafw-gst-renderer branch). It provides the same capabilities as MTR flavour, but inherits the names from mafw-gst-renderer: the plugin provided is named Mafw-Gst-Renderer-Plugin, which creates a Mafw-Gst-Renderer source that can be accessed through gstrenderer UUID. Install this flavour and remove mafw-gst-renderer and Mediaplayer will be able to use the equalizer.

Setting equalizer values is as easy as changing values in GConf. If you’re writting your own mediaplayer, you can provide your own equalizer but reading/writting gconf values. For those that doesn’t have an equalizer (like Mediaplayer) a Control Panel applet is provided. With the applet a set of predefined presets are provided, though applet allow to save user configurations.

My aim is to synchronize this development with original mafw-gst-renderer, integrating all relevant changes whenever new versions are released.

I hope you find this plugin useful.

Hello everyone.

If you’ve ever used a Maemo-powered device, including the older Nokia Internet Tablets, you know that OMWeather is one of the ultimate must-have applications. OMWeather brings detailed weather information straight to your homescreen through a really customizable widget, with transparency and even a few different icon sets that you can use. Newer versions of OMWeather also use the device’s built-in GPS receiver to automatically determine your location, making weather details even more useful.

The 3-person team behind OMWeather has now posted a preview of v0.3 of OMWeather, which is optimized for the Nokia N900, and includes some really cool updates. The interface has been simplified, and it also is one of a few applications to support portrait mode, even before Nokia does! This new version should be released soon.

Unfortunately, the team is running short of resources. They only have one real N900 between themselves, which makes developing updates quite difficult. They’ve done some quick calculations to realize they’ve only made $5/month on what is easily one of the most popular Maemo applications ever, and are now asking for donations. They’ve setup a PayPal donations link that you can use if you’d like to donate.

Related Posts

• The Nokia N900 Is Not A Phone
• How To Use Mauku With Multiple Twitter Accounts
• Multitasking On The Nokia N900 Is Awesome
• Nokia N900 Meetups Taking Place Soon
• Qt Comes To Maemo

Some time ago I started a Qt based open source project, which is basically a download client for community applications in the extras-repository. The client should be used in addition to the native application manager and provide easily more information for the inexperienced user. The client will:

• ease finding and sorting applications based on different criteria (ratings, number of downloads, categories, etc.)
• search for applications with a free-text search
• get basic information about the applications (like description, number of downloads, ratings, comments, screenshots, etc.)
• send feedback (like ratings, comments)
• download the installation file and pass it directly to the application manager, which handles the installation

Current Implementation

The current implementation is Qt based and uses a REST API, which is implemented by using the content part of the open collaboration services API. The idea is to request the data, and represent it in a similar manner as the web-interface of downloads.maemo.org. At the moment the following features are implemented:

• getting the list of applications
• search for applications
• get application details (like comments, screenshot, description)
• download the installation-file and open the application manager.

The implementation is still work in progress. The screenshots show a bit about the look and feel of the application. All source-code is available in a git repository in garage. In the next week I will concentrate my work to make the code more readable and polish it, so that if anybody is interested in contributing in the project they will have an easier start. Some changes to the back-end have to be done and some functionality has to be added (icons, filter, feedback). Please let me know if you are interested. I hope to receive further ideas and some feedback.

Screenshots

You probably know Panucci from your N8x0 where it allows you to playback, resume and bookmark audiobooks and podcasts. Some users seem to use it as a normal audio media player, too, although the primary design goal is to support resuming for long audio tracks.

Just today I asked on maemo-developers how to get GStreamer's playbin to work on Maemo 5 when several people (thanks, guys!) pointed out that playbin2 should be used.

After that, a new package was only some UI fixing and merging of the rotation code from gPodder away. While you are eagerly waiting for the autobuilder to put Panucci into Extras-Devel, here's a short video of it in action:

Please test Panucci when it finally appears in Extras-Testing and give some feedback! And thank you to all of you who were kind enough to take the time to review the new gPodder version - it has made its way into Extras today! :) Guess the next version should allow Panucci to be selected as audio player in the preferences dialog, then.. ;)

Important: Due to the way optification works, upgrading from older versions of might break the package (application does not load). To fix this, simply uninstall and re-install the package. Both Panucci and gPodder are affected by this if you have installed an older version.

Firefox for Mobile MozCamp EU 2009 - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2009... October 21 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

Here we go with some more video coverage of the Nokia N900 folks. This time I answered some reader questions in video format and showed a few other aspects of the Nokia N900. Check out the videos below for more about conference calls, email, SMS, and IM, N900 settings, and games loaded on the N900.

Conference calling

As you can see in the video below, conference calling with 2 additional parties (and yourself) is supported on the N900. I showed the process in the video, but you simply place and connect one call, tap the upper menu, place and connect the 2nd call, tap the upper menu and select to Start Conference Call. That’s it folks.

Email, SMS, and IM

POP, IMAP, and Exchange email is supported on the N900 and the client is pretty full featured, with support for HTML email. SMS is slick with threaded messages. Instant Messaging is nice, especially with live status of your contacts and their connections.

Settings

I know this is probably pretty boring, but people do like to know what kind of settings are present on the device. This walk through shows them to you and you can see they are all nicely in one place. That said, many apps have even more settings within each application.

Preloaded games

There 5 games loaded on the N900 out of the box, including Blocks, Chess, Mahjong, Marbles, and Bounce. They look pretty good on the high resolution display and show off the N900 too. I am not a huge gamer, but these looked nice and played pretty well. The Bounce game stuttered a bit at times, but remember this is still a pre-production N900.

I have posted several times about the N900 with some screenshots and video sprinkled throughout. I will soon have my definitive Nokia N900 consolidated guide page up and running, much like my E71x Starter Guide, so you will have one place to go to find my posts on the device. In the meantime, enjoy browsing through the screenshots of the device below and please feel free to ask me about any specific ones.

I use Youtube a lot and I just discovered users can automatically notify their Twitter followers when new videos are uploaded. This is possible thanks to Youtube’s AutoShare feature. It’s great because it also simplifies the process of sharing videos on Twitter directly from your phone. I’ll show you how.

Step 1. Activate Autoshare on Youtube. You can find it in Accounts – Sharing.

Step 2. Upload videos from your Nokia phone via Pixelpipe. Here’s more information about this step if you haven’t heard of it yet.

Sharing videos via Nokia N900

Step 3. That’s it! After the video is uploaded and processed, your Twitter account will automatically announce it for you. I only have one complaint. I wish Youtube didn’t add “I uploaded a Youtube video,” on the tweets. It limits the length of our titles.

Make sure to subscribe to the channel to preview videos before they get published on the blog.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

• Witter For Nokia N900 Updated to 0.1.1-9 – Twitter App Steadily Improving
• How To Install Power Twitter on Nokia N900 Web Browser
• Hahlo is an Awesome Twitter (Web) App on the Nokia N900
• Firefox Release Candidate 1 Now Available for Maemo – Nokia N900 & N810

Readers here know I have been working like a madman on my N900 coverage as I really embrace the device and forsake all others in my collection with my T-Mobile SIM living in the N900. I have also heard from you that so many articles and my coverage can be a bit overwhelming. Well, I heard you and today created The Definitive Nokia N900 Guide page that collects all of my articles and videos, along with other favorite N900 and Maemo content as it is posted. This is a living guide and I will be updating it as I post new content here and see other reviews and sites come on line related to the Nokia N900. Enjoy folks and please let me know what else you want to see tried out on the N900.

Two months past the last time I wrote something here, I realized things like:

1) these (trendy) micro-blogging thing make some people (including me) extremely accommodated and too lazy to blog;
2) I need vacations.

:-)

Well, now apart from these irrelevant personal feelings, I'd say that a bunch has happened in that meanwhile, and I will try to (slowly) get my to-be-blogged list freed ...

For now I will be sharing a some cool stuff that have recently happened in the QtWebKit land, project I am mostly spending my time on:

• Kenneth and I landed the QWebGraphicsItem (now called QGraphicsWebView) implementation. In summary class makes it possible in an easy and fast way to have native GraphicsItem based object for Web rendering. See bug 28862 ([Qt][API] Add a new QGraphicsWidget based version of the "QWebView"). It makes it possible to have all supported transformations to happen on Web content.
• Among other follow-ups to the above, bug 30162 made the "animated flip" feature a nice show case to the Demo browser.
• Girish has landed support for "windowless" plugin to QtWebKit. See progresses and details in bug 20081.
• "Holger landed his rewrite of ImageDecoderQt that significantly improves the memory footprint", said Simon Hausman is his blog :).
• Bug 27214 created a webkit-qt dedicated mailing list.
• Ongoing text drawing improvements in bug 24468.
• Bunch of API reviews, clean up and bug fixes toward Qt 4.6.

Some remarkable related stuff include:

• Qt 4.6 beta1 package preview for N900 released by QtSoftware/Nokia.
• StarLight Multitouch support for QtWebKit draft implementation also made avaliable by Nokia. See cool demostration videos in here.
• Arora browser 0.10.1 released.
  

Afonso Costa and I are working on some nice stuff embedding all the above for maemo ... so I'd say to keep tuned ..


--
Antônio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

I have heard from a couple of sources that the N900 will not be coming in October as originally scheduled. Over on the Chronicles of N900 blog they posted the response you see below from Peter Schneider, Head of Maemo Marketing. The good thing is, it sounds like they may be tweaking and refining the software of the N900 in direct response to all of the feedback those of us with pre-production units have been providing. That said, I plan to keep up the N900 coverage here. Make sure to check out The Definitive Nokia N900 Guide page with all of my latest articles and links.

In reference to your questions on the expected shipment date of the Nokia N900, let me tell you the latest information from Nokia:

The Nokia N900 is a great example of what we and the open source community have been able to achieve with Maemo software. We are working closely with open source developers and for example, at the Maemo Summit in October, we loaned 300 pre-production units to get more feedback from the community. This feedback is extremely important to us and as such we also want to provide the best user experience with the Nokia N900.

We expect it to start shipping during November 2009.

Peter Schneider Head of Maemo Marketing Nokia Corporation

The N900 is an awesome device and the more I use it, the more I like it and find it to be the mobile computer that I always wanted. It is more compact than a UMPC, has a good keyboard, is an awesome phone, has a browser that lets me access most every site I want on the go, and offers much more to come with developer support.

Hello everybody,

Due some problems with gcc-4.2 (currently available on Fremantle), we had compile PySide armel packages by ourselves, and that takes some time. Today I generated and uploaded these packages to PySide repository. Instructions to get this running can be found at PySide site at Download section.

This is a quick post to announce that I left INdT and joined Collabora.

These 3 last years at INdT was simply fantastic. Thank you (INdT) guys for everything. I wish the best for all of you guys.

Now it is time to move on. I joined Collabora today. Thank you (Collabora) guys for the good reception. Let’s rock.

I intend to write more technical posts related to the work at Collabora. (latter/in the future)

When the N900 was announced, just prior to Nokia World, Nokia specified a Q4 shipping date. Early pre-orders suggested the first retail units would be available in late October, but this is no longer the case. However we now have, direct from Nokia, some extra information: Peter Schneider (Head of Maemo Marketing) has posted in the talk.maemo.org forum that the N900 is 'expected to start shipping in November'.

Before I get into the details surrounding my participation in Maemo Summit 2009 and its aftermath, I wanted to make something clear:

As your newly-elected maemo.org council representative for the next six months, I expect input and feedback on what YOU expect.  So I’m not just begging for participation, I’m insisting on it.

The way I see it, there is a “currency” to complaints.  By that I don’t mean timeliness but rather value and cost.  Registering a complaint against an individual or organization is an implicit demand for response.  Usually the level of response is disproportionate to the original demand or request; i.e., more time and resources are spent addressing the issue than in presenting it.

So if you’re lodging a complaint, keep in mind that there is an expectation of further engagement on your part.  Dropping a little bomb into a discussion and running is trolling.  We can all do better than that.  Your bombs create craters that require filling; complainants should participate in that.  Such an effort takes many forms but it could be as simple as providing greater detail to your original issue or even nurturing it through to a conclusion of some sort.  Take ownership of your ideas!

Only a few hundred people out of perhaps thousands of potential voters bothered to indulge us in this past election.  I won’t go into the theories around that but I will say it is humbling.  It suggests to the current council we have no community-driven mandate and that it will be difficult overcoming the perception of a “government of, by and for the few”. We intend to face that challenge head-on.

One way to overcome the stigma of low voter turnout is high member follow-up.  Don’t just complain idly about issues– post clear, detailed and objective complaints or suggestions at talk.maemo.org and participate constructively in the subsequent discussion.  Try not to succumb to raw emotional impulses or appeals; stay objective and focused on your goal.  Be tolerant of minor distractions but firm in your resolve.

I am hoping you will use the Comments section of this blog, twitter, maemo.org channels or any other means you have of contacting me openly and honestly.  I will gladly respond in kind.  Together we can achieve Great Governance of maemo.org which will lead to other great things!  YOU decide what those should be.

Posted in Great Governance, Mentioning Maemo, The Write Stuff, Ways of Rocking Tagged: community council, LinkedIn, Maemo, Maemo Summit 2009, maemo.org, representation

I previously wrote about connecting your new Nokia N900 with your Windows PC using the Nokia PC Suite software. While waiting for my daughter’s soccer practice to finish and working in my car, I decided to try to figure out how to connect the N900 to my MacBook Pro instead of popping my SIM into my T-Mobile Touch Pro2. After remembering some connections from the good old days of tethering and a bit of trial and error, I figured it out and am cruising along at the same speeds I mentioned in my Windows PC article.

The steps actually turned out to be quite easy as you can see below:

1. Connect your Nokia N900 via USB cable to your Mac
2. Select Nokia PC Suite mode from the pop-up on your N900
3. Mac Network settings should appear; enter *99# as telephone number
4. Click on the Advanced button, and go to Modem tab
5. From the Model drop down, select GPRS (GSM/3G)
6. Enter epc.tmobile.com as the APN
7. Leave everything else as default and click on OK
8. Click on Connect to get connected

You should also be prompted to save these settings and go ahead and save as N900 modem or something.

I also checked the “Show modem status in menu bar” since that gives you an easy way to manage the connection right from the upper menu bar.

You should now be off and running with your Mac and Nokia N900. You can probably do this same thing via Bluetooth, but the battery life will take a major hit and you should probably use it via USB so you can charge your N900 as you surf the Internet.

One application I find works extremely well on the Nokia N97 is Qik. Qik is a streaming video application and service that started out on Nokia devices like the N95 and has moved onto some other select mobile devices. I admit I was pleasantly surprised to see it loaded by default on the pre-production Nokia N900 that I am testing out. There has already been an update pushed to the N900 (update notifications are slick) so I thought I would try it out a bit. I embedded two videos I shot with the N900 for you to check out. For some reason that second video was cut off in the end and I think I tapped the stop button a bit early.

I think it is cool how the small Nokia N900 automatically appears in the lower right corner of the Qik videos. I did nothing to toggle this on and Qik must be pulling this info from the video. I plan to try this out more over time, but am very pleased to see it supported out of the box on the Nokia N900.

I've started work on a memory mapped soprano RDF backend. Given that mobile devices use flash for their permanent storage, an RDF backend designed using primary storage algorithms should work well on maemo.

While the SPARQL implementation is "far from complete", it can already evaluate some common queries very very quickly. I have some triple matching and the ability to have multiple regex filter statements. Other filters and more complete SPARQL lanugage support should follow in time, as time permits... patches accepted etc and so on.

For those interested, see soprano-boostmmapbackend on my main sf.net page.

I want to start this post by making sure you all understand that the Nokia N900 I am testing is a pre-production model and now that we have word the N900 is delayed as Nokia refines the software many things that I am having issues with may be resolved and not even present on shipping N900 devices. I imagine that one are where many optimizations will occur is in battery life and efficient resource management. Given this disclaimer, here are some initial battery life figures to consider.

I have not yet run a test of video or music playing constantly and will try to do so over the next week. I conducted this first battery test with real life usage, which is how I use my device. I had the following up and running when I started with a full charged battery:

• Maaku with two Twitter accounts being updated every 5 minutes
• Push email with Mail for Exchange
• IMAP email with 2 accounts updating every 15 minutes
• 45 minutes of active web surfing, Mauku usage, and general device navigation (on the train)
• Active and updating home screen widgets (AP News, Facebook, Mauku)
• Connected via T-Mobile 3G and EDGE with WiFi and Bluetooth turned off

At 4 and a half hours I received the battery low warning. The battery ran out after for 4 hours, 45 minutes and the device shut down. After realizing Maaku was updating every 5 minutes, I went in and changed this to 30 minutes for automatic updating (you can always manually update). I will conduct more tests, but wanted to give you a feel for how things are going so far.

This is AAM's photo gallery of a pre-production Nokia N900. This gallery should give you a good visual overview of the Nokia N900. For each photo I have added additional commentary to highlight some of the key features of the first Maemo 5 device. Also included are a number of comparison images, with the N900 side by side against the Nokia N97, Samsung i8910, Nokia E55 and two earlier Nokia Maemo devices (N810 and 770).

Getting close now!!

It was cool to see the Maemo Summit participants playing with N900s. For those of you who still need to wait for a while (yes, my fault ...) check out the new videos from our UI team.


We are working like maniacs to get the N900 finalized. I'm so proud of the Nokia teams in India, US, and Finland working hard on Maemo 5 .... and already equally hard on Maemo 6. And I'm also very happy to see the Maemo community efforts getting cool stuff on and inside the Maemo platform.

People speculate now if N900 is a smartphone, or a computer, or a some kind of a killer of another phone --- you know. I understand that people want to compare N900 to other devices, but it's like comparing apples and oranges. Literally. N900 does many things better than any other device I know, some features could be improved, and some tricks it cannot do at all. So you better check it out and form your own opinion.

Those of you who know me know that I'm a bit of a petrol head. So for me my N900 is a bit like my Alfa Romeo. It can be almost anything -- but boring it ain't!



...and, life is simply too short to drive boring cars. But that's another story .....

Hot on the heels of the second maemo.org community council and their excellent work, the incoming third council representatives are ready to roll up their sleeves. Some vital needs identified by the growing community are wiki cleanup and expansion, increased Brainstorm activity and quickly routing newcomers to proper resources. Action plans have already been started, champions identified and progress made!

Short introduction with screenshoots about how to install new Theme for MicroB browser.

MicroB Engine supports for Firefox themes instalation. Let me show how to do it step by step:

Go first to google search page, and type "firefox theme nasa"

Select first link in google search results:

In addons.mozilla.org "Nasa Night Launch" theme page, tap on "Add to Firefox" button:

In opened window, read license agreement and click "Accept and Install":

Click "Install Now" button in "Software Installation dialog":

Wait until theme is downloading:

When theme downloaded and installed, tap on "Restart MicroB" button, and wait until

extensions window not reloaded with new theme

Here we can see result of our theme installation:

Let's check how looks our "Certificate error page"

Fonts looks a bit small, but buttons are much better:

Let's tap on "Add Exception" button:

And check certificate details:

Example about how to install and use AdBlock Plus extension with MicroB browser

There are 2 ways to install AdBlock Extension:

1) .XPI Installation with extension manager: Click here to download XPI extension

Open Bookmark view, and open "Menu"- "Open File"

Select downloaded extension in Open File dialog.

Click "Install Now"

Wait until downloading and installation is finished:

Tap on "Restart MicroB" button and wait until browser not restarted.

After restart you will see this:

Press on "Preferences" button in "Adblock Plus 1.1.1" row.

Unfortunately XUL Popup menus does not work in MicroB, and we cannot get "Filters->Add Filter Subscription" menu Item. I hope someone can fix this problem in future, or write Mobile version of AdBlockPlus extension (with big buttons, and tabs).

Right now we can subscribe to some filters in this way: Press "CTRL+N" shortcut or open "New window" via Application Menu.

Type in URLBar next url: "chrome://adblockplus/content/ui/tip_subscriptions.xul"

When page is loaded, you will see:

Select some filter list and Tap "Subscribe" button: Window should be closed automatically, and you will see again "Preferences" window with added filter:

Wait until subscription list is fully downloaded:

Press "Ok" button. Now you can open some page and see results:

Let's open "http://fishki.net" page:

Here is the page example without AdBlock Plus extension:

You see ad-banner right-top, ad-links "<<XXX>>, ***XXX...****, also big game advertising banner right-bottom:

And here is the same page with AdBlock Plus extension installed:

No banners, links, only user friendly topics ;)

I know it’s not out yet, but you can prepare by creating your own loopable wallpapers for the Nokia N900. Sometimes visuals are better than words, so I created this video to show you how to do it.

You can also watch this video in HD on Youtube. Subscribe to the channel to preview the latest videos before they get published on the blog.

Quick steps

• Get equirectangular photos
• Crop it to 3200 x 480
• Slice it into 4 images of 800×480 images
• Create a .desktop file to group the images
• Transfer the 5 files to N900/images folder

Sample .paris.desktop text file

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Background Image
Name=360 Paris
Hidden=True

X-File1=/home/user/MyDocs/.images/360paris_01.jpg
X-File2=/home/user/MyDocs/.images/360paris_02.jpg
X-File3=/home/user/MyDocs/.images/360paris_03.jpg
X-File4=/home/user/MyDocs/.images/360paris_04.jpg

X-Order=01

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

• How to Tether Nokia N900 To Mac OS X Snow Leopard Via Bluetooth
• How To View Ovi Store Content For Nokia N900 From Your Desktop Computer
• Video How to: Install .deb Files on Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 Tip: Use Backspace To Go Previous Page on Web Browser Faster

I had previously pre-ordered a Nokia N900 at Amazon.com for $582.99, but my total went over $600 because I have to pay sales tax being that Amazon HQ is here in Washington State. That is a steep price, even for an early adopter like me. I then received the pre-production N900 I have been writing about and get to use it until January. I then canceled my Amazon order because I figured I would tire of the N900 by January anyways. However, after now have spent a couple of weeks with the N900 I think it is one of the best mobile devices I have ever used and it will only get better. Thus, I started looking for another place to buy my own device.

I have used Newegg quite a bit in the past and find them to be super fast at shipping and a real pleasure to buy from. I especially like that I can avoid sales tax, which is over 9% in Washington State. I found the Nokia N900 for $559.99 with free 3-day guaranteed delivery so I just finished pre-ordering the N900 again. The good thing about the delay in shipping is that we continue to see lower prices being offered.

UPDATE: As a reader pointed out, there is a special Newegg policy when it comes to unlocked mobile phones and there is no refund allowed, only exchanges or returns for defects. That said, unless you are sure you are going to really want and keep the N900 you may want to go with Amazon or Dell for no hassle returns.

I’ve been checking the Maemo Downloads site and found this cool little applet called Simple Brightness for the Nokia N900. It adds an option to the top control panel that lets you quickly adjust the screen brightness. I made a video to show you how it looks.

You can also watch this video in HD on Youtube. Subscribe to the channel to preview the latest videos before they get published on the blog.

The applet works exactly as it is described. It is developed by Faheem Pervez and can be installed directly from the Nokia N900 by going to Maemo Downloads.

I like this a lot because it enhances the already awesome control panel on the Nokia N900. Even without this applet, users have out-of-the-box quick access to the access points, bluetooth activation, messaging status, clock, and profile.

I wonder what other options developers can add. What would you want?

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

• Video How to: Install .deb Files on Nokia N900
• New Nokia N900 Video On Photos and Sharing from Maemo
• Nokia N900 1-Minute Multitasking Demo
• Nokia N900 Demo – Share Your Life with Pixelpipe

I recently found out a few awesome tricks for git send-email that have made my life much easier, so I decided to share them here

To me the empty home screen* of the N900 looked like an invitation, so I tried to fill it up with useless stuff as quickly as possible. The home screen configuration menu offers app launchers (shortcuts), bookmarks, widgets and contacts. Let's go through all four options in detail:

• Shortcuts: I almost always have some tasks running in the background so launching an application would usually take three to four finger touches. Therefore the app launchers are extremely helpful to me.

• Bookmarks: The idea is neat but not essential. The browser starts with a list of bookmarks anyway (how convenient).

• Desktop widgets: I never believed in them, but the calendar widget might easily change this! It shows the current day and up to five upcoming events. It's a great addition to the fantastic calendar app.

• Contact shortcuts: On this device, everything focuses on integrated contact management. For once, keeping your contacts up-to-date is actually useful and not just a time sink, simply because you can use them from almost everywhere. The logical conclusion follows: you can also add shortcuts to contacts on your home screen! It will show online status, avatar and nick of the chosen contact. Nice!

So what's on my current home screen?

• Calendar widget,
• two bookmarks,
• home ip widget,
• 12 app launchers (from top left to bottom right): settings, app manager, terminal, media player, photos, chess, notes (nice app, too), e-mail (ugly icon, and potentially confusing), IM (why does this look like an e-mail icon?!), browser, address book, phone (I had to disable the "launch when rotating" feature since phone calls would stall and eventually force me into device restarts. Too buggy for now),
• two contact shortcuts.

I know - it looks as if this was a Symbian smartphone (that is, ugly and horribly crowded). But I like it this way, at least for now =)

So what's on your current home screen?

*: I still think dashboard is a better name.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-10-19 through 2009-10-25

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-10-19 through 2009-10-25

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-10-19 through 2009-10-25

Microfeed is a new D-Bus service for handling status updating and microblogging entries from various services. Just like Telepathy allows various applications to utilize instant messaging connections, Microfeed does the same for microblogging:

Microfeed is a specification and a reference implementation of client-server architecture providing access to various information sources that have a feed-type interface. Examples of those feed sources include micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Qaiku, and Laconi.ca. By utilizing Microfeed architecture, a client application can focus on user interface, while the actual feed fetching is done in the background independently. The communication between a local Microfeed server publishing information about feeds and a client application displaying that information to an user is done with the D-Bus messaging following the publisher-subscriber principle.

Microfeed service already is the power behind Henrik Hedberg's new Mauku microblogging interface for Maemo 5. Here you can see a stream of updates from both Qaiku and Twitter:

If you're implementing a tool that deals with microblogging services, please consider using microfeed for it. Advantages from this include:

• User accounts to various services need to be entered only once and can be reused
• You don't need to concern yourself with the particular features or quirks of a microblogging service API, just use the D-Bus interfaces provided by Microfeed
• Twitter? Qaiku? StatusNet? Facebook? You can let your users choose what services they want to use, without overhead of having to implement the protocols for each of them

More information from http://microfeed.org/

some people already got enthusiastic because they heard that the N900 – nokias latest Linux phone supports OpenGL. Playing games like Frets On Fire on your phone as soon as you got one was a common expectation. But this will not be possible – at least not as easy as you might think.

OpenGL does not always mean OpenGL. There is OpenGL1, OpenGL2, OpenGL3, OpenGL ES1 and last but not least OpenGL ES2. While all contain OpenGL in the name and are somewhat similiar they are not compatible with each other. Basically only GL2 is compatible with GL1 programs. As soon as the deprecated stuff will be removed from GL3, GL2 programs wont run any more. Generally GLES is also not compatible with GL – but programs written in GL2 are very similar to GLES1 and programs written in GL3 are likewise similar to GLES2. So porting between this two pairs is easily possible. The problem is that Quake3 was written with GL1 and the N900 only supports GLES2. This means that basically the whole renderer of the game has to be rewritten.

Another problem is that FretsOnFire uses SDL1.2 for input/ output handling and context creation(through pygame). But SDL1.2 uses GL1 for context creation so you cant use that. Luckily there is SDL1.3 which also supports GLES2 but it is not available on the N900 yet.

So in order to get an existing game running on the N900 one would have to rewrite the engine using the GLES2/GL3 model and replace any libraries  (SDL1.2, GLUT) with direct calls to EGL for context creation and Xlib to get the window . The port of Quake3 to Maemo shows that this is possible – but it will usually take more time than a simple recompile.

Today I was thinking...that's been a while no post.Thus here I am showing you how to use your Nokia N900 as a broadband modem with Ubuntu 9.10.It's as easy as connect it via USB and choOse the "PC Suite mode".A Wizard should appear on Ubuntu with few easy step to configure the modem with your provider (attached are the screenshots to document the process).If the Wizard does not appear simply go

Mer/Maemo.org had a table at the Florida Linux Show in Orlando this year and thinks could not have gone better.  Both I and GeneralAntilles were both there talking to people at the table.  GeneralAntilles did a great job of talking to people about not only what Maemo.org and the Nokia tablets are but what Mer is.  I would say that we had 10o to 200 people stop by our table,  some wanting to talk about a device they have or a device they want.  There was a lot of people also who had never heard of Mer or Maemo who wanted to find out what it was.  Of course we got lots of questions like Can Mer be ported to [Enter Device Name Here], a lot of the time the answer was no not yet but several people who are interested in getting Mer running on there device have stopped by #Mer ready to start working on a port to there device.

The Linux show was an over all success for both the show and for Mer in my option.  There was a lot of good speakers including my self at the show and tons of people to come listen to what we had to say.  The staff at FLS could not have been nicer.  They made sure everything we needed was taken care of.  I do have a few suggestions for them about the location of there show.  There was no good place to get food the only real option at lunch was a $10 Turkey Sandwich/Chips/ and soda.  I also never found anywhere else to get another soda.  By the end of my day I was hungry and thirsty.  In the future I hope they have better food options even if its just a guy there selling hot dogs and sodas.

I was happy to see at least one person from Maemo.org there that wasn’t involved in the Mer/Maemo Table.  Jeff Jackowski was there taking photo of the show and off my talk.  Once he gets those posted to him Flicker Account I’ll make sure to add a  link to them here.    There were lots of N8×0 devices there and lots of people commented that they had a 770 in a drawer somewhere.  I think Nokia needs to find a way to pull people who had a 770 but lost interested back into the community.  Several people said they would try to being there 770/N8×0 back to life with Mer.

The only thing I wish could have been better was my talk on What Mer is.  I’ll be posting the slides I used along with a post about my talk later.    If anyone has any questions about my time at FLS please let me know.

There was a little uproar in the open source community here in the UK when the BBC covered the Windows 7 launch. It was rightly pointed out that Apple didn’t get any coverage for Snow Leopard and Linux in general never really gets a shout at all so what’s going on?

Well in the interests of fairness one Canonical employee decided to send the reporter a netbook with a copy of Karmic (the next Ubuntu release) on it.

Here is the reporters response.

I think its pretty far off the mark. Comments such as

“But, even after some help from a Canonical advisor who came and installed a few add-ons such as Flash, I struggled to work out how I would organise photos, music and video with this system.”

are a little off the mark. Linux (not just Ubuntu) has a plethora of applications that can manage photos (oh how I love f-spot), music and videos so I’m not sure where the confusion comes from. I attach my USB camera or phone and I get offered the chance to import to f-spot, I open a video file and equally its easy to play it. As for flash, go to a flash based site and you get presented with an option to install not just flash from Adobe but other free alternatives.

Not wanting to get personal, as the reporter Rory Cellan-Jones may not be up-to-date with his market analysis but comments like:

“Risking another pasting from its supporters, I’ll predict that Ubuntu will remain a very niche product – but it’s Google’s Android which could bring open-source to the mass consumer market.”

show a little ignorance. Open source on the cell phone is a little different from the desktop. Android on anything but a cell phone platform is like trying to make a nun get drunk with beer whilst smoking crack (recent small bit of ammo).

The phone war will be fought with Nokia’s Maemo (but not the current generation) and Google, the desktop (which he was testing) will be fought with Google (Chrome OS), Windows 7 and some Linux flavour.

I look forward to an unbiased, educated analysis of the technical market by the main-stream media but I don’t hold my breath.

I know a few of you may be sick of hearing about the Nokia N900, but it is the hottest Nokia device at the moment and I will be writing much more about it this week. I just watched a great video overview of the N900 at Wired and was pleased to see that they understand what the device really is and that is much more than a smartphone. Spend a couple minutes checking out the video and stay tuned for more tips & tricks of the N900.

When I was at Maemo Summit, I kept hearing the terms ‘Maemo Extras’ and ‘Extras Testing.’ As a new user to the OS, I was totally clueless! I did some digging and found out these were repositories or places where applications from the community can be found. I’ll share with you what I learned and how you can use it when you get the Nokia N900.

Here goes the release log:

Brief summary of changes since 0.4.2:

- Provide a gstreamer-based MediaRenderer plugin. This is mostly code stolen (
  and heavily adapted) from gupnp-media-renderer except that it doesn't depend
  on libowl-av and/or gtk+.
- More ease for MediaServer implementors.
- Better error handling.
- Make sure no message is suppressed until we know what level of console output
  user wants.
- Make use of vala's async support to simplify code quite a bit.
- Plugins should load xml files from source tree when built with
  '--enable-uninstalled' configure flag.
- Build with no optimizations in debug mode.
- Use closure table to speed up object lookup and deletion.
- Add build option for SQL debugging.
- Workaround a crasher bug (#3774) in sqlite 3.6.12.
- Use vala's static client D-Bus syntax.
- Early ignorance of disabled plugins. This not only speeds-up startup a bit but
  also rids us of redundant debug messages.
- MediaExport:
  - Nicely handle unavailability of gstreamer's playbin(2) element.
  - Fix a potential crasher.
- Tracker:
  - Use multidimensional arrays to deal with search results. This combined with
    static client D-Bus syntax gives us quite a speed boost.
  - Handle item creation error.
- External:
  - Allow applications to provide custom thumbnails for items.
  - Support pixel-aspect-ratio properties.
  - All D-Bus operations are now done asynchronously.
  - Make use of plugin icon if provided.
  - Move magic string substitution to core so other plugins can benefit from it.
- Lots of other improvements and bug fixes.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require and adapt to libgee >= 0.5.
- Require and adapt to valac >= 0.7.8.

Bugs fixed in this release:

597276 - Rygel crash on startup
587649 - thumbnails not published for external media servers
589959 - External plugin should query media servers on demand
598005 - unable to load media-tracker plugin

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg 
Thijs Vermeir 

Download source tarball from here.

I got caught in a nasty traffic jam tonight just a few miles from home.

There was a road that I've never been down - windy country lanes, right general direction...

I grin and whip out my N900 and give it to my wife to navigate us - just the ticket?

No.

An hour later we've been lost several times, argued and are generally very annoyed and unhappy. My wife thinks that *I* think she's stupid 'cos she can't use a map application. She hates that. I hate that.

The maps UI sucks. It is unusable to a novice. The GPS seems to update randomly every 10 mins or so. It blocks the screen with messages. It tries to connect to GPRS when there's no signal (and clearly no need). Mostly it just completely fails to meet its purpose.

As we hit a road we recognised I realised that I was so pissed off with this experience that if I were a consumer who'd paid retail for this device I would want my money back - and as someone who has breathed Maemo for almost a year now, that makes me very, very sad.

If you have been reading my Nokia N900 posts, then you may be wondering how I am getting all of these additional applications on the N900 since the Ovi Store is not yet open for business. If you have used one of the older Maemo Nseries Internet Tablets then you are familiar with using the Application Manager to access repositories. There are various repositories and I some are highly experimental where “normal” users probably shouldn’t be dwelling too much. It seems that Mark over at The Nokia Blog and I are on the same page and he already assembled a great post on Maemo repositories on the N900 so I won’t repeat all that he wrote here with my own post and recommend you head over there to see how to access repositories.

I was very pleased to see that Nokia has integrated an automatic notification system through the Application Manager so that you receive a yellow notification in the upper notification area when updates to applications you installed are present. You then tap the notification and walk through the update wizard to install the program update.

I have added all the repositories I can find with N900 applications and am currently testing out the following 3rd party applications:

• Almost TI Graphing Calculator
• AP News desktop widget
• Bounce Evolution game
• Classic Gaming Wallpapers
• DialCentral (Google Voice application)
• Documents To Go
• Facebook Widget and Photo Uploader
• FBReader
• FMRadio (enables the FM radio hardware installed in the N900)
• Foreca Weather
• gPodder podcatcher
• Hermes
• Maelstrom game (Asteroids clone)
• Maemo WordPy
• Mauku and Mauku widget
• Mplayer
• mSaber
• Password Safe
• Personal Photo Frame
• Pixelpipe
• Qik
• SolarWolf game
• Plugins (Windows Live for IM, Connection Switcher, Evernote Sharing, Load-applet, Simple Brightness applet)

There are many more apps, especially those for the serious geek such as SSH, Telnet, game emulators, and many more. A large number of these are in early development so make sure you take care when loading up a ton of apps. So far, I have yet to experience any issues with apps I have loaded and enjoy checking the list every couple of days to see what these amazing Maemo developers have added. So far, all of these apps are free too.

Firefox for Mobile Handson with Nokia's N900: http://www.wired.com/gadgetl... October 27 from Twitter - Comment - Like

Until this week I was not familiar with qmake and CMake because I am a fairly satisfied user of autotools. I have not forgotten how strange it was when I first learned it, when there was no decent documentation, but things are much better now. I feel at home with it and I like how other systems and distros expect the standard “configure;make all install” steps. I am definitely biased against the use of other build systems.

Back in March, when Fremantle SDK was released, I had ported Frets on Fire to it. Subsequent discussion made it clear that modifications were required to actually make it run on the device. I created a stripped down version which could run without the OpenGL code. This made it suitable for n900 (and even n810). But due to lack of actual device, I couldn't test it.

Fast forward 7 months. Now I have access to actual n900, so recently I went back to the FoF code. After couple weeks of getting re-acquainted with the code, I have it satisfactorily running on the n900.

Frets-On-Fire code primarily has three parts -

• playing the song (loading song, computing notes, etc. uses pygame for audio),
  
• showing the visuals (PyOpenGL+pygame code) and
  
• handling input.
  

All these components are pretty involved and hard to rewrite - especially so with the audio part (I hardly have any experience in musical notes and midi files). So my priority was to get almost all of the audio code as it is. It was easy to tweak the input code - to make it suite the n900 keyboard. I bypassed the visual part completely - replaced OpenGL with simple pygame sprites. (You may get disappointed by the stark looks).

I have created a project on googlecode to host the code - maemofof. It shows all the changes I had to make, starting from the base Frets-on-Fire code from v1.3.110.

The next step is to package it nicely and push to extras-devel. There are few problems with packaging though.

I couldn't get ogg files to play through pygame. I installed the ogg-support package, but for pygame/sdl to work with it, something more is required - which wouldn't install due to broken dependencies (libsdl-mixeroggwav1.2-dev). So for now I converted all ogg files to wav. But the wav files are huge (~80MB if a single song is included as sample). That makes them inconvenient to package and they also take a long time to load (~90 seconds).

But good news is, the ball got rolling again. I hope to make some progress in coming days. If you have any suggestions, feel free to chime in comments.

Nokia’s ‘Online as it Happens‘ campaign has inspired a series of mockumercials entitled “Offline as it Happens”. In these short films the main character, John, finds himself caught in a set of unfortunate and embarrassing circumstances as he leads a life “Offline as it Happens”. Obviously, John could have easily avoided any of these situations had he been connected with the new N900.

Speaking of the N900, how would you like to trial one of them from our lovely friends at WOM World? All you have to do is spot me (PseudoFinn) in the N900  ad below and be the first to leave a comment to tell me the time stamp when I first appear.

Two of the videos have been released today, the next video will be out there tomorrow- and a final video in this series will air at a date yet to be determined.

Good luck!

PS- If you’re not familiar with my grizzly mug, you’ll have to work just a little more. A quick trip to http://images.google.com might be in order- the third page (currently) perhaps being the most helpful. ;-)

Related Posts

• First User N900 Meetup In San Francisco October 29th
• What Do You Love About Your N900?
• DFW Nokia N900 Meetup On November 25
• Maemo Will Soon Power The Nseries
• How To Update Your N900’s Firmware

Latinoware was a nice conference held in the south of the country last week, from the 22nd to the 24th of October. It was a really nice conference and we had a lot of KDE exposure there as we had our logo on the main website of the conference, a booth and also a lot of talks KDE/Qt related.

Starting from today, I will be officially starting my work as maemo.org distmaster. Nokia has gracefully sponsored this position for the community at the request of the maemo.org community council.

Firefox for Mobile Great addons meetup last night! Get in on the action & develop 4 the first browser to support mobile addons! Read more: http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... October 28 from Twitter - Comment - Like

Last few weeks I have been working on the new thumbnail infrastructure for future Maemo products.

Last year I made a specification for requesting thumbnails over D-Bus. Afterward I made a quick prototype and replaced the hildon-thumbnailer library of Maemo with it. This prototype will be deployed on the standard N900 image. It’s too late to replace Fremantle’s thumbnailer with the new stuff. It takes time to properly test it.

While I was developing both the specification and the prototype XFCE developer Jannis Pohlmann contacted me about rewriting my prototype for use in the XFCE project. Tumbler was born.

The nice people at Nokia are more interested in working with upstream projects instead of maintaining own products separately, so I shifted my focus from hildon-thumbnail to contributing to Jannis’ Tumbler project.

We realized that we needed different kinds of schedulers so while Jannis was developing Tumbler I kindly asked to consider abstracting scheduling a bit. Tumbler now has two schedulers. The background one sets I/O and scheduler priorities to IDLE and processes its thumbnail tasks in FIFO order. The foreground uses LIFO and will instead of grouping Ready signals together, emit them immediately after each single thumbnail is finished. Default is of course foreground.

We also realized that thumbnail flavors are going to be platform specific. So we added some support for this in the DBus APIs that we further fine tuned and versioned.

Congratulations and appreciation to Jannis who made Tumbler’s code and design really nice. Also thanks a lot for constructively considering our requirements and helping adapting Tumbler’s code to cope with them.

I know you for example worked one long night on this stuff, so I officially owe you a few beers and/or cocktails next conference.

How about FOSDEM?

In my talk in the Maemo Summit 09 I mentioned a way to follow the Hildon HIG in what comes to HildonAppMenu’s items’ availability.
As written on it, the HildonAppMenu shouldn’t have insensitive items. Items that are supposed to be dimmed, should be hidden instead.

Now if you’re porting an exiting GTK+ application, these will likely use GtkActions as they are a great way not to repeat yourself while defining and sharing actions for widgets.

So, a nice way to keep using GtkActions while not showing the insensitive menu items is to hide these using a callback triggered by the “show” signal.

Here’s the callback:

static void
update_menu_items_visibility_cb (GtkWidget *menu, gpointer data)
{
    GList *items = hildon_app_menu_get_items (HILDON_APP_MENU (menu));
    for (; items != NULL; items = g_list_next (items))
    {
        GtkWidget *item = GTK_WIDGET (items->data);
        gboolean item_sensitive = TRUE;
        g_object_get (G_OBJECT (item), "sensitive", &item_sensitive, NULL);
        if (item_sensitive)
            gtk_widget_show (item);
        else
            gtk_widget_hide (item);
     }
}

Which should be connected this way:

g_signal_connect (G_OBJECT (menu),
                         "show",
                         G_CALLBACK (update_menu_items_visibility_cb),
                         NULL);

Hope it’s useful to you!

Not too long ago, Nokia announced it would be sponsoring N900 Meetups at its Flagship stores, and while that’s all good and well, there are now hundreds of Maemo community members, myself included, with preview devices, and they should all be able to host their own N900 Meetup. I know the folks at Nokia are working out a way to help these people setup their meetups, but our friends Matthew Bennett and Tnkgrl have taken things into their own hands. With the help of WOM World, they’ll be hosting an N900 Meetup in San Francisco on October 29th (that’s tomorrow)!

The meetup is taking place at Schroeder’s Cafe on Front St from 630p-9p, and will have a few N900 devices on hand for you to ogle and fondle and whatnot. Have you started planning your own meetup? Let us know about it and we’ll be glad to post the information to help get as many folks as possible to show up. We’ll also be planning our own DFW meetup shortly, so keep an eye out for that.

View Larger Map

Related Posts

• Catch Me Offline As It Happens To Trial An N900
• DFW Nokia N900 Meetup On November 25
• Nokia N900 Meetups Taking Place Soon
• Dell Now Shipping N900 Pre-Orders
• What Do You Love About Your N900?

Installing packages and applications on n900 from extras-devel or extras-testing result most of the time on a nice error : ‘Not enougth space on device’. This happen most of the time because you have installed package which aren’t yet optified.

Found this packages isn’t easy. This is why i ve made this little script which is not optimal. It takes a long time to process all packages and files.

moptinagi.py

import commands
import os
import hildon
import gtk
 
details = ''
less = ''
 
r = commands.getoutput("/usr/bin/dpkg --get-selections")
packages = r.rsplit('\n')
for index,package in enumerate(packages):
  print 'Processing packages ',index,' on ',len(packages)
  #print package.split('\t')
  s = package.split('\t')
  if s[(len(s)-1)] == 'install':
    pkg_files = commands.getoutput("/usr/bin/dpkg -L "+s[0]).split('\n')
    pkg_size = 0
    for pkg_file in pkg_files:  
      #pkg_size = 0
      if ('/opt' not in pkg_file) or ('/home' not in pkg_file):
        try: 
          st = os.stat(pkg_file)
          if st.st_blocks > 0:
            details = details + '\n'+  s[0]+':'+pkg_file+':'+str(st.st_size/1024)+'Kb'
            pkg_size = pkg_size + st.st_size
        except:
          pass
    less = less + '\n' + s[0] + ' : '+str(pkg_size/1024)+'Kb'
 
print less
w = hildon.Window()
p = hildon.PannableArea()
t = hildon.TextView()
 
p.add(t)
w.add(p)
total = less+'\n\n\n'+details
t.get_buffer().set_text(total)
w.show_all()
 
gtk.main()

A little screenshot :

Just to be clear, i didn’t blame any developpers to not optify their packages. I understand why Nokia keep root fs on a fast nand. But a so small one is a real pain for everyone, users and developpers. I just hope that apps and libs will be optify in a short delay.

Firefox for Mobile N900 Meetup in SF tomorrow night, Oct. 29: http://nseriesus.com/n900-me... October 28 from Twitter - Comment - Like

Are you a lucky N900 owner ? Want to help the Maemo Community ? This call is for you.

In the next Saturday(Oct 31) from 2pm till 7pm(UTC/GMT) we’ll host a testing marathon at #maemo-testing@Freenode, in order to make more awesome community applications available to end users. This marathon will be also a test for our community QA process, we want to test it and improve it before the N900 hits the shelves.
If you’re a developer, make sure your applications are in good shape before the testing marathon.

The information above was bit confusing for you ? Here’s a small FAQ:

What is a testing marathon ?

Basically is a ‘testing party’, where people together test software, report bugs, talk/send feedback to developers  in order to improve our community applications.

Do I need to be a developer to take part of the marathon ?

No, even if you can’t judge all the criteria in the QA checklist, you’re more than welcome, every small help has big value for us.

Do I need to be in the irc channel during the entire marathon ?

No, you can join/leave at anytime, but it’s recommendable to be in the channel at the beginning of the marathon, if you need some help or have some doubts.

I can’t attend the marathon, can I help in some way ?

Of course, you can test and evaluate applications at any time. Try to follow our community QA process and checklist and vote the packages under: http://maemo.org/packages/repository/qa/fremantle_extras-testing/

Still have doubts, want to discuss something ?

Join the discussion here.

Let's spread this piece of news:Quim just sent this e-mail, please participate and test apps!It'll be fun! :)Forwarding this email from the maemo community council to Summit Participants with an N900. Please re-forward to anybody you know using the N900.http://maemo.org/downloads/Maemo5has currently 22 applications ready for end users.http://maemo.org/packages/repository/qa/

Nokia Online/Offline as it Happens Ads N900 viral ads have been showing up in YouTube. I can’t really figure out where they are coming from and who the official poster is so let me know if you find the main site that has them or if you find new ones so I can add them to this blog entry. Anyway, here they are, in HD. They are all well made, funny, and definitely highlights the N900.

Wedding Catastrophe

Fishing

Tickets

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

Ten years ago I swore I would never create a blog just to abandon it a while later, like everybody else. And up to now I’d held my oath.

This is only here because Jaffa suggested I should. Good for my Karma, he says.  Enough banter on t.m.o, time to leave a trace, etc.

Well, we’ll see. At the very least I’ll do a mini-series about my pet peeve, based on my presentation at last year’s Maemo Summit in Berlin (couldn’t attend this year, sadly).

In between the cracks, of course.

After that… well, maybe I’ll have an N900 then, and as Maemo will be evolving towards Qt, PyQt should be the next natural thing…

• Note : in case you wandered in here by accident and are wondering what this gibberish is all about, the aptly-named About page explains all.

Hello everybody.

Marko Mattila has published nice overview of Maemo Image Editor project which is part of Maemo 6 development, opened under Qt-GPLv3-LGPLv2.1 licensing triplet at Maemo Summit 2009. Maemo Image Editor is not an editor application in itself, it is set of libraries to provide basis for mobile image processing. History of editing is preserved and crash recovery is provided as part of image editing infrastructure. The project also aims to allow manipulations of huge images in memory constrained environments, like N900 and future devices.

On October 31st, developers, beta testers, and anyone lucky enough to have a pre-production Nokia N900 are doing a test marathon of applications before the mobile computer hits the shelves. The Maemo community will host the event from 2-7PM to make more apps available for end users. Applications that pass the tests will appear on Maemo Extras.

Photo by Michael Dawes

At publish time, there are 22 applications made by the community ready for end users. According to a recent email sent to Maemo Summit participants, there are 74 applications waiting for evaluation. With the help of testers, the marathon will attempt to have 50, 75, or even 100 stable applications from the community by sales start. The Nokia N900 is planned to hit retailers this November. Have you pre-ordered your N900 yet?

If you are interested in participating with the test marathon, join the discussion over at maemo.org.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

• Nokia N900 Ads Take Over Gizmodo
• Watch Out for BarrioSquare – A Foursquare App for Nokia N900
• App: Camkeyd for Nokia N900 – Shortcut to Dashboard Using Camera Button
• How to Tether Nokia N900 To Mac OS X Snow Leopard Via Bluetooth

I noticed that there are many packages which turn a maemo device into a remote control. Unfortunately, the MythTV ones I saw either didn't install or were not what I was looking for. Thus clawmotia was born yesterday.


I'm using edje for the interface and qedje to actually create the UI. The program logic uses Qt to talk to a MythTV server and send the commands to it. This relies on knowing there your server is, and what client you want to control which are both passed in as environment variables. Really simple stuff, but it works well.

You'll need the Web interface on the MythTV server machine too. The upshot is that you only need a wifi connection and you can control any MythTV client you want. No bluetooth or IR dongles needed.

As you can see, there are some nasty graphical artifacts on the buttons which I'm not sure if its the evas engine or something to do with qedje. The black parts on the buttons are not there on the desktop.

As it uses edje, you can create different themes and layouts, compile the edje on your desktop machine and just scp it to the device to change the layout and button functionality. Including cute little slide in and out panels for the more rarely used controls. Hopefully I can convince somebody with more artistic ability than me to do just that. Source will be released in the next few days.

Yesterday, Philip briefly wrote about Tumbler, the new D-Bus thumbnailing service that is going to be used on Xfce 4.8 and Maemo 6. Today, I'd like to explain how to use this service in client applications. Depending on the application type, the usage varies a little, so I'll focus on the basics here. I'll discuss some tricks at the end of this post though. What I'm not going to do is to talk about how to connect to D-Bus, how to call methods on D-Bus objects and so on. See the D-Bus tutorial or toolkit-specific documentation for more information about that.

Firefox for Mobile WIRED News says: "Fennec fits everything you love about Firefox in your pocket": http://www.webmonkey.com/blog... October 29 from Twitter - Comment - Like

I am not a developer, just an avid user, so I can’t talk from hands-on experience with developing software for mobile platforms, but found this very interesting article that compared several areas of these two Linux-based operating system. It was encouraging to hear that Nokia has kept Maemo fairly open and appears to offer more for the developer. Google Android devices are HOT right now with devices like the Motorola DROID and HTC Hero, but I hope that this type of excitement is generated for the N900 and Maemo. It is a tougher sell in the US where the N900 will cost you $550+, but if T-Mobile can offer this subsidized for half that price then we may see more enthusiasm.

The Nokia N900 is an awesome device that I find myself using more and more as I spend more time with it and I can’t wait for my own personal device to get here in November.

…and in my opinion it then becomes the iPhone killer.

See if you can spot it, and figure out why.

What's right with this picture?

Enter guesses or arguments in the Comments section!

Posted in Delivering Quality, Mentioning Maemo, Ways of Rocking Tagged: call button, iPhone, LinkedIn, N900, Nokia

The Nokia NYC flagship store is hosting a Nokia N900 meetup and I’ll be liveblogging it… using the Nokia N900. I’ll share live updates and photos while I meet with Nokia reps and fans at the event. It will be different from my previous liveblog because I will not be using a laptop for updates. Come back to this page when the meetup starts at 7:30PM Eastern, October 30th and see if the Nokia N900 can handle the task.

This week Nokia held official N900 meetups around the world, including at the Chicago and New York Flagship stores. Unfortunately, there is no Flagship store here in the Seattle area so I was unable to attend, but I am going to bring a meetup to you here in Western Washington. Are you enjoying all my coverage of the Nokia N900? Would you like to touch and feel the device yourself? How about seeing a lineup of the Nokia N800 and N810, along with a few other Nokia devices like the N97, N96, N93, N81 8GB? Thanks to the folks at Nokia WOM World we are having a local meetup in Tacoma, Washington at the Round Table Pizza just off of I-5 between Tacoma and Lakewood on Friday, 6 November between 6:30 and 9:00 pm. I’ll give a demo of the N900 on a projector using the TV-out functionality on the device and then let people ask questions and enjoy the evening getting hands-on time with the device.

There was a similar grass-roots effort meetup held in San Francisco last night and hopefully we will see more of these around the country. The N900 really is a fantastic device and I like this eval unit so much I pre-ordered my own for $550 and can’t wait for the official launch when developers have had even more time to create applications and refine the experience.

FYI, Nokia is supporting the event so I will be having pizza and soda provided in the meeting room at the restaurant. Sorry, I’ve decided to skip the beer this time and keep this an alcohol-free venue so I can focus on sharing my devices and experiences rather than worrying about people drinking too much and testing the durability of my devices;) If you are planning to come to this local Tacoma-area meetup, please visit the Nokia Experts Facebook Group site and RSVP so I can figure out how many people may show up. If we get a crazy response we may have to limit attendees (there is room for 30), but we’ll see how much interest we have in the Tacoma area. I plan to use this Group to post photos of the event and share other details so please become a Nokia Experts Facebook Fan.

Back in Helsinki after attending last week, sponsored by GNOME Foundation, to the Encuentro Linux 2009 in Valparaiso, Chile. My original plan was to talk about Tracker in the dedicated GNOME Day; but from the very first day it was clear that the people was very curious about maemo5 and specially the n900, so i decided to talk more about this. I recognize that makes me feel very proud to show an N900 and hear a WOW and see amazed faces.

So, the first talk (in an informal event between organizers and speakers) was about the N900 and some Q&A about it and maemo5. The people were mainly linux enthusiast, so lots of good questions about how to develop on it and the technology involved.

The first of the official talks (during the GNOME day) was about maemo5, what is it, relation with the desktop and how to contribute. I explained also one of the coolest things in maemo (IMHO): all the extras-devel/extras-testing/extras process. Your pet-application (or not so pet when you spend hours and hours on it) can easily reach a lot of users in few clicks. Well, few clicks on your side, and few more on the community side.

The second and last talk was about Tracker. The usual introduction to the basic concepts, and a couple of demos. I was happy to show that using tracker you can get “The last blog post of the user who sent me this song”. Sounds like a lab example, but it mixes RSS, contacts, files and activity, and you can easily see a plugin in totem using this.

About the event itself, the audience was more on the university side of life and people using free software in their companies/work; so a lot of curiosity for new projects and general conversation about open source. There were some people looking for a place to contribute in GNOME; I gave them few hints how to do it via tracker (e.g. writing plugins to Eye of GNOME), so let see if we get fresh blood in the community.

Finally, i want to say thanks to the organizers there, from Encuentro Linux and GNOME Day. They made everything easy, treated me really great, showed me a little bit of Chile and made me feel really warmly welcome. Thanks, guys!

So, let’s get this started. This first series will consist in a write-up of the talk I gave last year at the very first Maemo Summit in Berlin.

Firefox for Mobile Iteration 0 - http://stechz.com/2009... October 30 from Benjamin Stover's Blog - Comment - Like

Quim recently started a new thread on Talk.m.o about a tentative meeting for UX experts and Code writers in Barcelona in December (4th to 6th).Follow the thread and, if you are into Maemo as a UX enthusiast or Code writer, do register your interest in there.There is some budget for it and Quim is aiming at gathering around 50 people to it.Please note that nothing is confirmed yet.Based on the

Clawmotia, an edje MythTV remote control.
Sources hot off the presses: clawmotia-0.0.1. You'll also notice the diablo binary for clawmotia on there so you don't need a scratchbox to get going. I put the clawmotia.edj up too so you don't even need to compile that if you don't wanna.

Firefox for Mobile Taking a page from DF - http://daringfireball.net/ October 31 from Benjamin Stover's Blog - Comment - Like Howard liked this

Recently I started hacking on a memory mapped, multi_index soprano backend. While adding triples, and using listStatements() should work fine, implementing SPARQL is making for interesting times.