A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-02-23 through 2009-03-01

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-02-23 through 2009-03-01

Maemo 5 alpha SDK has arrivied, and with it a new UI framework! Reading the overview, it is sure that it won’t be exactly how new maemo based devices UI will look like, but it gives and idea. And it is definitely more finger friendly!!

Congratulations to the Maemo team!!

 

 

We announce together with Maemo 5 fremantle SDK alpha Qt4.5 for Fremantle. Qt release is based on Qt4.5 release candidate 1. In this version we have all major functionality of Qt including OpenGL-ES2, Webkit with and Mysql support.We have maemo Hildon compatibility including Hildon menus, Hildon style support, Hildon input menu support. The release includes support for both Arm and x86 targets. The release is still alpha level and wish all comments, suggestions and bug reports welcome.

You can read more from maemo Qt 4 pages  . At this moment, the debian packages are in temporary repository that you get in  use including following line In your /etc/apt/sources.list. It will be in maemo extras-devel as soon than maemo.org is getting repository up.

deb http://qt4.garage.maemo.org/ fremantle extras 

The picture is Arora browser running under scratchbox x86 target. Arora browser is Qt application using Webkit engine and it is build with our Qt release but it is not part of the Qt package. In my other blog entry you can see Qt OpenGL-ES2.0 application in Beagleboard. To run OpenGL-ES2.0 applications you need to have Imagination OpenGL-ES2.0 emulation library installed.

Happy hacking with maemo Qt

 

 

If you haven’t seen it, check out the spec for the latest iteration of the Maemo user interface. It’s pretty slick and I can’t wait to install the new SDK so I can give it a spin!

If you haven’t seen it, check out the spec for the latest iteration of the Maemo user interface. It’s pretty slick and I can’t wait to install the new SDK so I can give it a spin!

If you haven’t seen it, check out the spec for the latest iteration of the Maemo user interface. It’s pretty slick and I can’t wait to install the new SDK so I can give it a spin!

After the nominations were opened for the next Maemo Community Council, I wasn’t completely sure that I’d jump back into the mix. While I’ve had an extremely rewarding time being a part of the Council, these things — as you may know — have a tendency of becoming more than originally expected. To explain further, I must divulge a little personal information.

As an long-time open source advocate, I am very passionate about the state of open and free software (er…culture?) development and being a part of making open source more of a reality in mainstream computing…and life. This being said, I tend to obsess over the few communities that I’m still a part of (admittedly, this list is much shorter than it has been in years past). So, while being a member of the Council has been an amazing experience, it has also eaten up a lot of time and energy.

But, wouldn’t you know it? In the midst of my pondering and soul searching over the possibilities of the next Council election, one of the maemo.org staff and friend, Dave Neary, asked me if I’d allow him to nominate me… I was more than flattered; needless to say, I felt honored.

Likewise, while I began to see others’ nominations roll in on the maemo-community mailing list, I felt myself getting very excited — not excited over the aspect of actually being a Council member, but excited about just being a community member. It is amazing that so many people will offer their time and energy (the same time and energy that I give) free of charge, just from a sense of improving something that we believe in.

So, because of my love for the Maemo community — a little about what it is for, but mostly for those who fill its ranks — I accepted Dave’s nomination and here I am… Back in the mix.

After the nominations were opened for the next Maemo Community Council, I wasn’t completely sure that I’d jump back into the mix. While I’ve had an extremely rewarding time being a part of the Council, these things — as you may know — have a tendency of becoming more than originally expected. To explain further, I must divulge a little personal information.

As an long-time open source advocate, I am very passionate about the state of open and free software (er…culture?) development and being a part of making open source more of a reality in mainstream computing…and life. This being said, I tend to obsess over the few communities that I’m still a part of (admittedly, this list is much shorter than it has been in years past). So, while being a member of the Council has been an amazing experience, it has also eaten up a lot of time and energy.

But, wouldn’t you know it? In the midst of my pondering and soul searching over the possibilities of the next Council election, one of the maemo.org staff and friend, Dave Neary, asked me if I’d allow him to nominate me… I was more than flattered; needless to say, I felt honored.

Likewise, while I began to see others’ nominations roll in on the maemo-community mailing list, I felt myself getting very excited — not excited over the aspect of actually being a Council member, but excited about just being a community member. It is amazing that so many people will offer their time and energy (the same time and energy that I give) free of charge, just from a sense of improving something that we believe in.

So, because of my love for the Maemo community — a little about what it is for, but mostly for those who fill its ranks — I accepted Dave’s nomination and here I am… Back in the mix.

After the nominations were opened for the next Maemo Community Council, I wasn’t completely sure that I’d jump back into the mix. While I’ve had an extremely rewarding time being a part of the Council, these things — as you may know — have a tendency of becoming more than originally expected. To explain further, I must divulge a little personal information.

As an long-time open source advocate, I am very passionate about the state of open and free software (er…culture?) development and being a part of making open source more of a reality in mainstream computing…and life. This being said, I tend to obsess over the few communities that I’m still a part of (admittedly, this list is much shorter than it has been in years past). So, while being a member of the Council has been an amazing experience, it has also eaten up a lot of time and energy.

But, wouldn’t you know it? In the midst of my pondering and soul searching over the possibilities of the next Council election, one of the maemo.org staff and friend, Dave Neary, asked me if I’d allow him to nominate me… I was more than flattered; needless to say, I felt honored.

Likewise, while I began to see others’ nominations roll in on the maemo-community mailing list, I felt myself getting very excited — not excited over the aspect of actually being a Council member, but excited about just being a community member. It is amazing that so many people will offer their time and energy (the same time and energy that I give) free of charge, just from a sense of improving something that we believe in.

So, because of my love for the Maemo community — a little about what it is for, but mostly for those who fill its ranks — I accepted Dave’s nomination and here I am… Back in the mix.

 

The second release of BlueMaemo is out now and for the first time available on the maemo extras repository .

This release features the much requested reconnection feature, among others small fixes/improvements.

Here is a small changelog:

* Added ability to map the space key in the profiles;
* Added method to change bluetooth adapter mode;
* N810 Hardware keyboard support while in mouse profile;
* Major code refactoring - Separated all profiles;
* Added reconnect functionality;
* Added auto-connect functionality (auto-connect BlueMaemo to a device on startup, without user intervention).

Many thanks for everybody that reported bugs, made suggestions and filled features requests, especially for Qwerty12 (Faheem Pervez) and  Mgedmin (Marius Gedminas) for the packaging advices and tips.

BlueMaemo V0.2 is available here.

A year has already passed since the last edition of Bossa Conference and this years edition will happen in only a few days from now. Woohooo! I just can't wait for it to start.

Following the tendency of the previous editions, this year agenda brings a mix of many different subjects around the development of FOSS for mobile devices, from the basic platform components to the bling brought by the modern application development frameworks. Highlights: Kernel, Connectivity, Python, Qt, Webkit, Security, Enlightenment, Licensing, UI Design and Maemo.

Regarding Maemo, we'll have three presentations about it. Kate Alhola will give us a glimpse of the features of Freemantle with some live demos. Raul Herbster will talk about development for Maemo using the ESBox and Pluthon plugins for Eclipse. Definitely cool stuff. And finally, myself, for the first time presenting in Bossa Conference.

I will be wearing my hat as a member of the Maemo Community Council and my talk will focus on the Maemo Community, answering some questions such as: Who forms the community? What is it for? Why do we need the community? How to get involved? This is also the first time I'm presenting something on a non-technical subject and I hope to do it well.

I'm also trying to get some colleagues involved in the organization this year so we can get the presentations recorded on video and hopefully uploaded to the openBossa channel on youtube. Rock on!

As we all know, the Fremantle Alpha SDK has been released, and it features (at least parts of) the new UI. I downloaded the SDK and tried running gPodder inside it, and wanted to show you some pictures so you get an idea how an unmodified Maemo 4 UI looks on Fremantle:

Some other remarks: It seems that images have inverted color. I don't know if this is just a bug or if it's intended to be. Also, Xephyr sometimes crashes, which seems to be related to Clutter, although I do not really know ;) I expecially like how they managed to move the buttons of GTK Dialogs to the right side and stack them. This is a very good decision for the widescreen display, and it also means that one dialog in gPodder fits the screen nicely in Fremantle now that did not (and still does not - my fault ;) on Maemo 4.

See all screenshots at gPodder on Fremantle Alpha SDK on Flickr

Couple days ago I played Frets on Fire (FoF) for the first time. I was totally hooked on to it. After going through its hilarious tutorial and starting with a pathetic performance, I managed to score 37K points with 87% accuracy on the "Defy the Machine" song a few moments ago.

Couple days ago I played Frets on Fire (FoF) for the first time. I was totally hooked on to it. After going through its hilarious tutorial and starting with a pathetic performance, I managed to score 37K points with 87% accuracy on the "Defy the Machine" song a few moments ago.

I've been spreading the news here and there for few days now but it’s time to make it official.

After quitting Novell I decided to take the plunge and try something I've been long waiting for… – go self-employed and start own company. New Wild is just that — a young company offering services related to mobile software, web and unix(ish) engineering. Additionally (and that’s new) it’s also about cocoa — both mobile (iPhone) and desktop.

One part of what I'm planning to do at New Wild is pushing my own software projects — first of which I hope to be announcing quite soon. Another part is helping others to make their ideas happen. That’s more commonly known as contracting & consulting.

The decision to start New Wild is not something that came out of a profound business analysis and huge preparations. Quite the contrary — like every important decision it came out of an impulse. The very basic promise behind New Wild is that after spending the last several years working at big companies I know how to provide some real value to people who want to make their software ideas happen.

I'm open for business!

The deadline for submit organization applications for Google Summer of Code is approaching, so is time to move on. We already have a good number of possible mentors, but will be awesome if a few more appear, it will increase the chances of the Maemo community be chosen as a mentoring organization and also can increase the number of projects assigned to the Maemo community. So if you like Maemo and GSoC, go read this page and send some feedback for us in the next couple of days.

We also want more possible project ideas, some criticism to the current ideas will be welcomed too

More information about Maemo@GSoC can be found here.

Maemo 5 Alpha SDK (also known as Fremantle Alpha SDK) was released in maemo.org on monday. We are happy to announce that the Maemo 5 Alpha rootstraps are now also available for Maemo SDK+ development environment.

Those developers who are already using SDK+ to compile their source code can now start porting their code also to Fremantle without moving back to Scratchbox-1.

If you have installed SDK+ already to your machine you should run the command “$ maemo-sdk reload catalogue” to get the Maemo 5 Alpha rootstraps visible to your SDK+ rootstrap menu. To install Maemo 5 Alpha rootstraps just say “$ maemo-sdk install rootstrap” and a menu is provided to you where you can selected the rootstrap you want to start using. Maemo 5 Alpha rootstraps that are made availabe  are:  “fremantle5.0alpha_armel” and “fremantle5.0alpha_i386″.

Maemo SDK+ project provides alternative cross-compiling environment for Maemo developers. SDK+ is based on Scratchbox-2 instead of Scratchbox-1. To learn more about the SDK+ itself,  how to use it and how to do software development in this environment please follow the link below.

More information about SDK+:

http://maemo-sdk.garage.maemo.org
http://maemo-sdk.garage.maemo.org/user-guide.html

More information about Maemo 5 Alpha SDK:

http://maemo.org/news/announcements/maemo_5_alpha_sdk_released/

Happy hacking !

- SDK+ team

On 64-bit platform and willing to try the new fremantle SDK? Look no further, following the previous release, now here are the debs for scratchbox as needed by fremantle.

As last time, the debs are, again, available with apt, just add:

deb http://www.ipi.fi/~pablo/maemo5-sdk_amd64 /

to your sources.list and apt-get yourself out!

Hilights of the new MediaBox release:

The overall performance of the user interface has been improved again and the lists now feature transition effects and remember the position where you where standing in the parent folder when you go back. This is especially handy when browsing UPnP/DLNA servers.



The mplayer backend has been optimized and mplayer now plays videos generally a lot smoother than before. Playback of higher resolution videos (e.g. 640 x 480) is now also smoother by automatic downscaling.

Media indexing has been improved and runs faster. And if you don't like indexing of ID tags, you can always browse the filesystem to play your media, of course.



Music can now also be browsed by genre, additional to browsing by artist, by album, and by folder.



MediaBox can now be told to keep the display lit while playing media. Stop playing, and the device may enter powersaving mode again.

If you use the Nokia headset that came with the device, you can now use the headset button to pause/play and skip to the next or previous track. Do this by pushing the button once, twice, or three times, respectively. Do not press the button to quickly because the headset is bad at detecting consecutive actions, though. Half a second between clicks is just right.

When GUPnP was first used at Maemo software, one of the first questions I was asked was: Can't GUPnP handle multiple network interfaces just like ClinkC (the now deprecated UPnP framework in Maemo)? The answer to that question was "yes but you have to take care of creating GUPnPContext objects for each network interface yourself" and that wasn't very convenient. This issue, accompanied by the fact that applications had to know when the interfaces go up and down to create and destroy the associated GUPnPContext object themselves, made the lives of application developers not so easy.

I visited the Embedded World fair in Nürnberg on Wednesday this week together with some colleagues. Like always on events like this I stumble upon nice devices with Linux support… in fact embedded hardware like development platforms and devices for industrial use or consumer network stuff without running Linux seems to become uncommon. Just a few years back hackers had to search hard for useful devices or invest a lot of time reverse engineering consumer hardware. Unluckily cellphones are still problematic – even the linux ones are usually locked down so that they are not useful for developers.

But let’s stay with the ‘good’ ones: Karo Electronics showed a new low cost DIMM sized embedded module based on a 400MHz ARM9 CPU (The datasheet mentions Freescale, but lacks the name the chip.) A friend bought a similar one (a TX27) which came with full Linux kernel sources.

A real suprise was the booth of EBV: They build and sell their own BeagleBoard called EBVBeagle.

EBVBeagle (image source: EBV)

Its actually a BeagleBoard revision C2 with green PCB boxed with some useful accessories. It comes as a quite complete starter kit with AC adapter, USB to Ethernet adapter, MMC card, USB hub and some cables. The official press release can be found here. They claim (but not gurantee) to be able to deliver within two weeks. Looks like the only drawback is the minimum order value of 250 EUR which is – of course – more than the EBVBeagle kit.

Apropos Beagle Board – Maemo (which runs on the BeagleBoard too) has released some new bits. First  Maemo 5 alpha SDK is ready and released. This is pretty good for people using it on the Beagle Board because only the Maemo 5 SDKs support the OMAP3 SoC. For people who want to learn about Maemo development or development for Limux mobile devices in general there is a new Maemo Tutorial release. The Maemo Tutorial provides quite easy to understand and detailed information about Maemo platform and application development. It gives a lot of useful information about development for other Linux mobile device platforms as well.

Enjoy…

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-03-02 through 2009-03-08

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-03-02 through 2009-03-08

I think Facebook fixed their “People you may know” feature, because recently it was showing people I didn’t really know but this morning I knew the listed names and faces and among these:

(Not an actual screenshot, edited to remove non FOSS people)

Now, it is not as if I could be friend with them - after all I know their name/face because we attended the same conferences or read Planet Gnome.  I don’t want to be that excessive Facebook-friend-adder.  I personally draw the line by asking myself “Would that person know/remember who I am?”, therefore I try to only add people that I’ve talked with in real life.

Facebook chose the word Friend to identify the persons I allow to see my information.  It is a rather strong word because some of the people in my “friend” list are just acquaintances and they mix with my best friends!  Yet, they are people I’d like to keep informed about.

Thanks Facebook for forcing me to think about what defines friendship before breakfast

Of course, I am biased, but I think my new N810 is an amazing little machine.

When I pulled it out of its packaging I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the device and how much is included. What looked like plastic to my eye in pictures of the N810 turns out to be brushed aluminum. The back plate is carefully manufactured, more reminiscent of Japanese design than American or Taiwanese, the parts are finely machined and very detailed. It has heft which might make people think it is too heavy, but I like its weight. It comes with a case which the iPhone I received did not. It comes with a stylus and charger, again, the iPhone had neither. There is also included a mounting bracket and a USB cable that connects directly to the device.

All in all it feels as if I can do what I want to do right out of the box with my tablet, with the iPhone there are still hoops I haven’t jumped through; I need to pwn it to change the carrier, the GPS does not work until that is done, I need to port my phone number, etc. None of that is required with my tablet. Plus there are no additional hoops to jump through for development, I don’t need to get official approval from Nokia like I would with the iPhone, I can just send my ssh key to maemo and get started developing right away. Apple is a bit fascistic about their platform because they like to have complete control over the user experience and their partners leaned on them to limit the device to specific networks. But this type of control has been already easily bypassed and Apple is having trouble with developer accounts too apparently. Rogue iPhone apps are popping up on the internet, something that is the bane of any software distributor who wants to completely control the user experience. I am not convinced that the closed Apple model is sustainable, time will tell.

So take my review with a grain of salt, but I think this tablet is far superior to the iPhone and already the experience has been better than my expectations.

Quick sharing: for those who do not want to install Windows just to test Google Chromium browser :), run it on Linux by grabbing a crossover'ed version from here ... or follow instruction here.




--Antonio Gomes

The latest release of gPodder, a podcast downloader for Maemo has been released today, and packages for it are already available in Maemo Extras for Chinook, Diablo and Fremantle Alpha (..but there is no Extras-Promoter for Fremantle yet?).

Highlights of this release:

• Download resuming between sessions
• Finger-friendly lists using libmokoui2
• Friendly folder and file names for downloaded files
• Finger gestures for the episode list

The finger gestures are very nice and can be used to show episode details or play back episodes. Enable the configuration option maemo_enable_gestures and then swipe left to display shownotes or swipe right over an episode to listen to it.

Get it from Maemo Extras.

Last weekend, we were skiing for three days, and I took the N810 with me to do some GPS tracking. Back home, I wanted to visualize the route that we took, so I saved the track as .gpx file in Maemo Mapper, copied it over to my laptop and loaded it into Google Earth:

The result is quite impressive. Although there are some tracks missing, one can get the idea which slope we were going down most often. Sadly, Google Earth's satellite maps for this specific area do not show any snow, so the pictures look a bit weird. A nice use case for the tablets - thanks to Maemo Mapper!

I recently took another look at boost::python. It was a much better experience than when I first tried boost::python for Glom in 2005, probably because my use of the Python C API in the meantime has helped me understand what boost::python is doing. I have a mostly-done patch to use it in Glom 1.12 (Glom 1.10 will be released soon). This should make the code simpler and much more robust, allowing me to add more Python API to Glom, allowing people to drive more of the Glom UI via scripts.

As a side-effect this will force us to enable C++ exceptions in the Maemo build for Glom 1.12, increasing code size, but that might be less of an issue by then.

I do find the boost::python documentation fragmented and unfocused, spending too much time congratulating itself about its use of various design patterns and generic programming techniques in the implementation, instead of just telling me how to achieve common tasks. It often assumes knowledge of the Python C API, as if it is based on original proposals or internal documentation. Many companies are using boost::python so I’m surprised that none have arranged for more useful documentation to be written. I’d be happy to do it if someone wants to pay for my time.

In fact, boost::python’s API maps closely to the C API, so you probably need to know both, though I hoped that boost::python would make it clearer and more explicit.

However, the people on the boost::python mailing list have been very helpful when the documentation has not been clear or where I have made silly mistakes.

Boost should install pkg-config .pc files

Getting the CFLAGS and LIBS for boost python in your configure.ac is insanely difficult and fragile. There are some .m4 scripts out there, but I can’t get any of them to work. Why on earth don’t they install a .pc file? They can’t all be Windows programmers.

And despite using unstable APIs, they don’t seem to allow parallel installs. For instance, on my Ubuntu Linux system, the headers are directly under /usr/include/ rather than /usr/include/boost-python-1.0/. GNOME gets this stuff right.

The need for parallel installs is even greater for boost::python because there are various possible incompatible configurations, any of which you are likely to find on your system. At the moment you will just get compiler or linker errors (which distro packagers don’t understand) instead of being able to explicitly depend on a specific version with a specific build (which distro packagers could understand).

This will make life difficult for Glom distro packagers, but I think it’s still worth it.

Never one to hold a grudge, I’d like to congratulate the FFmpeg developers on their recent release of FFmpeg 0.5.

I’ve been pretty hard on FFmpeg in the past for their lack of releases and their API policy - it’s made packaging their software hard for distributions, and developing using their libraries hard for third party developers. A release is great news, and I hope it is the first of many.

A little lightheartedness.

I just looked at my Maemo profile today and was greeted with this ...

read more

Hi all,

as some of you already know, a week ago I started my new position in Nokia and in this scope I will be acting as an interface between the Open Source community and the Nokia internals from the technical point of view to support Quim Gil in this role. With this entry I want to introduce myself and give some overview what I am actually planning to do.

My name is Daniel Wilms, coming from the RWTH Aachen, and I started working for Nokia in 2007 as a Trainee in Nokia Research Bochum. There I worked on a Python-based prototype for the Internet Tablets and some back-end web service implementations. In spring 2008 I came to Nokia Research Helsinki and worked on back- and front-end implementations for location based services (LBS) for mobile devices and wrote my Diploma Thesis on this topic.

The first week in the new team I used to find some topics where I can jump in and where I will be active in the future. The most important task for me is to support developers in any kind of technical questions and wishes and to support Quim in his work on that. Further I want to let you know what I am doing. Therefore, I want to use those blog entries frequently to share what I am working on and what is going on on the Nokia side. Last week in the sprint meeting I promised to take over some small parts in the repository management, and further, to work on a SSO-concept for the maemo.org components. Besides this I try to participate actively in an Open Source project. I am still looking around what could be interesting for me. As soon as I have decided and found something I will let you know. If anyone knows a project, which would need some support, preferably in Python, please let me know.

I’m looking forward to supporting you with needed information and being active in the community. If you have further questions don’t hesitate to contact me in IRC (danielwilms).

Daniel

Thanks to Jürg is the experimental branch of Tracker storing its ontology descriptions using the Turtle format.

Here is an update on the Inkface library. But before that let me give a background of the project for the benefit of new readers that will be reading this post via Planet Maemo.

Inkface is an SVG based GUI framework. Unlike the desktops - where GUI components need to be keyboard/mouse friendly; the handheld GUIs need to be finger friendly. Therefore the handheld GUI components should be naturally manipulatable - like parts of an image. Therefore inkface provides a framework in which, GUI is composed in an image editor like Inkscape, instead of rigidly coded in the program. The various elements of SVG image are presented as python objects to the programmer who can then write his program logic using these elements as widgets.

The current version of inkface uses pycairo for vector graphics rendering and uses pygame as backend surface to draw on. A clutter backend is in the plans.

With that background, let me show a demo of an app that I designed (in Inkscape) and coded (in python) using inkface-pygame library v0.2.2. It's a twitter client. The demo shows how the GUI can be changed vastly by merely changing the SVG files and doing no change in the code at all. (the --theme option tells the app to just use a different set of SVG files) The first one is the default theme and the later has a vintage look.



The whole GUI consists of only 2 SVG images (corresponding to 2 screens - login and main twits page). So to create a new theme one only needs to create/change these two SVG files in Inkscape. Compare this to the traditional approach where a theme consists of tens of PNG images of specific sizes.

I was aiming to release it as an app for diablo, but I had to postpone the plan. For improving the performance during animation, I used pygame's features that are only available in v1.8.x and I later found that Diablo ships with pygame v1.7.x. So I need to work around this incompatibility before I release it for n8x0 devices.

For more information on the project check out the wiki. You can download v0.2.2 tarball from here. It is pure python code and can be tried on desktop. For details on the changelog of v0.2.2 check my post on the mailing list here.

Here is an update on the Inkface library. But before that let me give a background of the project for the benefit of new readers that will be reading this post via Planet Maemo.

Inkface is an SVG based GUI framework. Unlike the desktops - where GUI components need to be keyboard/mouse friendly; the handheld GUIs need to be finger friendly. Therefore the handheld GUI components should be naturally manipulatable - like parts of an image. Therefore inkface provides a framework in which, GUI is composed in an image editor like Inkscape, instead of rigidly coded in the program. The various elements of SVG image are presented as python objects to the programmer who can then write his program logic using these elements as widgets.

The current version of inkface uses pycairo for vector graphics rendering and uses pygame as backend surface to draw on. A clutter backend is in the plans.

With that background, let me show a demo of an app that I designed (in Inkscape) and coded (in python) using inkface-pygame library v0.2.2. It's a twitter client. The demo shows how the GUI can be changed vastly by merely changing the SVG files and doing no change in the code at all. (the --theme option tells the app to just use a different set of SVG files) The first one is the default theme and the later has a vintage look.



The whole GUI consists of only 2 SVG images (corresponding to 2 screens - login and main twits page). So to create a new theme one only needs to create/change these two SVG files in Inkscape. Compare this to the traditional approach where a theme consists of tens of PNG images of specific sizes.

I was aiming to release it as an app for diablo, but I had to postpone the plan. For improving the performance during animation, I used pygame's features that are only available in v1.8.x and I later found that Diablo ships with pygame v1.7.x. So I need to work around this incompatibility before I release it for n8x0 devices.

For more information on the project check out the wiki. You can download v0.2.2 tarball from here. It is pure python code and can be tried on desktop. For details on the changelog of v0.2.2 check my post on the mailing list here.

Note: As many people have reported to me, the practices described below seem to be pretty common among mobile operators in Europe. To some extent the proxy can be bypassed — at least on the desktop.

So I have been trying to get synergy on my new N810 and actually have been having a little luck. I managed to create a maemo package or two, synergy and its dependencies. Now I need to get the dependencies that are included in the scratchbox environment into my N810, but at least synergy is there.

I’ll have a longer post on how to set it up once I have uploaded the packages and tested. I hope this will be useful, I know I will use it a lot and have used synergy for a while – it is a great tool.

If you are eligible to vote in the current Maemo Community Council election, you should have received an email that reads:

Dear <your name>,

The election of the Maemo Community Council is now open.

Voting will run from March 12th (today) until March 19th 2009, 23:59 UTC.

To vote, please go to http://maemo.org/vote/ and follow the instructions there.

A list of candidates and their reasons for running is available in the wiki at http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Community...for_March_2009

When instructed to do so, enter the following details:

E-mail: <your email address>
Vote token: <your vote token>

The election has 4 steps - first, you must identify yourself using the
voting token above. Then select your preferred candidates in order of preference. A third step will show you your choice, and ask you to confirm or return to the previous step. Finally, after confirming your choice, a unique identifier will be given to you which will allow you to verify after the election that your vote was counted correctly. To ensure anonymity, no link will be kept between this token and your identifiers, so please keep this token safe. Once you have voted, you will not be able to vote again.

Thank you for your vote!

Regards,
Dave Neary, on behalf of the Maemo community.

This community relies on your participation, so please take a minute to vote!

After the release of the Maemo 5 alpha SDK, I've been working between my other duties on getting it running on the BeagleBoard. The Maemo on BeagleBoard project site has today been updated to include instructions for anyone to do the same. [caption id="attachment_68" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="BeagleBoard running the Maemo 5 ...

Hello,

I have managed to move forward a bit with the synergy package. I installed it on my N810, including its dependecies on libxinerama1 and libxinerama-dev, enable the cursor, and shared the keyboard and mouse between my N810 and OS X. Here is a short video demonstration;

N810 and OS X sharing keyboard and mouse with Synergy from jeremiah foster on Vimeo.

I am going to upload these packages to Extras-Devel and try and make some documentation so that this is easy to install. Thanks again qwerty for the script that enables the cursor on the N810, I have hacked on it a little.

While the ongoing financial and ecomomic crisis seems to be the most popular topic for months now I try to make this blog a little more positive – some pice of contrast.

I has been a little bit quiet around LinuxToGo for quite a while. We didn’t manage to do more than the absolutely vital administrative tasks and the machine suffered badly from the high load. But there are some lights on the horizon: First I seem to have a little bit of time to work on it again – I managed to sort out the worst I/O bottleneck caused by having all I/O load on a single disk. Thanks to Jay7 for the hints! I wrote a few lines about the server status and some statistics here.

The second is that LinuxToGo has gained new sponsor: Bytemark Hosting sponsors a virtual server for us. Now we finally have the chance to distribute the load among two devices. Many thanks to Nick Thomas (lupine_85) for the idea and approaching us and his boss Matthew Bloch!

There are quite some good news in the Maemo world as well. First is that the Maemo Community Council elections have started – active community members have the chance to elect the council till the end of March 19th. Mer, the community driven distribution project for Nokia Internet Tablets and some more devices seems to evolve more and more – there is a quite interesting article about it at LWN.net.

The new Mameo 5 SDK Alpha release runs on BeagleBoard now too – Juha wrote a blog entry about this in the Maemo DT group blog.

While we are on this topic already… the BeagleBoard has gained an interesting companion: The Leopard expansion board which comes with a camera and ethernet. I do not know much about it yet, but it is based on the TI DaVinci DM355. I’ll try to find out more and update the information here.

The last thing I’d like to mention is a little bit offtopic… I found this interesting proof for engineering beeing a kind of art while repairing the amplifier in my living room:

Creative, isn’t it?

I hope you enjoyed this tiny pile of good news :-)

Have a nice time…

A lot of people in the Maemo community asked for a Maemo 5 video showing the new Maemo UI, so here is one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiNF4C1p030

The application manager doesn’t work for me, and the Fremantle extras-devel repository doesn’t list the available packages trough the web, so I only showed in the video the apps that I know that are already in the repository.

More information about Maemo5 Alpha can be found here

Update: in good old brown paper-bag bug tradition we messed up the soversion calculation in 1.1.2, so please use the new and improved 1.1.3. Sorry for the trouble

Wow, just wow. The fruits of the arm port of Ubuntu are starting to flourish, behold, Ubuntu 9.04 on the Nokia N8x0 tablets.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-03-09 through 2009-03-15

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-03-09 through 2009-03-15

We realize

More than half way through the Maemo community council Spring 2009 elections, I thought it would be interesting to get a sneak peek at turn-out figures, to let people know how things have been going so far.

The results are slightly disappointing so far - but I know that there are a lot of last-minute voters, so I’m not exactly worried yet.

Out of 717 ballots issued, as of Tuesday at 15h UTC, we have registered 138 votes so far, or about 20% of the electorate. This tallies roughly with the participation rate that we had in the first council election with people who had more than 25 karma (roughly 35%).

The election will end at midnight UTC on Thursday evening, at which time anyone will be able to download the anonymous ballots and calculate the results of the election using OpenSTV or any other program that handles .blt format files. I will calculate the results using the pre-defined settings for the election (random transfer STV, static Droop threshold, with no lower limit for batch elimination) and publish them on Friday morning, European time.

All of you who have been waiting to vote, vote now! And all of you who have trouble voting, or who haven’t received the voting token you should have, contact me.

So, I am happy to broadcast the announcement of Fennec beta1 for the Nokia Linux devices. As pointed out by some Mozillia guys, this current release keeps agressively improving performance of the browser, giving to its users a boost of stability and responsiveness while surfing on the Web ... A

• Feature-wise, flash player is supported now.
  

• On the platform side, and the mozilla JS - JIT implementation is ON by default.
  

• About the UI, I have not seen much huge differential changes for this beta, but fixes in what was already available have been making rendering, painting and panning a lot more usable then before too.
  

• Startup time has been also hugely reduced, and it is really acceptable (~8 sec) now.

So, I'd say for those who have not installed it yet to give it a try, and so those who have, upgrading to this new beta should be automatic and smoooooth ...

There is a walkthrough video for this release. Check it out !

ps: also there is an on-going implementation of a gesture engine for fennec being driven by another Brazilian (Felipe Gomes) that can give it a taste of what is about to come soon ;)

Enjoy

--
Antonio Gomes

With little fanfare, this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting fundraiser has been progressing nicely.

In the three weeks since the announcement of the launch of the campaign, we have raised almost $3,000 in community donation - mostly smaller than $50 - from 71 individual donors. Much of the credit for the campaign this year has to go to Jon Phillips of Creative Commons, Inkscape and OpenClipart fame.

The campaign has started earlier this year than last year, when we were really caught unawares by our difficulties in getting sponsors, and has lacked some of the frenzy of the last campaign, but Jon has been doing stellar work keeping the fire burning, and ensuring a regular stream of donations from supporters of projects related to Libre graphics.

It is hard to overstate the importance this conference has to the communities working on projects like Inkscape, GIMP and Scribus, among others, and to overstate the progress we have made because of these conferences in the past few years in the realm of graphics applications on Linux.

It’s useful to point out that in the Linux Foundation desktop linux surveys, the most popular applications which companies and individuals want for Linux are graphics applications - Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, Autodesk AutoCAD, Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Visio are the top 6 applications which people are missing on Linux. This conference is all about encouraging the development of applications destined to fulfil those needs. Also worth noting, when asked whether they wanted the applications above ported to Linux, or they wanted to use equivalent Linux applications where possible, a large majority want to use native equivalents, rather than ported commercial applications.

For any of you looking for a good cause which will go directly to supporting high quality applications that you use, I’d encourage you to contribute to the Libre Graphics Meeting. The conference is only as worthwhile as the people attending it, let’s ensure that we get a critical mass once again and provide energy and momentum to all of the participating projects for the coming year.

This is our small collection of books.

The gtkmm web site also has a list of C++ books we recommend. David and Michael really liked Accelerated C++, confirming the good things I’ve heard about it.

I’d like to buy some Beagle boards for the trainees to play with. Does anyone know of some good general books about deploying Linux to arbitrary embedded hardware? I’d also like them to have some book about setting up custom Debian and/or Fedora repositories, as most embedded projects seem to do, ideally with a proper autobuilder. They should learn about OpenEmbedded and Poky too.

After a bit of a prod; and a delay; mud-builder's vala recipe has been updated to the latest release 0.5.7 and uploaded to Extras-Devel as "vala" - this can now be used in Build-Depends lines in auto-builder packages.

What is Vala?

Vala is a modern, object-oriented programming language with a syntax inspired by C# and Java. However, it compiles to native code (via C), giving the benefits of modern programming languages and the speed of native development.

From its website:

Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C.

Example

I've also uploaded another little package - vala-sample (basically, HildonSample) - which demonstrates that a Build-Depends: vala line in a package's debian/control can be built using the auto-builder:

This is only in Extras-devel as it's use to end-users is pretty small, however it demonstrates three things:

• How easy it is to package stuff with mud-builder.
• That the auto-builder can build Vala apps.
• That unlike other modern programming languages on Maemo (such as Python, Ruby, Java or C#) there is no additional start-up lag in a Vala application.

A screenshot all the same:

After a bit of a prod; and a delay; mud-builder's vala recipe has been updated to the latest release 0.5.7 and uploaded to Extras-Devel as "vala" - this can now be used in Build-Depends lines in auto-builder packages.

What is Vala?

Vala is a modern, object-oriented programming language with a syntax inspired by C# and Java. However, it compiles to native code (via C), giving the benefits of modern programming languages and the speed of native development.

From its website:

Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C.

Example

I've also uploaded another little package - vala-sample (basically, HildonSample) - which demonstrates that a Build-Depends: vala line in a package's debian/control can be built using the auto-builder:

This is only in Extras-devel as it's use to end-users is pretty small, however it demonstrates three things:

• How easy it is to package stuff with mud-builder.
• That the auto-builder can build Vala apps.
• That unlike other modern programming languages on Maemo (such as Python, Ruby, Java or C#) there is no additional start-up lag in a Vala application.

A screenshot all the same:

Another edition of Bossa Conference finished and it was great as usual. I must admit I was really tired by the end of the event mainly because I had to switch between recording the presentations and actually preparing my talk.

One great thing is that Glaubert prepared a presentation template using the new maemo.org logo/style and I was able to use it in the slides. I promissed to Andrew I would start a new page on maemo wiki and upload the images I used so we could have an unified template for anyone to use it. (Haven't had the proper time/mood to do it yet though. :P)

So, back to the subject of this post, we recorded all presentations given during the event. Actually some of them are already available at blip.tv in the openBossa show page. Many many thanks to the guys that helped me somehow on this tough task. You know who you are! It would not be possible to do it without your help.

I'm still working on importing/converting/editing the remaining videos but you can already watch some of them.



Don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed so you can get automatic updates in your favorite feed aggregator as soon as new videos become available.

I’m proud to announce that the Maemo community is one of 150 organization out of 395 accepted in this year Google Summer of Code

I would like to thank the Maemo mentors and backup mentors and everybody that helped with ideas, reviews and other small things.

The Maemo ideas list still’s open, you can give  new ideas for possible Maemo GSoC projects in the next couple of weeks.
Let’s hope a great Summer of Code for the Maemo community

After the Frets-on-Fire-on-Fremantle post, the feasibility of it on real actual hardware was discussed on maemo mailing list and in comments. It became clear that it's not sufficient to get FoF running in SDK to prove that it will also run on final hardware. We will have to work on the OpenGL GUI to make it happen.

So I dived into the internals of FoF. And this is what I've come up with so far. (Click on image for detailed view)



It is far from a formal UML diagram, but it tries to capture the elaborate architecture of FoF code.

I am experimenting with some parts of the above diagram. Let's see how it goes.

That's all for now... BTW, I posted inkface v0.2.3 yesterday (highlights - all tests running in Diablo SDK, basic Clutter support). Check the detailed changelog here.

After the Frets-on-Fire-on-Fremantle post, the feasibility of it on real actual hardware was discussed on maemo mailing list and in comments. It became clear that it's not sufficient to get FoF running in SDK to prove that it will also run on final hardware. We will have to work on the OpenGL GUI to make it happen.

So I dived into the internals of FoF. And this is what I've come up with so far. (Click on image for detailed view)



It is far from a formal UML diagram, but it tries to capture the elaborate architecture of FoF code.

I am experimenting with some parts of the above diagram. Let's see how it goes.

That's all for now... BTW, I posted inkface v0.2.3 yesterday (highlights - all tests running in Diablo SDK, basic Clutter support). Check the detailed changelog here.

While still improving the 0.6.9x version of tracker for Fremantle (last week we released 0.6.91 with tons of bugfixing), we are also working on the 0.7.x plans. Philip has already described in detail what are we doing, and i think the most exciting feature is going to be the “observe changes about resources”.

The problem is easy to explain: you write your application (e.g. email viewer), populate its views with data from tracker (e.g. “last 10 emails”), and then… how does your app know when is a new email has been received? It does so because maybe evolution has already pushed a new one into tracker!

Obviously “polling” tracker every n minutes is not a solution, and the nice live queries are very complex and hard to implement properly. BUT we have come up with an easy solution that can help.

The applications will subscribe to an object (or more) in DBus (one object = one class in nepomuk), and then they will receive a signal when something happens in that category with the relevant URIs (e.g. an email is deleted in Emails category, a music file is added in Music class, a document updated, and so on). With this information, the app can decide what to do (e.g. deprecate the view, ignore it because now it is showing other info, query tracker about the relevant metadata, …) .

In coding terms: your email viewer will ask “last 10 emails” and subscribe to signals from “/org/freedesktop/Tracker/Resources/Classes/nmo/Email”. Then when a new mail enters the mailbox, the app will receive a signal “ChangeAdded ([list of tracker uris added])”. Here are some more details of the design.

Once we have this mechanism in place, it will be easier to use tracker as backend for user data in the applications: a nice query language + update notifications! It will also allow us to switch into a model where providers (e.g. a feeds monitor, browsers) push info into tracker, and completely independient applications just query it from there… and then to write a mashup app would we soooo easy… and….

P.D. Philip told me: “before you blog about this, it will be implemented”. Well… if i waited one more day…

Ivan Frade already blogged this, so that that means that I can keep this one shorter.

But yeah, we have just finished what we decided to call class-signals for Tracker. You are looking at software development taking place as we speak, because we still need to do a peer-review of the branch and then merge it to our experimental branch. This will probably happen in a few minutes.

The new feature means that if the ontology of a rdfs:Class contains a rdfs:Property tracker:notify that is set to true, then Tracker will offer a DBus object for that class. Whenever a subject of that class is added, updated or removed you will receive a signal about it on that DBus object.

Ok, ok, I know. You don’t want to click links and search for it yourself. Here are some “screenshots”:

nmo:FeedMessage a rdfs:Class ;
         tracker:notify true ;
         rdfs:subClassOf nmo:Message .

The DBus API is split per rdfs:Class. That’s because we don’t want that a lot of applications will be listening for each and every change to each and every subject. Now they can instead select the classes that they are interested in. That way they can avoid getting woken up constantly by our damn signal.

This feature is a change signal mechanism. We will eventually implement support for full live-queries.

Supporting full live-queries means that we’ll need to store some state about your session to test whether your SPARQL query requires an update from Tracker to get your client’s previous result list synchronized. It’s quite a bit more tricky, especially if you want to support most of SPARQL to go together with the live-query notifications, and especially if you want to be accurate.

Finally you don’t want the live-query capability to be a huge performance burden each time material becomes updated.

This is why we are now putting in place this feature. We think that for 90% of the applications the capabilities of the class-signals feature will be sufficient for their live update needs.

The Enlightenment project is a lightweight desktop environment and a bunch of supporting libraries (which are used in projects like Canola). The Illume module is a new Enlightenment desktop "that modifies the user interface of enlightenment to work cleanly and nicely on a mobile device." E17 is the newest, still-in-development version of Enlightenment.

Nathan "Neato" Jones got E17 Illume running on the tablets under Mer, and then he gave us good instructions to try it ourselves. And he even posted an annotated video of Illume in action!

I fired up an Ubuntu Jaunty chroot on my tablet, installed the E17 builder-installer script, and after many hours of compiling the entirety of E17 on-tablet and two SVN versions, I got a working version!

I then used my Xephyr-on-Maemo trick (the trick I used in Easy Debian to run IceWM and LXDE on top of OS2008) and, from within OS2008, I tried out the interface in both portrait and landscape mode.

Here are some screenshots of portrait mode:



The browser is Epiphany, using the Mozilla engine. The text editor is Leafpad.

I have to say the on-screen keyboard is much too big for landscape use, and too small for portrait use. I found this frustrating. I also found it frustrating that there was no way to "log out" of E, I had to kill the X-Server or reboot the tablet to get out of it.

My final opinion (and Nathan seems to agree) is that the E17 Illume desktop has a lot of potential as an interface for the tablets, but it is still a work in progress and there are a lot of rough edges to be taken off.

The votes are in and counted. Thank you, all, for voting!

The new lineup is as follows:

Andrew Flegg (Jaffa), Ryan Abel (GeneralAntilles), Tim Samoff (timsamoff), Kees Jongenburger (keesj), Alan Bruce (qole).

Read more about the results here:

http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...ch/003524.html

Please welcome the two new members (Kees and Alan) warmly.

Also, let us know what you'd like to see us tackle/facilitate over the next six months. We rely on your input! If you have comments, suggestions, questions, or anything else, please post them on the maemo-community mailing list.

The Maemo community council election is over, and the results are in.

166 people voted to elect the incoming council, and when the dust settled, the new council will be made up of:

• Andrew Flegg
• Ryan Abel
• Tim Samoff
• Kees Jongenburger
• Alan Bruce (better known as qole)

For those interested in that kind of thing, you can download all of the ballots from the election in .blt format (the format used by OpenSTV) and replay the election with different counting systems and options for transferring votes. You can also browse the votes online, and verify that your vote was recorded correctly.

Congratulations to the elected council members, and thank you to all of the candidates for running!

For those who unfortunately were not able to come to Bossa Conference this year, we are uploading the talk's videos to our "channel" on blip.tv: http://openbossa.blip.tv. There are really interesting talks from Trolls (Qt), python, maemo, e17, kde and lot of other stuff. Check the abstract of the talks here. Hope you ...

Thanks to everyone in the Maemo community for voting me into another term of the Maemo Community Council. I’m honored to have had Dave Neary‘s nomination and I’m honored to be serving the community once again.

There is a lot happening for Maemo during the next six months. If you’d like to participate, please join the conversation on the maemo-community mailing list!

Thanks to everyone in the Maemo community for voting me into another term of the Maemo Community Council. I’m honored to have had Dave Neary‘s nomination and I’m honored to be serving the community once again.

There is a lot happening for Maemo during the next six months. If you’d like to participate, please join the conversation on the maemo-community mailing list!

Nice days at Porto de Galinhas with good presentations and a great opportunity to share open source experiences. That was Bossa Conference 2009!

You can see some presentations posted by Bossa guys and great pictures posted at Marcelo’s flickr.

I’m still waiting for new posts at http://openbossa.blip.tv/ with presentations from Koen, Kate and Barbieri.

The video below demonstrates Infoshare feature in Carman 0.7 beta 2:

Main difference to beta 2:

  * Infoshare feature does not need Pidgin anymore
  * Carman supports up to 4 connected buddies
  * Jabber/MSN/Yahoo are the supported protocols
  * Infoshare daemon: infosharingd handles all communication between Carman
    and libpurple, using DBus.
  * A lot of improvements in carman-evas code

Thanks Carman team !

Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, released a new version (beta 1) for the Nokia N8x0 Internet Tablets recently. Here are my first impressions after about 15 minutes of use:

• It supports the virtual on-screen keyboard now, so would be actually usable on the N800.
• Panning the page is very fast! Unfortunately, opening pages is very slow.
• It eats a lot of memory rather quickly and bogs down when the system starts swapping.
• The user interface is going to be awesome, once the speed and memory problems are fixed.
• Going back in history is cumbersome when you have to pan to the side of the page. The hardware back button doesn't seem to work.
• It has a nice large icon, but there's no small version, and this makes the application organizer in the control panel look weird.

JFFS2, which is the file system used for internal flash memory on NITs, compresses all data, which makes free space comparisons weird. I had 5 megs free, freed up 20 more, then installed Fennec (which, the Aplication Manager assured me, required 10 megs) and ended up with 5 megs free.

I'd include a screenshot, but ad-hoc wifi doesn't work between my Thinkpad and my N810 for some reason.

Last night I thought it would be fun to try to suspend my laptop with the 3G USB modem still plugged in and connected. This morning when I woke it up I had no keyboard.

Ctrl+Alt+F1 worked to switch to a text console (when I pressed it twice). The text console wasn't garbled, which was nice. killall gnome-settings-daemon or gnome-screensaver didn't fix anything. Suspending and resuming again didn't fix things either (not that there's any reason why it should). When I noticed that Ctrl+Alt+Backspace didn't work in X, I realized this wasn't an X grab issue.

/var/log/Xorg.0.log has a series of errors like this:

(EE) AT Translated Set 2 keyboard: Device has changed - disabling.
(WW) AT Translated Set 2 keyboard: Release failed (Invalid argument)

Sadly, there are no timestamps. I think this was printed once on resume, and then once on every VT switch.

xinput still lists "AT Translated Set 2 Keyboard" among its devices.

I remember now -- before suspending I had used sudo showkeys -s in an xterm (trying to see the scan code of the ThinkVantage button). Could've mucked up the keyboard mode?

Alt+SysRq+R (raw mode) didn't help, even when followed by more VT switches. I think I'm gonna restart the X server. Or reboot the whole PC, Ubuntu notifier is showing its reboot icon again...

Meta: I wrote this post on March 6, and then decided it wasn't interesting enough to post. And then posted it accidentally on March 20.

Update: looks like bug 327175.

Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, released a new version (beta 1) for the Nokia N8x0 Internet Tablets recently. Here are my first impressions after about 15 minutes of use:

• It supports the virtual on-screen keyboard now, so would be actually usable on the N800.
• Panning the page is very fast! Unfortunately, opening pages is very slow.
• It eats a lot of memory rather quickly and bogs down when the system starts swapping.
• The user interface is going to be awesome, once the speed and memory problems are fixed.
• Going back in history is cumbersome when you have to pan to the side of the page. The hardware back button doesn't seem to work.
• It has a nice large icon, but there's no small version, and this makes the application organizer in the control panel look weird.

JFFS2, which is the file system used for internal flash memory on NITs, compresses all data, which makes free space comparisons weird. I had 5 megs free, freed up 20 more, then installed Fennec (which, the Aplication Manager assured me, required 10 megs) and ended up with 5 megs free.

I'd include a screenshot, but ad-hoc wifi doesn't work between my Thinkpad and my N810 for some reason.

So, long story short, the place I was hosting my maemo repository was on a host at the university I did my PhD at. The server has been suffering unpredictable hardware issues so I have now moved the repository. There is a new subdomain fuuko.libferris.com where I'll be putting up some libferris related stuff, including packages.

In particular, the new libferris maemo repository is now up.

Also note that I have binary rpm files for Fedora 10 in both 32 and 64 bit at OBS.

Since transcoding is one of the hottest feature almost every user expects from a decent modern MediaServer, I finally manged to put some time into implementing it. After two weeks of hacking, I finally have transcoding implemented in Rygel. Yay! The source format/codec could be anything that gstreamer's decodebin2 can handle. The target format/codec had to be specific and I currently support mp3, PCM and mp2 video + mp2 audio encapsulated in mpeg transport stream.

Before you ask, no! none of the above transcoding classes work against PS3 but PCM. So you can listen to your OGG vorbis file on your PS3, yes but no videos that are in format alien to PS3. With transcoding working with PCM, I don't think any PS3 user will miss transcoding to mp3 (especially keeping in mind the inevitable loss in quality because of transcoding from one lossy codec to another) but transcoding of videos is something users would want/need so I will look into why PS3 refuses the mpeg ts stream from Rygel, however I have a feeling that the problem is most probably not in my code but mpegtsmux gstreamer element. If that is the case, I might not be able to get to dig into this issue any time soon myself. However, anyone willing to contribute is welcome to look into this matter.

libchamplain is a map widget for your application.

I’ve just tagged some bugs or enhancements with the gnome-love keyword.  If you ever wanted to contribute to libchamplain, I think these bugs should be rather simple to fix/implement.

In other news, I selected a list of bugs and features that needs to be fixed before a 0.4 release is made.   Such a release will happen before Gnome 2.28 as I plan to ask to be an external dependency (as Empathy, Eog-plugin and f-spot will have use for it).  The list of bugs is listed in on the mailling list.

Libchamplain is part of Gnome’s Google Summer of Code.  There are already some libchamplain ideas. These ideas are planned for 0.6 release, but the work need to start this summer! Students: apply!

Yes, you did read f-spot! Anders Mørk-Pedersen started a f-spot plug-in to display the geolocation information of your photos!  It even works with multiple selected photos.  Now the poor Anders is so busy with school that it is stuck in a demo state. Anyone interested to help should ping us about it!  libchamplain in f-spot was made possible by Stephane Delcroix’s hard work both to libchamplain’s bindings and clutter’s.

Along the python and managed bindings, perl bindings have been announced.  Emmanuel Rodriguez is writing them with support from the perl community. He’s also contributing unit tests in perl.  These have already proven to be quite useful!

Finally, I decided to give it a try and create a website and logo for libchamplain.  I quickly made the site by borrowing Cheese’s website hehe. The logo represents a jigsaw puzzle piece of a world map as libchamplain is a module to add to existing applications to add maps. I tried to tango-ify it as much my capabilities allow me, if you have a better touch here’s the svg.  Since I have so much use for The Gimp and Inkscape, I donated to the Libre Graphics Meetup!

That was a short résumé of what happened in libchamplain recently, excluding the 53 files changed, 3591 insertions and 1165 deletions.

Hi,

the last two weeks I worked on some topics around maemo.org. One part was to start with some implementation for the repository, and further to work on a SSO concept for all the maemo.org related services, namely the main page, the wiki, the bugzilla and Gforge. The challenge is to keep the existing architecture as far  and the changes as small as possible. I have added the result as a first draft into the wiki. You can find the entry following this link. Comments, suggestions or hints based on your experiences with SSO concepts are of course welcome. Feel free to contact me in here, post in the developer forum or let me know in IRC. 

Daniel

Ryan, Tim, Alan, Kees and I have started work as the second Maemo Community Council. First order of business was sorting out who we wanted to be chair this time and muggins-here volunteered. So, I'm pleased to announce I'll be taking over Ryan's role of shepherding the catsouncil through the next six months.

One thing we're going to try and do, to set a good example, is to report what we've been doing - when appropriate - through the normal maemo.org sprint process. This should allow the community to keep abreast of what we're doing, but will suppliment - rather than replace - this council blog.

As I was rereading Ivan Frade’s blog post about the class-signals feature that me and Ivan developed for Tracker last week I got reminded of something I wrote a long time ago:

In my opinion, there’s nothing as important as developer documentation for a framework or library.

Ivan decided to ~ dump our internal planning document on GNOME’s Live wiki service. He didn’t write the document so he’s of course not to blame, but the document was in my opinion not suitable as end user framework documentation. Application developers should not be required to understand what goes on in our team’s minds. So I rewrote this.

You can find the document at the SignalsOnChanges page. Let’s see if starting next week I can convince the other team members to document their new features in a similar way. Many new things in Tracker’s experimental branch could use more clarification and examples.

I happen to believe that undocumented libraries and frameworks aren’t meaningful. That’s because letting it remain undocumented the developer renders his work utterly irrelevant for a serious application developer. I also believe that undocumented infrastructure software is worse than no infrastructure software.

I strongly recommend to application developers to refrain from using any piece of undocumented library or framework. Don’t lower yourself to their standards. Demand documentation by refusing to use undocumented infrastructure. Doing it as free software is no excuse for delivering extremely low quality, like what undocumented infrastructure is (in my opinion).

Thanks to Ivan’s blog post for reminding me of what I once wrote, and today still believe in, myself. While passionately coding new features you sometimes forget about this.

Which is unacceptable.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-03-16 through 2009-03-22

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-03-16 through 2009-03-22

A search engine is, from a high level view, a computer program that comprises at least two tools: an indexer and a "searcher", both to work over some given content. Going deeper a bit on it, the indexer part would be the responsible to identify all of the terms in a document or corpus and builds a table (or whatever) that indicates where the terms are used. Basically it maps a term to documents it appears. On the other hand, the searcher is what makes it possible to perform quick queries over this indexed content.

I'm pleased to announce that I've just closed bug #3881, which means that from now on Canola and all its components are licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.

The source code of the former closed-source packages, Atabake, Download Manager, Terra and Canola, has been uploaded to our gitorious server a few hours ago.

The canola-devel mailing list for developers is already set up and working on garage. Everyone is very welcome to join us in the development of the project. For documentation, such as installation instructions, build dependency, and so on, I'm setting up a wiki that should go online by the end of this week under the openbossa.org domain.

With all this, Canola officially leaves the beta status. The packages of for the final 2.0.0 version will be uploaded soon, together with brand new Maemo-EFL.

Last, I'd like to thank everyone for supporting the project even before the very first release and especially for providing feedback on the various releases we had since December 2007. If today we were able to release Canola as Free Software, consider yourself responsible for it as well.

For those who missed the next last week, the Gran Canaria Dasktop Summit website got updated last week – and with it, we opened registration for the conference. This is the organiser’s way of knowing who’s coming, and the way for attendees to reserve accommodation and request, if they need it, travel assistance.

We also concurrently opened the call for participation. Since we’re already a little late organising content this year, we’re going to have a pretty short call – please send abstracts for GNOME-related and cross-desktop content to guadec-papers at gnome.org before April 10th (midnight on the date line, I guess).

The procedure is going to be a little unusual this year because of the co-hosting of GUADEC with Akademy – a GNOME papers committee headed up by Behdad will be choosing GNOME-specific content, and a KDE equivalent will be choosing Akademy content, and we are co-ordinating on the invitation of keynote speakers and choice of cross-desktop content.

The thing that got me excited about this conference last yearn and the reason I was so enthusiastic about combining the conferences, is that cross-desktop content. The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit has the potential to be the meeting place for free software desktop application developers and platform developers, as well as embedded and mobile Linux application developers. We will have the people behind the two most popular free software development platforms coming together.

The conference is an opportunity to plan the future together for developers working on the kernel, X.org, alternative desktop environments like XFCE, application platforms like XUL, Eclipse’s SWT, desktop application developers and desktop-oriented distributions. I’m looking forward to seeing proposals for presentations from all over the mobile and desktop Linux (and Solaris) map.

So to your plumes! We’re not expecting abstracts to be works of art, but we are looking for thought to be given to your target audience and what you want them to get from your presentation. Compelling, entertaining and thought-provoking content will be preferred over “state of…” presentations, or other types of presentation better suited to blog posts. Knock yourselves out!

If you could decide the venue for a Maemo Summit like the first one but bigger and in Amsterdam, what would you choose? http://www.studio-k.nu/ http://www.felix.meritis.nl/ http://www.debalie.nl/ http://www.dezwijger.nl/ http://www.vu.nl/ else (what?) A discussion started. Tagged: Amsterdam, community, events, maemo, maemo summit

Hello everybody. Since our OMWeather team hardly working on Maemo 5 version, I’ve finaly forced myself to learn Adobe Flash technology for better interaction between my brain and programmers :) Dynamic UI prototype can greatly increase whole team productivity: designer will see, if his idea is actually cool and tweak details without waiting for actual code [...]

After a lot of work (mostly of convincing people of the importance of open sourcing it) we are now able to release Canola2 full code with GPL v3. You Can read Etrunko’s post about the release: here and the code is located in our code repository: http://code.openbossa.org/

Just copy&paste from Valerio's blog to get this on planet GNOME:

The Maemo community is looking for talented students to join us in the Google Summer of Code initiative.

We already have a good pool of ideas, but we are also looking for students ideas in the mobile/embedded field, especially in the following areas:

* Location based apps;
* Context aware apps;
* Linux kernel advances, related to mobile/embedded;
* Social apps clients;
* Mobile/embedded apps in general that can benefit a wide range of platforms (maemo, openmoko, beagleboard, etc…).

More informations about Maemo @ GSoC can be found here.

After spending some time on the Frets-on-Fire code I have managed to liberate it from PyOpenGL dependency.

In first step, I bypassed all the GUI code, without making any changes to the audio and input processing components. So I ended up with a completely blank window with a default song playing and me pressing the keyboard frets blindly.

In second step, I wrote only few lines of code to draw the notes on the screen using basic pygame.draw functions.

Here is a screen shot of the minimal UI.



Then I realized that, in theory this minimal version can also run on n810. I tested it in Diablo SDK and it runs. I couldn't hear the sound, but that's an issue with my scratchbox settings. I am sure that this will run on n810, however I am not sure if it will have real time response times. Unfortunately, I don't have a n810 to try this on (mine must be changing hands in black market as I write this :( ). Nevertheless I made necessary changes so that someone can try it on real n810 if they wish to.

If you have played FoF on keyboard, you would know F1-F5 keys are used to control frets and RETURN key is used to pluck the string. One possible way to achieve this with n810 is to use the keys on the keypad.

Following mockup should give you an idea.



F1 = Quote, F2 = K, F3 = H, F4 = F, F5 = S

In place of RETURN we can use the square key as shown above, but I couldn't find what its keycode is. So for now I have assigned that functionality to Q. If someone can provide with that keycode in pygame, I will fix it.

The gameplay is for single song only. I have bypassed all the menus for now. As the song starts the goal is to hit the note when it reaches the white line. You can play different songs by specifying their name as --play command line option.

This is not (yet) a single click install app, however.

I have put together the steps that you will need to follow, to get it working on actual n810. Those should work to the best of my knowledge, but you may run into errors. If you do, please report them in comments and I can help with them.

If you are interested in the changes I had to make, then here is the list of changes starting from the baseline FoF code (r1165 - r1176)

Give it a try. If it runs slow, let me know how slow. There still must be bunch of code paths that we can eliminate to improve the response times.

After spending some time on the Frets-on-Fire code I have managed to liberate it from PyOpenGL dependency.

In first step, I bypassed all the GUI code, without making any changes to the audio and input processing components. So I ended up with a completely blank window with a default song playing and me pressing the keyboard frets blindly.

In second step, I wrote only few lines of code to draw the notes on the screen using basic pygame.draw functions.

Here is a screen shot of the minimal UI.



Then I realized that, in theory this minimal version can also run on n810. I tested it in Diablo SDK and it runs. I couldn't hear the sound, but that's an issue with my scratchbox settings. I am sure that this will run on n810, however I am not sure if it will have real time response times. Unfortunately, I don't have a n810 to try this on (mine must be changing hands in black market as I write this :( ). Nevertheless I made necessary changes so that someone can try it on real n810 if they wish to.

If you have played FoF on keyboard, you would know F1-F5 keys are used to control frets and RETURN key is used to pluck the string. One possible way to achieve this with n810 is to use the keys on the keypad.

Following mockup should give you an idea.



F1 = Quote, F2 = K, F3 = H, F4 = F, F5 = S

In place of RETURN we can use the square key as shown above, but I couldn't find what its keycode is. So for now I have assigned that functionality to Q. If someone can provide with that keycode in pygame, I will fix it.

The gameplay is for single song only. I have bypassed all the menus for now. As the song starts the goal is to hit the note when it reaches the white line. You can play different songs by specifying their name as --play command line option.

This is not (yet) a single click install app, however.

I have put together the steps that you will need to follow, to get it working on actual n810. Those should work to the best of my knowledge, but you may run into errors. If you do, please report them in comments and I can help with them.

If you are interested in the changes I had to make, then here is the list of changes starting from the baseline FoF code (r1165 - r1176)

Give it a try. If it runs slow, let me know how slow. There still must be bunch of code paths that we can eliminate to improve the response times.

The Maemo community is looking for talented students to join us in the Google Summer of Code initiative.

We already have a good pool of ideas, but we are also looking for students ideas in the mobile/embedded field, especially in the following areas:

* Location based apps;
* Context aware apps;
* Linux kernel advances, related to mobile/embedded;
* Social apps clients;
* Mobile/embedded apps in general that can benefit a wide range of platforms (maemo, openmoko, beagleboard, etc…).

More informations about Maemo @ GSoC can be found here.

I thought it was time I had a category for Maemo related posts only, so here it is. I expect to post some interesting news and info in the days to come, so stay tuned if you are interested!

Quim has just announced that MAFW (Multimedia Application Framework) has moved to an open development model. This means that from now on we will work directly in garage and anyone interested can browse the source code and provide feedback (and even better, patches!). I’ve been looking forward to this moment for quite some time, so I am really excited that this has finally happened. Thanks to Nokia and Quim for making this possible!

If you are planning to write or port Maemo multimedia applications for Fremantle, I suggest that you to give MAFW a try and share your experience with us, we really need your input. In that case you probably want to start by reading the documentation here.

BTW, I intend to use my blog to keep the Maemo community updated on MAFW news, so stay tuned…

Yesterday Last.fm announced important changes in their radio streaming service.

The most obvious one is that from now on users will have to pay a monthly fee of €3.00 to continue using their radio stations (except in Germany, the USA and the UK, where the service will remain free).

This is sad news for all Last.fm users (and music lovers in general) as it appears to be a consequence of the licensing agreements that Last.fm has with labels and the royalties they have to pay on streaming music (this article from last month gives some details on this).

Besides this, a post in one of the Last.fm forums adds a couple of things:

1. The old API to stream music will disappear in a few weeks. Unless I’m missing something, that implies that all clients (official and third party) will stop working, and upgrading them is required to continue using the service.
2. Streaming music to mobile phones will not be permitted (a comment in the same thread explains that this restriction applies only to phones, so Nokia tablets are not affected).

The new API and its details haven’t been published yet, and I don’t know how this could affect open source clients.

My plans are to continue using Last.fm (since I still think it’s a great service) and to keep working on Vagalume, but right now the future is uncertain so we’ll have to wait for a few weeks to see how all this ends up.

Update 25 Mar 2009 18:16:03 +0100: Rob Taylor asked about open source clients and the answer is that Open source apps can apply for an API key at the moment, and that won’t change.

Update 28 Mar 2009 16:57:16 +0100: It had already been said in the initial post, but another comment in the same thread confirms that you need a subscriber account to be able to use third-party clients, even if you’re in the UK, US or Germany.

It took some time but finally tiopenmax 0.3.5 was released. It’s essentially 0.3 plus DSP binaries that actually work.

I verified with gst-openmax (git omap branch) and they work just fine Thanks Daniel Díaz!

So people with OMAP3 hardware (beagleboard) can already try D1 MPEG-4 decoding using less than 15% of CPU. If you missed the demo, here it is:

Update: the latest information is actually here.

All the information was available in my previous post. One minor update is that I’ve made a tag (v2.6.28-tidspbridge) to the linux-omap tree on my github repo to make it extra easy for people to compile a stable kernel with the dsp-bridge driver. There’s many DSP fixes available and some performance improvements which are not in this tag, but I’ll make sure they are once 2.6.29-omap1 is tagged.

Following Etrunko, who was the most rushed :P, I must announce that Canola 2, a media player for the Nokia tablets (but not restricted to them!), was set free! It is now available under GPLv3 and its code can be reached here. There you’ll find some instructions on how to build it, made by Etrunko.

I must only warn some of you that, for reasons already raised by Etrunko there, to this date there seems to be issues regarding some of the EFL python bindings. You are encouraged to wait a little bit, until they are fixed, help to fix them or try to stick to a revision older them Enlightenment repo’s HEAD (can’t say which will work). Profusion is also going to post instructions on how to build it, it won’t take long.

Another important thing is that Google Summer of Code 2009 did accept Maemo as one of its organizations. There are project ideas on Canola 2 plugins and I have applied as a mentor to one of them. I (glima) would joyfully embrace any plugin idea on Canola, but I’m specially interested on musical stuff (blip.fm anyone, now that last.fm has lost most of it charm?) :).

Finally, we hope you all enjoy hacking on Canola 2, which is a great piece of software!

ps.: Besides the title, no relation to catholicism (and no puns, either :P) intended!

I'm glad to announce the first (experimental) release of a project I've been working on recently — Midgard bindings for the ObjectiveC language. Those bindings are for the upcoming Midgard2 — the brand new fresh version of the library.

Midgard2 is an Open Source Content Repository and it provides an objectified view to the data and services surrounding it. At the basic level it abstracts the database access (SQLite, MySql, PostgreSQL) but this is only where it all starts. Serialization & replication, managing own storage objects, multi-process access to data are all covered. The fully object-oriented (GObject-oriented) API allows you to focus on the data, not the database syntax.

For many desktop software developers, database technologies belong to where they belong — the web alone. This is not necessarily true. As the software & services en masse move to the web, the need to integrate the cloud with the desktop becomes indispensable.

Midgard is quite ready for that — it based & engineered fully on the top of the desktop (Gnome) software stack. Being highly modular and having very little dependencies it scales from a note taking application to a full-blown CMS system.

ObjectiveC bindings

The Midgard objc bindings come in a shape of a standard Mac installer. The package (which requires a Leopard+ system) installs a Midgard private framework which allows to develop Midgard applications using XCode. The applications built this way have Midgard embedded dynamically into them — they don’t require any extra libraries/components on the target machine.

Links

• Midgard installer for the mac — requires Leopard.
• Source code of the bindings — the bindings are auto-generated from API description.
• Technical overview — a couple of notes about the process.
• XCode tutorial — building your first application with Midgard on the Mac.

After a longer-than-expected wait, Quick Clip version 0.3.0 is available for download. New things in this version include a much improved help system (now integrated with hildon-help), and a builtin Quick Clip Viewer. Here is the full changelog:

* Switched to hildon.banner for information/warnings/errors
* Now has Open button in settings dialog for easy file navigation
* Now uses hildon-help for builtin help
* Simplified About Dialog
* Added Donations sub menuitem
* Initial release of Quick Clip Viewer (beta)
* Now packaged with dpkg-buildpackage

You can download the new version from my website here.

I'm going to start this post with a defence of my pronunciation of "chroot" as a single word, not "c-h-root" or whatever. I believe it should be pronounced this way for three reasons:

1. Unix/Linux commands and computer acronyms are commonly pronounced as words. "grep", which is a contraction of the g/re/p command, is pronounced as a word, as are many even less plausible acronyms. Try saying "s-c-s-i" instead of "scuzzy" in a computer lab and be prepared for the derisive laughter.
2. I think the chroot command was intended to reference the cheroot, a kind of inexpensive cigar also known as a stogie.
3. It is much easier to say. Why would you make work for yourself by saying a one-syllable word as two or three syllables?

The rest of this post is a more in-depth technical discussion of my easy-chroot package, targeted at developers, those wishing to easily mount partitions and image files, and those wishing to try out new linux distributions and environments with a minimum of hassle (no rebooting, partitioning, etc).

If you could read the subject then maybe you are target for this:

http://fruct.org/index.php?morus_itemid=65

Yesterday we met in Helsinki the organizers of the next FRUCT seminar and they told us they would welcome Maemo developers willing to showcase their work and tell about their experiences in the Maemo community. If you are good and not too far away they might even have some budget to sponsor your trip. If you are interested introduce yourself to Timofey (dot) Turenko at Nokia (dot) com.

FRUCT stands for Finnish-Russian University Cooperation Program in Telecommunications and they develop several Maemo research projects.

See also the discussion thread in Internet Tablet Talk (soon to become talk.maemo.org).

Tagged: development, events, maemo

Today we have added our test GUI to the garage repository (component mafw-test-gui). This is by no means a product quality application, but it is a good sandbox for testing MAFW while we work on it. Maemo developers interested in writing multimedia applications based on MAFW can use this application as a reference. If you just want to give MAFW a try, this application is a good place to start as well.

If you missed the previous posts, you can find MAFW’s repository here.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Zeeshan just remembered me that I forgot to mention that this UI is based on gupnp-av-cp code

The Smart Q5 MID – now this might be a device for Mer: ARM11 cpu, WiFi, Bluetooth, 1G storage, SD-slot, 800×480 screen, touchscreen and a sub-150$ price tag. (Now that price sounds way too good to be true!) Originally designed to run Ubuntu for ARM, but seems to have everything needed for Mer / Maemo.

By the way, where is the next Nokia tablet hardware?

How up to date are the bug reports? There's currently only 5 open non-moreinfo Apps/Platform tickets left with version field set to a version earlier than 4.0. That's quite cool because it means that there's nearly no non-updated bugs left about Bora or earlier - stuff that's not being worked on anymore ...

Well, it seems to be the season when Plasma developers are blogging again about their progress =)…so..here I go =)

The weeks befora Bossa Conference Sebas started helping me with Pastebin applet as we discussed during Tokamak: it was not as sexy as a plasmoid needs to be. So he just started (re)doing the UI bits and I tried to help him a little bit. We cleaned the code, changed the UI completely and now it’s much better!

Default view (left), Mouse Hovering (right)

Now you can also put it on your panel and have something that looks nice (instead of just a sentence telling you to drop stuff in that region)..We also added tooltips showing the status of the applet.

How it looks at the panel

Today the only thing that was not working was fixed and now notifications are working! So when it finishes posting your stuff, you’ll see a nice kde4 notification telling you that the URL was automatically copied to your clipboard.

pastebin's notification

From the functionalities point of view, thanks to Davide we now have a context action (right click menu action) that performs a “paste” if you copied something (CTRL+C) and wants to directly paste into the applet. I also made it more “mouse friendly”: you can also middle click it and what you have in your clipboard will be pasted.

Now I’m really looking forward GSoC proposals and I hope to be a good mentor. There are a lot of proposals and the subjects that most interest me are Plasmate, Kinetic and Plasma-MID. Two weeks ago I gave a talk about GSoC and KDE at a local university. It was really good:

Talk about GSoC (left) and students (right)

Now I’m planning to really focus on plasma-mid and plasmate that are the running projects (during my free time). As (almost) everybody knows, during work we’re playing with Animated Layouts inside Kinetic.

So here I am at Chicago attending at PyCON USA where I’ll present how Python enabled the development of mobile media center (Canola2) in record time. So far it’s being an amazing conference, lots of interesting talks but more MacOS-X than I’d like to see in a conference about a free software technology (at least we seem to have more Linux than Windows).

As for freedom, free software, mobile media centers and specially Canola2: as announced previously at Maemo community, Canola2 is now opensource (GPLv3)! That’s amazing news, specially to me as I have Canola2 as my baby and would like to have more people involved into its development. It’s not just a great end-user software, it’s an amazing Python platform where you can build all kind of rich user interface.

As you might know, ProFUSION is working with INdT to improve Canola2 and we plan to keep supporting it, starting with some instructions and scripts, see our post for more details. As we want to build a community around it, don’t miss the mailing list and our IRC channel #canola at irc.freenode.net.

Seventy Six trombones led the big parade
With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand …

Others have blogged about it already, but I still felt like I had to post something. Canola2 is now Free Software. We’ve been working on it since last year, and it has been quite an experience. As developer and team leader at ProFUSION, I can say that we’ve learned quite alot with this project and that we hope now with the release of the source code it will grow into a nice community.

I once heard that everytime a piece of proprietary software is released a puppy is born and angels sing Hallelujah in the sky. Don’t know if that is actually true, but either way, the source code is here and instructions for building it are here.

Google’s Summer of Code for 2009 has also started, and is now accepting student applications. Maemo got in as a mentoring organization, and I’ll be mentoring possible projects there (as will glima and antognolli from ProFUSION). There are a few ideas of plugins for Canola in Maemo’s suggested projects page. If you are eligible and want to develop for Canola, talk to us on irc.freenode.net at #canola.

Hello, there!

The state of virtual instruments for the Nokia Tablets has been very, very sad... (My PyAno has been very lonely!) Until these two beauties came along, that is.

Two applications have made the N8x0s into some amazing music making machines! I just stumbled across them while browsing the Application Manager. Why had I never seen these two before??

Boxar and Theremin are available in Maemo Extras and Extras Devel... Go check them out! They're very compact programs and pack a big punch. Amazing stuff. I haven't put down my tablet yet today ;)


They're in the repos... but here are direct links if you're browsing from your tablet :)

Theremin----------------------------Boxar
------------

Here's a video of Boxar, for your enjoyment...





And one of Theremin...



http://waterweight.tylerlongwell.com/
http://geekcomics.tylerlongwell.com/
http://geeknews.tylerlongwell.com/

Hello, there!

The state of virtual instruments for the Nokia Tablets has been very, very sad... (My PyAno has been very lonely!) Until these two beauties came along, that is.

Two applications have made the N8x0s into some amazing music making machines! I just stumbled across them while browsing the Application Manager. Why had I never seen these two before??

Boxar and Theremin are available in Maemo Extras and Extras Devel... Go check them out! They're very compact programs and pack a big punch. Amazing stuff. I haven't put down my tablet yet today ;)


They're in the repos... but here are direct links if you're browsing from your tablet :)

Theremin----------------------------Boxar
------------

Here's a video of Boxar, for your enjoyment...





And one of Theremin...



http://waterweight.tylerlongwell.com/
http://geekcomics.tylerlongwell.com/
http://geeknews.tylerlongwell.com/

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-03-23 through 2009-03-29

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-03-23 through 2009-03-29

So, another two weeks, another release. I suppose nobody would have noticed, but we are releasing on Mondays instead of Sundays because we figured it was better to have reviewers around for the inevitable last minute commits. This time we helped Darin to fix a nasty regression on IRC which would have been a shame to ship with, so yeah, it happened again.

The big visible things on this release are preliminary support for the HTML5 media tags (it works, I saw the Transformers trailer with it!), and a new signal, WebKitWebView::new-window-policy-decision-requested, which gives us the means to properly handle, at last, links with target=_blank (already available in Epiphany trunk). As usual there’s a bunch of bugfixes and other improvements, the complete NEWS file is:

================
WebKitGTK+ 1.1.4
================

What’s new in WebKitGTK+ 1.1.4?

- WebKitWebView gained uri and title properties, deprecating the
usage of the title-changed signal.
- Basic functionality for HTML5 media tags has been achieved; there
are many unimplented methods, and rough edges still, though.
- Font rendering received quite some love, with layouting, and
memory handling fixes, and at least one less crash.
- A new signal, new-window-policy-decision-requested, has been added
to WebKitWebView, that makes it possible for the application to
correctly decide what to do when new windows are requested.
- A bug that made tooltips for consecutive links not update their
location was fixed.
- Several improvements were made to the HTTP backend, including
making it more robust when talking to servers which send bad
Content-Type headers.
- WebKitWebView now uses the GtkBinding system to handle key events,
which means that the user is now able to customize the keys used
for various operations, and that many subtle bugs have been fixed.