Way back in the Maemo Summit in September 08, Jay Sullivan put up a slide which talked about spheres of participation in Mozilla.  I threw together a rough approximation of what was in that:

As seen on Engadget Mobile:



This is the new phone by LG, named GD900, first presented in Barcelona during the Mobile World Congress in February. By the time, they only did not have pictures showing the UI, only the piece of hardware with that shiny transparent keyboard.

But let's take a closer look on the UI, especially the icons:



The UI is named S-Class, and it is kind of familiar to me. You still didn't get it?? Let me help.



Did we influence the design? Hard to say, but who cares? :) I prefer to think so. This is a sign of the wonderful work of our design team. Thanks so much Patrícia and Marcelo. She had a nice presentation about the disturbing relationship between designers and developers during Bossa Conference this year. She even gives some examples of how things were decided during the development of Canola. A must see.

By the way, this is how the Canola main menu looks like from now on. If you've already downloaded and installed the software you may have noticed it. In fact we want to know the opinion of the users, if they prefer this kind of approach, with one access to all plugins or the other one, with categories for the plugins. Please post it in the comments.

Thanks Marcelo for pointing this out (via twitter).

Two weeks ago it was once again time for the Society of Computers and Law’s Annual Lecture. I made it along to my first of these events two years ago. Well, to the SCL Scotland’s Annual Lecture to be precise, and this was given by none other than Free Software legal expert and key driving force behind GPL v3, Eben Moglen, who turned out to be an incredibly powerful speaker. The following year I attended the SCL’s Annual Lecture in London, where we were treated to an address by Stanford professor, lawyer, founder of Creative Commons, enemy of “Corruption 2.0″ and general protector of digital freedoms, Lawrence Lessig.

In keeping with their theme of hosting talks by world-leading protectors of the commons and legal system agent provocateurs, the SCL secured the services of Google Senior Copyright Counsel and general copyright nut (and I mean that in a good way) William Patry, whose lecture was entitled Crafting an Effective Copyright Law.

The lecture was given as a tribute to Sir Hugh Laddie QC, Patry quoted him on numerous occasions and I became increasingly sad to learn that he is with us no more. Sir Hugh sounded like he brought a sense of much needed sober reason to an increasingly out of control world of copyright absolutism.

A few of the key messages from the lecture:

• We need not weak/strong, but effective copyright
• …not based on public feeling, but empirical evidence!
• Copyright problems are analogous to recent banking system problems: free market fundamentalism and a belief that actors will self-regulate and act in their own and public best interests
• Copyright is based on a belief of private ownership, however there is no natural right – it is simply statute…
• Regulation in public interest must be a pre-condition to copyright
• Governments have a responsibility to ensure copyright programmes are effective (argument that copyright is simply a government programme and thus they are responsible)
• Not copyeft! Copyright is valid…
• Policy makers are not demanding accountability, and are ignoring advice, e.g. the Gowers Report, where they did not dispute the evidence and instead chose to turn it into a vague question of human right (again emotion/public feeling over empirical evidence)
• We must reject any system that restricts learning
• Creators are consumers too – there is no black/white hat
• Copyright should be tort, as property comes with too much baggage and is based on exclusive rights and thus puts a huge burden on public to overcome

Apologies for any inaccuracies introduced due to either my poor transcription efforts or lack legal education! But, I think you get the idea… I think we are all getting the idea. Noises are increasingly being made in connection with the ineffectiveness of copyright, and it’s encouraging to note that it’s not just us Net liberals, but recognised legal giants and copyright experts.

Today I was reading about Texas Instruments Zoom(TM) OMAP34x-II MDP, the first hardware reference design for Symbian^3 (future opensource version of SymbianOS). And I’ve found that it seems some parts in common with new maemo hardware platform:

• OMAP3 based
• 4.1″ LCD WVGA LCD
• keypad
• accelerometers
• etc…

But one of the funniest thing is that it has a capacitive touchscreen! Many people have told me that iphone/ipod touch devices are better because their capacitive screens, but finally we will see a symbian phone using same hardware technology.

Now the question are:

• Will Maemo be supported too by Zoom2? (at least Linux is supported)
• Or even better, how similar are new Maemo5 based devices to Zoom2? I hope not too much, because this development platform starts from $1150!! (maybe because the debugging parts and the 8MP camera!)

Just execute this code in your browser and find the ten differences between the two loops:

1. <html>
2. <body>
3. <script type="application/javascript;version=1.7">
4.  
5. let funs = {};
6. let msg = "";
7.  
8. for (let i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
9.   funs[i] = function() {
10.     msg += "i = " + i + "\n";
11.   }
12. }
13.  
14. for (let i = 0; i < 10; i++) funs[i]();
15.  
16. alert("Without redeclaration: \n"+msg);
17.  
18. msg = "";
19. for (let i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
20.   let idx = i;
21.   funs[i] = function() {
22.     msg += "i = " + idx + "\n";
23.   }
24. }
25.  
26. for (let i = 0; i < 10; i++) funs[i]();
27.  
28. alert("With redeclaration: \n"+msg);
29.  
30. </script>
31. </body>
32. </html>

As you can see, the i variable works as if it was declared outside the loop, so it’s reused inside it. Thus, if you use it inside a closure, all the closures share the same reference and can see the changes produced during the iterations.

However, in the second loop a new fresh local variable is defined for each iterations, so the values aren’t shared among the closures.

On April Fools’ Day (1.4.2009) Scratchbox-2 version 2.0 was released. We are going to use this version in the next maemo SDK+ release that we are planning to release on week 15/2009. Scratchbox-2 is one of the core components of maemo SDK+ development environment.

SB2 home page: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/sbox2

Maemo SDK+ home page: http://maemo-sdk.garage.maemo.org

I think I'm going to blog about Ubuntu bugs I encounter during my day. Don't get me wrong—I love Ubuntu and haven't seen a better OS yet. But it has bugs.

This is just to remember the students interested in participating in this year edition of Google Summer of Code that the deadline for submitting new proposals is today (Friday, April 3rd) at 19:00 UTC. If you want to develop a project related to the best software platform for mobile devices out there ;), becoming part of this exciting community and after all earn some money with it, this is your last chance. (At least until next edition of GSoc).

We have already received more than 30 project proposals, some of them very well written and complete. High quality stuff that may soon will be available for all Internet Tablet users.

Thanks to everyone involved in this effort, especially Valerio and all other guys that are willing to mentor the projects. Let's make Maemo rock this summer!

Yesterday, PyMaemo support was added to Fremantle (instructions available), and I couldn’t wait anymore…

1. PyMaemo installed
2. sympy downloaded
3. 
[sbox-FREMANTLE_X86: ~] > python2.5
Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Mar 27 2009, 18:30:12)
[GCC 4.2.1] on linux2
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> from sympy import *
>>> x,y,z = symbols(’xyz’)
>>> Plot(x*y**3-y*x**3)


And here is the result:

Who wants to create a powerful scientific calc for Maemo 5?

Wanted: PyBlosxom plugin to bake CSS styles into the RSS feed, i.e. replace things like <span style="keyword"> in the main blog pages with things like <span style="color: #ff7700"> in the RSS.

Also wanted: a spam-resistant comments plugin. (Maybe some/all of them are? I was always afraid to try.) And a tags plugin (categories are too limiting). And useful page titles. And a pony.

Update: Laurence Rowe and Alexander Artemenko suggested I check out cssutils. Alexander also pointed out that a similar question was asked on stackoverflow. Peter Bengtsson recently posted a similar tool built with lxml and regexps. Meanwhile, I took the plunge and installed a comments plugin, and even somehow managed not to get drowned in spam.

The Maemo Community received 43 GSoC students applications (plus 5 ineligible), a big success so far. Thanks to students that applied for us and to everybody that helped on the GSoC initiative.

Now is time to review the proposals

Hello world. I’ve read on ITT forums that new style foe maemo.org is ready to be criticised by the community and is looking for feedback. As I’m a web-designer aswell, I thought that my feedback would be good advice for maemo.org guys. But I’d like to mention that I’m not the ultimate truth of any kind [...]

This example shows an implementation of a custom QGraphicsLayout that tries to keep the layout as much “squared” as possible.

But the main thing being shown here is that the layout deals with a QGraphicsLayoutProxy, making it transparent for someone who is just adding or removing items from the layout, so all items are automatically animated when they change a position inside the layout or we change the size of the layout.

Jeez has more explanations here, but if you want to just watch the demo, take a look at Openbossa channel or just watch it below:

This example shows an implementation of a custom QGraphicsLayout that tries to keep the layout as much "squared" as possible. But the main thing being shown here is that the layout deals with a QGraphicsLayoutProxy, making it transparent for someone who is just adding or removing items from the layout, so ...

I’m rather behind the times, but I’ve now released a matching kernel for Diablo 5.2008.43 with the highspeed SD/MMC support. Make sure to update to 5.2008.43 before installing my kernel or the update will overwrite it.

You can find my custom kernel, patches and instructions here.

I have two maemo related presentations in Embedded Linux Conference in San Francisco . Monday 11:00 i have "Animated UI technologies in maemo 5" where i tell more about new UI enabling technologies like OpenGL-ES2.0, Clutter and Qt .Tuesday 2:30 pm i have "Maemo 5 mobileLinux environment with cellular connectivity" where I tell more about what is Maemo 5 .

There is in Tuesday evening demo session. I demonstrate  Beagleboard running maemo Fremantle alpha.

ELC is arranged co-operation with Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in same location  . ELC is April 6..8 and Collaboration Summit April 8..10 . I will be there around all of the week. There is some well known persons from Maemo community having presentation in Collaboration summit .

If there is maemo developers around and like to talk, feel free and come to talk. May be we can arrange some informal maemo meeting there also .

I will be in San Francisco area untill April 27, i will kep there couple of weeks my vacation .

 

 

 

 

Some people don’t like to subscribe mailing list, they are so used to internet forums that can’t use a mailing list properly.
Recently in ITT, some people that don’t use the maemo community mailing lists, complained about the lack of information about the maemo community council, because the decisions/achievements of the council are mostly announced in the community mailing lists, in order to help those users, I took the liberty to create a forum archive for the maemo mailing lists at Nabble.

What is Nabble:

“Nabble wants to improve public discussions on the web and provide useful embeddable applications to end users. This includes forums, user groups, message boards, mailing lists, photo galleries, newspapers, blogs, etc. There are many vibrant discussions in these places, so are problems such as cluttered UI, broken search, moderation, and cataloging. Nabble wants to be a place where your discussion can grow and be free of these problems.”

The Nabble forum allow users to browse the maemo community mailing lists like in regular internet forum, and is also possible to reply trough the forum.

You can found the “maemo mailing lists forum” here.

The April 2009 maemo.org sprint will be held tomorrow (Monday), 2009-04-06 at 13:30 UTC. Anyone who would like to get involved in community tasks is welcome to attend the IRC meeting. Full details can be found in the wiki.

Public service announcement #1: the council homepage has had a bit of a refresh to try and explain what - apart from chair the sprint meetings - it is we do. Comments, as ever, are welcome.

Public service announcement #2: The latest release of Mer - the community Linux distribution for numerous devices, including Nokia Internet Tablets, based on Maemo - has been released. Go get v0.11 now if you want to help, like to live on the cutting edge, or just want a play!

Today I happened to read about lazr.enum in a mailing list. I went to the PyPI page and saw raw ReStructuredText markup instead of a nicely formatted page. Now I know from prior experience that this happens when the package's description has an error in the markup. I thought I'd report a bug and provide a patch.

Leap of knowledge: since I know lazr.enum was created by the Launchpad.net team I could safely assume they were keeping the sources in Launchpad. Therefore I was pretty sure I could get them with

$ bzr branch lp:lazr.enum

so I ran that command and it worked.

Next I looked at setup.py to see how it produces the long_description field. It was reading the contents of a couple of text files, one of them being src/lazr/enum/README.txt. I looked at that and saw a .. toc-tree: directive that does not exists in plain docutils (it's a Sphinx extension).

I added up a couple of lines to setup.py to strip that out, tested it (with setup.py --long-description > test.rst; restview test.rst) committed to my local branch, and created a bug report in Launchpad. Then I was a bit lost, since I didn't know how to make my fix available. Attach a patch? Maybe, but I wanted to see if this distributed version control thing is good for anything else.

I thought that first I'd make that branch public, and then see if there was a way to link it to the bug report. I ran

$ bzr push lp:~mgedmin/lazr.enum/pypi-fix

which took a few seconds to create a new public branch on Launchpad with my fix in it (it would be nice if I didn't have to explicitly specify my Launchpad username and the project name—both of which bzr already knows—and just specify the name of the branch). Then I went back to my bug report and saw an option to link it to a branch. There was a search field in the popup that found my "~mgedmin/lazr.enum/pypi-fix" easily enough when I pasted it into the search box.

After clicking on the branch, I saw a "propose a merge" option. I did that and Launchpad sent an email to the developers asking them to merge my fix.

I made one mistake, I think: I should've created the bug report first, and then mentioned the bug number in my commit message (with bzr commit --fixes=NNN, although here I'm suddenly not sure if the bug number should be left bare, or prefixed with something like "lp" to indicate it was a Launchpad bug number?).

Other than that it was a pretty smooth experience. When will I be able to do that for Ubuntu packages?

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-03-30 through 2009-04-05

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-03-30 through 2009-04-05

Ubuntu 9.04 is going to be released in around three weeks. As usual I couldn't wait (and saw that some bugs that were irritating me every day were fixed in Jaunty), so I upgraded to the current beta.

I'm a very poor Nokia Internet Tablet blogger.

In the last months, some great software has been released and updated. Maemo 5 development is well underway. Things are, in general, moving right along. I've been silent through it.

I could pitch excuses about how I've been busy with the new job and such, but I'll get right to the core: I am not using my Internet Tablet nearly as much as I used to. I started using the iPhone 3G when I arrived in California just for the convenience alone. Now I find myself accidentally sucked into the Apple ecosystem - and I'm tired of it. I want out.

Here's a promise: I'm going to write a series of articles all about the extraction from Apple to other devices. It will cover Email, messaging, microblogging, music, video, podcasts, and apps. I'm going to wait for a maemo 5 tablet or an N97 first, though. Both promise far more than my current N95-3 (with the neglected NAM firmware) and the Nokia N810 can offer. Budget permitting, I'll get ahold of each (or both?) and get the articles cranked out. In the meantime, make sure to watch the maemo news page for all the latest on Internet Tablets.

Interested in WebKitGTK+, a11y or both? This Thursday (April 9th 2009), from 14:00 UTC onwards, we’ll hold a virtual a11y hackfest on #webkit-gtk at irc.freenode.net. Willie Walker from Sun will join us, and we’ll try to move forward and set up a plan to fix this last blocker in the WebKitGTK+ integration into GNOME saga. See you there!

I've been working recently with Qt Animation Framework, trying to learn how to utilize it efficiently. Below is a video showing circular carousel widget which uses the animation framework.



I need to still continue experimenting how to really extend the animation classes and use the whole state machine framework, but so far I'm impressed by the latest 2.2 API version. Originally my biggest concern about this whole "Kinetic" was that it would be too high-level and have suboptimal performance in embedded devices, but luckily that doesn't seem to be the case. Now with Qt 4.5, QGraphicsView starts to be very usable also in N810 and one just needs to know tips & tricks how to utilize it efficiently. Below is the same carousel widget in N810, using the "raster" graphics backend:



FPS up there means how many times QGraphicsView paintEvent() is called, so it drops when more drawing to view is needed, but stays quite healthy & usable anyway. Back to coding!

Special thanks for graphics used goes to:
- Background: Tribe, by Alexander Timonov
- Icons: Kreski-Lines, by Holger Bauer

Yes, finally it is public that we are contributing to MAFW project, born for the Maemo platform.

My latest jobs were focused in the mafw-gst-renderer component so feel free to ask me any questions related to that or any other component.

I am damm lazy to blog, but I will try to do it sometimes to talk about what I did for the project so that you can stay tuned and follow a bit project’s evolution.

Small things

These last days I touched some small issues as changing a bit the way we destroy the GStreamer pipeline, since we we checking for asynchronous state changes when setting it to NULL that should never happen.

After some emails exchanged with the Mozilla folks we agreed on an unprecedented co-organization of a Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend. It’s conceived to be a hands on developer event held in the IT University of Copenhagen on May 30-31 (preceded by a welcoming evening party on Friday 29).

Both teams are pushing their alphas to a beta stage as we speak, so it made sense to have a collocated hackfest.If you are working on Maemo 5 applications or Fennec add-ons this call is for you.

Right now there are 13 participants registered from 11 countries – a promising kick off! There is a modest travel sponsorship budget for developers short on cash but abundant in skills.

More information in the joint announcement and the wiki page. See you in Copenhagen!

Tagged: applications, development, events, fennec, Fremantle, maemo

Should we rely on GStreamer timeouts when handling disconnections or should we write some code with conic to immediately detect if network goes down and raise the proper error? Good question, uh?

Issues are network changes and how conic handles them. Because AFAIK, if conic changes it connection it signals the disconnection and then the connection to the other network, (for example if you switch from one WLAN to another or it switches from WLAN to Bluetooth GPRS or viceversa). Issue is that we don’t handle connections ourselves but GStreamer does. They rely in underlying components, such souphttpsrc (which happened to have a problem with the timeout) so they raise an error when that timeout expires. They have more components dealing with different kind of servers that can behave in a different way.

When network goes down and other one comes, we would have to ask for other connection if we are currently playing a stream, but I don’t know if those GStreamer underlying components can handle those connection changes gracefully because the underlying protocols can be stafeful or stateless.

In those cases, we would need to handle those changes ourselves. We would need to set a timeout to see if a new connection event comes or raise the error if not and if it comes, hope that GStreamer can handle that change gracefully.

We think those changes would make the code more complex and wouldn’t fix problems perfectly since maybe GStreamer cannot handle it, so we think it is better to keep things as they currently are, raising the error when GStreamer says so and we don’t have a connection.

Midgard2, the content repository for multiple programming languages that we've all waited for so long is now in beta stage, and some services like Qaiku and St1 ReFuel already run on top of it. To get you started, here are some of the best Midgard2 blog posts out there:

• Midgard 2: More than just PHP, more than just CMS - The architecture of Midgard2
  
• Midgard2 at FSCONS: Your data, everywhere - Using Midgard2 as the content repository for synchronized mobile, desktop and web apps
  
• Midgard and JCR: A look at two content repositories - How Midgard and Java Content Repository compare
  
• MidCOM3 at a glance - Basics about the PHP MVC framework built for Midgard2
  
• Midgard workshop at FSCONS - Make Midgard Python and PHP processes talk to each other via D-Bus
  
• Midgard ObjectiveC bindings - Use Midgard2 as replicated data store for your Cocoa and GNUstep apps
  
• Midgard with Lighttpd - Running Midgard2 with Lighttpd and FastCGI
  
• Bread, electricity and Midgard2 - Setting up Midgard2 on Maemo devices
  

This post has been made for Day 2 of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog campaign.

Technorati Tags: midgard

The Embedded Linux Conference 2009 is over. Small but technical conference in nice San Francisco Japantown. I will be there also participationg in Linux Foundation Collaborations summit listening to presentations.

In Tuesday evening we had a demo session where I was running maemo on Beagleboad. It looks like Beagleboard is going to be popular hacker toy. I wrote in my Hotel room small demo how to use Qt for animation to make picture carousel, it just took couple of hours and few dozens of lines of code. I run code in both Scratchbox and Beagleboard but it was possible to demonstrate actual compositing window manager feture only in Beagleboard. 

The Animated UI technologies in maeemo 5 Fremantle can be found here animated_ui_elc_2009.pdf OpenGL-ES2.0 looks like being the thing that raises more and more questons among the developers. Even if OpenGL is not new any more, many developers are still using OpenGL 1.0 style API's and now that the OpenGL-ES2.0 forces to use programable shaders, it is big change. Writing animated UI looks also being an area where a lot of new technology development happens. Now is the time for new ideas and lot of paralel development happens at the same area. Then later comes time for convergence .

The Maemo 5 Fremantle presentation is here fremantle_elc_2009.pdf.

Modified 9.4.2009 After demo someones asked source of the simple Qt animation demo i had running in beaglboard. There is source gt4.tgz, feel free to look and try it.  

The Embedded Linux Conference 2009 is over. Small but technical conference in nice San Francisco Japantown. I will be there also participationg in Linux Foundation Collaborations summit listening to presentations.

In Tuesday evening we had a demo session where I was running maemo on Beagleboad. It looks like Beagleboard is going to be popular hacker toy. I wrote in my Hotel room small demo how to use Qt for animation to make picture carousel, it just took couple of hours and few dozens of lines of code. I run code in both Scratchbox and Beagleboard but it was possible to demonstrate actual compositing window manager feture only in Beagleboard. 

The Animated UI technologies in maeemo 5 Fremantle can be found here animated_ui_elc_2009.pdf OpenGL-ES2.0 looks like being the thing that raises more and more questons among the developers. Even if OpenGL is not new any more, many developers are still using OpenGL 1.0 style API's and now that the OpenGL-ES2.0 forces to use programable shaders, it is big change. Writing animated UI looks also being an area where a lot of new technology development happens. Now is the time for new ideas and lot of paralel development happens at the same area. Then later comes time for convergence .

The Maemo 5 Fremantle presentation is here fremantle_elc_2009.pdf.

Modified 9.4.2009 After demo someones asked source of the simple Qt animation demo i had running in beaglboard. There is source gt4.tgz, feel free to look and try it.  

Ubuntu people want users to use apport to report bugs. There's a command-line tool called 'ubuntu-bug' that you can use if you know the name of the package or at least the name of executable. There's a "Report a problem" menu item in many, but not all GUI apps.

Here's what you can do if the GUI app in question doesn't have that menu item, and you don't remember what it's called, and you're the same sort of a crazy command-line person that I am:

$ xprop|grep PID

Click on the app's window. Watch that shell command return a line that looks like

_NET_WM_PID(CARDINAL) = 807

Now run

$ ps 807  # substitute the real number

You'll see the command name, e.g.

  PID TTY      STAT   TIME COMMAND
  807 ?        S      0:02 /usr/lib/indicator-applet/indicator-applet --oaf-acti

Now you can run

$ ubuntu-bug /usr/lib/indicator-applet/indicator-applet

If you're not running Jaunty, you'll need to do one more step to find the name of the Ubuntu package:

$ dpkg -S /usr/lib/indicator-applet/indicator-applet
indicator-applet: /usr/lib/indicator-applet/indicator-applet

You can use that with apport-cli or on the Launchpad online bug reporting form.

For some (many?) programs you can short-circuit this trail by looking at the WM_CLASS property instead of the _NET_WM_PID property:

$ xprop|grep CLASS
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "indicator-applet", "Indicator-applet"

While there is no requirement for the window class name to match the name of the Ubuntu package or the name of the executable, it may give you a reasonable guess.

GUPnP AV 0.4 released.

New in this release:

- Watch for empty DIDL-Lite nodes.
- Escape the URIs before putting them into DIDL-Lite XML.
- The '.' must be omitted from duration if fraction part is not included.
- Be more lenient when parsing DIDL-Lite XML fragments.
- Don't require the DLNA profile string.
- Try to guess the DLNA Profile if not provided and put "*" in the whole 4th
field of protocolInfo if our guess work fails.
- Make sure 4th field of protocolInfo is completely in compliance with DLNA
guidelines. This only implies one change in the API: enum dlna_play_speed is
replaced by play_speeds, a GList of allowed play speeds as strings.
- Use '1' and '0' to express boolean properties in DIDL-Lite XML.
- Other minor fixes.

All contributors to this release:

Henrique Ferreiro García
Peter Christensen
Sven Neumann
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download from here: http://gupnp.org/sources/gupnp-av/gupnp-av-0.4.tar.gz

-------------------------------
GUPnP Vala 0.5.4 released.

A new minor release mainly to update the gupnp-av bindings.

Download from here: http://gupnp.org/sources/bindings/gupnp-vala-0.5.4.tar.gz

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-04-06 through 2009-04-12

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-04-06 through 2009-04-12

CloudAve reviews the CrunchPad browsing device, and concludes that these days, a single computer is just not enough for all our needs:

A tablet for lazy surfing, a netbook for travel, an iPhone for when we don’t even want to carry that much, a full laptop for everyday work, and even a full desktop as the multimedia workhorse: at these price levels we may very well have 5-6 or purpose-designed computers, situational devices. Pick up one, continue on the other as you move around – the switch should be seamless, our computing experience is becoming to device-independent.

While the idea of a universal communicator is appealing, the multi-device situation is more practical. However, pick up one, continue on the other is still more wishful thinking than reality. Even if you keep all your data and applications in the cloud, you still face the issue of having to find and open the various browser tabs when you switch devices.

Mozilla Weave is a browser synchronization tool for the upcoming Firefox 3.5 that will hopefully help here, at least on all computers where you can install a browser:

Weave Sync, a prototype that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop, and mobile phone can all work together. It currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs.

Having solved this, we still face the problem is that cloud locks your data behind proprietary software run in data centers of multinational corporations. While data portability and standardization slowly help giving users control of their own content, the better free software response would be relying on data synchronization and peer-to-peer connections.

Via Internet Tablet Talk.

Technorati Tags: crunchpad, dataportability, midgard, weave, synchronization

Hello!! It has been a while since I was looking for a shorter domain. Now I got one and I'm asking everybody that has a "direct" bookmark to this blog to update it. If you follow this blog through a planet don't worry: I already asked to each planet's admin to update ...

Yes, now tracker is in the gnome git repository. Martyn sent an email to the tracker mailing list with the details and all the commands you may need to checkout the code. You can also use the web-interface to know what is going on.

The next step will be to move our work for the new tracker (SparQL, signals,…) from the codethink git to the gnome repository. Then we can work on the merge of both branches to make 0.7.x the main development line with as few regressions as possible.

The plan is to use the 0.7.x numbers for unstable (soon and often) releases and 0.8.0 for the next stable release.

Tracking with the Nokia N810.

Hey all,

This Passover, I went on a trip in the North of Israel in the Golan heights.

However, apart from enjoying the beauty of nature I thought I might do a little experiment with my Nokia N810, a Linux device with a GPS receiver.

What I did was switch it on at the beginning of the tour and put it back inside my bag, ignoring it most of the time.

The result was a complete GPX file of our tour.

On the Nokia it looked nice, however I wanted to see if I can extract more data at home with the GPX file.I found 3 tools I could do with it.

The first was slicing the exact route (since I left it on after getting in the car and driving home, it had the 5 hour route I drove home too). For that I used an application called Viking. Viking also give me another bit of information I liked – it said we walked 10 kilomiters.

The second was an online tool called gpsvisualizer. This gave me a nice view of the track, along with the height variation, you can see the outcome on the right.

gpsvisualizer

Gpsvisualizer also gave me an option to convert the gpx file to a .kmz file, a googleearth filetype. So I could now load my track in to googleearth.

I could see now the route overlaid with google’s rich data, from photos to a high res satellite map, and 3d view!

The Track from Google Earth

A Deep Valley we crossed

I thought I might share with you the fun trip I had, and digital fun that came after it. I know there are others here that have gps tools and I’d love to hear what tools you use.

A lot of Caterpillars on a shoot

A nice View of the valley

Tracking with the Nokia N810.

Hey all,

This Passover, I went on a trip in the North of Israel in the Golan heights.

However, apart from enjoying the beauty of nature I thought I might do a little experiment with my Nokia N810, a Linux device with a GPS receiver.

What I did was switch it on at the beginning of the tour and put it back inside my bag, ignoring it most of the time.

The result was a complete GPX file of our tour.

On the Nokia it looked nice, however I wanted to see if I can extract more data at home with the GPX file.I found 3 tools I could do with it.

The first was slicing the exact route (since I left it on after getting in the car and driving home, it had the 5 hour route I drove home too). For that I used an application called Viking. Viking also give me another bit of information I liked – it said we walked 10 kilomiters.

The second was an online tool called gpsvisualizer. This gave me a nice view of the track, along with the height variation, you can see the outcome on the right.

gpsvisualizer

Gpsvisualizer also gave me an option to convert the gpx file to a .kmz file, a googleearth filetype. So I could now load my track in to googleearth.

I could see now the route overlaid with google’s rich data, from photos to a high res satellite map, and 3d view!

The Track from Google Earth

A Deep Valley we crossed

I thought I might share with you the fun trip I had, and digital fun that came after it. I know there are others here that have gps tools and I’d love to hear what tools you use.

A lot of Caterpillars on a shoot

A nice View of the valley

Not 1.0 release yet, but moving towards it!

Last week I started a discussion with some packagers so we could get ride of lots of outdated and unmaintained repositories as well as updating the maintained repositories so they get improvements from SVN HEAD and also help testing our code.

This was interesting, first packagers did not know each other (even various Ubuntu/E17 package maintainers) so the first task was to get them to talk and settle differences.

Then they complained about trunk often being unstable and hard to get a consistent snapshot to package. While this is true, I also complained about their interaction, or lack of, with developers to know how to build and we agreed that having a public schedule with period to stabilize code base followed by development snapshots could help. So I did propose one monthly plan that people liked, being this weekend (Thursday April 16th) the first freeze followed by a development snapshot on Monday.

The result is turning to be better than what I imagined: all packagers are now united and talking to developers, we set up http://packages.enlightenment.org/ to release packages until they go into mainline distros and we increased SVN commits, with lots of motivated people fixing problems here and there, cutting rough edges and making experience better and better. Now let’s hope during this bug fix weekend we manage to get rock solid EFL and E17 so we can release packages to spread use of our technologies.

Having more people to know and test Enlightenment and its technologies is very important. We’re getting our Release Plan done and expect to release E17 and EFL 1.0 this year. Our project got really interesting Google Summer of Code applications covering Netbook, Browser and other areas were we can rock. But we could use more press releases and marketing, people still don’t know that Enlightenment Technologies power products from phones to home automation systems to mobile media centers and even digital tv set-top boxes around the world!

PS: expect Debian/Ubuntu/SuSE packages for Canola, Enna and other nice applications on top of EFL afterwards. Thanks to all developers and packagers to make it happen!

If you do not use your car that often, and have built/bought a car mount for your tablet, why not repurpose it and stick it up to your desk near the main monitor? Having Mauku running in it which lights up the display whenever someone posts updates surely is nice. Some other use cases are monitoring servers with an open X-Terminal or listening to some music/podcasts with the media player of choice.

I built mine by buying a gooseneck mount and screwing the included car mount onto it. This still allows me to use the mount in the car, too.

It's time for another maemo.org redesign update.

The design and "bug" fixes for the new maemo.org website design are speeding along and we're fast approaching out launch date of Wednesday, April 22... That's less than a week away! This launch will be considered a Beta launch, as there are still a lot of issues to work out (wiki and itT integration, just to name a couple). There are also a lot of minutia that will have to be organized, managed, and tweaked after launching the new design.

In fact, if you'd like to help test (and improve) what we're doing, feel free to browse the new design, take notes, and add what you find (or what you might like to see changed) to the maemo.org Bugzilla. (Please take time to view the existing newstyle reports before posting something new.)

All of us who have been working on the new design are very excited to be seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. As you might assume, anything that is done via committee has a tendency to become more complicated and take quite a bit longer than one might hope. Still, I think we are creating something that will not only be visually appealing, but will be easier for everyone to use.

Again, let us know (by using Bugzilla) if there are any major bugs or features that might hold us back from the Beta launch. We would really appreciate it.

Today I'm pleased to announce the release of Quick Clip 0.4.1-1. What is Quick Clip? Quick Clip is the combination of a statusbar plug-in and text viewing application specifically designed for the Maemo platform. The statusbar plugin allows you to "clip" highlighted, or enter text directly, into a plain text file for later reference. While the text viewer easily allows you to read and/or access data you've already clipped.



New features in this release are:

* Added Clear submenu item
* Added Delete submenu item
* Switched to XML for target file list storage
* Switched storage location for user files
* Major code cleanup * Fixed Open Bug
* Fixed preinst script
* Renamed Open Settings button to Browse
* QCV: Changed preference warning to bold
* QCV: Added application menu
* QCV: Fixed bug in scrolling choice
* QCV: Added Select All option
* QCV: Added Right/Left buttons for flipping through clippings
* QCV: Added Properties submenu item
* QCV: Added Help menu item
* QCV: Mapped the +/- keys to increase/decrease font size
* QCV: Mapped the Up/Down D-Pad keys to scrolling (only for GTK)
* QCV: Changed Title (more path visible)
* QCV: Major code cleanup

Here are a few screenshots from the new release:

Having to convert some SVN repositories to GIT, Misha pointed me to this recipe that was quite what I needed to convert svn tags to real tags.There was some more typing involved and I hate typing, plus I had to deal with a non standard SVN layout that by experience I think it's like a second standard. So I included all the hints found there and somewhere else in a "one click" script that tries to

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-04-13 through 2009-04-19

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-04-13 through 2009-04-19

Almost exactly a week ago I became a dad of a very sweet little girl. Her hello world message will be coming a bit later on when a name has been bestowed upon her.

I am the happiest man on the planet.

Google announced today the accepted students for the Google Summer of Code 09, the maemo community will host 10 projects this year.
We received more than 40 students proposals, around half of the students proposed features/advances for Canola, seems that the ‘open sourcing’ of the project attracted much attention.

Some of my favorite projects weren’t selected, but I’m happy with the one’s selected by the democratic vote of the maemo mentors

Here is the list:

Barcode scanner and Shopping Assistant.
Bittorrent plugin for Canola.
IM Client For Canola Using Python-purple.
Integrating Maemo in Open Embedded(OE) – Creating a ‘maemo image’ in OE for the N800/N810.
Liqbase Framework Development and Application Implementation.
Mnemosyne for Maemo.
Picasa plugin for Canola.
Remember The Milk plugin for Canola.
Semantic-Based Context-aware Personalized News reader System for Maemo.
Twitter application and Twitpic support for Canola.

Some of the project titles may seem strange at the first look, so stay tuned in the maemo mailing lists for further  details, criticism and suggestion around the GSoC projects.

There will be a Google Summer of Code project for libchamplain - your Clutter based Map Widget for your Clutter or Gtk+ based applications. This project will be realized by Simon Wenner.  He will be working on getting the map rendered locally (using OpenStreetMap xml data) as opposed to downloading the pre-rendered tiles as libchamplain currently does.  At the end of the summer, libchamplain will support both for best flexibility.

This functionality means a lot of possibilities for libchamplain: better accessibility, smaller bandwidth needs, smaller cache footprint, more context data and finally themable maps.  These can be very useful if you are running on different platforms such as Maemo 5 or a desktop: bigger fonts, more contrast, tango colors!

(oh and by the way, this is the new default markers: more on them in a later post)

Unfortunately, another very interestant SoC idea didn’t make it to selected list: a glib based OSM data API.  That would have made it very useful to access the downloaded data.  But hey, that will be for later!  Thanks to all the students that submitted a project idea on libchamplain

FON is a shared WiFi service. Couple of years ago they gave their routers for free in Finland, and since then I've been sharing my home connection with other FON users. And occasionally I've even roamed using FON connectivity provided by other users, using Devicescape to log my Internet Tablet automatically to the network.

Now FON has released Fonera 2.0, which can support OLPC's mesh networking technology. This means that the FON routers can share each other's connection so not each of them has to have a direct connection to some ISP. Also it means that peer-to-peer connections within the mesh network can happen directly, bypassing the wider internet completely.

If mesh networking became popular, it could provide an important part of a free software -compatible cloud:

• Mesh network for internet connection sharing and direct connectivity between users
• XMPP and Telepathy for enabling peer-to-peer collaboration in applications
• Content repositories for replicating data between application instances and users

Meraki is another WiFi access point provider that supports mesh networking.

Via Boing Boing.

Technorati Tags: mesh, p2p, fon

Hold on to your britches everyone, the new maemo.org Beta will be launching tomorrow at 1200 UTC! (That's 7a my time, so I'll most likely be watching Curious George with my son -- not that I won't be checking in.)

The first phase of the launch will be some back-end stuff and link checks, so don't expect the new site to be live until sometime after 1200. There are a lot of different elements the incorporate the maemo.org website and migrating a project of this size is no laughing matter.

This is where we must ask for your help again. There is no doubt that a few things may be broken after everything is up-and-running. Not only will there be links that need editing, but some pages may not look or work properly. In these cases, please help us by searching and adding the bug to bugs.maemo.org (classification: maemo.org Website/newstyle). Please search Bugzilla before posting a new bug.

Also, many features of maemo.org will still look like the "old" site after the new design is live: wiki.maemo.org, garage.maemo.org, etc. Likewise, we are still trying to figure out the best way to integrate Internet Tablet Talk into the forthcoming talk.maemo.org.

Lastly (for now), I'd like to point out all (or most) of the people who were integral in making this new website happen:

• Ryan Abel
• Henri Bergius
• Niels Breet*
• André Cunha
• Andrew Flegg
• Quim Gil
• Lauri Manner*
• Dave Neary*
• Glaubert Oliveira
• Me
• Reggie Suplido

Did I forget anyone? Let me know if I did and I'll add them... As you can see, a project of this magnitude cannot be done by just one person. It was a wonderful privilege to work with all of these talented people. There were arguments along the way (and still are about some issues), some stepped-on feet, some hurt feelings, and so on. But, when all is said and done, we were all able trudge through through the issues with the main goal always in sight. And, the fact that we're finally counting down to an actual launch time is such an amazing testament to a healthy open source community.

But!

Our jobs are far from complete. As I said, the launch of the new site is most assuredly Beta. Don't think of it as anyting but. In this case, our next days will be filled with bug reporting and fixing and trying to figure out how to go from Beta to final. (Hopefully, all of this with your help!)

* Rock stars

If you're like most people who have contacted me since my last post, you are pretty sick of the über-80s pop-metal anthem, "The Final Countdown" by Europe, spinning in the back of your head. Well, good news... The new maemo.org website has barely been out a day and we've already gotten some good feedback and some bug reports -- all to be expected. Personally, I think the change-over went even more smoothly than I ever expected (thank you X-Fade!). All this, regardless of what you have playing on repeat in Canola.

As stated previously, there will still be a lot of issues to be worked out in the coming weeks -- and subsidiary pages that need to be worked into the new design. We'll try to accomplish all of these things in as timely a manner as possible (there are really only two people who are integrating actual design stuff, so please bare with us).

You may have noticed that the "Talk" button up in the main menu now points to Internet Tablet Talk. This is an interim solution that is helping us get ready for when itT is styled to look just like this new site (thanks Reggie!).

Again, thanks for the feedback and bug reporting. We really appreciate it.

Let us know here in the comments what you think about the new site & design!

It was 1999 when AsturLiNUX, was created. I joined in 2000, when my first machine with Linux inside was an iPAQ 3130 using Familiar distro and GPE (Gtk based framework). I’ve found friends here, and I think I am getting older when I remember these moments. But there is a funny maemo related timeline I would like sharing:

1. In 2002, I met Ivan, AKA Asjas, in a little workshop about Linux in handhelds. We were discussing about if someday a company could create a Linux based handheld for consumer market.
2. Months later, we travelled to give a talk in a national OpenSource congress about Linux in handheld devices (photo). There is the rumour that the boy who created maemo name was in the conference room.
3. In 2006, Ivan and me gave a talk about Maemo. Some months before, I had shown my 770 to Ivan (a boy who didn’t have even a phone) and we talked about Python possibilities on it. So, there we were talking about Maemo platform.
4. In 2009, during AsturLiNUX anniversary celebration, I have had the pleasure to introduce Ivan’s talk about Maemo platform (photo), since he was one of the invited celebrities

And during all this time friendship still remains. So yes, at the end, it is all about people and friends. Thank you friends!

Yesterday Last.fm announced that from now on users will need a subscriber account in order to listen to their radio streams. The new API for streaming music has also been published.

I already talked about this change in my previous post and I think that I don’t have much more to add.

For those of you who are going to keep using Last.fm: I updated Vagalume yesterday and it’s already using the new API. I’ll try to test it more thoroughly during these days and release a new version soon.

I’m also interested in adding support for other compatible alternatives such as Libre.fm.

Over the last few weeks, Daniel Elstner, Johannes Schmid and I have updated our Clutter tutorial to the latest Clutter 0.9 API and I think we are now finished. I think Clutter 1.0 will appear soon, without major API changes needed in the tutorial.

There’s a html version and a PDF.

Apparently

Apparently this hasn’t been echoed enough times. A lot of teams are still wondering what they should use if they want to store RDF metadata in Nepomuk and how to query it.

What happened before

We have refactoring to bring Tracker’s codebase into a better state. This is being released as Tracker 0.6.9x. This one sentence is really not enough to describe the changes. We can’t continue talking about the past forever. Sorry guys.

We have introduced support for SPARQL and Nepomuk in Tracker. We also added the class-signals feature, Turtle import & export, and many other features like SPARQL UPDATE support. Making the storage engine effectively a generic Nepomuk RDF store that can be used to store and query RDF data.

What will happen

We are at this moment planning to rearchitect Tracker a little bit.
Among our plans we want to make the RDF metadata store standalone. The store stores your metadata using Nepomuk as ontology and enables the application developer to query in SPARQL. This means that it’ll be possible to use this storage service without the indexer even installed. This is already possible but right now we do the crawling and monitoring in the storage service.

We plan to move the crawling and monitoring to the indexer. One idea is that the indexer will instruct the extractor to do an analysis and then the extractor will push the extracted metadata to the RDF storage service. Making the indexer and extractor a provider & consumer like any other. Making them optional and separately packagable.

This because we get requests from other teams who don’t want the indexing. Modularizing is usually a good thing, so we now have plans to make this possible as a feature.

Other plans

Other plans that we haven’t thoroughly planned yet include support for custom ontologies. We have a good idea for this, though. We want to wait for it until after the rearchitecturing. Support for custom ontologies will include removing ontologies, installing ontologies and asking for a backup that’ll contain the metadata that is specific for an installed ontology.

Support for custom ontologies doesn’t mean that application developers should all go spastic and start making ontologies. I know you guys! Don’t do it! We want applications to reuse as much of the Nepomuk set as possible. The more Nepomuk gets reused, the more interopability between apps is possible.

I am one of those (seemingly many?) people that migrated from a Palm device to a Nokia N8X0. Being a longtime user of the Palm OS platform, I grew accustomed to some things being built right in to the platform e.g. the Palm PIM suite (Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Memos, Contacts). Although all of the PIM applications were really nice, the one I always found myself using most was the Tasks application.

I always thought a Calendar was a little strict (and extremely time-intensive to keep up) for my needs, and something like a plain-text memo-like reminder was too far the other way. Tasks was just perfect. Structure with compromise.

When I first got my N800, I was disappointed there was no Palm Tasks-like application. I've tried them all, and none were up to the task (no pun intended).

Recently (actually, like just the last couple days) I looked into programming my own solution. At this point it is merely a mock-up: no data storage, no functionality, no killer features (or features at all), but it presents the concept of my ideas.

I call it Quick Do (and no, it may have the same Quick prefix, but it will not be integrated in Quick Clip).

Here is the proposed main view: (also showing future filtering options)


And the Add Task dialog:


The Date selector:



Will this turn into an actual application, probably (after battling with the gtk.TreeView widget for hours already, I would hope so!). But more importantly, what do you think of the interface? Finger-friendliness is out-of-the-question, but anything else? I have a laundry list in my mind of features that could be added, so a little direction is welcome.

Feel free to leave comments below.

The updated version of Tennix, the open source tennis game is now available in Maemo Extras for Chinook, Diablo and Fremantle (anyone with Fremantle hardware care to test if it works correctly? Thanks!). The 1.0 release has been announced to the public in February already, but I have only now had time to create a proper package for Maemo. It plays fine with stylus or the D-Pad.

Here is a gameplay video if you can't wait to download it onto your tablet.

I haven't been blogging much about Fremantle yet. But, yesterday there was a question on the maemo developers mailinglist about what files are indexed to the trackers metadata database, so I though to clear out that issue and also to tell a bit about how your app can use tracker.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-04-20 through 2009-04-26

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-04-20 through 2009-04-26

Maybe, you've already heard about ESbox and PluThon IDEs for maemo development. They have a lot of things in common: remote launching/debugging, Debian package generation/installation, and much more. But why two different products? Because ESbox needs Scratchbox, but PluThon does not.

That's right... I got it. But since ESbox and PluThon have some features in common, why don't we create a common framework? And so we did :)

Mica (Maemo Integration Common Architecture) framework does not only provide a common architecture for ESbox and PluThon, but also a common plugin architecture for developing maemo development environments based on Eclipse.

If you're planning to create a plugin for Eclipse framework in order to help other maemo developers, you can use Mica. On its official site, you can access useful documentation such as architecture and developer's guide. If you need any other example, you can check Mica-Plugins project. For example, a plugin that finds the Internet Tablets available.

You, as Mica/ESbox/PluThon user/developer, can contribute a lot with such projects! Please, report your suggestions, doubts and any other comments to eclipse-integration at maemo dot org.

In the race to the 0.3 development release, we are reviewing the API to see it is nice to use, bindable and most of all intuitive to g* coders.  But sometimes, it is hard to find out how to do it well: comments on this particular issue would be appreciated.

ChamplainView is the map view that displays the map.  It needs a ChamplainMapSource from which it gets the map.  There are specialised objects that inherit from ChamplainMapSource such as ChamplainNetworkMapSource and the upcoming ChamplainLocalMapSource (or what ever it will be named by the end of the SoC).

champlainNetworkMapSource* champlain_network_map_source_new_full (const gchar *name,
    const gchar *license,
    const gchar *license_uri,
    guint min_zoom,
    guint map_zoom,
    guint tile_size,
    ChamplainMapProjection projection,
    const gchar *uri_format);

As you don’t want to fill all this information each time you create a new map source, libchamplain currently provides helper constructions:

ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_osm_mapnik (void);
ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_osm_cyclemap (void);
ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_osm_osmarender (void);
ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_oam (void);
ChamplainMapSource * champlain_map_source_new_mff_relief (void);

We think it could be interesting to replace these by a Factory to which you pass an enum value to get the constructed ChamplainMapSource.  You would probably be able to add your own map source constructor (as you can implement your own map sources).  You would probably be able to get the list of available map source too.

The question is: is this overkill? the best way to do it? is there something similar in glib or gtk to get inspired from? We base most of the API decisions by looking at other Gtk+ widgets, but this particular object seems to be a different case.

We are asking for your ideas.

Most of the media players need album art. So, ever application does the handling of the art by themselves (just like getting the metadata). For the metadata, we have tracker to get the metadata - one less headache. For the album art, we have tracker, hildon-thumbnailer and a standard to help alleviate another headache.

I got (again) interested on OpenGL ES 2.0 and bought OpenGL® ES 2.0 Programming Guide.

The examples on the book can be downloaded from http://www.opengles-book.com/. Those are meant to be compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio.

I made a small patch that adds initial support for Linux/X11. It doesn’t support texture loading (because I misplaced my png loader somewhere), the WinCreate() is copypaste code I don’t fully understand and the WinLoop() is missing some functionality. But at least the Chapter 1 Hello Triangle compiles and runs in Fremantle on Beagle board :)

Compile and install the libes in a normal autotools manner. Then you can compile the examples by exporting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH and running gcc:


gcc `pkg-config libes --cflags --libs` Hello_Triangle.c -o Hello_Triangle


As usual, patches are welcome :)

(Not really tablet-related, but related to NumptyPhysics, which has been initially written for the tablets. Feel free to skip :)

The summer semester is in full swing, and we have been working on our HCI multi-touch seminar work for the last few weeks. We plan on extending Tim Edmonds' NumptyPhysics to work on multi-touch tables and adopt the UI accordingly to take advantage of multiple input cursors. We did a trial run on a real table last week:

The cude currently only emulates mouse events, but will allow real multi-touch input soon. We will release the code as soon as some bugs have been fixed and the code design got a bit more stable.

Today Nokia announced a new version of the Maemo 5 SDK, here is a small video with some new UI features:

Note: other features could exist in this new SDK, I don’t searched too much. I also noticed some elements missing in this version, like the application switcher and the back menu button in the right top corner of the screen, you can also see my previous video for a better comparison with the alpha SDK UI.

Happy Hacking

Today Quim Gil announced the release of the new Maemo 5 beta SDK.

Renewed looks, introduced docs and much more for you to dive/continue to swim into Fremantle’s world and do nice interfaces for mobile devices.

The introduction of docs, that I and my friend Iván Gomez maintain, are very important to the development of Hildon applications in my opinion.
Two docs are introduced, the Hildon Tutorial, targeting developers and making your hands dirty with a pratical approach; and the Hildon Interface Guidelines, less technical, that will give you some guidelines about how to develop a usable application for mobile devices.
The docs are very beta-ish but we’re working on that and will continue to improve them. Please give us your contribution and let us know about any bugs you find or suggestions you may have.

Happy mobile developing!

The Maemo 5 Beta SDK has just been released. Apart from the many changes introduced since the alpha release, one important milestone is that from now on the development of Hildon and Modest will be open and hosted at the Maemo Garage in a public Git repository.

For Hildon we now have a development mailing list where you can talk to us, make suggestions, contribute, complain or simply follow the progress of this project.

I’d like to thank Nokia for having taken yet another step towards openness, and of course all the people who have been supporting Maemo, using it, spreading it, developing for it and reporting bugs.

Let’s make Maemo 5 a success!

Today I was thinking...that it's finally time to start working on porting Xournal to Maemo 5 and start implementing a few new features I had in mind lately.I've just installed it and t works OK on my system (Dell Mini 9), but it's kinda... slow :(I'll have to check if a better driver for its graphic card exists.I'll keep posting here updates about the development.

As Quim announced yesterday, the Beta release of Maemo5 SDK has been released.

It includes our beloved Modest, which goes back to the opensource development. It’s been migrated to GIT, and you can see and track the development of the project from now on, but also browse the history of the project. See more about all of this in Modest Garage project webpage.

One very interesting new feature you’ll get with Modest is the new plugin system. The protocols code has been refactored, to allow extending Modest to support new protocols, in addition to the ones supported in standard Modest (IMAP, SMTP and POP3). And this has been exposed through a plugin API.

What you can do with this is adding plugins adding support in Modest for RSS, NNTP, etc. Just imagine the kind of mail server you would like to see in Modest!

We’ve added to the new created Modest development wiki some information about Modest Plugin development.

One final note. This plugin API is still not assuming an API/ABI stability, but this is our goal. Bad thing is you’ll need to keep your development in sync with Modest (at least for now). Good thing is that you can still contribute or request changes to the plugin API, and this won’t be a hell.

After the long wait, Midgard2 was today released to the world. This marks a big change in the scope of what Midgard is. Instead of building a CMS, we've built a generic content repository that can be utilized in web, mobile and desktop applications.

As MDK wrote when announcing the Objective-C bindings for Midgard:

...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.

This is indeed a big step for our project, as suddenly Midgard moves from the realm of PHP-only web development to the area where Midgard applications can be written for mobile devices, replicating their data with a social web app.

As Piotras is fond of saying: You could write Drupal on top of Midgard, but you couldn't write Midgard on top of Drupal.

Learn more about Midgard2 via the Eight best Midgard2 posts.

The first stable release of Midgard2 coincides with the 10th anniversary of the project, to be held in Helsinki, Finland next week. Come and join the celebration!

Technorati Tags: midgard

I didn’t blog about the 1.1.5 release (although Gustavo did, much better than I do as usual), so now that 1.1.6 is out I’ll make a 2×1 post with the highlights.

• gtk-doc support was integrated into the build system. There’s still a few rough edges, but hopefully it won’t be too long now before the full API documentation is available at, say, library.gnome.org.
• l10n support. All text in warnings, dialogs and GObject properties is marked for translation using gettext, and everybody is welcome to contribute new translations!
• A full-fledged printing API using GTK+’s GtkPrintOperation.
• Spellchecking support through Enchant.
• Error reporting. A new signal, WebKitWebView::load-error will be emitted when there’s an error during the page load. You can do nothing, and a default error page will be shown, or handle the signal yourself and show some customized error UI.
• Caret browsing mode has been added. It still has some bugs and missing features (notably, interaction with forms is kind of shaky), but I think it’s quite on par with the support in Gecko at this point and not bad for the first stepping stone.
• After the a11y hackfest and the great help from Willie and Joanmarie, a lot of improvements to the ATK support have landed. There’s a lot to cover here, but same as with caret mode we’ll keep improving with each release.
• And as usual, lots of small bugfixes all over the place.

That’s quite a lot of stuff don’t you think? I think we are making great progress, with contributions from the whole team, so let’s keep rocking!

I have just promoted SharePy 1.0~alpha3 to the Extras repository (don’t scare you this version name because it should be stable enough).
This new stable version has the following new features from the 0.2 version that was until today in Extras:

• Flickr support.
• Picasa support.
• Youtube support.
• Blip.tv support.
• SlideShare support.
• Option to add an entire folder.

Now the application is coded in such a way that it’s easier to add new services, as if it was supporting plugins, still I need to improve this code to make this much easier to other developers who want to add other services easily.

Also I have dropped the support of the Share on Ovi service because from the change in the method of authentication in share.ovi.com it wasn’t working and I haven’t been able to get it working again. Sorry.

There some services that will be supported in the future like Facebook, Vimeo, Metacafe, etc.
If you would like some other service , don’t hesitate in ask it.
Also I have uploaded some python modules to the repositories like python-slideshare and python-facebook. With this names you will imagine that are doing them.

In another related topic, the last Monday I was coding a small application to show quotes from the markets. It gets data from Yahoo Finance.

I was launching a contest in the IRC and in Talk to choose to name, and the winner is StockThis.
Congratulations to man_in_ltop, he has suggested this name. Sorry, there isn’t prize.

The application is simple as hell, you can see some screenshots here:

It will be available in Extras in some hours or days when I fix the last couple of bugs. A new python module is uploaded python-ystockquote, to get data from Yahoo Finance.

To finish the post, just to say, last week I was in a talk that Frade gave about Maemo in the Asturlinux X Anniversary. Also, I did a free software course in the University of Oviedo, where jsmanrique spoke about portable devices with a part about Maemo too. Very Interesting talks.
I am very glad that one of my applications was put as example in both talks. Thanks!

In the past several years we've seen many companies offer up their vision of The Next Big Thing in personal computing. The goal to get PCs increasingly portable is an admirable attempt but any drastic changes to the interface status quo tend to be met with consumer resistance. Screens and keyboards can only get so small before they become cute but useless novelties. [...]

If you are in Europe and want to hear about libferris and other cool storage stuff (register &) drop by the
NLUUG Spring Conference on Storage on the 7th of May.

I will of course have a maemo unit running libferris there as well as a laptop. Carrying a server with ferris is a bit too much though :) I'm brewing up the slides now with XQuery, KML, and SQLite goodness. Probably not the first three terms you think of when the words Virtual Filesystem are muttered.

As maemo.org is now in beta mode and the new style is adapted to almost all the different services of the community side, the need for a proper SSO solution increased. So I want to give a brief update, to show that the work on this solution is ongoing. Some weeks ago I proposed a possible way to adapt a SSO-concept to the set of services and after some discussion about that it will contain these components:

• CAS as a centralised authentication server
• The user-authentication will be realised against a LDAP directory in the first place, later by OpenID
• Services will interact with the server by using provided client libraries

The reasons for this set up can be found here. At the moment I am working on building up a test environment and start to integrate the services, which are needed. I will keep you up-to date how the work is proceeding.

Hyvää vappua ;)

Daniel