A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-07-27 through 2009-08-02

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-07-27 through 2009-08-02

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-07-27 through 2009-08-02

This summer I'm having the pleasure of working in Igalia (a spanish free software company) for a couple of months and they assigned me to an interesting project: developing Python bindings for MAFW library (a Maemo multimedia library that will be used in Fremantle release).

Having the opportunity to work both with C (yes, Python bindings are almost C code) and Python (it's a good practice to write unittest of all implemented methods) it's a good way to improve my knowledges in both languages and since I wasn't able to find much documentation about these kind of things, I'm going to share my own experiences.

What is a Binding?

A binding is a Python module, written in C language, that allows Python developers to call functions from existing C libraries from their python applications. It's just like a "bridge" from C world to Python one.

Why writing bindings?

There are a couple of reasons to write python bindings instead of writing a library in python language from scratch.

First of all I don't think is good duplicating code, so if a library already exists and it's written in C, why writing it again in another language? There's no reason. A lot of code already exist in C world and all we have to do is to create a bridge with python world.

Another good reason, in particular when a C library doesn't exist yet, is the fact that python code is slower than C code for some tasks (for example multimedia codecs). In these cases is good to implement the core library in C language and then create a python binding for it.

Coming next

As the title of this post says, this is only an introduction to the subjects I'm going to write about. If you have any particular request about any argument you would like to read, please feel free to leave me a comment. Next posts will talk about these things:

• A simple example of binding: I'll write a simple library in C language and I'll show how to create the relative python binding, providing complete source code and an example for python developers.
• Building and installing python bindings with distutils: I'll explain how to use distutils to build and install the binding (using the well know method "python setup.py install").
• Defining new types: this post will be about how to write new types in C language and being able to use them from python code.
• Using codegen to write bindings: I'll explain how to use codegen utils to automate lot of tasks, to generate the most part of binding code and how to customize the generated code using overrides.

Recently, zenvoid and I recently participated in DebConf9 and presented an one hour BoF session on Mer - made possible by sponsorship by Nokia for our travel and accommodation.

[...] What I discovered shocked me although I really should not have been surprised: the vast majority of our mission-critical business data was sequestered in spreadsheets and shared virally via emails [...]

Most of Python packages in the Zope world use Buildout:

svn co svn+ssh://svn.zope.org/repos/main/plone.z3cform/trunk plone.z3cform
cd plone.z3cform
python2.4 bootstrap.py
bin/buildout
bin/test -pvc

Now suppose you want to change the buildout environment somehow, e.g. use the current development version of zope.testing instead of whatever is specified in buildout.cfg. Don't edit the existing buildout.cfg (you might accidentally commit your local debug changes), instead create a new cfg file, e.g. test.cfg:

[buildout]
extends = buildout.cfg
develop += ../zope.testing

[versions]
# override any existing version pins
zope.testing =

Now re-run buildout

bin/buildout -c test.cfg
bin/test -pvc

And the tests should be run with the newest zope.testing.code.

Only this does not work with plone.z3cform, and I have no clue why. It generally works with other packages (at least those that use the zc.recipe.testrunner rather than collective.recipe.z2testrunner). Buildout is like that sometimes :(

libchamplain’s development was not blocked by the never ending delays in Clutter 1.0’s release. But we were waiting for 1.0 with eager.  And now the results are in.  Clutter 1.0 introduces many changes that simplified libchamplain’s code and solved some of our long standing issues at the same time.

Taking opportunity of the new introduced animations in Clutter, I added new marker animations in libchamplain:

If you are viewing through a planet, or a non HTML5 capable browser, here’s the file.

Since porting to Clutter 1.0 was the only condition set by the Gnome release team for libchamplain’s inclusion in Gnome 2.28, we can consider it a done deal!

See the complete announcement.

In other news, libchamplain 0.3.5 was also released last Saturday. It is the last release to use Clutter 0.8, but it also has very good Perl and Python bindings. Since Clutter 1.0’s bindings are not ready yet, libchamplain 0.3.5 is the last release to have bindings until Clutter gets some!

Some time ago Andrea Gallo from ST-Ericsson called me and proposed participation in their workshop during ELC Europe. It will be about NHK15 developer board which is based on STn8815 cpu (arm926 core + dsp). I will present Poky Linux and OpenEmbedded based environments on it.

Few days later board arrived at home in a big carton box filled with stuff.

As it is shown on picture above package contains everything needed to use board. From top-left:

• tv out cable
• board
• debug board (serial + ethernet)
• miniUSB cable
• speakers + battery cable + wifi antenna
• ribbon cables to connect debug board
• PSU (5V)
• UK/EU/US power plugs
• headset
• serial cable

By default board comes without operating system flashed. The only thing available is test picture which can be used to test does device works at all:

NHK15 offers many connectors:

• audio in/out
• SD/MMC slot
• battery connector (cable included, battery not)
• speakers (separated left/right — both are included)
• WiFi antenna (board uses same chip as Nokia tablets)
• FM antenna
• TV out (cable included)
• miniAB USB device/host port
• camera (daughterboard with image sensor included)
• debug board (which provides serial + Ethernet ports)
• ETM/Nexus ports
• SIM socket

There is 128MB of memory and 128MB NAND + 256MB OneNAND for storage. Connection with world can be done over serial, Ethernet, WiFi or Bluetooth. Screen has WVGA resolution and touchscreen attached.

Now I have Linux running on it but plan to switch to Poky Linux (supported) and OpenEmbedded based systems (Ångström for start) soon.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz NHK15 arrived was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. ST-Ericsson Community Workshop 2009
2. Bug Labs and their BUG device
3. ELC Europe 2009

If you know HTML, CSS or have a penchant for design; there's an opportunity to help finish off the packages interface for its intended audience of developers, maintainers and community testers before Fremantle's released.

To get involved, start posting your ideas in this talk.maemo.org thread.

Please have a look at this thread at Maemo Talk and help us finalize the design and items that will available at Maemo Summit 2009! We'd love to have your input and ideas -- and come up with some merchandise that all of us will really want.

Some weeks ago, Maemo 5 Beta 2 SDK was announced. Eleven weeks passed since the first version. During this time, we have been working hard in MAFW, the multimedia framework that comes in Maemo 5. Most of the work we did consisted of bugfixing and improving the framework, while keeping as much as possible the current API.

The monthly maemo.org sprint meeting was held today (first Tuesday of the month). The committed tasks, and meeting actions, are now published in the usual location:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_Sprints/August_09

Each task in the sprint is assigned a MoSCoW prioritisation: one of must, should, could (or won't). The following people have committed to organise tasks in this sprint:

• Ferenc Szekely (3 MUSTs, 1 COULD)
• Niels Breet (1 MUST)
• Jeremiah Foster (1 MUST, 1 COULD)
• Alexey Zakhlestin (1 MUST)
• Daniel Wilms (1 MUST)
• Quim Gil (1 MUST, 1 SHOULD, 1 COULD)
• Andrew Flegg (2 MUSTs, 1 SHOULD)
• Tim Samoff (1 MUST)
• Valério Valério (1 MUST)
• Dave Neary (1 SHOULD)
• Andre Klapper (1 SHOULD)
• Carsten Munk (1 SHOULD)

The following people have actions following the meeting:

• Andrew Flegg
• Tim Samoff

Day-to-day activities will be reported on the Qaiku #maemork channel.

The next sprint meeting will be held at 13:30 UTC on Tuesday, September 1st.

If there are any errors or omissions on the page, please let me know on this talk.maemo.org thread.

MAFW is a new multimedia framework that will be used in Fremantle.

The PyMaemo team is currently working on writing bindings for Python
language for this library and at the moment we've released a 0.1
version of python-mafw that you can install directly from Scratchbox
repository.

Not all the methods are implemented (you can manage the Registry and
the Playlist, but nothing more), because even if we're using codegen
to generate bindings (and it's helping us a lot), we've seen that at
least 30-40 methods have to be overridden by hand so it's taking us
more time than we expected and we're trying to organize how to
continue this work.

We would like to get feedback from python application developers and
also from C application developers that are currently using MAFW so we
can work on a "roadmap" that reflects what developers want:

• What are the functionalities you're using in your application that you think they cannot miss in the Python binding?
• Have you already started using MAFW or even better python-mafw to develop something?
• What is the currently missing method/methods you would like to be implemented first?

Come on developers! We're waiting for your feedback

The Maemo Summit is a showcase for the Maemo community, so it’s important to get the word out.

We are looking for help, specially from those who have designing skills, but everybody can help

You can help us promote the event in several ways:

* Create cool promotion banners, web badges or flyers.
* Write about the summit on your website, and add the url here.
* Help in the Summit merchandise design.
* Add banners/web badges in your website, put flyers in your work place/university/user group.
* Join the Maemo Summit groups in social networks.
* Spread the word about the summit, among your friends and colleagues.

Ideas, thoughts ? Come discuss with us

Introduction

As I promised in the preceding post, I'll provide a very easy example of a python binding. Let's suppose we don't want to use the methods included in Python to sum two integer values and we want to do it in C and then call the add method from a python script. I'll write the complete source code first and then I'll explain all the parts of it.

I'm going to take a break from my series on the data cloud and interrupt with a request from my readership. I'm putting together a presentation proposal for the Maemo Summit 2009, titled "From corporations to communities: responsible and effective engagement" and could use some opinions and experience. If you have anything to offer on the items below, feel free to comment! [...]

This is a followup of my previous post, but now running on Nokia Internet Tablet N810 with Maemo. We interleaved it with parts of screen casts so you can note it’s very close to the desktop edition, even animated video thumbnails works fine:

We even managed to convince Mariana to do the initial talk!

It always stuck me as a little odd that you have specific applications to upload to flickr, another little app with a cute interface for throwing video files at webserviceY etc. I should also mention that all of this is coming to the maemo build shortly... what better place to unlock web services than a tablet or phone, neh?

Nokia and Fronteer Strategy, an Amsterdam-based innovation shop, are going to be holding a series of "co-creation" events during the Maemo Summit and are looking for people to attend and help shape the long term future of Maemo-based devices.

The first will be held the day before the summit (Thursday, October 8th) with a small group of volunteers from within the Maemo community and beyond. The second will be held on the second day of the summit (Saturday, October 10th) in Jussi Makinen's Maemo Co-Creation workshop and is open to as many people who will fit in the room!

For more details, see this talk.maemo.org thread. You can get involved in a number of ways:

• Volunteer, or nominate someone, to take part in the first session (by replying to the thread).
• Attend the workshop on the second day of the summit.
• Take part online, if you're not attending the summit.
• Talk to people at the summit informally!

This is a really exciting shift in how Nokia are dealing with the community: not just software roadmaps, but device and use-case brainstorming. Hopefully everyone involved will take something positive away, and Nokia will continue to seek the community's input.

The Maemo Summit is a free get together of anyone interested in Maemo- and Mer-powered devices. It is being held in Amsterdam on October 8th-10th. Register now to reserve your place.

FYI, Engadget reporting the RX-51 passes FCC for T-Mobile USA

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/07/nokia-device-passes-fcc-for-t-mobile-usa-looks-an-awful-lot-lik/

How soon can I get one?!

As usual, the FCC knows about Internet Tablets first. The only thing interesting in the filing articles are requests for confidentiality (filed Jul 14) and a silhouette of the device. It was initially submitted for testing on Jun 8.

It is a phone - showing tests on GSM 850, GSM 1900, and WCDMA 1700 ranges. The published documents show "Slide closed" indicating that it may have a similar form factor to the current N810.

Tested modes were:
2-slot GPRS50
WCDMA 1700/2100
3-slot GPRS1900
WLAN 2450
2-slot GPRS850+WLAN2450
WCDMA 1700/2100 + WLAN2450
3-slot GPRS1900 + WLAN2450

The 1700/2100 band confirms T-Mobile as the target US market.

Of course the designation of LJPRX-51 is not news to the maemo community: they've been talking about it since December.

I must admit, I wasn't using Maemo email client, because I did find it was simply unusable, at least with my GMail account.

I tried both POP3 and IMAP, but having about 25.000+ messages in my account, downloading just the headers was a job that the client simply couldn't manage.

Yesterday I knew about "recent mode" support in POP3, a functionality that GMail supports too. This mode allow you to download only last 30 days messages (in my case, no more than 1000)  so the client can manage them without any problem.

All you have to do to enable this mode is put the "recent:" string before the username. For example: if your username is "username@gmail.com" you have to write "recent:username@gmail.com". Important: this mode only works with POP3, not with IMAP.

To conclude, let me say thank you to the kind guy who let me discover this mode. Thank you Sergio! Now there is another thing I can do with my tablet!

Thanks to chilko, from talk.maemo.org for linking to pictures of the elusive RX-51 aka Rover. Looks like it is marketed still as a N Series device. Waiting for an announcement and release dates now! Stay tuned...

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=309831&postcount=290

The podcast client gPodder has had its 0.17.0 release some days ago, and after some testing in Extras-Devel (thanks to Dan Ramos) we fixed some last bugs. Most notable changes are an improved feed update logic and UI wording fixes (thanks to timeless for reporting these). Now it's time to hit the street, so gPodder 0.17.0-2 should appear in Maemo Extras on your tablets running Chinook and Diablo today. Please report any problems you find. Still have not got gPodder? Go to the downloads page.

gPodder for Fremantle has also seen some fixes lately, related to changed (fixed?) API behaviour in the beta 2 SDK. Downloads are now stored in the user's $HOME, as this is the location where user-specific data goes on the new devices. Please test the latest version (0.16.1-8fremantleui) and report back if it's ready for Extras-Testing in your opinion.

For Fremantle, one thing that probably does not work yet (except if xdg-open is available and works) is starting the playback of files with the built-in media player. As this is not included in the SDK, testing it is impossible for me here. Future versions will probably use MAFW to create podcast playlists, which is now available in PyMaemo thanks to the PyMaemo team and Andrea Grandi. As soon as alternative media players (Panucci?) become available for Fremantle, these will be selectable for playing back episodes, soo.

Today I was thinking...that it's time to start doing the port of Xournal for Fremantle.As you can see from the screenshot I've almost started from scratch, but it shouldn't take long before I can release a working version of it.Stay tuned.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-08-03 through 2009-08-09

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-08-03 through 2009-08-09

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-08-03 through 2009-08-09

The PyMaemo team is pleased to announce the second beta release of PyMaemo for Fremantle!

Hello!

During my presentation on GCDS/aKademy, I talked about the Qt Labs America and that it would be released soon. Some of you may have heard about it on the dot too.

But, what is this Qt Labs Americas thing ? Well, taken from the “about” page:

Qt Labs Americas is an openBossa initiative aiming the growth of local Qt and KDE communities all over America, starting in Brazil.

So right now we are launching the website and people are welcomed to send us links to their feeds so we can aggregate them on our planet and we’ll always try to have content in three languages: portuguese, spanish and english.

There you can find projects that we give some kind of support and also partners in this initiative. We are also on identi.ca and twitter.

So, check it out and if you can be part of it in some way or you represent a university in Brazil please contact us! The website is: http://qtlabs.openbossa.org .

Cheers!

In part one of this series I touched on the conflict between the order of databases and the freedom of files. The latter are fiercely hoarded and guarded by information workers who in many cases don't really care about the object so much as the information it conveys. But what are files, and why does this issue of managing their chaos even exist?

Last Tuesday, I have started working on adding network-based multiplayer support to Tennix (a free 2D tennis game for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Maemo). In addition to two players playing on one computer (which already worked a long time ago), we now support playing Tennix over the network on two tablets (obviously, playing a tablet-versus-PC game will also work).

Currently, this network play runs over UDP, so WiFi connectivity is needed when you want to play tablet-versus-tablet. I might be able to add Bluetooth support later on, but the BlueZ API seems way more complicated than SDL_net's API which I currently use. Let me correct myself here: There's no real documentation for the BlueZ C API that I could find.

A small library with a clean API that abstracts Bluetooth, WiFi and maybe some other connectivity options and provides an easy way to establish a transport between two hosts/tablets would surely help boost developer interest in creating multi-player games and cross-tablet applications.

A video demoing the controls on two tablets can be found on YouTube.

IDE Integration 2nd edition is comming soon, including new PluThon Eclipse product. It comes with new and interesting features, such as ltrace integration. However, we know that Maemo community has a lot of valuable feedback and ideas that certainly improves PluThon and any other IDE Integration components (ESbox, PC Connectivity, etc.)

Please, visit PluThon 2nd edition web site, check how features you´d see implemented on PluThon and provide a feedback to eclipse-integration AT maemo DOT org. Your comments are welcomed!

As current chair of the Maemo Community Council, I'm announcing that the third council election will conclude on: Sunday, 27th September 2009 23:59 UTC. This will give the incoming council about two weeks to nominate a chair; prepare for the first sprint meeting of the new term (Tuesday, 6th October) and get ready for the kick-off of the community days at the Maemo Summit 2009.

As current chair of the Maemo Community Council, I'm announcing that the third council election will conclude at:

Maemo Summit 2009 is free. Aside from travel and lodging, if you can get to Amsterdam during October 9-11, you can come... If you register.

Here are all of the people who have registered so far:

http://maemo.org/news/events/maemo_summit_2009/#participants

There are currently 104 registrants and 300 slots. Please help us out by registering as soon as you can -- it would be beneficial for us to be working on actual Summit responsibilities the few weeks before the Summit instead of scrambling to approve last-minute registrants.

But, what if you can't afford travel and lodging?

That's the interesting part. If you go to the link above, you'll see a section on the right called "Sponsorship" with the value "Requested" under it. Like last year, Nokia has generously offered some budget for sponsoring community contributors to attend the Summit -- especially if you would like to lead a presentation. Got an idea? Submit it here. View the current draft schedule here.)

If you are granted Sponsorship, it means that you get travel and lodging paid for by Nokia.

October is quickly approaching and the open slots for registration (Sponsorship or not) will fill up soon. Please take some time to register so that your place is set.

* All Maemo Summit graphics are still works in progress. Go here to see all of the different versions that have been created.

I am no longer closely involved with the venerable, aging, and often renamed Hildon Application Manager; Víctor has very successfully
stepped into bigger shoes and is maintaining it now.  Nevertheless, I
can’t stop myself from giving a brief rundown of its new Fremantle
features.

Development has moved to Gitorious, so you can check the detailed
history there.

In the last post of this series, we saw how to write a simple binding and we finished to build and install it manually. This is of course not a good way to manage the building/installation procedure. In Python we can use a library called distutils that let us to automatize the building and installing [...]

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-08-10 through 2009-08-16

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-08-10 through 2009-08-16

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-08-10 through 2009-08-16

Hi everybody, my name is Paulo Cesar, and I was invited to participate on the Maemo planet recently. Here I’ll post about my adventures with Maemo development.

My first ‘test’ application is actually something that’s very useful for me: a Gmail client. Well, technically the client isn’t mine, it’s from Google, and for iPhones. My application is a little webkit browser made in Qt that identifies itself as iPhone’s Safari, and it uses kinetic scrolling to have a similar behavior as iPhone.

This is a picture of it’s first version:

 

I made a video too, so you can see the kinetic scrolling in action:

After that, I added a little bunch of goodies to it, basic stuff, like a name, an icon, a loading animation and error handling. The name it’s Macuco, and the logo it’s this nice bird my wife draw for me

If bugmasters are allowed to blog wishlists, then developers should also be allowed to write them! Which is why I wrote my wishlist!

I am very happy to announce that our OpenBossa labs have just released LGPL licensed Python bindings for Qt, endorced by Nokia. It is our first product being released as part of our newly founded Qt Labs Americas, and we hope they will be well received by the Python and Qt communities.

Though, not being part of the Python team, I have long followed the project and tried to encourage the team and their work, and I think that they can all be very proud.

The product is not a binding alone, but also a Binding Generator and an API Extractor, which should make it easier to generate bindings for other languages as well as easily bind other Qt libraries, and make them accessibly through Python.

Please check out the brand new site: http://www.pyside.org

It was a really great experience to talk about the basic concepts of Qt and to present new features such as the Animation framework to people that had never used Qt before.

Before lunch we had an overall look at QObjects (signals/slots), QWidgets, canvas based interfaces (QGraphicsView) and other basic stuff. After lunch we had “hands on” activities so people could create small applications. At first we created an address book using regular QWidgets, later we created our own QGraphicsWidget and played with canvas based interfaces and at the end we took a look at QAnimation.

You can take a look at the slides here (it’s in portuguese) and in one week we’ll announce the winners of a challenge: create an application using Qt. The prize for the best two applications will be free entrances for Bossa Conference 2010!

Regarding Bossa Conference, stay tuned for the call of papers that will be announced soon! Now I’m looking forward bringing this kind of training to other universities and doing more advanced trainings at UFPE.

If you assisted the talk Iago did at GCDS’09 about MAFW, maybe you remember he showed a demo to explain some of the concepts managed in MAFW. And if you paid attention too you noticed the demo was running on a standard desktop, not in scratchbox. Yes, cool!

Early September. That's when all the cards hit the table.

Nokia is the #1 global smartphone provider, but Apple's chipping away at them. Nokia makes superior hardware, technological leaps ahead, and open software platforms. Apple makes "pretty" hardware and an all-in-one solution for hardware, software, music/video management, and applications.

iPhone users have a hard time using Nokia products due to the lack of a cohesive management interface. Users feel like the Nokia PC Suite and Ovi suite apps are far behind iTunes in music/video management, music/media store, app store, and interface cohesion. In my personal experience, the N97 software is about as stable as an egg. On a flag pole. During an earthquake.

Nokia users have a hard time using Apple products because the hardware is inferior, has fewer features, and has no opportunity for homebrew applications. Nokia users are accustomed to using any application they can find and download instead of just those approved by the application store. They're used to 5 megapixel images with video and flash. They have options for keyboards, touchscreens, candybar phones, sliders, and more.

Maemo is cut from a different cloth than Symbian. It started out as a proof-of-concept project for Nokia on the 770 Internet Tablet and grew into a global collaboration of some of the brightest people on the planet. From this "fresh start," the Maemo 5 tablet (phone!) has to capitalize on all the strengths of other Nokia devices, compensate for all shortcomings, and smack Apple head-on. If it were just up to the developers, I'd have no doubt that it would carve up the iPhone fans. However, a successful smartphone/media phone/Internet device relies on developers as well as business partnerships, lifestyle integration, and finding the right key points for market penetration.

What happens now?

Two things will happen in early September:
Nokia World 2009. Given how many "leaked" shots of the Maemo 5 tablet have already surfaced, the sensible press date for official release will be at this September 2-3 event. That gives the media and developers plenty of time past the NDA to properly discuss the tablet openly before the 2009 Maemo Summit a month later. Announcing at the Maemo summit will be too late as developers would have no time to properly present their latest attractions on the new platform.

Apple's special event on Sept 9. If there's an Apple tablet incoming (as often rumored) the Sept 9 event may be just in time to get the thing out by Christmas. It seems a little late to announce such a thing, but it's certainly possible. At the very least, it will give the competition something to play against during the upcoming holiday season.

Pardon me. I'm going to go hold my breath for a few weeks.

Mobile Review came through with a very early preview of the Nokia N900, an upcoming device running the new Maemo 5 OS. I wrote that Nokia needed a facelift and they responded with the N900. I think this is the freshness that Nokia’s high-end users like me are looking for.

Eldar Murtazin’s preview of Noka N900 is worth reading entirely but I’ve broke it down for a shorter read.

Specs

• Side-slider form factor similar to the Nokia N810.
• 5MP camera with lens cover similar to Nokia N97.
• 1320mAh battery
• 32GB internal memory + microSDHC slot for extra storage.
• Responsive 800×480 pixel resistive screen

UI

There are lots of UI screenshots provided by Mobile-Review, but here are some of my favorites.

Music Player

Customizable Home Screen

Nokia Maps

Applications menu

Multitasking

Impressions

Here are some of the stand-out impressions from Mr. Murtazin.

• For simplicity sake, it runs the next version of Maemo and it differs dramatically from the Nokia N810.
• Variety of visual effects, smooth transitions and decent reaction time of the touch screen which is a significant improvement over the Nokia N97.
• Browser is pretty stable, and it supports flash, video and applets.
• Phone’s GPS department seemed well-tuned.
• Context menus are made in the form of pop-ups which are easy to dismiss. All you need to do is press on any area of the screen outside the menu and it’ll be closed in an instant.
• True mobile powerhouse… that comes wrapped in a very eye-candy and functional UI at that
• Available late in 2009 for 550 Euro (subject to change).

Are you excited as I am about this device?

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like…

• Review: Simple Brightness Applet for Nokia N900
• How to Create Loopable Wallpapers for Nokia N900
• How To Auto-Tweet Videos Uploaded to Youtube From Your Nokia Device
• Nokia N900 Review of Email

This post is part two of my DebConf thoughts series, first post here. At DebConf we also attended three talks directly related to something we use quite often in Maemo and Mer: cross-compilation. The first was by Riku Voipio/suihkulokki about Scratchbox 2 (mirrored by me as I can't find the original URL) - which was also a maemo.org talk like ours, as well as the round-table session on Multiarch and a talk by Wookey on Crossbuilding on Debian for a derived distro.

As I promised, I’m posting pictures of the Qt training that we had last Monday

Today I was thinking...that the community is amazing :)In order to port Xournal to Fremantle I needed my old code. Unfortunately that was on my old desktop in Italy lying in the lab there. And that box was shut down (ready to be wiped out!).I called my friends and told them to wait before wiping it out so that I could back up my stuff, but the machine is still off. I had to wait for people to

During my hackfest time in Igalia I thought it’d be interesting to see how much it’d take to make OCRFeeder run in Fremantle just like Stefan Kost did for Jokosher and Pitivi talked about during GCDS.

At the beginning, I thought it’d be a little difficult (I thought I’d need a lot of stuff)
So I installed libgoocanvas-dev, checked out pygoocanvas and compiled it (I also needed to manually copy the generated egg from Python 2.3’s site-packages to Python 2.5’s). After that, no OCR engines available so I installed OCRAD which was pretty easy. I also decided to give a shot at installing Tesseract which went wrong supposedly due to a broken make file or something but this week that problem was fixed and now Tesseract works like a charm!

I’m not thinking of porting OCRFeeder to Maemo (it is an office application that wouldn’t be very easy to use on a device nor it makes sense to want to do that kind of office task in a mobile device) but it was indeed nice to see how easy it is to make a GNOME application written in Python to work on it.

OCR can have many interesting applications in a mobile device and I got a few ideas stashed in a corner of my memory so, if the time allows, I’ll try to put some to practice in the future.

Here are some screenshots of OCRFeeder and the result ODT document (yes, the ODFPy modules worked fine as well):

It’s a normal day, I am being bombarded by twitter, facebook, the intertubes, et. al. and I come across a tweet from @debian mentioning the new packages available from the last few weeks. I look at what has come into debian for something interesting and there is a lot, like an ofono package.

What catchse my eye is vala-terminal since vala is something I would like to learn more about. Clicking on the vala-link in the debian packages web interface shows another interesting link to some web site called freesmartphone.org. I click there to find that the same people behind the freesmartphone.org site have created a commercial entity that used to be funded by OpenMoko. So its good to see that the OpenMoko stuff has found its way into the community and that these tools are making there way into debian which is upstream for Maemo.

Things move so quickly nowadays, it’s just amazing to watch the ecosystem for free software expand.

[...] I've been very pessimistic on Nokia's future prospects in the United States but there's no distinction in that stance; so has just about every other pundit. It seems like every time Nokia had something novel to offer, whether it be new devices like the promising internet tablets or a potentially hot service like Ovi, the ball wound up fumbled... [...]

Today I was thinking...that well it's better to play for Maemo than working :)So I went ahead and, after a whole day fighting with bugs andpackaging, I am proud to say that finally Xournal is available forFremantle!!It's only an alpha version (as you can see from the screenshot above) and probably it won't even start on your SDK, but it's the very first step on the right path.You can find it in

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-08-17 through 2009-08-23

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-08-17 through 2009-08-23

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-08-17 through 2009-08-23

This is going to be a long post, I’m going to go over a bunch of stuff, so feel free to go and fetch some coffee before reading it

Last week I wrote down why I believe the model should not have anything about columns. In .NET many people only ever used DataTables as their models. Because of that they often believe that in .NET the model must contain the columns.

Since this blog isn't even passing payout thresholds for AdSense and Chitika anymore, I've decided to simply remove both advertising elements from the site. The future of the actual TabletBlog content will be determined by mid-September.

In addition to removing all ads from TabletBlog.com -

Except where specifically noted, all content created for TabletBlog.com and UltraMobileGeek.com are now covered by the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0. This includes all videos hosted under the ThoughtFix YouTube channel and all images hosted under ThoughtFix accounts on Picasa and Flickr linked from these blogs.

GSoC is already over, and the Maemo Community had a very successful participation this year, all students successfully completed the program, some with more difficulties than others, but in general, I’m very happy with the final results.

I hope that all who had involved in our organization have had a very pleasant time and a great learning experience. Let’s hope that we can run similar programs inside our community more times in the future, with the knowledge acquired, the benefits for the community will be even bigger, for sure .

I would like to thank some individuals and some company’s which had an important role in our GSoC participation:

Our mentors: Eduard Bartosh(ed_), Eduardo Lima(etrunko), Florian Boor(florian), Gary Birkett(lcuk), Gustavo Chaves(glima), Luis Felipe Strano Moraes(lfelipe), Rafael Antognolli(antognolli), Thomas Perl(thp), Ulisses Furquim Freire da Silva(Ryback_) and all the others that don’t had an student assigned.

Our Students: Amit Sethi(amit_usual), Andrei Mirestean(andrei1089), Andrey Popelo(apopelo), Feng Gao(derkaiser), Kasun Herath(kasun), Kirtika Ruchandani(rkirti), Lauri Võsandi(v6sa), Max Usachev(plastun), Thiago Borges Abdnur(bolaum) and Zachary Habersang(z4chh).

Our Community: Everybody that proposed project ideas and helped our students, especially the Mer guys (I’m looking at you Stskeeps et al ).

Nokia: For sponsoring the trip & accommodation of the students and mentors that attended the Mozilla Maemo Danish Weekend held in Copenhagen, especially Quim Gil for the help given during the program.

Texas Instruments: For the Beagleboard kindly offered to Kirtika, was a great help for her project.

Google: For running this successfully program, especially the GSoC team(Leslie, Ellen et al) and the Melange team.

Here’s some screenshots of our students work, more screenshots can be found in lfelipe’s blog.

Shop-mate

Moncells

Maemo OE

Mnemosyne

Nokia has not officially announced the Nokia N900 yet, but press photos have leaked out. It’s not a big deal, really, because we’ve already read an early review of the N900. OMG it looks pretty…

We’re only a few days away from Nokia World, where the Nokia N900 is supposedly going to be announced. I’ll be there and you bet I’m going to run towards this device the moment I see a demo person holding it. Watch out!

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like…

• A Guide to Maemo Extras for More Nokia N900 Applications
• Review: Simple Brightness Applet for Nokia N900
• How to Create Loopable Wallpapers for Nokia N900
• How To Auto-Tweet Videos Uploaded to Youtube From Your Nokia Device

After a bit of a delay I'm going to wrap up this series tonight. In the last segment, I finished up describing the struggle between file independence and data management, ending with the usefulness of metadata and touching on Cory Doctorow's dissension on that topic. [...]

The Nokia N900, previously known as Rover, previously known as ‘RX-51′, has not been officially announced by Nokia, but it has already been leaked in photos, and is now already covered in a full review. That’s right – Eldar from Mobile-Review has apparently been using one for a few weeks now, and has posted his full review in English.

The review contains plenty of photos of the device, confirming the slide-out QWERTY form factor, the 5 megapixel autofocus camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual-LED flash, and the large touchscreen display. The Nokia N900 will apparently be powered by Maemo5, which is the operating system previously used in Nokia’s Internet Tablets, and has a bit of an Ovi-fied look, with new icons and such.

There are also a number of screenshots, which reveal quite a few details that I previously had questions about. For starters, you can see that there is a real email client, with support for Mail for Exchange, and I’m sure we’ll have a version of Nokia Messaging loaded in there, as well.

The Music player has also been revamped entirely, with a much better organization scheme, as well as one-click access to simply shuffle all of your tracks. There are plenty of screenshots available on Eldar’s review, so click on over and check it out.

We’ll be on-site at Nokia World next week, where the Nokia N900 is expected to be announced, and will hopefully have some live hands-on photos and videos available then.

Related Posts

• Nokia RX-51 Tablet Caught In The Wild
• 10 Awesome Features Of Maemo5
• Nokia N900 Compared To The Nokia E71
• Nokia Confirms The Nokia N900 With Maemo5
• We’re Relaunching As Maemo-Guru.com

I proudly present yet another Maemo port, DrNokSnes, which comes from DrPocketSnes. 

It is capable of emulating Mode7 games like Mario Kart at 20fps with sound in your average N810, which is nowhere near full speed, but much better than original snes9x’s 2-3 fps (without sound!) and still very playable.

You can get it from extras-devel, and check development over at garage. 

The biggest problem I found while porting opensnes9x ASM core sources is that it seems that the ABI the N8x0 devices follow mandates that the upper 16 bits of a register holding a unsigned short parameter value be set to zero. The ASM code doesn’t take care of zeroing those and as such random data was being introduced in the C functions, making those crash at weird points, or even worse, adding random behavior to the emulated games (man, seeing all the Mario kart characters keeping hitting themselves the whole race instead of racing was fun). 

Also, I was bitten by a gcc bug; thankfully just switching the order of two statements (in the dsp1emu.c file) made the bug go away.

The port uses SDL for its video, audio, input, and timekeeping functions. SDL uses XShm in Maemo and I believe is the third fastest way to put images to the N8x0 video hardware (first one being omapfb, second one being Xv). Audio uses the SDL ESD backend by default; I found it works much better setting buffer sizes <= 512 samples — same as what the SDL ALSA backend “wants”.

I implemented snesadvance.dat speedhacks support into the emulator, since they’re becoming very common these days. Incredibly enough, I couldn’t find a single opcode 42 implementation for the opensnes9x asm arm core, so I had to write my own. It’s still incomplete and doesn’t handle most branch types, but it seems to work fine with my test rom set.

The GUI uses osso-games-startup. I don’t know why I decided to use it (probably because I like integration with the rest of the system), it’s a bit undocumented and has some “wtf” features, but I like the result.

Many thanks to the original authors of DrPocketSnes and all of #maemo, who helped me a lot with the port, and enjoy!

There should be a new version of Mussorgsky available in Extras-devel.

Changes mainly in the album-art part of the program:

• Allowed to choose manually the album art for a specific album
• Moved “Automatic retrieval” of album art to a menu option
• Better information in the automatic download dialog
• Changed the first screen layout/buttons and added a window for the album art.

On the technical side, more things are asynchronous and i discovered how elegant is the code using the “yield” statement. As usual, feedback is welcome.

It's out!
http://maemo.nokia.com

I'm so proud of what we have achieved in maemo team.

So the Maemo-based Nokia N900 is finally announced. We are finally free to tell everyone the cool stuff we have been cooking all this time. My work on this device was mostly with UPnP/DLNA and MAFW, not counting my work from n800 that was re-used. GUPnP will soon be in your pocket, so those out there who doubt the greatness of this library, time to face the facts. :)

So now is the time to ask all the questions you have on our soon-in-the-shelves mobile phone. :)

So after months of denial it turns out, that the/we Maemo folks really built a phone!

http://maemo.nokia.com

The Nokia N900 has finally been given an official announcement on Thursday. Nokia says the device will show where they are going with the Linux-based Maemo and continue to work with the community to push the software forward. We have seen an early preview of the N900 already so it was only a matter of time before Nokia unleashed their announcement.

More photos are available at the official Nokia Conversations blog. They’ve also included a couple of videos as well.

Update: A third video of the N900 surfaced. Pretty kick ass!

Highlights

• TI OMAP 3430: ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz processor
• up to 1GB of application memory (256 MB RAM, 768 MB virtual memory)
• OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration
• 3.5in touch screen
• 800 × 480 pixel resolution
• 32GB of storage, which is expandable up to 48GB via a microSD card
• 5MP camera and Carl Zeiss optics.
• 1320mAh battery
• 110.9 × 59.8 × 18mm dimension and 181g weight
• Maemo browser powered by Mozilla technology
• fast internet connectivity with 10/2 HSPA and WLAN
• full Adobe Flash(TM) 9.4 support
• Video recording at up to 848 × 480 pixels (WVGA) and up to 25fps
• full physical slide-out QWERTY
• Expected fourth quarter 2009 at around 500 Euros

I’m concerned about this:

• Quad-band GSM EDGE 850/900/1800/1900
• WCDMA 900/1700/2100 MHz

Will there be a variation that supports WCDMA 850/1900 MHz so I can use 3G in the United States with AT&T?

More of the technical specifications and Nokia N900 overview also available at maemo.nokia.com.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like…

• Maemo Community Hosts Test Marathon for Apps Before Nokia N900 Hits Retail
• A Guide to Maemo Extras for More Nokia N900 Applications
• Review: Simple Brightness Applet for Nokia N900
• How to Create Loopable Wallpapers for Nokia N900

It’s announced. And I’m proud to be part of it. See it in action.

Ifeel good. It is now publicly announced. See www.maemo.nokia.com.
More to follow.

See you at Nokia World, Maemo Summit and OSIM.

Oh finally we announced this thing. Still can't talk about it that much :(The video looks great though :)

The N900 has been announced, it is based on Maemo 5.
Here is the N900 official press release about it:
http://www.nokia.com/press/press-releases/showpressrelease?newsid=1337594
And here is the maemo site about it:
http://maemo.nokia.com/.
Check it out.

The new Nokia N900 has been announced. How does it sound? Taking in account that comes with Maemo 5 and therefore MAFW, it should sound very fine

With all the fuss that’s going on around the announcement of the Nokia N900, I honestly didn’t want to write yet another post about it.

But I can’t resist :-)

I’m not going to talk about its features or its specs. I just want to say that it’s really exciting for me to see the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones releasing a high-end handset with a GNU/Linux-based operating system.

I think that this is a great milestone for the free software movement as a whole, because none of this could have been possible without all the work that Linux, GNOME, Debian and other projects have been doing before this.

Being part of the N900 team, of course I want this new device to hit the big time; but what I really want to see is not just the success of this particular model, but the proof that free software has entered the mobile phone market to stay. For good.

Let’s make it happen.

Did I say I’m excited? :-)

In this first impression post, I'll be talking about the hardware changes only. I have yet to use Maemo 5, so I cannot really comment on it yet.

Our secret N900 "The Device" is no longer so secret as it just got announced. I can't though show yet my own videos about it (I will post them some time later, so stay tuned), but there is already plenty of announced material that might interest you. Others have already announced links to them I am sure. I really love our device and I am sure you want it too!

New site, lots of cool pictures and information:
http://maemo.nokia.com

There is a video in Youtube (not my video, but cool nonetheless):
N900 interaction documentary

I recommend watching the above video if you are eager to see (I am sure you are) how our completely renewed fancy UI works. It is very cool and it works!

While implementing the maemo.org packages interface, I wanted to add a link to the bugtracker for a package or project. Eventually integrating bug reporting/searching, but more on that later. As all information is gathered from the debian packages themselves, it would make sense to have the bugtracker URL available in the control file.

There doesn't seem to be a default field in debian control files for and URL of the bugtracker which the project is using. Therefor I want to propose introducing the XSBC-Bugtracker field.

XSBC-Bugtracker:
The URL of the bugtracker for this package, preferably (when applicable) the URL where you can directly file a bug. The content of this field is a simple URL without any surrounding characters such as .

Example:

XSBC-Bugtracker: https://bugs.maemo.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Wormux

By putting the bugtracker URL inside the package, people always have a way to find out where to file bugs. This could even be used for filing bugs through an application interface or crash reporter in the future.

When this feature is accepted, it should be added to the Packaging Policy too.

Please let me know what you think. Discussion at talk.maemo.org.

The wait is over, today, N900 was announced. It is the first Maemo powered cellphone and represents a long way since the first version of Maemo came out.

Now I don’t wanna be bugging you around with another post explaining how much I like what was announced but I’d leave a lacuna in my blog if I didn’t write anything at all.

So, I’d just like to say I’m proud and happy to be part of such a great team that, along with others, contributed to bring in this great piece of technology that represents another step in the history of GNU/Linux in mobile phones.

Viva o Maemo!

I love how full-on Nokia has launched the new N900 handset. We work so much on the underlying technology that it’s a welcome reminder how users feel emotionally about the whole product. The enthusiastic response is real encouragement for our developers. But don’t be confused by Nokia’s odd emphasis on “mobile computing” in their text – this is a highly capable smartphone that’s about communication and lifestyle rather than mere computing for the sake of it. This is their latest greatest phone – the one that people will hunger for.

For a year or so we’ve had to keep the secret that Nokia want to make phones with Linux, though every other major handset company was already doing it, because it make so much more sense than fighting the eccentricities of all those in-house proprietary platforms. I’m glad we can talk about it now, though we have vague orders to not to go into too much detail until Nokia World 2009 next week.

This product has been the major part of our work at Openismus, and is the reason for our growth, keeping Mathias, Jan Arne, Daniel B, Karsten, and André very busy and determined, with the others helping and learning so we can build on our success. Soon the code will be in our hands.

Ever since Nokia contacted me about improving Tinymail to make it suitable for their Modest E-mail client have they given me a reason to get up in the morning, to work on something of which I knew would someday kick ass.

With the Maemo5 based Nokia N900 device we’ll have Modest shipped by default, and Tracker being actively used by several of its softwares. Future is going to shine even brighter for Tracker. Hard to brag about it, Tracker is inherently a background thing. Ah, well, technical people know about it.

Having worked on Tracker for more than a year, I now understand Tracker’s potential. At first, while I was trying to make an API for- and store the summary of E-mail envelope headers, so that E-mail clients can access this in a memory efficient way, I was critical of this Tracker stuff.

But then I joined Ivan, Urho, Ottela, Martyn and Carlos who were working on Tracker. Later Jürg joined and at the Berlin Hackfest people like Rob Taylor, Jürg and Urho discussed replacing Tracker’s poorer own ontology with Nepomuk and replacing its query language with SPARQL.

Given the implied complexity I was again critical, but then that crazy Jürg guy in a few weeks time turned Tracker into 99.9% pure fine awesomeness. I quickly joined working on this crazy “vstore” branch. Since a few months we have convinced the other Tracker guys to just start calling it “master”.

Ever since I feel again like a student who is learning how to develop software. Jürg is utilizing so many good techniques and we’re implementing so many specifications that are just “the right thing to do”, that the beautify of it all could sometimes make me cry of happiness.

Thanks to creating the opportunity to develop on software that will be used on for example their N900 device, Nokia continues giving people like me a reason to get up in the morning.

Don’t tell the native Nokians, but that’s why the N900 announcements secretly also made me a little bit proud. To whoever of us that worked on this stuff: guys, we’re all doing a great job. Let’s make the next one even better!

We’re very interested in the Nokia N900, but will it be too big? The best way to find out is through size comparisons between devices we’ve probably seen before. I’ve entered the Nokia N900 dimensions on Sizeasy next to the iPhone, Nokia E71, and Nokia N97. Take a look.

Color Guide

Top view

Front and Side view

Actual Comparison

Here’s an actual comparison between the Nokia E71 and N900. This photo was shared by @chansearrington on Twitter.

I think the best way to imagine it in your hands is that it’ll have the width of the iPhone with the thickness of the Nokia N97. Fortunately Nokia made it shorter than all the devices compared here. Does the size of the Nokia N900 bother you?

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like…

• Liveblogging the NYC Nokia N900 Meetup Using a Nokia N900
• Maemo Community Hosts Test Marathon for Apps Before Nokia N900 Hits Retail
• A Guide to Maemo Extras for More Nokia N900 Applications
• Review: Simple Brightness Applet for Nokia N900

It almost sounds like a Monty Python skit except that it isn't really funny. Apple product users worldwide are reporting exploding and sparking iPhone and iPods in what's becoming an all-too-familiar story over the past few years. [...]

The Nokia N900 sure looks like the next Nokia device to get, but the announcement leaves current Nokia ‘NAM’ users in the dark. For the past few years in the US, I had to be an AT&T subscriber if I wanted high-end Nokia phones with 3G internet. Nokia produced phone variations labeled ‘NAM’ that worked with AT&T’s high-speed network. The Nokia N900 announced recently will not work with AT&T’s 3G, but there is hope for a forthcoming variation.

After the N900 has been announced. I was saying this to a friend of mine:

[Me] so
[Me] remember our discussion about a Linux powered phone ? ;)
[Me] sorry I convinced you that Linux on phones is a no while I knew we were doing it :)

read more

That's what the OBS does for us.

The openSuse builder  provides Mer with an incredibly powerful tool for building packages.

It gives us:

• over 150 build cores !!
  
• powerful monitoring and control tools - web and cli
• total access - it's all GPL
• proven capability - openSUSE and SLE are built using it
• distribution neutrality
  

OBS is a GPL, distro-neutral build system; it works by creating a totally empty virtual machine (or chroot), bootstrapping a minimal version of a distribution and then driving the distro's own build tools to pull in the build dependencies from the official distribution repository. Finally it calls the native tools (eg dpkg-buildpackage) to build the package

Think of it as a wrapper around the distribution's standard build tools which provides queue management and a good web interface.

What's good about that then?

• No wheels being re-invented - it uses the 'standard' tools
• Quality control - packages must specify exactly what they depend on to build; and a build installs clean packages and builds from clean source
• Management wrappers - more about this later
  

And it does this around multiple base distributions inclding Debian/Ubuntu/Redhat/Centos/Moblin and of course SUSE and openSUSE.
Just try building a Redhat package on the Debian build system - or vice versa.

What makes it particularly interesting for Mer is that it also does this with multiple architectures including ARM.

So what Mer essentially does is to feed it a large number (~200) standard debian format source packages and wait for it to spit out .deb files in an sources.list compatible repository.

Doing this correctly means it needs to analyse build dependencies and, make-like, consider the freshness of those dependencies to determine if a rebuild is required. So if a change is needed in  libhildonfm2 then all the packages that depend on it will be rebuilt - nice.

If you'd like to read a bit more about how Mer uses it then start on the Mer Build pages.

Nice buzz ;-)

We have a tough last mile to finalize the N900 for the sales start. The Maemo team is working very hard and I'm so proud of it! Thus, I want to say a few words about how we build the Maemo devices. We do it as a part of the community in upstream projects, maemo.org projects, and internal hardware and software development, finalizing, and releasing.



Upstream projects
The most significant part of this joint development happens in upstream communities, such as kernel.org, Mozilla, and Gnome. Hundreds of individuals are participating the development and this is what creates the foundation of the Maemo platform.

Maemo is based on the world's most significant open source components. It is build with the community. I've said some time ago that our vision is to bring open source to consumers. That is what is happening right now.

Maemo.org
While working within these upstream projects, we have maemo.org as the Maemo community. It provides a means for developers to discuss, contribute, follow up, praise&complain, and be part of the Maemo evolution. The Maemo community has over 16.000 registered members that contribute to more than 700 development projects. Is it the largest community of mobile open source developers? We as Nokia sponsor it but it is governed by the community council.

Nokia Maemo team
The Nokia team runs device development programs, such as the N900 program, and software programs, such as the Fremantle software program as a part of the Maemo Devices. Software programs and the roadmap are communicated and discussed openly within the maemo.org. Device programs are Nokia secrets before days like this Thursday.

The Nokia programs utilize the work from upstream projects, maemo.org work and Nokia internal R&D. They finalize the software and hardware, and create an open source based user experience that -- I hope -- people will love the way I do.

Don't think that this is a simple engine to run! In addition of getting the most significant parts of the code from community projects, the Nokia Maemo team has a huge job to develop, finalize, optimize, fine tune, test, and integrae the devices into ready packages. The work varies from bootloaders to UI widgets, from power management to graphical elements.

In addition to the open source projects, the Maemo team works intimately with external companies providing components and technology to Maemo devices. Texas Instruments, Adobe, Ebay/Skype to name a few.

Summary

Great user experience through open source. Excitement in the air. The community development in the core.

This really made my day: A reason to get up in the morning by Philip.

N900 is now out and we all want to make it even cooler. Even more My device than it already is. To the majority of the world that probably moot point as you don't yet have one, but you will. Soon. And then you want to make it more You. Enter Theme Maker N900.

I have updated Theme Maker (from now on, TM) to fully support N900 Theming. Not only can you convert the buttons, toolbars, all the widgets, but TM themes also convert the fonts, the icons and bacground images.

Wwhat is so different from before. Base theme template is larger than before. It's mostly legacy support stuff and you only really need to touch the right third of the template if you are lazy. In addition you will have two new templates: icons and backgrounds.

Lemme show these to you:



The icon template contains all the apps you have by default in the launcher and also for different mime types, devices and some control panel items. I'll be adding a few more later on. Ideas for good candidates are welcome. The reason these are not Nokia icons is that we need to have a CC basis for the icons so that you can work on top of them. Nokia Icons are of course strictly copyright Nokia, so I just used these beautiful Oxygen icons to set a good example for you.


Backgrounds contains on the top part a full 4 screens wide image (3200x480), so you can easily put an image that pans nicely on the device. Under it there are / will be some bgs for some additional apps.

So, even if you don't have N900 yet, I urge you to download theme maker and the example tempaltes and start hackign for a new theme, because you will surely be able to install it on your beautiful N900 very soon.

Theme Maker comes with two default templates, one for dark themes and another for light themes. This should set up the basis nicely for your new theme.

Link to download:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=36

[Edit: Forgot to mention that theme maker requires bigger java heap on linux than by default. OSX app handles it nicely, just doubleclick to open, but on linux you need to start with -Xmx1024M parameter. I'll add a .sh script to next release to easen the pain of linux users. Windows version will follow soonish. You can edit the theme template anyway already and that's the most important thing. ]

New debs allowing you to copy to flickr, 23hq, vimeo, youtube etc from the n810 are available. The next step is closer integration, tapping into the "send to" menu to let you send any image file to these places. Hey, its just a filesystem now ;)

One interesting possibility is using the n810 to shuttle images from a digital camera to the net. This gets around the vendor lock-in that might be present on your camera because the n810 just grabs the images from the cam and then shuttles them onward to wherever.

I also updated libferris to allow you to authenticate from the console, just the ticket to let you set things up over ssh with your desktop browser.

OK, for maemo, check the repository and you'll want ferris, libferris, and libferrisui at least. Version 1.3.6.
If you get into dependency trouble, see the build order to get an idea of the tree. Sorry its a bit hard to get on the device, hopefully stuff will move into extras in time.

Anyone who has used desktop flickr tools, you'll know about the whole authenticate before you buy thing. The below commands setup 23hq and copy an image over to it.

$ ferris-capplet-auth --list-auth-sites
...
flickr
23hq
...
$ ferris-capplet-auth --auth-with-site 23hq
...
Grant Auth following URL...

http://www.23hq.com/services/auth/?api_key=...

Then press return to continue...
<Open above link in browser, grant auth, hit return>

Done...

$ ferriscp -av 26082009071.jpg 23hq://me/upload

Hopefully things will become easier in the future: installation, setup etc. Of course, streaming from the webcam to youtube will rock, but baby steps as they say.

As many of you know, Andrew and I will be traveling to Stuttgart, Germany this week to attend Nokia World. We are very excited (and appreciative) that Nokia has placed such importance on having some Maemo Community members present for the unveriling of Maemo 5 and the new N900. There has been quite a lot of buzz since the Maemo 5 site launched this past week and even more visitors to the site than imagined (maemo.nokia.com had over 12-million page views in the first 24-hours that it was live). There have also be many new visitors to maemo.org. It's pretty amazing all the way around.

Andrew and I aren't just going to Nokia World for fun, though. We will be microblogging the entire event. Rather than creating an entirely new Twitter hashtag, I figured it would be a good idea to just use #maemo5. I'll also be taking photos and posting them for everyone to see.

Lastly, I don't know about Andrew, but I've already received a number of emails from people who had questions about the Maemo 5 and the N900. This is fine, but we're not going to be able to tell you much until after we see everything at Nokia World. There have been some great questions so far -- keep 'em coming -- but don't expect any answers until after Wednesday or Thursday.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-08-24 through 2009-08-30

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-08-24 through 2009-08-30

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-08-24 through 2009-08-30

Before I head over to Germany in a few hours for Nokia World, I thought you should see some sample photos taken with the Nokia N900 that were discretely uploaded on Flickr. Remember the Flickr search trick? No results for Nokia N900, but plenty show up for prototype model “007 001.” Check it out.

Let’s start with incriminating photos.

The photo above was conveniently placed in a photo set called “N900.” Now take a look at the camera model by checking the right sidebar on the Flickr page. It says “007 001″

If you’re still not convinced, the next photo pretty much confirms the Nokia N900 as the 007 001 model. @chansearrington posted a twitpic with a caption, “test”. He then replied it was from a Nokia N900 that wasn’t final hardware or firmware. If you download the full image, the exif data shows it was taken from camera model, “007 001.”

Sample Photos

We just need to perform the Flickr search trick for camera “007 001″ to see Nokia N900 sample photos.

• site:flickr.com “Taken with a 007 001″

I’ve listed a few below. Click to enlarge the photos and see their respective owners.

There are lots more. Just use the trick to find them!

As a reminder, these photos are from Nokia N900’s that are not running final firmware. I expect to see improvements before they become available later this year.

The next post will be blogged from Stuttgart, Germany. I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on a Nokia N900. Check back as I provide firsthand coverage directly from Nokia World!

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The Nokia N900 is more targeted to the mass market than any of the Nokia Internet Tablets before. This means that Maemo will see new users, with different levels of knowledge, and involvement.Some will just use their device and will not be interested in contact with other users.Some will ask questions on mailing lists or [...]

A cursor on a query of a database is a finger pointing to the current row. Most databases do this without pulling the entire resultset into memory. It’s indeed much like a C/C++ pointer, except that a pointer can only point to memory in your process’ virtual memory. A cursor is a bit more abstract.

POSIX developers can compare a cursor with a pointer to a region in an mmap. For people who don’t know about mmap, mmap can be used to map a file into your process’ memory. You get a C/C++ pointer back, from which you can read the data as-if it’s in memory. With mmap, when you create a pagefault, the kernel will pull pages into your memory (from the file, or whichever resource is behind the mapping).

In Tracker all database operations used to be much like how using g_file_get_contents works: you read the entire thing into memory, and then you operate on that memory. Internally it used the database’s cursor API too, of course. The sqlite3_step is sqlite’s cursor API too.

First the database has filled up its pagecache with this data, then you copied it to your application’s memory, then you used it, then you freed it.

That’s kinda silly! Why not use it straight from the database’s caches instead? That’s what you use a DB cursor for.

The result is less copying of memory. This means less memory fragmentation and fewer memory operations to perform (which should result in a small performance improvement).

This effort is ongoing but a lot of Tracker’s internal loops over resultsets are now using a cursor instead of a in-memory result-set.

I’m at Tokamak 3 in Randa where Mario is hosting us. First of all, thanks to Mario: everything is perfect!

Great landscape surrounding us

During the last days we had presentations, meetings and talks. The GSoC projects are being merged in trunk (a lot of great features coming: new widgets explorer, mouse plugins, remote widgets, plasmate), the netbook stuff is going on, Qt stuff being solved, etc..

I talked about QGraphicsAnchorLayout, the new layout engine that will be present on Qt 4.6 and even did a small demo about that. We are nailing down the remaining bits (API, bugs) and hopefully we’ll have an awesome layout engine to create rich UIs when Qt 4.6 comes to “the streets” !

I’m also working with Alexis (darktears) to debug some problems that we’re facing with the raster engine on embedded devices. The thing is that the performance was not so good as it was in 4.5.0 and we’re tracking down where is the regression. Besides that we already tested Qt 4.6 on some hardware that we have here and the performance is much better than 4.5.X (regarding GraphicsView). While we wait Qt cross compiling, I’m also updating the pastebin applet to provide a nice dataengine/service so other plasmoids/applications can take advantage of this.

Until now, it has been a great sprint with lot of work being done on Plasma and on Qt 4.6. It’s awesome how much our speed increases when we are together!

In a few hours, I’ll be on a plane, headed towards Stuttgart, Germany, for Nokia World 2009. This annual event is where Nokia shows off its latest products, and also typically makes quite a few announcements around its services, such as Ovi Maps and the like. I’ll be attending as Press, courtesy of Nokia’s PR team, and will be looking to cover the Nokia N900 as in-depth as possible. I definitely plan to spend some hands-on time with it, and I’m bringing along a Nokia N810 to do some side-by-side comparisons for you, as well.

If you’re going to be there, please do find me. I’ll be sporting a tan fedora most of the time, and also operate under the name Ricky Cadden, or Symbian Guru – I shouldn’t be difficult to find. You can also catch me on twitter under our official twitter account, @maemoguru – I’ll be tweeting periodically through the event, and will be monitoring @replies, so if you have something you’d like me to cover on the N900, please do find me there.

If you’re interested in other announcements, as well, you can skip on over to Symbian-Guru.com – that’s where most of my non-Maemo coverage will be going up, and you can get the appropriate links here. Also, I’ll be tagging things with ‘NW09‘, as will most everyone else, so you can use that tag to find other coverage, as well.

Related Posts

• Guided Walkthrough Of The Nokia N900
• More Nokia N900 Hands-On Video
• Video Interview With Dr. Ari Jaaksi
• Nokia N900 Vs N810 Comparison Photos
• Theme Maker Updated For Nokia N900/Maemo 5

I've always fancied myself an efficiency expert, but admittedly not due to any formal education. Rather, an innate laziness has always ironically motivated me to constantly and intuitively look for process improvement. Laziness, more than any other factor, is the true mother of invention. [...]

Internet Tablet’s a journey from nothing to nothing. Has Nokia gone from filling a hole in the marketplace to creating one? Pehaps not as there are now other arm based pocketable Linux devices emerging, but will Nokia be able to hang on to its large “computer geek” following while bringing in a larger retail market. [...]