Firefox for Mobile Firefox for Maemo RC1 released! - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2010... December 31 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

Mozilla just released the first release candidate (RC1) of Firefox for Maemo. The Nokia N900 and N810 are supported devices. If you’ve been running the beta, they say RC1 is more polished and that text rendering has improved. You can download it now at firefox.com/m.

Firefox Mobile brings the Awesome Bar, add-ons, Weave, and location-aware browsing according to the Mozilla FAQs page. I just installed it, so I will report what I think in the next post. In the meantime, download and check it out yourself if you have a Nokia N900 (or the N810). The team is asking for feedback or bug reports as well, so head over to bugzilla.mozilla.org if you find any.

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Mozilla has released the first release candidate of Firefox for Mobile 1.0 which is now available for Maemo Devices as a preview release! If you’ve already got beta 5 installed on your Nokia N900 or N810, you will be receiving a software update shortly. Otherwise, if you’re viewing this on your device, you can get it for a test drive from here or you can visit Firefox.com/mobile to learn more and download it as well.

Firefox for Mobile 1.0 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performa... .. .

We’ll if you wanted to push the TV out functionality of any phone to its limits, How about connecting it to a 50inch LCD TV and playing a Divx movie ?

The folks at UMPC portal did just that. The play a Music Video in Divx Format with a resolution of 720x480 pixels at 4.2 Mbps on the N900 and beam it to a nice looking huge television screen !

Must Watch !

via

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For those who are playing with maemo and network, now are available at maemo
extras-devel {fremantle|diablo} the tcpdump package and its dependency (libpcap) working
like a charm

Philip Langdale's bluetooth dial-up networking daemon (BT-DUN) for the Nokia N900 is a real godsend. Now I can tether my N800 and my laptop to my N900.

OK... What does that mean for an average N900 user?

I setup a BT-DUN connection to the N900 on my Win XP Pro laptop for those times at the airport when I need more screen real estate than the N900 affords. For a single user, this is a great way to share an internet connection.

I'm planning on setting up my N800 as an in-car computer with OS2008 maps, Canola and Carman as the 3 anticipated usage scenarios.

Why not the N900 for in-car use? Simple. Screen Size! At arms length, the N800's screen makes manipulating buttons much more friendly.

In addition, on long trips, I can pass of my well used N800 to my passenger to surf while the shiny N900 sits in its cradle or jacket pocket (no selfishness there).

Interestingly, while a device is connected via BT-DUN, the N900 is able to maintain its own internet connection. Either the same connection as the tethered device, or a different one (wi-fi, for example). The screenshots below show that the N900 is connected to wi-fi while the N800 is tethered to it using the cellular data connection.

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Figure 1: N900 IP while N800 is tethered (N900 on wi-fi and N800 on cellular data)


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Figure 2: N800 IP while N800 is tethered (N900 on wi-fi and N800 on cellular data)

Thanks to Philip Langdale, we can now tether our Nokia N900 with other devices over bluetooth. He has released the Bluetooth Dial-Up-Networking (DUN) package that many people have been waiting for. Since I use a Mac, I’ll share my guide on using the Nokia N900’s internet connection with Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

First, install Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking. This is available in Application manager under the Extras repository or simply install it from this page. Reboot the N900 after installation.

Open Network Preferences on the Mac and click on the ‘plus’ sign to add a service. Select Bluetooth DUN as the interface, name it whatever you like and click the create button.

Select the service you just added and click Advanced..

Under the Modem tab, select Nokia as vendor, and GPRS as the Model. Type in your provider’s access point network and hit OK then Apply. I use T-mobile in the USA so my APN is internet2.voicestream.com. The Nokia N900 does not show your APN so you might have to call your provider or insert the SIM card into another phone that tells you the APN (S60 phones show it in connection settings).

Make sure Bluetooth is ON with the Nokia N900 first. Click on “Set up Bluetooth Device” and follow the directions to pair the Mac with the Nokia N900.

Mac will ask you to confirm if the number displayed is also showing up on the Nokia N900. Click Pair on the Nokia N900 and Continue on the Mac.

If the pairing is successful, you will see this screen. I didn’t have to fill out username or password. Just click Continue.

That’s it! To use the internet connection from your Nokia N900 on the Mac, just click on the phone icon on the top right corner and then Connect.

I hope this guide helps you out. Let me know if you have any questions setting it up.

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I just woke up this morning and saw an email from my buddy Phil from WMExperts that was a great way to start of 2010. Last night Firefox Mobile RC 1 was made available as a free download for Nokia N900 owners. I quickly went and downloaded it and am working on a video of it to share with you as I test it out a bit.

According to the Mozilla site, here are the features of Firefox Mobile:

• The Real Deal Forget about the clunky, stripped-down mobile Web you’re used to. Firefox delivers the performance and security you expect, plus all the bells and whistles you know and love.
• Site for Sore Eyes Tabs and browser controls are stowed away to the sides of the screen. Now you can see what’s been hiding all this time – the entire Web page. Enjoy the view.
• Touch of Genius Bookmark your favorite sites with one touch. Swipe your finger across the screen to access tabs or install useful add-ons. Double tap to zoom. So smart it’s simple.
• Awesome Bar Forget about typing long URLs, let the Awesome Bar do the searching and get you the sites you love in an instant.
• Get Personal Add-ons have gone mobile. Personalize your browser and make it your own. Search and install add-ons on the go.
• Password Manager Typing passwords on your phone is just plain hard. Why do it more than once? Choose to “remember” site passwords and forget ever having to endure long and difficult typing.
• Fab Tabs Your tabs are close at hand. Just swipe your finger to the right to see thumbnails of all your open tabs to find what you want quickly.
• Be a Local… Wherever You Are Looking for the city’s best live music joint? An alternative route to the highway? Get insider info and access maps with Location-Aware Browsing.
• Get Up and Go Get Weave and surf the Web on your PC, get up and go, and have everything waiting for you on your phone: your history, open tabs, bookmarks, the Awesome Bar – just as you had left it.

I am particularly interested in Weave and syncing everything from my desktop to my N900. This can be very powerful and I sure hope this Release Candidate performs faster than the previous betas.

I just wanted to post to give a head up to any users of my KDE 3.5 on the N810 or 800. KDE 3.5 install relies on tablethacker.com to install KDE. I just paid the 108$ for hosting tablethacker.com for the year, after this the install process will no longer be available. This gets you [...]

The iptables package is on maemo extras devel. There is no support for connection state on the device Kernel consequently the NAT is not working. I tried to compile the modules, but I found myself in trouble trying to load them at the device. If you want to flash a kernel with support for connection state there is one available at my personal repository (read: mWall :: netfilter + ui for maemo for more information). Antoher discussion about that modules can be found at: http://forums.internettablettalk.com/showthread.php?t=30916&page=1

NSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) technology is gaining momentum across a wide range of segments and applications such as navigation, telematics, person tracking, fitness, and high precision industrial applications including machine control, network timing and surveying. ABI Research forecasts GNSS system shipments to reach more than 500 million worldwide in 2010 and to continue growing to 1.1 billion in 2014.

“GNSS technology is increasingly enabling all mobile services,” says practice director Dominique Bonte. “Connected converged form factors such as hand... .. .

I wrote a couple of weeks ago a little teaser about writing a custom cell renderer.

Camkeyd is nifty tool developed by Heikki Holstila that lets Nokia N900 users access the dashboard quickly by half-pressing the camera button. It is disabled when the lens cover is open so it doesn’t mess with camera functionality. Read on for the video demo.

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

Camkeyd is useful with fullscreen apps like the web browser on the Nokia N900. Without this tool, the usual way to see current open apps from fullscreen is by clicking expand on the lower right corner and then the dashboard icon on the top left. Camkeyd makes it even quicker with just one click. If you already have the keyboard open, pressing Ctl+Backspace provides the same result without installing any other apps.

Camkeyd is currently available in the Extras Development repository. Read the Maemo Extras guide to find out how to download apps from this repo. Make sure not to skip the information about the risks involved by installing apps from there.

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The Nokia N900 is powered by a ARM Cortex-A8 processor and has OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration support . Till now we have seen the Bounce Demo and Quake 3 Arena on this Maemo Powered device which demonstrate the capabilities of this device. But here is a surprise from IndiaGames with Home Run Baseball for the Maemo Platform.  We have an exclusive preview of the game for all you Maemo fans !

Watch the video of the game after the cut

The game has 3 modes 10 Out Rule , Pass N Play and  Rapidfire.In 10 Out  rule you are expected to go on a Home run hitting spree.

The Pass N Play works like a 2 player game where player 1 and Player 2 take turns to smash the ball into the crowds.

In Rapidfire an automatic ball pitcher bombards you with balls in quick succession.You how to face 10 pitches in 20 seconds,oh  man ! that was tough.

Controls are very simple. Just the screen -- touch and swipe. No Keyboard advanced controls. You can play the game without opening the slider.The game uses the Ice 3D engine which has been developed by Indiagames to be used as a common rendering engine across various platforms such as iPhone , Maemo , Android , Symbian etc.

This is not a full fledged baseball game but Home Run Baseball. You can surely kill sometime in the Subway.The game should be available for download on the Nokia OVI Store for Maemo which is expected to go live sometime this month.  We expect the game to be free for download atleast initially .

Would be cool if Maemo got the T20 cricket game also !  What do you think about this game ?

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If you need to tweak, delete or overwrite a system file in Nokia’s Symbian powered devices, you’ll quickly notice that you cannot change or even browse files and applications on the system partition of the phone. For instance if you want to overcome a security measures to install unsigned simple freeware application or game you’ll need to hack your phone or use Symbian’s rather annoying signing service.

This obnoxious concept was introduced by Nokia few years ago with its first S60 3rd edition phone (N80) and it is based on the idea that nobody gets access to these data caged directories which indeed improves the security but at the same time it makes these devices modding unfrien... .. .

The third week of the Smartphone Round Robin was a tough one to work through since we had Christmas weekend followed by the New Year’s Day holiday. Thankfully, I was taking a look at Windows Mobile this week and I am intimately familiar with this platform and devices since I have been using them since 2001. I posted a couple of times over in the WMExperts forums and received some great feedback from readers there. Coincidentally, Phil from WMExperts was covering Nokia this week as he stated in his blog post soliciting your feedback.

I’m proud to present you with my last Enlightenment module: ConnMan!

For those unfamiliar with ConnMan, it is a solution to configure and manager your network connections. Unlike NetworkManager, it is very simple and fast, specially for users of it’s DBus API. It will manage everything, including DNS proxy to avoid messing with your /etc/resolv.conf. It also handles WiFi, Ethernet, WiMax, Bluetooth and even Cellular connections easily. For developers using it, it is very simple to use and you just need to use the high level “Service” interface.

In order to make it more useful, I created econnman inside e_dbus that abstracts the DBus API as a nice C interface that matches it perfectly and optimally, keeping objects in sync with server and emitting Ecore_Event whenever things change.

The module is quite simple, yet useful. As seen in the above screenshots, it will list the current status and service name (if module is bigger than 32px), when you mouse over it will show a fancy popup with more details, including error messages and IPv4 addresses. If you click it, you get a simple popup with the current connected service selected and clicking it will disconnect, while clicking a new one will connect to that one. Services requiring password will automatically ask for it, while those that failed to connect will also re-ask your password.

The module nicely exposes the offline mode feature to turn off radios. It integrates well with E17 mode: whenever you change E17 or ConnMan, they will sync with the other.

There is still work to do, mainly focus on the cellular specific needs and also create static services. And I also plan to have an application to allow managing your services, reorder them (that defines the priority) and even switch technologies that are available.

Foursquare just launched a native app on Palm, joining the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android OS. Nokia users don’t have any apps for Symbian or Maemo, so we have to rely on the mobile site instead. Fortunately, a developer named Chris B has written on his blog that he started work on a Maemo app for the Nokia N900 using Foursquare’s public API.

If you haven’t heard of Foursquare, several analysts predicted that it will be this year’s Twitter. Check this page from their website to learn more about the service.

At its current state, Chris says BarrioSquare is still “an alpha version, not quite stable and polished enough for release yet.” There are many things on his to-do list but he wrote down what is currently implemented:

• Sign in using OAuth
• Get nearby venues based on the location of the device
• Search for venue nearby based on keywords
• Get basic venue details
• Basic check-in for a venue

Here are some screenshots from the alpha version:

I know it looks rough right now, but I’m definitely going to keep a close eye on the development of BarrioSquare. Chris is looking for people who are interested in collaborating to create this app, so let him know on Twitter @pablohoneyNYC, or use the contact page on his blog. I could definitely use a native Foursquare app for my Nokia N900. Do you feel the same way?

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I've spent the past few days trying to get MMS to work on the N900.

EDIT: Seems frals has managed to beat me!

read more

If you have been waiting for MediaBox Media Center on the N900, then I have good news for you.

MediaBox version 2010.01.03 is now going to extras-testing for some QA. In the meantime for you to watch, I have recorded some videos with the N900's awesome TV-out feature.

Browsing UPnP shares with MediaBox is as easy as browsing the filesystem. In this video MediaBox is used for watching a movie over WiFi on the N900.



A new feature of MediaBox is the shelf. It's the starting folder where you can always return with the press of a button. You can put shortcuts to almost anything on the shelf for quick access (songs, albums, artists, videos, photos, folders, internet radio stations, playlists, you name it).



MediaBox has a finger-friendly way of reordering playlists. Simply drag the items with your finger.



Oh yes, this video shows MediaBox in portrait mode.

The upcoming MediaBox for Diablo for N8x0 will be quite similar to this version.

It has been a long, looooong time since the last tutorial on the Internet Tablet School, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.As the video above explains, a site called All About Maemo has asked me to carry on doing these tutorials for the new generation of Nokia's Maemo-based devices. The first of these new devices, the N900, is the direct successor to the internet tablets. It uses the

This is just a quick blog reply to requests to show the code of the Calculator of my previous blog post. I would gladly share the source in a nice zip as well, but maemo.org wiki doesn't allow zip uploads (DOH!), so you'll have to accept badly commented wiki page.

Here be the WIKI.

As I worked on my blog post about QR Codes, I confirmed something I had been concerned about with mbarcode; it doesn’t send SMS messages. In the discussion about mbarcode, the author writes about his desire to “Add support for further 2D barcode payloads - please suggest any you think it doesn't handle, code appreciated too”. I added a suggestion for supporting sending SMS messages, and started looking for how to add this.
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One of the first things I discovered was Kurt Fleisch’s logarchive.py. One of the things that is great about working on the N900 is that you can find good python code that you can read through, copy to a file on your N900, execute it, and then start modifying it. Yet even before I started playing with the script, I noticed something very interesting. The script is reading from an SQLite3 database called “/home/user/.rtcom-eventlogger/el.db”

Firing up SQLite3 on my N900, I went into the database and started looking around. It was a listing of communications events. Every SMS message that I had sent or received, and had not yet deleted, was in there. The same for every phone call placed, received, or missed. A quick look revealed eleven different tables. Most of which didn’t do much for me. However a few tables jumped out at me; Services, EventTypes and Events.

Services has three entries, Calls, Chat Messages and SMS. There are eight entries in the EventTypes table, Inbound calls, Outbound Calls, Missed Calls and Voicemail Messages for the Call service, Inbound Chat and Outbound Chat for the Chat message service, and Inbound SMS and Outbound SMS for SMS services.

The real data is in Events. As I write this, there are 214 events in my Events table. Using a simple SQL query, ‘select event_type_id, count(*) from Events group by event_type_id;’ I can find how many of each type of event there is. With further exploration, I can check various times of various phone calls and messages. There is a lot that can be done with this, especially in terms of building up interesting interconnectivity between a CRM and the N900.

Yet this didn’t get me any closer to being able to suggest code to enable the addition of SMS functionality to mbarcode. A little more searching led me to PyMaemoSMS. I copied this text and gave it a run and it seems to work pretty well. However, it seemed to fail when I used numbers with an odd number of digits. It seems like some patch had been added to append an F to numbers with an odd number of digits. I commented out that section and the SMS messages work nicely from Python. With working Python code for sending SMS messages, there are a lot of interesting things that can be done and this code could be used as a basis for adding SMS messages to mbarcode.

It’s been a challenging week with my n900. Not for anything the device has done (it’s still the same wonderful machine!) but for what I have tried to do with it.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-12-28 through 2010-01-03

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-12-28 through 2010-01-03

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-12-28 through 2010-01-03

As promised yesterday, I'll start cleaning up my code a bit preparing to post it here.

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We've now put our first videos onto All About Maemo's YouTube channel, which you can also see embedded below. If you want to see AAM's videos as soon as they appear on the internet, head on over to the channel page and click on the "Subscribe" button.

Nokia N900 is probably the most ingenuous and powerful combination of software and hardware that they have ever created but it is also first of its kind and there are couple of missing features and few rough spots where the developers haven't completely finished their work.

From other hand operating systems are always a work in progress and the work is never done to improve them!

Look at Apple; it took them couple of years and numerous software and even hardware updates to get the native support for MMS but apparently it will not be the ca... .. .

As it can be read in many places Maemo is based on Debian. The problem arrives when someone asks “which version of Debian?”…

The answer is “oldstable” (etch) + parts from “stable” (lenny) + some updates from “testing” (squeeze). But what does it mean for developer?

1. If you maintain Debian packages and want them to build for Maemo5 prepare to refresh your memory for (officially deprecated) Debhelper v5 (Debian uses v7 since Lenny).
2. If you use Debconf then you are out of luck rather — 1.4.70 is not even from Etch…
3. If you use Subversion then do not even try to touch repositories which you will checkout under scratchbox — 1.4.3 from Etch is too old for working with repos fetched with today’s 1.6.x versions.

For me it looks like they just refreshed Maemo from OS2007 times again and again and again without considering rebasing on newer release. But why?

On #maemo-devel channel I got answer that this was probably due to sticking with crap^Wscratchbox which has that old stuff. But moment…. Maemo is product made by Nokia, big company with big money, so why no one got paid to update it to at least Lenny?

Good that Mer people use quite recent Ubuntu as a base for their distribution which should make development for it easier (ignore fact that there is very small user base). But this project needs lot of love still.

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All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Are Maemo5 developer tools obsolete? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Every time we read about the Nokia N900 being compared with a desktop computer, there are contrary feelings. Some of us may feel excited and some may react in a more defensive way and have misgivings about this (It´s all right to think that way, diversity it´s always good in my opinion). For both kinds of people here is some exciting news. Have you ever imagine downloading a torrent from your mobile “phone”? Now with the Nokia N900 is possible.  Using a P2P Client app, called Transmission (for more info please ...

Bad news! (Or not, it depends on the looking glass) We have to wait for the Nokia N900 a little more. How much? It´s said until November, so that would be next week. Nothing to worry about. But on Play.com says that the phone is expected to be arriving on some day around the 20 of November, no more than 3 weeks from now. Pete Schneider, Nokia’s Head of Maemo Marketing, has since said: “We expect it to start shipping during November 2009.”. And why is this? We got nothing official ...

If you remember we have already talk about this new browser of Firefox for handheld devices called Fennec. Back on that post (New definition of Mobility? & Just a little more on mobile browsing with the Nokia N900) I only wrote a few words about it because it was a very early version, more detail it was an Alpha version. One month later, we finally got the beta version (beta 4) and a video devoted to show Fennec, in this case on a Nokia N900, and all the new stuff that ...

Three days after the official release of the Nokia N900 it’s probably a good day to start talking about applications for this device. Why? Because I’m sure that there is already a bunch of people who is enjoying happily and peacefully his brand new Nokia N900. So I decided to give them a hand with their phones. First you should know what is “Maemo Extras” and “Extras Testing”. These are repositories or places where applications from the community can be found. That´s more than enough. So there is two ways of ...

I have been asked to do a new comparison between our Nokia N900 and the new Motorola Droid phone which Google is showing the power of their OS, Android. As usual I’m not going to talk about every spec from both phones, what I would do is to point out the differences and the some other important thins related to them. First of all we got to highlight the OS. On the Nokia N900 we have the Maemo 5 which is a new OS that it’s really promising and most of ...

This is exciting news that I have read it on the Conversations Nokia Blog, and I want it to share with you. Because I have been following this Qt idea for a while and it’s created a anxiety on me about the improvements to the UI that Qt could introduce, mostly on the N900. “The latest version of the cross platform application and interface framework,Qt, was announced this week. Alongside new platform support comes new graphical capabilities and support for multi-touch and gestures. With the introduction of the N900, there’s never been ...

The lack of Portrait Mode for applications other than the phone on the Nokia N900 has been an issue since its announcement. If you remember on the early post on this Blog, we pointed out this people opinion on the Conversations Nokia poll. Probably because with the device stuck in landscape mode, it’s a two-handed device only. A really challenging experience for common-day-use. But take it easy because fortunately Nokia has promised an update that includes at least partial portrait mode support around Christmas. Just a few days! However, for the ...

The Nokia N900 is now capable of running an Palm OS emulator called Garnet VM as their last two version where capable of too. It is still officially unsupported although there is an installation possible with a little bit of hard work you could get it to work. If you don’t feel sure about this, you can wait because the next update will work officially on the Nokia N900. I want to point out that the current version of the Garnet VM emulator is not built for the last version of ...

After having read plenty of reviews about the Nokia N900, I finally found what I think is the best one. In my opinion it’s the first review that covers every angle of the Nokia N900 and the most complete ever. The Nokia N900 review made by our folks at PhoneReport, an excellent news portal about the last mobile world news which I highly recommend, its separate in 9 different categories such as: Introduction: History, Competitor and Specs Design: Hardware and Performance Features Software: Introduction and the Basics Software: Multimedia and Games Software: GPS Navigation and ...

As it happens with everything, you can’t expect to don’t finding something missing or something to improve it. For some people may seem perfect and complete just as it is and some people may need more from it. These are the reasons why the Nokia N900 can’t escape from this situation. Despite of being one of the most complete and integrated mobile phones on the market on the hardware looking glass, it seems that it is needed an software adjustment. Thankfully, these improvements can be made by writing a few ...

Forget the fumbling with tiny cell phone keys and virtual onscreen keyboards.Prof. Masatoshi Ishikawa and Dr. Takashi Komuro of Tokyo University developed so-called "vision-based Input Interface" that allows users to control phone or even write short notes by capturing the movement of five fingers by embedded camera and translates it to command.

This touchless interface breaks down traditional barriers between people and technology, changing the way people interact with all kinds of everyday information. A prototype device developed by Tokyo University team is capable to process complex in-air movements of fing... .. .

While I still find the Nokia N900 a bit limited for my use, there’s no doubt that developers are quickly coming to the table with new applications all the time. Today’s little nugget of gold is a video from Qt Studios showing off a Qt 4.6 application that they have running on the Nokia N900. This little app ties into the despotify library to stream tracks from Spotify, and is definitely the closest thing to a native Spotify app for the Maemo platform that I’ve seen.

Unfortunately, as you can see in the video, the UI needs some help, as the person showing the application off is forced to use the stylus, which is just awful. However, using the Nokia N900’s 3G cellular connection, he’s able to easily (and nearly instantly) stream tracks, just like Spotify does on other mobile platforms such as Symbian. This does, however, require a premium Spotify account, though again, that’s the same as other mobile platforms, as well.

This application is not currently available through any of the repositories on Maemo just yet, though you can get more information about it from the Trolltech blog.

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Nokia’s executive vice-president and head of the mobile phones entity Rick Simonson, in a wide-ranging interview with India’s Economic Times, speaks about the challenges Nokia faces globally, even as he seeks to address many of the ‘misconceptions’ in the media’s reporting of Nokia’s performance. He also explains why the company remains bullish on winning the war in the long term.

Starting November 1, 2009, Rick Simonson holds the position of Executive Vice President and head of the Mobile Phones entity within the Devices unit. He also heads strategic sourcing for the whole of the Devices unit. In his prev... .. .

Yes! Libchamplain now has a scale! It was long overdue. In fact, I first started to work on it way before libchamplain 0.2.2 was even released (1.25 year ago). It got impeded by more important features and bug fixes. Two or three months ago Tollef Fog Heen took over the branch and added the magic required maths to compute the scale. I then took over his work (as he was quite busy and I wanted this too) to provide the final result.

Since all the changes are backward compatible, I’ll soon release a libchamplain 0.4.3 with the scale disabled by default (to ensure the same visual behaviour as before upgrade). To display a scale, an application just has to change the show-scale property to TRUE.

#if CHAMPLAIN_CHECK_VERSION (0, 4, 3)
g_object_set (champlain_view, "show-scale", TRUE, NULL);
#endif


The scale also supports other exotic units than the SI/metric ones. It can display miles and feet, if you’re into that. By the way, the scale will automatically switch from kilometres to metres when it makes more sense. That was quite more complex to do with miles and feet as they are not simply a power of 10. Set the scale-unit property to CHAMPLAIN_UNIT_MILES to get miles.

You can limit the width (in pixels) of the scale with the max-scale-width property.  If you watch closely, the scale will adjust itself right away when you move the map.

We haven’t talked about the FM Radio Player application for the Nokia N900 available on the Maemo web page yet. As the Nokia N900 has a built-in FM receiver on its’ hardware, the device doesn’t have a Nokia software application complementing this feature. The lack of this complement, give the idea to Martin Grimme who developed the FM Radio Player Application. So by connecting the headphones, you are really connecting the antenna as the headphone cable work as it. Lately, Martin Grimme promised a new update for the application and its’ ...

My current favorite device, the Nokia N900, is plastered all over one of our favorite tech sites today, Gizmodo. During my routine browsing, I noticed Gizmodo nicely themed with a huge collapsing rectangle ad at the header, skyscraper ad on sidebar, another giant ad in between content, as well as matching the logo and side panels.

According to Gizmodo’s advertising page, they are dedicated to gadgets, gizmos, and cutting-edge consumer electronics with an audience of 6.1 million monthly tech-hungry reader. I think that’s the right audience to expose Nokia’s latest and greatest Nokia N900, right?

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

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• Capture Panoramic Images with QuickPanorama for Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 Firmware Updated to 3.2010.02-8

Over the last couple of weeks the MF Moderators, Admin and Members of the Dev team have discussed what to do with the SF/MF’s 'Member Of The Month' award and we came up with some great ideas on how to improve it and what is even more importantly, how to involve more participation in process of nominating, voting and awarding.

But that's not all, for the first time we are running the Member Of The Year Competion and offering some really cool prizes for the winner as well as for the voters. It is time to let you all decide who will be our first SF/MF Member of the year and to win either 16GB microSD card orfree softw... .. .

Google Translator application for Maemo 5 devices is a free, powerful and easy-to-use multilingual translation interface that uses the Google translation engine and satisfies your translation needs on the go.

Similar to its web based translation service, the Google Translation app for Nokia N900 translates a section of text into another language. While using the service, all you need to do is to select the source language type or paste some text, select the language in which it will be translated to, and finally tap on the tra... .. .

First we get a proof-of-concept for MMS, and now we can send USSD codes, such as *135# or *100# for checking your balance.

It's still very early, but here's a screenshot of a working app.

T-Mobile has completely upgraded its entire 3G network to HSPA 7.2Mbps today according to Phonescoop. I busted out my Nokia N900 to test the speeds here in New York City and I was able to get about 6Mbps downloads and at least 1Mbps uploads!

Here are three consecutive speed tests from Speedtest.net. Yes… the Nokia N900 can actually run that website in the web browser unlike most, if not all, current phones in the market.

Does this mean AT&T have to stop saying they have the nation’s fastest 3G network?

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

• Angry Birds Level Pack 1 Back in Ovi Store for Nokia N900 (Update: taken out again)
• PUSH Nokia N900 MOD in the USA Finalists Announced
• Capture Panoramic Images with QuickPanorama for Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 Firmware Updated to 3.2010.02-8

Bossa Conference 2010

After some people’s requests, it’s nice to hear that the BOSSA committee decided to extend the call for presentation to January 17, 2010.

This is the first year that the conference is doing a call for presentation, so if you are working with free and open source technologies related to mobile embedded platforms, please submit an abstract of your presentation at http://www.bossaconference.indt.org/.

The conference will be held in Manaus, Amazonas – Brazil, a different city from the other years. As always, it’ll be an awesome conference, having lots of interesting talks and people, and also the opportunity to hack and discuss new ideas

Firefox for Mobile Make your Fennec RC1 fast again - http://stechz.com/2010... January 5 from Benjamin Stover's Blog - Comment - Like LonelyBob liked this

N900 has been on the market for more then a month now…Time flies…
The buzz is continuing and sales seem to have started very, very, very well…
I am obviously happy about all this…But actually something else is making my day.

For months and months, we have been designing a ground-breaking product for Nokia in a completely closed environment.
Off course, designers have designed, architects have "architected", developers have developed, and managers have managed. We have done feasibility studies, we have done usability studies, we know more or less where we succeeded, and we know more or less where we still need to improve. And we have been endlessly testing the device and doing endless amount of modifications with customer satisfaction in mind.

But all this is no substitute for reality that is to say: real people using the device in their real environment

The fact remains: when you are designing such a product, you need to have an intuition for what the customer wants and this intuition drives every single one of your actions for months.
There are tools, methods and process that you can use to measure how good you are doing along the way, but in the end it is all about the intuition and the strength of the confidence that you put behind it to drive the work…and eventually it all boils down to the time when the device gets in the hands of the customer.
Are they going to like the browser? The multiple home-screen? What about the conversation views? Are they going to notice this and that feature? All this gets resolved magically within couple of weeks.

I was not the only one starving for this. Last week-end, some of our guys from our application testing team went to do a couple of days of internship at our flagship store. They actually sold our device during a whole day and got confronted to customers themselves. The feedback we got from the guys was quite outstanding; some said the experience was simply tremendous.
With the huge coverage the N900 has been getting, no need to say that we have on our hand a unique opportunity to grow our knowledge and experience on the matter. We need to leverage this.

I myself will probably see you around at the Nokia Flagship store somewhere in the winter.

Wishing you a happy new year.

Use coupon code 8Q3R8HBT5HNWMD at Dell SB to get $120.99 off the Nokia N900. The total comes to $479 with free shipping. You may have to pay sales tax depending on where you live. This offer expires January 9th, 2010 while supplies last. I believe this is the current lowest price if you need to get one now.

If you haven’t read it yet, check out my Nokia N900 review. It’s currently my favorite device because of its excellent web browser and killer camera. However, it’s not perfect. Its lack applications compared to other platforms may turn off potential buyers. Read the review for more details.

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

• Joikuspot for Nokia N900 Now Out of Beta. Coming to Ovi Store Soon
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• Capture Panoramic Images with QuickPanorama for Nokia N900

Is the current maemo.org community council hitting a sophomore slump?

I’m happy to inform that Niels (X-Fade) will be taking on a bit more responsibility in the maemo.org team.

After thinking and discussing with people how to improve the paid work done on maemo.org, I came to the conclusion, suggested by several people, that the maemo.org paid contributors (Niels, Dave, Andre, Jeremiah, Carsten and Reggie) need to have a team lead.

The goal of this change is to make the maemo.org team more focused and work more toward shared goals.

As a team lead Niels will have more responsibility over the target setting of the maemo.org team and also implementation of work. This means more communication and talk between the team, which is a good thing.

This change does not affect the roles in maemo.org, the division of work is clear as it is. Also this should not effect the work of the council in setting the direction.

Congratulations to Niels on the new responsibility!

Tero

Another tutorial video aimed at people new to the N900, this time showing how to launch several applications at once and switch between them. See below for the embedded video.

Ok,

Sampo (sampp or sampppa on talk), the author of eCoach, has joined us in Maemo Developer Platform to write his master’s thesis for Maemo.

Sampo’s thesis will revolve around (surprise) writing and porting software for the Maemo platform. All details are still pretty firmly floating in the air, it’s his third workday, and he just got a desk to put his laptop on.

As eCoach was first implemented for Maemo 4 and has been available for Maemo 5 for some time now, it is natural that it will be used as the case for the thesis. And if anyone is wondering, this won’t affect Sampo’s work on eCoach, rather the opposite. We want to have eCoach out there as an open source project in the future too, it’s a popular application and a good example of what the N900 can do.

Good luck to Sampo for the thesis!

As we promised before here a this Symbian Nokia N900 theme, we are the first on the web giving you this preview of the Color City theme for Maemo 5/Nokia N900 phones. This theme is under development with MMMOOO folks and will be released very very soon(price over 4 euros). We were able to test this theme and give you some screenshots. The theme name will make you remember a city with tall buildings, but it can also makes you remember tetris because you have very little squares falling down with ...

As some know, we removed some emulators from maemo.org due to a legal dispute between Nokia and Nintendo. The dispute was not related to the emulators itself, but since the maemo.org infrastructure *is* paid for by Nokia, we decide to remove the emulators to avoid further problems.

This decision was made by Nokia together with the council and the developers involved, but we fail to communicate the decision in the first place to the community, was a very messy situation in a very grey area, and we were all a bit afraid to create more buzz. On behalf of the council I sincerely apologize for this lack of communication.

After some evaluation and discussion we decide to put the emulators back at maemo.org since there's no copyright infringement in the emulators code.

Maemo is intended to be an open platform, and we not intend to do any censorship in the applications available as long they meet the required Q&A, but the maemo.org infrastructure is sponsored by Nokia, we can't risk losing it.

On Behalf of the Maemo Community Council,

Valério Valério

Maemo Community Council Chair

 

Marvell, a worldwide leader in integrated silicon solutions, today announced the newest addition to the ARMADA family of application processors – the Marvell® ARMADA™ 610 series.

Designed for mobility, the ARMADA 610 features a gigahertz-class CPU, integrated 1080p full-HD encode and decode, and 3D graphics to offer high performance and visual and entertaining experiences for eReader, Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), tablets, smartbook/netbooks, connected portable media players, smartphones, and new personal information appliances.

Apart from its family members, the ARMADA 610 is designed to use extremely low power while maintaining high proce... .. .

Firefox for Mobile Health of the web and mobile site redirections - http://stechz.com/2010... January 6 from Benjamin Stover's Blog - Comment - Like

Of course N900 cannot compete with IPhone yet, so don’t you expect to see here some mouth waterring grafics. But in terms of openness and customization, N900 is surely a winner.

Here are my preferred 3rd party apps for Maemo5:

1. Xournal:
handwriting notes, very useful during meetings or quick notes of any kind:

It saves as .pdf so you can always send the file via share services or email. The developer is working on a handwrite recognition version which, hopefully, will be ready till February.

2. DiskUsage:
it shows what it says, all the partitions and used vs free space, including root partition.

Very useful app for a non linux pro who’s willing to test all the apps in all the repositories… Rootfs tends to go to 0 in no time, so this is one tool that can help you not to reflash the phone due to low root free space. DiskUsage is also able to show the rootfs as a pie where you can pinpoint with your finger / pen the biggest space hogs:

3. Maemo Mapper:
this is an old friend of all previous maemo version users, and the maemo5 version is highly usable. It’s a mapper who can use Google Maps or Yahoo Maps to track, route, find, pinpoint etc. Very intuitive and very easy to use:

Still, beware of your cache and saved maps location: go to map settings and modify the location of the saved maps to “My Docs” in order to avoid writing in rootfs of huge amount of data. Works best under 3G or Wi-Fi connections.

4. MGutenberg:
This is a small ebook reader that can successfully compete FB Reader in terms of basic operations. What’s really amazing with MGutenberg is that you can query and download free ebooks from Gutenberg project. Maybe not a spec for everybody, but you can find there the classics.

It also supports manual portrait mode

5. MaStory:
The last but not the least, a blog editor. WordPress integration is very good, html option rich, it knows how to deal with local pics but not movies yet, shows post previews, can share thru Flickr and Picasa and ake live photos straight from the camera. For a blogger this is a must have app:

These are my 3rd party apps at heart. Without them N900 would have been much naked and unappealing, for both newcomers and pros.

Instant messaging has become an important part of everyday communication and one of the greatest features of Nokia N900 is the power it gives individuals to maintain and expand their online activity and stay connected with friends and people who share a similar interest, profession or hobby, whenever and wherever you like.

If you are looking for a mobile IM, Nokia N900 should be your first choice as it combines the best of the mobile phone and internet and offers the easiest, user friendly and feature rich all in one messenger solution on the mobile phones ever!

Unlike many of its competitors, Nokia N900 offers tight integration of the contacts and conversation application with a variety of communi... .. .

Just spent a day getting RTC (clock), battery charging and watchdogs working for Mer on N900 and I thought I'd like to share how it was done for those of you wanting to run other OS'es on N900. The watchdog package in typical Debian does not by default work with two watchdogs, so we are using DSME.

This example assumes that you have made a /mnt/initfs directory on your rootfs and that you're running this from fanoush's bootmenu which will put the Maemo5 root file system in /mnt/initfs

You should as early in your boot process (after udev has been started), run the following script:


# Set up initfs environment


hwclock --hctosys

chroot /mnt/initfs mount -n -t proc proc /proc

chroot /mnt/initfs mount -n -t sysfs sysfs /sys

mount --bind /dev /mnt/initfs/dev

chroot /mnt/initfs mount -n -t tmpfs -o size=1M,noatime tmpfs /tmp

chroot /mnt/initfs mount -n -t tmpfs -o size=256k,mode=0755,nosuid,noatime tmpfs /var/run

# Check current boot state. Could be 'USER'
export BOOTSTATE=`chroot /mnt/initfs getbootstate 2>/dev/null`

touch /mnt/initfs/tmp/$BOOTSTATE

echo $BOOTSTATE > /mnt/initfs/tmp/STATE

chroot /mnt/initfs /sbin/dsme -p /usr/lib/dsme/libstartup.so &

until chroot /mnt/initfs waitfordsme; do

sleep 1

done

LOGGER='/usr/bin/logger -s -tBME'

SYSFS_VBUS_PATH=/sys/class/i2c-adapter/i2c-1/1-0048/twl4030_usb/vbus


# check dead battery pre-charge

if [ $(cat $SYSFS_VBUS_PATH) -eq 1 ]; then

chroot /mnt/initfs /usr/sbin/bme_RX-51 -b

case $? in

0)

$LOGGER -pdaemon.notice 'precharge -> ok'

;;

2)

$LOGGER -pdaemon.crit 'precharge -> power off'

exit 1

;;

*)

$LOGGER -pdaemon.crit 'precharge -> failure'

;;

esac

fi

# Start battery management entity
chroot /mnt/initfs /usr/sbin/bme_RX-51 &

# Bonus: To get hald-addon-bme working (bad bad voodoo). We need to test if toggles_w's hald-addon-bme replacement works on N900.
# dpkg-repack hald-addon-bme from rootfs and dpkg -i it
mount --bind / /mnt/initfs/mnt/new_root
chroot /mnt/initfs ln -s /mnt/new_root/tmp/bme-dbus-socket /tmp/bme-dbus-socket
ln -s /mnt/initfs/tmp/.bmesrv /tmp/.bmesrv
ln -s /mnt/initfs/tmp/dsmesock /tmp/dsmesock

I was having a discussion earlier on IRC about the role of the N900’s App Manager. The question I’m raising is: is it legitimate to package non-programs which can be already downloaded in another way?

Here’s an example.  A film which is DFSG-free such as Sita Sings the Blues could be packaged as an app.  The package would install the .mp4 of the film, which would then appear in Media Player, but perhaps would also have an icon in the launcher.  (Of course people can already find Sita on the web and watch or download it there, giving the same effect, but then they might be more likely to find it in the app launcher.)

Far-fetched?  Not really; there are already iPhone apps which contain only a book, and there are existing Debian packages which only install free HTML and text content.

Since films are essentially documents which can be opened by Media Player, the question can be generalised: Should documents be packaged, or only apps? When someone ports Frotz to the N900, should it have its own separate download manager for Z-machine games inside it as the iPhone port does, or should each game become available in the App Manager as a separate package as used to be done on Debian?

And then there are radio stations such as Soma FM which have iPhone apps to let you listen to them.  Now of course you can already do this in the N900’s media player, so would it be worthwhile for them to package a specific N900 app which connected to their streams?  Or to make a package which only populated the media player with a list of them?

But just because people do something with the iPhone it’s not necessarily a good idea:

• media packages should probably install into /home/user/MyDocs or /media/mmc*, but the conventional place for large files in app packages is /opt, which would fill up quite quickly with a few Sita-sized films
• each package gets to run scripts as root, and this may have more security considerations than people are comfortable with just to watch a film
• people expect app stores to contain apps (don’t they?)

I think an alternative route would be to have one standard application which could maintain a browsable list of Free content, and which could download it for you as appropriate.  Maybe it could be extensible to act as a download manager for Free content for the emulators and so on, as well as just films and text.  What do you think of all this?

Photo © Caro’s Lines, cc-by-nc-sa.

In unrelated news, last night I packaged the Maemo port of Beebem which I’ve been talking about for a while.  So if you want to play around with the BBC Micro, go and have a look. Be warned that it’s very, very flaky.

I’d rather like feedback on whether and how well it works for you, and suggestions on how to fix any of the points raised in that post.

This domain name is for sale. Contact tabletblog (at) thoughtfix dot com.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Google Nexus One was announced, available for purchase, and shipped at the same time just a couple of days ago. Mine was just delivered and the first thing I wanted to do is compare it in size with Nokia’s own super-phone, the Nokia N900. Take a look.

Photos

Nexus One First Impressions

So far, I’m blown away by the size and display of the Nexus One. It’s more pocketable than the Nokia N900 because of its thickness. The colors on the display are richer and appear to stand out more than the N900 too.

I still need to get used to not having a real hardware keyboard on the Nexus because I’ve already misspelled plenty of messages. Correcting myself was annoying.

I don’t have any complaints about the web browser after some quick browsing, but I didn’t like it when websites forced me to use their mobile version.

Setting up the Nexus One was very fast. My Google mail, calendar, contacts were all synced right away after entering my email address. The Nokia N900 cannot currently sync all these three services using Exchange. As expected, there were also much more apps available on the Android device over Maemo.

I’ll have a full review of the Google Nexus One soon after more usage. This is primarily a Nokia blog, so I’ll place a lot of emphasis on comparing it with other Nokia devices especially the Nokia N900.

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We all know N900's outstanding multimedia capabilities, right? Built-in media player can chew full-blown divx movies without hesitation. However, it doesn't support subtitles useful to foreign-language-impaired people. Fear not, solution is there.
Read more »

We all know N900′s outstanding multimedia capabilities, right? Built-in media player can chew full-blown divx movies without hesitation. However, it doesn’t support subtitles useful to foreign-language-impaired people. Fear not, solution is there. All you need is install kmplayer and mplayer packages for extras-testing. Widely recognized mplayer is ultimate media player for Linux with built-in support [...]

Michael Foord wrote about some Latin-1 control character fun in a blog that's hard to read (the RSS feed syndicated on Planet Python is truncated, grr!) and hard to reply (no comments on the blog! my Chromium's AdBlock+ hid the comment link so I couldn't find it), but never mind that.

Unfortunately the data from the customers included some \x85 characters, which were breaking the CSV parsing.

0x85 is a control character (NEXT LINE or NEL) in Latin-1, but it's a printable character (HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS) in Microsoft's code page 1252, which is often mistaken for Latin-1. I would venture a suggestion that the encoding of the customer data was not latin-1 but rather cp1252.

>>> '\x85'.decode('cp1252')
u'\u2026'

NTT DOCOMO, INC. announced today that it has developed a prototype multi-band power amplifier that accommodates eight frequency bands between 700 MHz and 2.5 GHz, paving the way for lightweight, all-in-one mobile phones capable of standalone wireless communications of different standards, including the forthcoming extra-fast LTE standard as well as existing W-CDMA and GSM.

Power amplifiers are used in mobile phones to increase signal power up to levels required for wireless communication. As conventional multi-band phones must em... .. .

Google launched a new mobile web service called Near Me Now that can recommend things like restaurants, bars and ATMs near you. This uses browser geolocation to provide only results relevant to where you are.

The idea is quite good: to replace business directories like Yelp or eat.fi with something that is easily accessible from Google's homepage and uses Google's great relevancy algorithms.

However, the implementation is not quite there yet. My main gripe is that they implemented this using browser sniffing so that the feature can be accessed only with iPhones and Android devices. Even though I'm using N900, a mobile device that has GPS and provides geolocation through the browser I cannot access that site. That reeks of the bad old times of IE-only websites.

Lesson: if you need browser sniffing to provide some feature, implement it based on browser capabilities, not the user agent (which can anyway be spoofed easily).

In a previous blog posts, I wrote about the FM receiver on the Nokia N900. I commented

I recently met an acquaintance around Maemo (hi Khertan!) who was having problems coming to grips with how to use Qt in general. He's a python developer currently, with exposure to Gtk+, so I thought I'd write up some help for him to read over.

fMMS is a python application with a graphical frontend for sending and receiving MMS on the N900.

With the release of 0.1.2-1 (which should make it’s way in to devel soon) minor tweaks have been made and it should now work with most operators in the world.

Until it shows up in extras-devel you can find a .deb-file at http://mms.frals.se

Video of an older version in action (in Swedish): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdpIA24Yegw

If you decide to test this application, please drop a comment here, on talk.maemo.org or in an e-mail

Garage site: https://garage.maemo.org/projects/fmms

Firefox for Mobile Firefox for Maemo RC2 - http://blog.pavlov.net/2010... January 8 from blog.pavlov.net » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Mark/Space partnered with Nokia to release GoGadget for the Nokia N900 Friday afternoon. It enables synchronization of music, photos, ringtones, video, and documents from a Mac to a Nokia N900 connected through a USB cable. It works similar to Nokia Multimedia Transfer, but offers a couple more features.

GoGadget for N900 works with iTunes to transfer whole playlists of music, with album art, genre and artist info. Save photos you snap with your Nokia N900 to your computer, into iPhoto. Transfer photos from your computer too – to make an N900 a digital photo album that’s always with you. Drag a video to GoGadget and it is converted to fit the phone’s screen size for a great viewing experience. These three features, however, are already offered for free using Nokia Multimedia Transfer.

Two things GoGadget has that NMT doesn’t are synchronization of ringtones and files/documents. The ringtone editor is pretty cool. Choose a song, trim, and name it. The audio meter also guides you with the trimming. Ringtones are transferred on the Nokia N900 the next time it is synced.

GoGadget’s ringtone editor

GoGadget for Nokia N900 is available today, free to try for 7 days and to purchase for $19.95 USD. Try it out and let us know what you think.

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

• Foursquare App for Nokia N900 – BarrioSquare Now Available in App Manager
• Video How to: Use Bookmarklets on the Nokia N900’s Browser
• Joikuspot for Nokia N900 Now Out of Beta. Coming to Ovi Store Soon
• Angry Birds Level Pack 1 Back in Ovi Store for Nokia N900 (Update: taken out again)

Folks, we got another application for Nokia N900, this time it isn’t a theme but a Game. There’s not much to say about this, as you all know how these games are. This N900 game is called Magic Check and it is under development by the MMMOOO team and will be released very very soon. Here at nokia-n900.com we got the first screenshots from the game. Check all them on the gallery below. Let’s way for more developments but never forget that a good game is made not only by it’s graphics ...

Well , the iPhone UI really innovative . But the N900 is innovative too. And it actually beats the iPhone in terms of usability according to this finding

Peter-Paul Koch is a mobile platform strategist, consultant, and trainer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He concentrates on Web technologies, mobile websites, and W3C Widgets.

Paul handed over some phones to a friend to see what he was comfortable with.

Here are the phones which were tested : Nokia N97, Samsung M1, HTC Touch Pro (Windows Mobile), SonyEricsson W960i, Nokia E71, BlackBerry 9500, HTC Pioneer (Android), LG M900, Nokia N900, iPhone.

Conclusion from the test

He was extremely careful to note that he did so only because he felt that the hardware keyboard and zoom button were most conductive to his personal goal of accessing and working with his online banking site. He could imagine that the iPhone would be better suited for other purposes.

This confirms my hunch that Nokia is on the right track with the Maemo platform. The next Maemo phone, I think, will be something to watch.

To my surprise he ranked Windows Mobile above Android. Although he liked Android, it did not entirely deliver on its promises as far as B. was concerned. Windows Mobile promised less, but delivered.

Via MIR

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/01/a_basic_usabili.html Similar Posts:

• Google Maps with GPS on the Nokia N900
• Video : Quake 3 on Nokia N900
• Nokia brings Qt port to Maemo5 , shows it off on N900 on Video
• Nokia N900 Rover Official Press Pic Leaked
• Win a N900 by Hacking it at Push N900

Share/Save

Earlier this morning the Mozilla community released the second release candidate of Firefox mobile browser for Maemo based devices that fixes bug which brings latest Nokia’s Linux based device to its knees!

If you’ve already got beta 5 installed on your Nokia N900 or N810, you will be receiving a software update shortly. Otherwise, if you’re viewing this on your device, you can get it for a test drive from here or you can visit Firefox.com/mobile to learn more and download it as well.

Firefox for Maemo RC2 is a pretty hot update that includes latest version of our layout engine, Gecko 1.9.2 RC1, which is the same version that the soon-t... .. .

Marvell, a worldwide leader in integrated silicon solutions, today announced another breakthrough in advanced chip design: the world's first "quadruple" core processor for applications utilizing the ARM instruction set.

Building on a long and successful history of CPU core development and previous multicore implementations, Marvell's achievement represents a milestone breakthrough for the ARM ecosystem with many positive implications for consumers.

Based on the same CPU architecture as the Marvell® ARMADA™ 500 and 600 processor series, Marvell's quadcore implementation can deli... .. .

Let’s kick off the new year with a new series.

If you recall, Season One was about a presentation I gave at the first (Berlin, 2008) Maemo Summit, revisited and extended. Season Two will be about a presentation I would have given at the 2009 Summit in Amsterdam… if I had actually managed to attend, that is. This way I can salvage some of it, and maybe give some readers useful tips or ideas for new uses of their tablets.

This presentation would have been quite different from the first, if only for the fact that it was to be a 5-minute “lightning talk”. This format does not lend itself well to philosophical ramblings, so I intended to do what suits it best: a demo of an application, which I had created last summer.

As is usually the case, the idea for this app stemmed from an “itch to scratch”. Of course, as you may already have guessed, there is plenty of Python and Web protocols in this story, and some web2py, but in the end I had to dig into deeper and more complex stuff than I had initially anticipated, so that is not all of it.

In hindsight, the five-minute demo would probably have been quite a challenge to set up, as it would have involved at least two devices (one of them a tablet) communicating over three protocol stacks.

Hyakutake is the name of the resulting product. For the curious, it is also the name of an atypical comet which crossed the solar system in 1996. It’s a bitch to spell, but I find it has a nice ring to it :-)

The nature of the itch I’ve been scratching, and the reason for choosing a comet’s name, will be made clear in the following posts…

International environmental organization Greenpeace has published its fourteenth Guide to Greener Electronics, and Finnish mobile phone giant continues to lead Greenpeace's list, with a score of 7.3 out of 10.

Sony Ericsson follows closely, and is the only company to score full marks on all the toxic chemicals criteria.

In third place is Toshiba, but it risks losing points if it fails to meet its commitment to market new models of all its consumer electronics products that are free of PVC and BFRs by 1 April 2010. Philips comes in fourth place, while Apple rises from ni... .. .

Good ideas are a dime a dozen, or so the saying goes. But now a single good ideacould be worth a million dollars (USD). Nokia has announced a million dollarventure challenge to encourage innovators to create a mobile product or servicethat raises the standard of living or enhances the lives of those in growtheconomies.

The Growth Economy Venture Challenge is part of Nokia's globalCalling All Innovators competition announced on January 7 at the ConsumerElectronics Show (CES).

Announcing the GrowthEconomy Venture Challenge today at the conclusion of his keynote at CES, NokiaCEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo called on inno... .. .

Hi again!

I'm still working on the MMS support for fremantle.

read more

Mark from NokiaBlog has some great comparison pictures of the Nokia N900 and the Google Nexus One. He ordered the google phone online and it was delivered to him the next day- incredible isn’t it ?

He was blown away by the display on the Nexus One mainly for the size and he feels that it’s more pocketable than the Nokia N900 mainly due to the thickness.  But he feels that the virtual keyboard on the nexus one was not perfect and he needs the hardware keypad like on the N900.

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For a while I’ve wanted to take notes in the Shavian alphabet on my N900.  The other night I finally got around to putting in Shavian support. It was a whole lot easier than I’d imagined: about ten minutes’ work, and as so often I’m rather impressed at how flexible Maemo is. This post was enormously helpful.

You can switch alphabets using the system menu; excuse the dreadful antialiasing on the icon I whipped up in a few seconds. When you’re typing in Shavian, the Fn (bluearrow) key will let you type in the Latin alphabet briefly.

And the notes application (and Conboy) don’t have any problem with the non-BMP codepoints needed.

I would package this, but I’m not sure it would be useful to anyone but me. On the other hand, it might be helpful for other people who wanted to know how to do something similar.

There’s been Yet Another Thread™ on the problems in the community this week. It started well as a discussion on the nature of ‘constructive criticism’, and went downhill fast. (Including some lovely practical demonstrations of destructive criticism.)

There’s been Yet Another Thread™ on the problems in the community this week. It started well as a discussion on the nature of ‘constructive criticism’, and went downhill fast. (Including some lovely practical demonstrations of destructive criticism.)

I other news, I sent an MMS today.

That may not sound like news to most phone owners. But n900 (like the first edition iphone) came without MMS capability.

The difference is that whereas iphone owners had to wait for Apple to decide this was worth doing and implement it, n900 is designed for anyone who wants to make improvements. So community member Frals has been working on creating an MMS function.

It's still a way from fully working, and it's a good bit clunky to use, But it most definitely works, and I can transfer MMS between n900 and n95 relatively cleanly now.

Huge, huge thanks go to Frals for this. I stand in awe of people who can write stuff like that.

(Note - LJ doesn't have 'in awe' as a mood option!)

I other news, I sent an MMS today.

That may not sound like news to most phone owners. But n900 (like the first edition iphone) came without MMS capability.

The difference is that whereas iphone owners had to wait for Apple to decide this was worth doing and implement it, n900 is designed for anyone who wants to make improvements. So community member Frals has been working on creating an MMS function.

It's still a way from fully working, and it's a good bit clunky to use, But it most definitely works, and I can transfer MMS between n900 and n95 relatively cleanly now.

Huge, huge thanks go to Frals for this. I stand in awe of people who can write stuff like that.

(Note - LJ doesn't have 'in awe' as a mood option!)

Miniclip is the very popular website where you can play a large range of free online games including sports games, massive multiplayer games, action games, puzzle games, and flash games.

Although there are lots of free games available on this website there is one game that especially caught my attention . The name of this game is Bloxorz, simple but yet challenging puzzle game that consists of rolling a block to make it fall through a square hole.

Just like most of the greatest puzzle games, Bloxorz is simple as black and white, the objective is to tumble a rectangular block through each sta... .. .

Last week I finally got around to downgrading my laptop from karmic to jaunty. I did this for a couple of reasons. For my laptop the control of external displays regressed from working flawlessly, to crashing everytime it tried to detect an external display that it didnt boot with.
Secondly,, eclipse has some major problems on karmic due to some changes. The fault is with eclipse, but it will be some time before any fixes work through to the eclipse based products I need to work with, so I downgraded.

If you browse through my Definitive Nokia N900 Guide you will see a post describing how to connect the Nokia N900 to your Mac computer. I had posted the steps needed to connect with a Nokia N900 running with a T-Mobile USA SIM and thought it was a good guide. Molly then told me that she couldn’t get her Mac working with the N900. After a bit of back and forth chat I finally figured out she had an AT&T SIM inside the N900. As a guy who has connected to various carriers over the year, I knew there were some different settings needed for AT&T.

As you can now see in my N900 to Apple Mac tethering post I posted the steps needed to connect through an AT&T SIM so you should be all set. Remember that you will only get EDGE data speeds, but it still may be helpful for those who do not want to have a T-Mobile account.

For those that didn’t attended my presentation at the Maemo Summit (videos are still MIA ), I added some new features in BlueMaemo for Maemo5, one of these feature is the ability to send events using the accelerometer motion, is still in a very early stage, but as you can see in the video below, you can already play simple games.

BlueMaemo needs a lot of love before entering Maemo Extras, but unfortunately this month I don’t have plans for more improvements, I’ve a lot of other things to do and also I’ve to start job hunting (Know a position for a talented SW devel ? ), but I appreciate suggestions for improvements and bug reports. Big thanks for all alpha testers that helped a lot so far.

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

If you want to test the alpha version of BlueMaemo, you can grab it in the Extras-devel repository, please remember that the software in that repository is not intended for end users, before enable this repository, read this post.

The accelerometer control is enabled via the button “one” and “two”(experimental air mouse) in the gamepad profile. More instructions here.

Certainly, I think most of you would agree with me that PiZero is one of the best Theme designers for the Symbian based handsets and I just can't tell you how excited I am to see that he is already experimenting with Maemo Theme Maker and that his first Maemo 5 is going to be available soon!

His themes are sharp and uncluttered and it’s real pleasure to work with. I use PiZero’s themes on several S60 devices and I found them very user-friendly and not junked up with a lot of unnecessary elements.

Alfa  by PiZero is still under construction and isn't available yet but this green toned theme of spring with beautiful wallpaper of tall grass in Vi... .. .

The Nokia N900 mobile device belongs to the Nokia Internet Tablet family. This device includes all the features of mobile functionality and connectivity that is found on all the modern cellphones, sometimes termed as PDA. Nokia N900 also includes a kick ass browser which has full flash support. Coming to specifications, this device has a 3.5 inch touch-sensitive screen, 800×480 pixels display, TI OMAP 3430: ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz processor and so on.

While iPhone 3GS on the other hand, is an improved version of iPhone mobile from Apple. It features iPhone OS which is proprietary of Apple.iPhone 3GS also has a 3.5 inch screen, but that is multitouch enabled. It has OMAP 600 MHz CPU, 480×320 pixels display and so on.

But when we start comparing the size of both devices, iPhone 3GS has dimensions of 115.5×62.1×12.3 mm, where as N900, when expanded with full QWERTY keyboard has dimensions 110.9 × 59.8 × 18 mm. As we have stated in our previous comparison, that in terms of size comparison if you are comfortable with a keypad, both the devices are a tie in size, but if we leave out the keypad iPhone 3GS is sleek as it is without a keypad.

At FoneArena , we have previously covered the  full specification and details about Apple iPhone 3GS vs Nokia N900.

Here is a video of size comparison of Apple iPhone 3GS vs Nokia N900:

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A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-01-04 through 2010-01-10

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-01-04 through 2010-01-10

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-01-04 through 2010-01-10

The main reason I embarked on this Hyakutake adventure is that I’m too sentimental.

You see, I just hate to see perfectly good, if slightly obsolete, hardware go unused. At the same time, I can’t bear to part with it, and sometimes even rescue “collectors” from corporate dumpsters. So of course, I always end up with more than I can use or manage, which breaks my heart.

Specifically in this case, I have too many tablets. At the time (last summer), I had one of each: 770, N800, N810. The N810 was my daily workhorse, always with me everywhere. The N800 was the stay-at-home mobile terminal, for news at breakfast and quick domestic lookups at any time (weather, TV programs, bus schedules, etc.). Both saw daily, even intensive use. The 770… well, good old 770 mostly sat around and served to test those Mer releases that had support for it, when I got around to it, which was not saying much. I needed some other use for it.

I also had an old laptop lying around, a victim of the netbook wave. It had been an expensive ultra-light in its day, still sleek and in good working order, just not up to modern standards any more. I wanted it put into active retirement, but none of the “mod” ideas I could find on the Web (like a digital photo frame or torrent box) appealed to me.

Then one day I happened to think of both devices at the same time, and something clicked into place: I would kill both birds with one stone. I would write an app that would make them both useful again — together.

I saw it all so clearly in my mind…

What happens when you get challenged to break an unbreakable phone on the floor of CES in Las Vegas? Well Dan Simmons from the BBC's Click team managed to do what every one of us has secretly tried to do, and break the phone. The out-take is now online at BBC News.

I just connected my N900 to my PC and checked for updates via Nokia software updater and was surprised to find a new firmware update for the device. The update is version 1.2009.44.1 and has been tested select members of the maemo community for a few weeks nowWhile the download and update is still going on will post the changelog once the update is done.

While I would love a major update. Users in the Maemo talk are describing this a minor update.

WARNING :  Using NSU might erase all your data(mainly settings,apps ) Wait for OTA update to appear in your app manager if you don’t want to loose data.

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The first maintenance release is out. What you can see as the biggest news items is that application manager looks quite a bit different, and Ovi store is out. These two things go hand in hand. The work on application manager is on improving the user experience for installing applications from Ovi store. In addition to that, it's on improving the user experience of installing content from the community and nokia applications catalogues. Application manager is now fast enough to use - if only maemo.org would be updated soon, then so would the community catalogues.

Just want to give everyone a quick heads up that Nokia has rolled out first firmware update for Nokia N900 and you can get it as Firmware Over the Air (firmware over the air) through the Application manager.

If you haven’t been warned yet, than enable internet connection and refresh app manager and you should see the 18.5 MB large Firmware version 1.2009.44-1. It should be available for most of the generic product codes but owners of branded devices might have to wait a bit longer.

Although there is no detailed change log it is still highly suggestible to get it as it usually brings dozens of minor bug fixes and improves reliability of your pho... .. .

Just want to give everyone a quick heads up that Nokia has rolled out first firmware update for Nokia N900 and you can get it as Firmware Over the Air (firmware over the air) through the Application manager.

If you haven’t been warned yet, than enable internet connection and refresh app manager and you should see the 18.5 MB large Firmware version 1.2009.44-1. It should be available for most of the generic product codes but owners of branded devices might have to wait a bit longer.

Although there is no detailed change log it is still highly suggestible to get it as it usually brings dozens of minor bug fixes and improves reliability of your pho... .. .

If you're one of the many people who spend their days on Facebook, you might be interested to know that we here at All About Maemo have finally opened our own Facebook page. Become a fan and you'll see all the latest AAM news as part of your FB live feed.

I’ve been all smitten with my new Google Nexus One the last few days, but when the battery was dead this morning it gave me a chance to pop my SIM back into my Nokia N900. Nokia and Mozilla had a couple of surprises for me this morning when I saw that a new Maemo 5 update and Firefox Mobile RC 2 were available to download.

The firmware for the N900 is 1.2009.44-1.002 and is a 21.8 MB download. After selecting to perform the update you are prompted to create a backup. I skipped this step and went for it. Thankfully, all my apps and settings came through the update with flying colors and work just as well prior to the update. I have not been able to find any notes on what was updated and have not been able to find anything different on my device yet. There is still no MMS support or support for texting in portrait modes. I understand this is a minor update to prepare the device for a much more extensive update coming soon. Hopefully, this update does improve battery life a bit and make it a bit more stable.

Mozilla also released Firefox for Maemo Release Candidate 2 on Friday. If you are not prompted to update or do not yet have it loaded, then simply point your web browser to Firefox.com/m on your N900. As I said before the first release was unusable because it was so painfully slow and after some initial testing this does seem to be faster. I’ll try to take a video of it in action soon to share with you all.

I got an email from Nokia today, reminding me that the Nokia N900 I received a few months ago was only a review unit and that I need to return shortly. At first, I was rather sad – sending a device back is almost always a sad affair, for obvious reasons. However, the more I’ve thought about it, the less upset I am, mainly because I haven’t really been using it much. I used the Nokia N900 as my primary device for a full 3 weeks when I first got it, and spent another full week with it a few weeks ago, to see how the experience had changed since its launch. Unfortunately, not much had changed.

Recently, while researching a blog post or two about how to package python apps, I’ve run across some really good resources on packaging that I’d like to point out. One is Ubuntu-oriented and the other is debian-oriented, but a deb is a deb so use which every one you prefer.

The first: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide/Python is from the Ubuntu wiki which is a really good source for all things Ubuntu. The wiki entries tend to be clearly written and easy to read which is a blessing. This particular wiki entry takes one through packaging a python app from beginning to end in a straight forward manner – nothing really complex here. It should cover about 90% of the packaging requirements of python Maemo apps.

The second: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/336 is from the site Debian Administration which is a great site. The site has an active community and some experienced admins post there so you’ll definitely find advanced topics like chroots, MTA configuration, etc. The article I pointed out is a fairly thorough discussion on packaging with some theory at the beginning.

The downside of the first article is that it describes using CDBS which requires more editing of files and is not as widely used as debhelper. The second article is a little older and doesn’t take advantage of the changes to debhelper that have come along in later versions. But between them I am sure you’ll find something useful and they are a great way to get started.

I want to take a little break away from the major Nokia X6 review I'm doing just now to directly address one of the issues that I'm seeing in the comments both of the X6 review and in other products that are reviewed both here on AAS and on other tech sites: the use of third party software to compensate for a manufacturer's omissions.

A minor firmware update for the Nokia N900 is now available. The update contains only minor changes. However it does include enablers that makes the device ready for its first major firmware update (PR 1.1). PR 1.1 is expected to fix a number of bugs and add a number of features including improved portrait mode support in select applications.

Ahead of an official availability announcement it seems that the mobile site version of the Ovi Store (store.ovi.mobi) is operational on N900's running the recently released firmware update (1.2009.44.1). A number of application and games are currently available for download. Content is installed via the Application manager, which is automatically launched when you tap a 'Download' button on the store. Read on for further details and screenshots.

Twitter and maemo.org are buzzing with great news: you no longer have to wait on the Nokia N900 firmware upgrade I teased you about.  That’s right: a new update, 1.2009.44-1, is now available.

Lack of Nokia-generated buzz along with the version number suggests that this is apparently a minor release and meant as a precursor to something bigger to follow soon.  Yes, “soon” is a vague political word but I don’t have a date.

But it must be a banner day for Nokia as well as customers, though, because as small as this update may seem it comes with Ovi Store support.  That’s right, the long-promised N900 knob to the Ovi Store door is here.

Initial access success was reportedly mixed, as the greenlighting appeared to occur on a region-by-region basis.  Some URL tricks were necessary at first for some but the ever-resourceful maemo.org community figured it out quickly and had eager users buying games like “Angry Birds” in short order.

The Ovi Store access has also been said to be accompanied by a nice improvement to the Application Manager, something long requested and overdue.  Sorry, no screenshots yet– I still don’t have a replacement N900.  However you can catch a glimpse at some N900 technical blogs like maemo-freak.com.

Today proves once again that big things can come in small packages.  And it’s still speculative, but I’m betting these advents precede an announcement regarding T-Mobile US and the N900.  We’ll see…

Posted in Mentioning Maemo, The Write Stuff Tagged: 1.2009.44-1, firmware, LinkedIn, Maemo, maemo.org, N900, Nokia, Ovi, Ovi Store

There are many people quick to jump all over Nokia, suppliers of the maemo-based n900. But today they’ve neatly shown that somewhere in that vast empire they employ a psychologist or two.

There are many people quick to jump all over Nokia, suppliers of the maemo-based n900. But today they’ve neatly shown that somewhere in that vast empire they employ a psychologist or two.

After morning’s news about the firmware update that brings some minor improvements here and there, enhancements of the user interface and addition of the non-functional OVI application catalogue, I’m pleased to tell you that Nokia’s OVI Store has today reached another major milestone by adding support for Maemo platform!!

The first public Beta version of Nokia's eagerly awaited Ovi Store for Maemo devices is finally available and the just released catalog can only be accessed from Nokia N900 through the web browser.

If your one of lucky Nokia N900 owners you can test Ovi Store by pointing your browser to store.ovi.mobi and join ‘the buy it on the go’ fu... .. .

Nokia N900 users who updated to 1.2009.44-1 earlier today and clicked on the Ovi store icon were met with the same old “coming soon” page. However, going to store.ovi.mobi directly on the web browser now actually lets you install apps, games, audios, videos, themes, and wallpapers. If you don’t have a Nokia N900, I’ve made a video to show you how it looks.

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

There were no official announcements made by Nokia about the Ovi Store’s opening, so we’re not sure if this is temporary. I recommend making Angry Birds your first must-have download.

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Since there are a few votes on this bug and it’s still to receive a target milestone, I present… fAPN 0.3 – now (soon) in extras-testing!

So what is fAPN? fAPN is a graphical front end for adding another GPRS AP on the N900 – for example when you need a separate connection for getting your lovely MMS.

What it does is more or less this, as well as adding a ‘user_added’ value so it’s visible in my GUI (by doing this only user added APNs are listed, so should be no risk of removing all your APNs )

Comments? Write a line below, drop me a PM on talk or send me a mail.

Talk-thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=39951

The camera/photo viewer on the N900 has a pretty nice tag cloud widget, which lets you quickly label your photos before you upload them to Flickr. (The novelty hasn’t yet worn off!) But an autocompletion accident left me with a tag in the widget that I’d really prefer not to be there when I’m showing off my nice new phone to people.

I spent a happy¹ few hours trying to figure out where it gets the set of tags from. The viewer asks Tracker for the most commonly-used tags, but this tag wasn’t used on any of my photos, so wasn’t coming from there. In fact, it didn’t appear in any of Tracker’s database files! After a bit of investigation, I discovered that the photo viewer keeps its own independent set of recently-used tags, not in Tracker, but in GConf, at /apps/osso/image-viewer/recent_tags. Lest you should find yourself in my position, a quick

gconftool --set --type list --list-type=string
/apps/osso/image-viewer/recent_tags '[]'

will expunged your undesired utterances from the cloud. Bug report time. Next stop: finding a tool that lets the user remove typos from the autocompletion database …

1. Grr.

The camera/photo viewer on the N900 has a pretty nice tag cloud widget, which lets you quickly label your photos before you upload them to Flickr. (The novelty hasn't yet worn off!) But an autocompletion accident left me with a tag in the widget that I'd really prefer not to be there when I'm showing off my nice new phone to people.

I spent a happy¹ few hours trying to figure out where it gets the set of tags from. The viewer asks Tracker for the most commonly-used tags, but this tag wasn't used on any of my photos, so wasn't coming from there. In fact, it didn't appear in any of Tracker's database files! After a bit of investigation, I discovered that the photo viewer keeps its own independent set of recently-used tags, not in Tracker, but in GConf, at /apps/osso/image-viewer/recent_tags. Lest you should find yourself in my position, a quick

gconftool --set --type list --list-type=string /apps/osso/image-viewer/recent_tags '[]'

will expunged your undesired utterances from the cloud. Bug report time. Next stop: finding a tool that lets the user remove typos from the autocompletion database …

1. Grr.

The Nokia N900 got a minor firmware update yesterday to version 44.1 Here is the changelog for the update.

• Performance Fixes
• New icons in Application Manager
• Application Manager remembers the position prior to app installation( it used to go to the top on refresh before)
• Red Pill mode does not work.
• OVI Catalogue has been added to list of repositories
• FM Transmitter Fixes

Some  more changes as reported in this thread

• kernel contains one fix, which is allowing HAM to trigger ubifs to higher compression level for the SSU update.
• browser contains one fix, which is browser UA string to say that it’s pr1.0.1 device.
• GTK contains one fix, which is dropping the icon cache support.
• application manager contains 37 fixes, mostly related to SSU stability
• And a bit related to the new look of the app grid.

And here are the packages which got updated.

updated package list(shortened):
mafw-iradio-source-bookmarks
microb-engine-settings
hildon-application-manager
kernel
tablet-browser-controls
hildon-theme-variant
clockd-settings
rtcom-accounts-sip
operator-wizard-settings-overide
maemon-wlan-network-settings
apt-transport-ttps
maemo 5
theme-default-settings
libcityinfo-settings
maemo-customer-logo
hildon-welcome-settings
extra-application-shortcuts
kernel-modules
osso-startup-wizard-settings
tvout-settings
apt
tablet-browser-bookmarks
libgtk2.0bin
hildon-desktop-applet-settings
preinstalled-contacts-variant
modest-provider-data
kernel-flasher
hildon-input-method-data
hildon-theme-alpha
osso-rss-reader-feeds
rtcom-accounts-xmpp
hildon-desktop-background-settings
maemo-ringtones
icd2-settings
maemo-icons

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Here is how I envisioned things would happen…

The laptop I would turn into a wall-mounted or table-top display, using an enclosure similar to any number of the “photo frame” mods you can find on the Web. Only the 12″, 1024*768, non-tactile screen would appear.

Then I would write a web app (with web2py, of course) to serve a finger-friendly UI tailored for the 770 form factor, using mostly just big icons. These icons would form a sort of (rather shallow) menu, enabling one-touch access to all the mundane Web services that get used daily or frequently around the house:

• real-time schedules for the nearby bus stop (to the kid’s school) and train station (to work)
• real-time traffic maps for the area
• TV programs for tonight
• weather for tomorrow
• movies at the local theater
• current playlist on my favourite FM station
• anything else that might come up…

So far, nothing very original. The goal that made the project interesting was that pressing an icon on the 770 would not display the resulting page on the tablet itself, but in a full-screen browser on the laptop. In essence, the tablet would be a Web remote command for the laptop, itself acting as a remote display.

This way, I thought, anyone in the family could use the system easily, the information would be displayed on a larger screen and could be viewed collectively from a distance. When idle, the laptop screen would also serve as a large wall clock.

This “remote command” stuff was a totally pie-in-the-sky notion at the time, and the prospect of doing something new (to me) was of course part of the appeal. The http protocol is such a resilient beast, and has been made to do so many unforeseen things over the years, that I felt naively confident: an hour of googling would certainly yield enough prior art, clues and similar projects to get me started, and from there I would cut ‘n paste my own.

Boy, was I mistaken… :-)

As some of you may know, in the N900, the root file system is stored in a OneNAND chip with 256M of space. Meanwhile /home and /home/user/MyDocs are in a eMMC in two different partitions: ~2GB (ext2) for /home and ~29GB (vfat) for /home/user/MyDocs.

The OneNAND is faster than the eMMC, and it’s intended to host only the Maemo main system, moving out the third party applications to the eMMC. Though, this new layout has brought new limitations, the more visible one is the /opt problem [2].

One of the debates about what left and what not in the OneNAND is the apt’s database and metadata. Moving out the apt’s database out from the OneNAND to the eMMC, in my personal opinion, is very risky: It will slow down the database processing (which is already slow given the size of the Fremantle repositories), and if the eMMC gets corrupted, the base system wouldn’t be upgreadable either, because apt couldn’t read its database. And that’s why I’m against the proposal.

Nevertheless I’m aware that the apt’s metadata and database could be huge, consuming much of the precious OpenNAND storing space. Just to mention it,  I’ve found myself, in my development cycles, moving out those files.

That’s why I cooked this script: move-apt-dirs.sh

WARNING: this script is not official. You’re at your own if you run it: no promises, no guaranties.

I’m pleased to say that Peter Penz will become an Openismus employee at the start of February. I’ve known and liked Peter since I worked with him six years ago in Linz, Austria on a proprietary C++ mobile phone platform. Back then I was impressed with his skill and temperament so I’ve watched with interest as he has become a core KDE maintainer via the Dolphin file manager.

Obviously Peter will help Openismus as we gain experience with Qt for Maemo 6 (Harmattan) in addition to our continued use of GTK+ and gtkmm.

Peter will work from home in Linz, occasionally visiting the office in Berlin. I like the idea of another office in Linz though.

Nokia Research Center (NRC), Hollywood, has begun a private pilot of its research project, the Westwood Experience.

The pilot explores how a compelling narrative, combined with a user’s physical location (context) augmented with digital content as well as social interactions with other “participants” can enhance the user experience and provide the media industry with new options and business models.

The story unfolds as the participants wander through the village of Westwood. They learn about a man, and the woman who changed his life through one magic evening, and how both of them are forever tied to Wes... .. .

I was browsing my Twitter stream and saw that Mark posted a way to access the Ovi Store on the updated Nokia N900. The icon on the N900 still isn’t active to launch now takes you to the Ovi Store and you can also go to store.ovi.mobi in your N900 web browser to be taken to the Ovi Store with the N900 recognized as the device. It looks like the official, non-beta  Ovi Store application launch is getting closer and closer for the N900. You will see something like 10 games and 30 or so apps, along with themes and videos to download. I personally installed the Project Gutenberg ebook reader (found on a repository and NOT in the Ovi Store), Angry Birds, and Solitaire Touch. Check out the video below of the Project Gutenberg reader and Angry Birds game in action.

UPDATE: When you choose to download an application from the Ovi Store you are taken to the integrated Application Manager where all apps are installed. I must have gotten confused bouncing back and forth between the Ovi Store and Application Manager because an astute reader pointed out that the mGutenberg ereader application is in the repositories and NOT in the Ovi Store.

All applications currently in the N900 Ovi Store are free on the device, but I see you can purchase apps via the Ovi Store on the Internet so paid apps are rolling out as well. I thought the Angry Birds game was hilarious, but I also found that throwing the rabbits in Open Season (I said Great Outdoors in the video, oops.) was really funny so maybe I have a bit of twisted sense of humor. I like that the Project Gutenberg ebook program works in both landscape and portrait mode too so I can now get a ton of books on my N900 and it is getting more and more useful all the time.

Did you find any good apps in the Ovi Store for your N900?

When Vagalume was announced for the Nokia N900 a few weeks ago, it was able to scrobble to Last.FM, but not stream music, unfortunately. The application easily connects to Libre.FM, but due to restrictions with on mobile phones, is unable to stream music from Last.FM. However, thanks to our friend Gerrymoth, it’s possible to stream Last.FM through Vagalume on the N900 after a small tweak.

Here are the steps to get Last.fm working in Vagalume on the N900:

1. Goto Last.fm to request an API Account http://last.fm/api and take note of your API Key and API Secret Key.

2. Download the LastFM.zip file from nokiAAddict downloads HERE

3. Unzip the LastFM.zip

4. Edit the LastFM.xml and replace the ADDKEYHERE and ADDSECRETKEYHERE with your API Key and API Secret Key.

5. Transfer the edited LastFM.xml file to your N900. (It doesn’t matter where you store it)

6. Open Vagalume and select Last.fm/Import servers file… and browse to the LastFM.xml file you just transfered.

7. In Vagalume select Last.fm/Preferences and set Service to LastFM.

That’s it! Now you can choose Play Radio and create a station and stream that wonderful Last.FM music straight onto your Nokia N900. Brilliant.

NOTE: You may need to restart Vagalume?

Related Posts

• Vagalume Updated to V.05, New Look
• Spotify Support Coming To The Nokia N900
• Vagalume Update Brings Last.FM To The N900
• Ogg Vorbis Support Now Available For Nokia N900

Happy new year!

We opened Ovi Store beta today for Maemo 5, i.e. for N900. Go and check it out! More here.



I made a trip during the new year. And I used my N900 to take a lot of pictures. There are at least two advantages in N900 over a conventional camera:


1) The sharp high resolution screen makes it possible to really edit pictures with the device. I think somebody should build or port a good image editing software for Maemo 5. The screen would make it really useful. But even with the in-build editing capabilities you can do nice stuff.

2) I can upload the images directly to my Flickr, Facebook, Ovi and other accounts. And make my friends jealous ... By the way, there is a nice N900 group @ Flickr.




..and now, back to work!

Peter-Paul Koch, writing on the QuirksBlog, shares the results of a usability test comparing 10 different phones. What's most interesting is that the user in question might be considered the 'average' user rather than a tech-influencer (as is typical in online media). Consequently many of the observations offer insight into what matters in the real world compared to rarefied atmosphere of the 'media bubble'. Read on for more.

Google announced on Tuesday that they are rolling out the ability to upload and store any type of file in Google Docs over the next few weeks. It’s cool that Nokia N900 users will be able to take advantage of this service directly from their device by using the Petrovich and Pixelpipe apps.

Upload files other than pics or vids with Petrovich

The Petrovich app on the N900 allows you to send a file of your choosing via Bluetooth, E-mail, or a “Sharing service”. Add Google Docs as one of your Pixelpipe pipes and you’ll be able to store any type of files on Google’s servers.

Let’s break it up in simple steps:

• Install Petrovich
• Install Pixelpipe
• Add Google Docs to Pixelpipe
• Take note of the routing tag. Default is “@gdocs”
• Open Petrovich on Nokia N900
• Select the file you want to upload and choose “Share via Service”
• Type title or description, then add the “@gdocs” tag.
• Make sure the account showing is Pixelpipe.
• Click Share.
• That’s it!

Nokia N900’s Share feature makes this possible

Google says, “you’ll have 1GB of free storage for files you don’t convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year.” File size limit is 250MB. This feature is not enabled for me yet, but it will be available in the next couple of weeks. Will you be using it with the Nokia N900?

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Well, I finaly got my hands on a N900 (given as a Christmas gift by Collabora to Gabriel).  This gave me the occasion to observe first hand that the Ovi Maps, while having a lot of features, is slow and that the Hildon Emerillon port is less than perfect.  It is hard to use with fingers and feels alien to the platform.

Recently, three source packages that were published in Diablo times was released in their Fremantle versions which I had waited for a long time for. These are:

For this we will use the new pypackager 3.0. There isn’t currently no graphical interface (but the UI will be available in version 3.1).

In a brief break from Hermes-related Maemo work, I was inspired by Manfred Weiss' MyMenu to create an auto-organising menu application for the N900:

Catorise organises the application menu to have top-levels corresponding to the sections in Application Manager. Features:

• Uses the section icons from the current theme, falling back to the default theme if none available.
• Determines an application's section from the same information the packager used when uploading it to Extras.
• Keeps track of application installs/uninstalls.
• Entirely non-destructive: remove the package and everything goes back to how it was before.
• "All" and "Other" sections, just as in the App Manager, to provide additional access routes.

So, with Catorise the section you find an application's icon is the same you used to install it!

It is currently in Extras-devel. This should, therefore, only be tested by people who are willing to suffer potential data loss, hair loss and the eating of babies.

It's largely feature complete, however there are some known problems/future developments:

• Applications installed from Ovi will go into the "Other" section, due to the way Ovi on Maemo has been designed. I've some thoughts on how to work around this, though.
• Changing the theme will only update the icons on the next application install/removal.
• A quick GUI editor could be created to manipulate /opt/catorise/menu which is a simple text file cache to speed-up rebuilding. This would allow the user to shuffle the apps to best suit their use cases.

In a brief break from Hermes-related Maemo work, I was inspired by Manfred Weiss' MyMenu to create an auto-organising menu application for the N900:

Catorise organises the application menu to have top-levels corresponding to the sections in Application Manager. Features:

• Uses the section icons from the current theme, falling back to the default theme if none available.
• Determines an application's section from the same information the packager used when uploading it to Extras.
• Keeps track of application installs/uninstalls.
• Entirely non-destructive: remove the package and everything goes back to how it was before.
• "All" and "Other" sections, just as in the App Manager, to provide additional access routes.

So, with Catorise the section you find an application's icon is the same you used to install it!

It is currently in Extras-devel. This should, therefore, only be tested by people who are willing to suffer potential data loss, hair loss and the eating of babies.

It's largely feature complete, however there are some known problems/future developments:

• Applications installed from Ovi will go into the "Other" section, due to the way Ovi on Maemo has been designed. I've some thoughts on how to work around this, though.
• Changing the theme will only update the icons on the next application install/removal.
• A quick GUI editor could be created to manipulate /opt/catorise/menu which is a simple text file cache to speed-up rebuilding. This would allow the user to shuffle the apps to best suit their use cases.

While i’m still working on PyPackager, PyGTKEditor and others projects. I’m finishing an other one for first Fremantle release.

mNotes is a Notes Application, specially designed for Maemo Devices. It s feature a synchronization with a web server.

It s feature :
– auto link between notes.
– auto indent
– search
– undo / redo
– fullscreen
– auto rotation
– font/size preferences
– and Synchronization !

It s still in developpment. And some feature aren’t yet implemented :
◦ search in note and hiligh when opening global search
◦ Windows Version (Currently in developpment)
◦ Linux Version
◦ Web Version (Currently in developpment)

Some optimizations is needed :
◦ Defering Optimize
◦ Refactoring mnotes_window.py (window.py + editor.py)

Currently synchronization is working with the web server, but there is still need to save feature of the web online editor.

One major thing missing from the Nokia N900 is an official Google Maps application. Fortunately, the mobile version of their website looks like a good solution until Google decides to release a native app for Maemo and the Nokia N900. I’ve created a video to show you how it looks.

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

Simply go to google.com/maps/m on the Nokia N900’s web browser. The browser have the Hover and Manipulation modes that are handy on the Google maps mobile website. You can use these modes in order to move and zoom on the map.

The Google Maps mobile website allows users to search, view traffic, satellite view, and even call places. This solution isn’t perfect and a proper application should make the experience better. The web browser does not know your current location, so you have to double tap many times to zoom in from world view to to street. Have a Nokia N900? Go check it out and let us know what you think.

Update: Thanks to a tip by @dsawhney, installing the maemo-geolocation plugin from Application manager enables the web browser to find my location for Google Maps! Awesome!

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Actually, I was both right and wrong.

I was right in that my goal is, ultimately, achievable. But I was severely off-base in my estimation of what it would take to get there.

Like Alice in Wonderland, I found myself dragged further and further down into a whole, new and unsuspected world of unknown concepts, with its own rich alphabet soup of acronyms and protocols.

You see, it turns out that what I wanted to do is just not that easy — yet. It will be, in time, because among plenty of other things, the upcoming HTML5 standard defines a new javascript API, WebSocket, which is designed to solve just that problem: bidirectional communication between client and server.

This is all still just a draft, however, and is mostly not supported by common, currently available browsers. In the meantime, the usable solutions are — self-admittedly –  a hodge-podge of clever hacks and kludges. This mixture has been brewing and evolving behind the scenes since around 2006, and goes by several names. COMET, however, seems to have caught on as the catchy nickname  for this field of Web programming, much as AJAX emerged some years ago to sum up the various uses of javascript and XmlHttpRequest to enhance web interfaces.

This is no coincidence, as most COMET techniques rely heavily on AJAX and/or XmlHttpRequest. The name itself is not an acronym, but an AJAX-related pun.

The analogy further extends to the state of the field as a whole, which is strongly reminiscent of how AJAX simmered in the years before it was known by that name and went mainstream: elite, bleeding-edge, black-magic like. Full of obscure jargon and implicit concepts. Sparse, elliptic, scattered documentation. Tutorials with more holes than Swiss cheese. Mutually contradictory HOWTOs on the same page because of rapid API obsolescence and no versioning. Browser incompatibilities … you name it, it’s there.

For the unwary explorer who crosses this kind of New Frontier in his sandals and shorts, hoping for a “quick-in, quick out”, it means long hours of honing Google searches, wandering through a maze of links, cross-referencing, second-guessing, correlating, hoping something will start making sense at some point… like climbing every dune in the Sahara to see what’s behind, hoping it’s an oasis.

Normally I would flee such a state of affairs immediately, and let it mature for some years until it reaches “normal human” levels, like AJAX did. But this itch must have been unusually strong, for somehow I stuck in there, meandered through the swamp again and again, to finally emerge with a couple of trophies.

That’s when I decided that if I succeeded in my project, it would definitely bear the name of a comet :-)

My good friend Lisa Gade, editor of Mobile Tech Review, writes some of the most comprehensive reviews online and I read all of her stuff before making my own purchase choices. She commonly uses T-Mobile like I do so I was very interested in reading her comparison of the Nokia N900 and Google Nexus One. I just bought both of these devices over the last two weeks and was going to write a comparison like this, but Lisa actually expressed my feelings almost exactly so I figured I would just direct you to her post.

The bottom line, as clearly stated by Lisa, is “… the Nexus One is more phone-centric while the Nokia N900 is more Web and media-focused.” I keep moving my SIM between both throughout each day and I do find the applications to be better on the Nexus One, particularly the social media clients like Twidroid and Foursquare. With the Ovi Store now rolling out on the N900, I am hopeful we will see more of these types of applications soon to take the application edge away from other new devices. Google Maps or updated Ovi Maps is also a major area that needs improvement on the N900 and it will make a fantastic navigation device once we get a solid mapping solution.

Have any readers tried both of these out and if so, do you agree with Lisa and me?

As it has been expected, the new firmware update for the Nokia N900 is ready. Under the version code 1.2009.44.1, this new firmware update fixes a numbers of bugs that have been reported for the users and developers at Maemo.org, including just a bit more stability to the Maemo 5 OS. Apart from the bug fixing, the Nokia Conversations Blog pointed out ““This software update prepares the Nokia N900 for opening the Ovi Store – watch out for a separate announcement for the store opening shortly.” The firmware update file weighs around ...

Now that Qt is hot and QGraphicsView is even hotter, I’m quite surprised that Trolls haven’t provided a good common component for kinetic panning. There are some existing demo codes like this FlickCharm in dojo examples, but the problem in FlickCharm is that it doesn’t work with QGraphicsWidgets. Please correct me, if I’m wrong. QML [...]

During the last days (well, actually during the last nights [*]), I’ve been spending some time in adapting frogr 0.2 to also compile and work on my brand new N900 (thanks Igalia!), and this is the humble result up to date:

Perhaps you’re thinking why the hell I needed frogr to upload pictures when the N900 already comes with a nice and handy sharing application to upload pictures directly from the camera app or the image viewer, so here you have some use cases where I found the  sharing app not enough for my needs:

• To upload several pictures in a row to flickr, instead of having to do it one by one (tipical use case after taking several pictures that I’d like to share/backup in flickr).
• To set same name, description and/or tags to a bunch of pictures instead of doing it one by one (related to previous use case).
• To be able to upload pictures as “private” instead of “public”.

Update: I’m correcting this post here since it seems the sharing application already was capable of doing some of those things I mentioned above (ups!). Anyway, as I commented there, this does not discourage me even a little bit of keeping porting my little frogr to Fremantle, but just encourage me to try to make a difference and because… why not to tell it? I’d just love to bring frogr with me wherever I go . Thanks Daniel for your comment!

Current status of this port to Fremantle is still work in progress so don’t expect to find anything working out-of-the-box if you download the source code at this moment, but the idea is to get it into a stable state soon to upload it to maemo-extras, along with a packaged version for Fremantle of the great flickcurl library, which is a requirement for frogr to work (and at this moment I’m jsut packaging and using it on my own for development purposes).

[*] I think the screenshot explains pretty well the main reason why I work so slowly and at late hours in frogr

During the last days (well, actually during the last nights [*]), I’ve been spending some time in adapting frogr 0.2 to also compile and work on my brand new N900 (thanks Igalia!), and this is the humble result up to date:

Perhaps you’re thinking why the hell I needed frogr to upload pictures when the N900 already comes with a nice and handy sharing application to upload pictures directly from the camera app or the image viewer, so here you have some use cases where I found the  sharing app not enough for my needs:

• To upload several pictures in a row to flickr, instead of having to do it one by one (tipical use case after taking several pictures that I’d like to share/backup in flickr).
• To set same name, description and/or tags to a bunch of pictures instead of doing it one by one (related to previous use case).
• To be able to upload pictures as “private” instead of “public”.

Update: I’m correcting this post here since it seems the sharing application already was capable of doing some of those things I mentioned above (ups!). Anyway, as I commented there, this does not discourage me even a little bit of keeping porting my little frogr to Fremantle, but just encourage me to try to make a difference and because… why not to tell it? I’d just love to bring frogr with me wherever I go :-). Thanks Daniel for your comment!

Current status of this port to Fremantle is still work in progress so don’t expect to find anything working out-of-the-box if you download the source code at this moment, but the idea is to get it into a stable state soon to upload it to maemo-extras, along with a packaged version for Fremantle of the great flickcurl library, which is a requirement for frogr to work (and at this moment I’m jsut packaging and using it on my own for development purposes).

[*] I think the screenshot explains pretty well the main reason why I work so slowly and at late hours in frogr :-)

No, no, this is not just another nostalgic article about crappy games from the late '80s and early '90s before the Microsoft came and bought our souls.

This is the article about the Maemo port of the DOOM, a game which set new standards for graphic quality and graphic violence in computer gaming when it hit PCs in 1993! Doom is a landmark title in the first-person shooter video game genre, and in first person gaming in general.

I loved this game and have played every Doom version since the early days and I can’t tell you how happy I am because I’m able to run in on my lovely Nokia N900 and its great high-defi... .. .

Yesterday I finally uploaded the changes I had locally committed in my git clone of SeriesFinale and send them also for building in the extras repository of Maemo.

The 0.3 version has the following changes:

Added extra information to tree views

While you can enter the list of episodes and check what’s the next you need to watch, it is boring to need to navigate so much just to check this, so I added some extra information to the shows and seasons views. Basically now you’ll readily know how many seasons you have in a show, how many episodes you are left to watch, what’s the next one to go and which seasons/shows are completely watched.

SeriesFinale 0.3 seasons view

Added configuration file handling and episodes order recall

Paco Zafra, a SeriesFinale user, asked for the app to remember his episodes’ sorting preferences and with this version it will start doing so. Hope you like it Paco.
This also means it now stores an XML file with these preferences and will do it for other future preferences added to the program.

i18n:

With this release I also added support for internationalization and included the Portuguese translation already.
You can contribute to SeriesFinale by sending me a .po file translated in your language.

SeriesFinale 0.3 in Portuguese

Apart from the changes above, several code improvements were made.

The update should be arriving at you N900 any time soon.

Hope you like it!

After a recent firmware release to v44.1 firmware, Nokia has now finally opened its door for the Maemo Platform, more specifically Nokia N900.

Therefore from now on, whenever you click on any Ovi Store icon, bookmark or shortcut on your N900 desktop, you are now taken to a smart Ovi Store interface tailor made for N900 where lots of Apps, Games, Utilities, Video Clips etc have already been made available. This Ovi Store for Maemo also features a collection of Wallpapers and Themes to personalise your N900.

Here is a Video Demo of the newly launched Ovi Store on the Nokia N900, by The Nokia Blog. Do Check it out.

Similar Posts:

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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology solutions, today announced two high-density memory solutions for mobile devices. The new storage solutions – a 64 GB moviNANDTM memory device and a 32GB microSD memory card – satisfy mobile handset designers’ requirements for advanced compact high-density memory.

"Samsung’s high-density memory solutions bring the storage capacity levels of computing systems to small, mobile devices," said Dong-Soo Jun, executive vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Electronics.

He added, “The 64GB embedded memory, moviNAND, and the 32GB microSD card each greatly expand the data storage density of mobile devices, meeting custo... .. .

Firefox for Mobile Add-ons and Restarts – Yuck! - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... January 13 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

The Ovi Store for Maemo just arrived for the Nokia N900 and some users already found a way to bypass the payment gateway. An example is that users were able install the extra level for Angry Birds that costs $3 directly from the Nokia N900 for free. I’m assuming Nokia found about the security breach right away because the extra level is no longer listed at the store.

Developer of Angry Birds concerned about the Ovi Store problem

I actually purchased the extra level for Angry Birds while it was still available because I love the game! I discourage piracy and will not share how these users were able to download it for free, but here’s the ongoing discussion from the Maemo community where this issue was brought up.

The Ovi Store is clearly labeled as beta, but I hope this incident does not discourage other developers from creating awesome apps for the Maemo platform. I also hope Nokia sorts this out as soon as possible because I know plenty of Nokia N900 users want to get that extra level for Angry Birds!

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Use coupon code 4$11W9VRS8BT0N to get the Nokia N900 for $469.99 at Dell. Coupon expires after 600 redemptions or January 16th, 2010, whichever comes first. It’s cheaper than Nokia’s retail sites right now ($569) and even Amazon.

The Nokia N900 packs a powerful ARM Cortex-A8 processor, up to 1GB of application memory and graphics accelerator. There’s also a 5 megapixel camera, built-in GPS, hardware keyboard, and more. Take a look at my Nokia N900 review for more details and my thoughts on this device.

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In order to help people, free and widely available maps are a good tool to rescue parties.  Many users of OpenStreetMap have organized a wiki page to manage the work that needs to be done to quickly improve OpenStreetMap for this part of the world. Thankfully, Yahoo has high resolution imagery of the region making it possible to trace the streets.  Note: remember that only Yahoo imagery can be used, as OpenStreetMap has a signed derivative work permission with Yahoo.

If you know how to edit maps, maybe you can land a hand! CrisisCommon also has other resources.

Follow-up: Mikel Maron has before and after images along with more info.

It’s not often the bear growls. But I learned something today that made me angry. It appears that some of the n900s being sold by Vodaphone are carrying a branded, locked and otherwise knobbled version of the wonderful, open, free maemo firmware. I just can’t quite make up my mind whether I’m madder at Vodaphone for doing it or Nokia for letting them. Do you blame the choir-master for castrating the boy soprano “So he can sing for life” or the boy’s father who let him do it (for a price)?

It’s not often the bear growls. But I learned something today that made me angry. It appears that some of the n900s being sold by Vodaphone are carrying a branded, locked and otherwise knobbled version of the wonderful, open, free maemo firmware. I just can’t quite make up my mind whether I’m madder at Vodaphone for doing it or Nokia for letting them. Do you blame the choir-master for castrating the boy soprano “So he can sing for life” or the boy’s father who let him do it (for a price)?

Yes, it's another AAM tutorial video for those who are new to the Nokia N900. This video shows how to customise the N900's four-screen desktop, and also includes an example layout at the end. The video can be viewed below.

So here are the items I brought back from my trek in the wilderness, after I didn’t get eaten.

First, I quickly realised there would be no “cut ‘n paste, roll-my-own” here. COMET is a complex beast, covering a good handful of different techniques, relying heavily on javascript code and AJAX, and accordingly having to negotiate with browsers to work around incompatibilities. The only way someone like me could use that stuff would be through a ready-made package to encapsulate the complexity of setting up the communication channels between clients and servers, on both sides.

Speaking of which, I also discovered that I would have to add another web server to my toolbox. You see, http is a stateless protocol, by design: a client sends a request to a server, the server responds, and both happily forget about each other right away. There is normally no way for a client to stay connected to a server indefinitely, much less for a server to send data to a client that didn’t ask for anything… Pushing the boundaries of the protocol specs that hard requires active participation of the server, to say the least. So COMET servers tend to be specialized and dedicated to their function — feeding their clients. If these also have need of standard, request/response http services, they must ask somewhere else.

So, if a picture is starting to build in your mind, you may see where this is leading: if one client communicates with a “normal” web server (say, web2py), and the result of that interaction is pushed to another client by an unrelated COMET server, where is the missing link?

The answer is that the two http servers must communicate between them through a “message queue”, using a protocol which adds yet another entry to the alphabet soup: STOMP (Streaming Text Orientated Messaging Protocol). A complete COMET package will also include a STOMP server, such as MorbidQ or RabbitMQ… it sort of piles up, doesn’t it ? :-)

Finally, I learnt that the various methods used by COMET servers to stream data to their clients all had their specific pros and cons: that’s why there are several, to choose the best one for a given job. Fortunately for me, those pros and cons mostly seem to revolve around the same couple of issues: scalability and performance with many clients, and/or fine-grained control over the appearance of the content being streamed to a client. As I only intend to have one client at a time, and basically just switch it from one Web site to another, this, at least, was something I wouldn’t have to worry about.

So I set out to summarily evaluate the prominent COMET packages, and rather quickly settled on the one we’ll see next: Orbited.

And hot on the heels of the little Maemo firmware update from the other day, here’s the other shoe dropping: http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/01/14/nokia-n900-software-update-part-2/

I think I hear the sound of happy N900s… not to mention maemo.org community members relieved to see the release accompanied by a Nokia announcement.    Oh, on that note: http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_5/PR1.1.

Fire ‘em up!

Posted in Mentioning Maemo, Ways of Rocking Tagged: firmware, LinkedIn, Maemo, maemo.org, N900, Nokia, PR 1.1

The Nokia N900 received a minor update on Monday to prepare for the major update released just now. The Maemo team is calling the update Maemo 5 PR1.1, but the version number is 2.2009.51-1. Nokia has provided the official changelog and wow it is long!

I was planning on just copying and paste the changelog here, but you’ll be overwhelmed. Read the Maemo 5 PR1.1 changelog.

The update is available through the application manager on the Nokia N900, so go check if it’s available for you. I’ll report back my thoughts after spending some time with the new firmware.

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• Nokia N900 Firmware Update PR1.1 Sent to Select Few – Still No Portrait Browser
• Meego Now Available For Nokia N900 But End Users Should Stay Away

Its raining firmware updates from Nokia once again . The N900 which got a minor firmware update(version 44.1) few days back is now getting a HUGE firmware update which is around 89.5 MB. This update bears the version number 51.1 and is also known as a PR 1.1 update. Check out the screenshots for the details. If you don’t get a prompt about the update. Head over to the Application manager and click on the updates icon.

You will see a Maemo5 item in the list of updates available. This is all over the air (OTA) with no need for a PC or NSU.  But to get this update you must have the version 44.1 firmware installed on your phone.

We recommend you to take a backup before installing the update. Also make sure you have sufficient amount of charge left or connect the phone to a charger.

Since the update is huge is size even OTA , use a Wi-Fi connection .

We will post the Changelog soon.

Similar Posts:

• Nokia N900 Firmware Updated To Version 3.2010.02-8
• Nokia N86 gets bumped to v21.006 Firmware
• The Updates Continue to Roll from Nokia: E63 AND 5800XM get new firmware and Nokia Maps Updater goes to V1.08
• New Firmware Update v31 out for Nokia N85
• Nokia E72 gets a firmware update to v22.007

The Nokia N900 just got a firmware update to version 55.1 or PR1.1. The changelog for the update has been posted on  the Maemo Wiki and we are still counting the changes this update brings.

You, like I, may have noticed that PR 1.1 is out as of this morning!

It is a big update and if you get a complaint of too little space, you may need to uninstall some applications. If you run into issues, please post a comment here, ask for help on talk.maemo.org thread or the #maemo IRC channel on freenode.net.

You can find the proper change log in the wiki. The changelog includes a full list of fixed bugs that the community reported against the initial product release. A big thank you to everyone who opened a bug!

The flashable images will be available in the usual location, tablets-dev during today. So you can also flash your device, if the SSU update for some reason fails.

The SDK will also be updated today. If you don’t have the SDK and want to start coding, get it here. For MADDE users, we are looking at possibly updating the MADDE tech preview to PR 1.1 also.

Enjoy the new release!

P.S. it seems that talk.maemo.org got overrun by traffic. Need to get that back on-line again.

After the minor software update that brought Ovi store and app manager face lift earlier this week Nokia has released the first major update for its flagship Smartphone that brings wide range of improvements , dozens of minor bug fixes and further optimizes functionality and stability of the phone across many applications.

Maemo 5 PR1.1 is being released on January 14, 2010. Starting in Finland at 7am local time and following a staggering process country by country through the different time zones.

This update is currently only available over the air by users with the PR1.0.1 already installed. Images for manula flashing will be available later today as well so in case you can’t get updat... .. .

I noticed a bug report about portrait mode on the Nokia N900’s web browser. Wait… there’s portrait view now? It seems this hidden feature can be enabled on the web browser by pressing Ctrl-Shift-o. This works on the latest Nokia N900 firmware 2.2009.51-1 and seems to be an undocumented feature. I made a video to show you how it looks.

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

Pressing the three buttons toggle it on and off, maintaining the setting even after rebooting the Nokia N900. The screen automatically rotates when the keyboard is closed and the device is held upright. It goes back to landscape view if keyboard is slid open. The on-screen keyboard also appears in landscape view only.

Despite some of the drawbacks I mentioned above, it’s cool that Nokia left this “hidden feature” to be found by its users. I believe this option was hidden because it is simply not finished yet.

I actually prefer to use browser in landscape view, but some websites appear better in portrait mode. For example, my favorite Nokia N900 Twitter web app, Hahlo.com, looks great in that view.

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

• App Video: Raemote for Nokia N900, an Apple Remote Widget
• Video: How Maemo Looks on HTC HD2’s 4.3in Screen
• Video How to: Use Bookmarklets on the Nokia N900’s Browser
• Video: Google Maps Mobile on Nokia N900 Web Browser

The N900's minor firmware update earlier this week (PR1.0.1) was to prepare for a larger update, and that larger update (PR1.1) is now being rolled out country-by-country. You can find the full technical details on the maemo.org wiki. There have been quite a number of bug fixes and feature improvements, including support for Microsoft Exchange 2003. The new firmware version should become available worldwide over the next couple of days, so if you can't see it yet try again tomorrow.

A very short but useful hint which not everyone knows: you can access your contacts directly from the N900 desktop by just typing them on the keyboard. You don't even need to have the Contacts app open, it will open automatically at the correct section when you start typing. See the video embedded below for a demonstration.

Due to popular demand, the Headphone Daemon is now available for Fremantle and the N900, too. A package is in Extras-Devel and should be available for QA testing in Extras-Testing soon. There is also a discussion thread on t.m.o and the packages page for QA.

In other news, I'll be giving a talk about Maemo.org and Maemo development at the Metalab Vienna on the 22nd of January. This is in preparation of the Hackathon that's happening on the weekend after the talk (a good opportunity to hack on CLI Sharing, maybe..).

In general, it seems like the N900 seems to get up to speed here in Austria now: The Nokia App Forum Alps is organizing a competition for mobile applications, so hopefully we see some new apps coming out of this. And if you happen to be around Hagenberg in early March, do join the Mobile Developers Conference.

A new gPodder version will be out "very soon now" - just one bug and one feature (my.gpodder.org API) left to do. I hope I'll be able to do it this weekend, so you can all enjoy the #maebar UI updates and new features such as Flickr support.

A few weeks ago, I got a cool Christmas present from work. It's pretty sweet, and I've been writing some apps for it. I'll try and blog about them here.

A while ago, I wrote some a number of account plugins for Maemo 5, so that other Telepathy connection managers could be used and well-integrated into the N900's Contacts and Conversations User interface. This enables the following extra protocols:

• AIM
• GaduGadu
• Groupwise
• ICQ
• IRC (currently only supports 1-to-1 private messages)
• MSN (soon to gain calling support)
• QQ
• link-local XMPP
• Sametime
• Yahoo

There are still a few problems which I'll try to iron out soon enough but they appear to be working pretty well. The best thing about it is clearly the integration with the rest of the phone, as demonstrated by Marco in the screenshot above.

The PR1.1 update, which is due today, also opens the door for enabling other protocols dynamically by providing libpurple plugins. I will be adding Facebook Chat support soon, and someone else has made a package for Twitter.

This is in extras-testing for you all to download and try out. You can find all the packages in the "Network" category of the Application manager. The Extra protocol plugins for Conversations and Contacts metapackage (telepathy-extras, in reality) pulls in all the cool account plugins and connection managers of the time. File bugs from the maemo.org package link.

This is slightly technical, but PR1.1 included a small but interesting patch to /sbin/preinit (part of getbootstate). /sbin/preinit is the first thing that gets run on Maemo5 for N900. Some history first: In the past we've always had to patch initfs or /sbin/preinit in order to get any sort of bootmenu on 770/N8x0(W)/N900. This has changed with PR1.1 - the patches are now part of Maemo5.0!

Besides some patches to aid MMC booting, what is added is few very important lines:

SLIDE_STATE=`cat /sys/devices/platform/gpio-switch/state`
if [ x"$SLIDE_STATE = "xopen" ]; then
echo_g "slide open, attempting to use bootmenu"
[ -f /bootmenu.sh ] && . /bootmenu.sh
fi

What does this mean? This means, that when you have the keyboard slid out at power on, it will look for /bootmenu.sh and try to include it in the boot process. If it doesn't exist, it goes on with business as usual.

This means, you can add have fanoush's bootmenu or your own rescue menu, or whatever could be interesting to have this early in the process.

Thanks to fanoush for his bootmenu and to Peter De Schrijver from Nokia for applying my patches.

A request to DNS management has been sent to start pointing maemo.org to the new infrastructure tomorrow at 8:00 UTC and it was acknowledged and scheduled.

After the change there is about a 6-24 hour period in which the DNS change propagates all over the world.

To do things in a sensible way and to minimise downtime, the old site will go to read only (off-line for garage) mode tomorrow morning. Then the last changes are synced over to the new site and the new site will then be opened to public.

When you see the new site naturally depends on the DNS propagation speed, but 3-12 hours seems to be normal based on the smaller moves done earlier.

Things you will experience are:

• Read only on the site before and during the move
• Garage will show a ‘we are moving page’
• No wiki editing during the move
• No git and svn work during the move

Things you might experience are:

• Some data loss is possible, but we’ll try to avoid it
• The site will look strange for a while as the changes take place and the static content is pointing wrong for a while

Things you should not have problems with:

• talk.maemo.org Talk will be open to public all the time, it is on separate hardware and not moving
• bugs.maemo.org Bugs moved last week, it’s there waiting for the other services
• Mailing lists moved to the new hardware some weeks back

After the DNS change propagates the services will start appearing normally again, and naturally there will be notices posted.

When everything is done, please be patient with the service, and open bugs on anything that looks odd or doesn’t work. Raising issues on this post, the community mailing list and on talk will also help. But bugs are a sure way to make an issue known (also remember that more bugs is more work for Andre, so please check for duplicates before opening).

And then a huge thanks to the people who have been hard at work throughout the move! Ferenc and Niels have done the bulk of the work. Ed, Jeremiah, Eero and Bergie pitched in. Much appreciated everyone! Naturally not forgetting the people at the new ISP, it was a crash course into the infra needs of maemo.org for them

Recently, I've been working on a file transfer app for the N900. It's called monorail and I uploaded it to extras-devel last night, so you can try it out right now.

I implemented an OssoABookContactView with support for filtering on Contact Capabilities (or a draft of it, at least) as old-style caps aren't great. This gives a nice list of address book contacts who have at least one account that should support receiving file transfers. It would be nice if these extra caps could go into the address book which is where they belong, but it won't.

If someone would find this widget useful, I'll clean up the code and maybe throw it in its own library.

Choose one of the accounts which support file transfer.

I also started to implement a sharing plugin, but it turns out it's poorly documented and appears to be impossible to do anything useful for my use-case, like popping up a dialog when the user taps "Share". The example isn't very exemplary, but does contain some amusing code.

This sharing plugin is only half-written and impossible to debug. If anyone has any pointers on writing these plugins, I would appreciate them.

It's a shame that although Hildon widgets can look really good on the device, it can often take some fiddling to make them look consistent with the rest of the UI. Additionally, oddities in some widgets can leave you baffled, or amused.

The most annoying thing I have come across regarding this app is just how little I can get it integrated. The file manager is all hard-coded so there's no way to add a Send to Contact menu item, and no buttons can be added to the libsharing dialog (which appears when the user shares a photo) which is annoying as it looks like it's missing this feature.

Oh, and Telepathy is pretty sweet.

The long-awaited firmware is now available for the Nokia N900 after a smaller preview one was released yesterday. This new firmware, v2.2009.51-1 is now available through the device’s onboard update process, and brings a massive changelog of updates, both large and small.

The biggest things you’ll notice in this new update, though, are support for portrait-mode web browsing and updated support for Microsoft Exchange 2003. The portrait web-browsing is not enabled by default – you’ll need to press Ctrl + Shift + O in the browser to activate it, but aside from that, it seems to work well. Text is properly reformatted to fit the taller display orientation and overall it’s quite nice. Unfortunately, text input hasn’t caught up, so you’ll still need to rotate back to landscape and use both hands to enter any information in a web form. This is going to get really old, really fast, so hopefully Nokia is working on a portrait-mode QWERTY keyboard option soon.

The new Exchange support should make syncing with various accounts a much smoother process, and the email client has also been updated to hopefully provide a smoother experience for users who have overly large inboxes. Supposedly, Ovi Maps was also updated significantly, though I haven’t had a chance to check that out just yet. You can view the full changelog here.

If you get an error that you don’t have enough space, try deactivating a catalog or two, and then trying again – this worked for me.

Related Posts

• How To Update Your N900’s Firmware
• Sending The Nokia N900 Home
• New Twitter Plugin Integrates With The N900 Phonebook
• Witter Brings More Twitter Features To Maemo 5
• The Nokia N900 Is Not A Phone

So far my N900 seems to be a lot zippier with the latest firmware and I have heard reports that battery life should also be improved significantly so will keep an eye on this too. I just read a great tip from Mark over at The Nokia Blog where you can actually switch to portrait mode in the default web browser with a bit of finger gymnastics. Mark created a video to show how this works. You will need the latest firmware to enable this capability.

I didn’t watch the video at first and just read that you need to press Ctrl-Shift-O to enable portrait mode and after doing this over and over I saw now switch at all. I then watched the video and discovered you enter this three-finger press and then close the keyboard to see the browser in portrait mode. You can then open and close the keyboard to toggle back and forth. To turn off this functionality you can do the three-finger toggle again. To me, this is actually a very slick default to have since I always browse with the keyboard open in landscape anyways. Google Reader’s iPhone formatted page looks and works great in portrait mode and is something I use all the time. FYI, text input fields do NOT appear to work in portrait mode so this orientation is just a good way for single hand browsing where you can scroll with your thumb and is not for power surfing.

Thanks to Dave Neary I was reminded this morning of the upcoming FOSDEM 2010 conference in Brussels, Belgium, and brought up to date more-or-less on Maemo participation.

For those unfamiliar, FOSDEM stands for “Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting” and is an event held annually in Brussells.  The website description is:

FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community for the community. The goal is to provide Free Software and Open Source developers and communities a place to meet to:

• get in touch with other developers and projects;
• be informed about the latest developments in the Free Software and Open Source world;
• attend interesting talks and presentations held in large conference rooms by Free Software and Open Source project leaders and committers on various topics; and
• to promote the development and the benefits of Free Software and Open Source solutions.

Participation and attendance is totally free, though the organization gratefully accepts donationals and sponsorships.

Maemo had respectable representation in 2009 and hopefully this year is no different.  Note, however, that most of those listed on the current Maemo wiki are tentative for FOSDEM 2010– if you know for sure you’re going, now is the time to update your status!  I’m listed as volunteering but that was a shot in the dark; hopefully though we’ll have some sort of community council representation, possibly our chairman Valerio.

The event is scheduled for the 6th and 7th of February this year.  Details provided by Dave are:

Here’s the latest from FOSDEM co-ordination:

* Stand – unfortunately, we missed the November deadline for requesting a stand, so there will be no Maemo stand in FOSDEM this year. The list of stands is here: http://www.fosdem.org/2010/stands

* Presentations: There will be a Maemo presence in at least 3 different
devrooms this year:
* Mobile & Embedded
* GNOME
* Crossdistro

The final schedules have not yet been published.

Also of interest to Maemo participants, no doubt, will be Patrick Ohly’s presentation of SyncEvolution in the lightning talks at 18:00 on Saturday.

As more Maemo related content gets schedules I’ll keep you posted.

I would also like to propose that we have a Maemo get-together on Saturday night in Brussels. Anyone interested?

Hopefully we get enough of the right people going, and this turns out to be a successful engagement for Maemo and FOSDEM alike.  I’ll post again when I have more details.

Enjoy the event guys!  Keep us updated.

Posted in Mentioning Maemo, The Write Stuff Tagged: 2010, FOSDEM, LinkedIn, Maemo, open source

Firefox for Mobile Mobile Add-on Categories - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2010... January 14 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Rotating the dishes - http://stechz.com/2010... January 14 from Benjamin Stover - Comment - Like

Once I had this general understanding of how things stood, which took a good while, choosing a COMET server package was no big deal.

For the N8x0 the way to create flashable rootfs's - that is, rootfs's usable in flasher-3.5 -r rootfs.jffs2 -f -R was through these two steps:

mkfs.jffs2 -d $ROOTFS_DIRECTORY -l -n -e 128KiB
-o rootfs.jffs2.raw
sumtool -l -n -e 128KiB -o rootfs.jffs2 -i rootfs.jffs2.raw

Now that the N900 uses ubifs for rootfs instead, how do you do create a flashable rootfs?

You need to make a file, ubinize.cfg:

[ubifs]
mode="ubi"
image="/full/path/to/base.ubi.img"
vol_id="0"
vol_size="200MiB"
vol_type="dynamic"
vol_name="rootfs"
vol_alignment="1"
vol_flags="autoresize"

Then, you run these two commands - you have to grab mtd-utils - Ubuntu Karmic has mtd-utils with ubifs support.

mkfs.ubifs -m 2048 -e 129024 -c 2047 -R 4MiB -r $ROOTFS_DIRECTORY -v /full/path/to/base.ubi.img
ubinize -o /full/path/to/ubi.img ubinize.cfg -m 2048 -p 128KiB -s 512

You can now run flasher-3.5 -r ubi.img -f -R.

What can this information be used for?

* Generate a full snapshot of your NAND rootfs and restore it with flasher after trying out something stupid that failed.

* Flash alternative OS'es onto your N900 NAND.

* Possibilities in rescue menu as in my previous post about bootmenu.sh hook - dump my rootfs to SD and I'll fix it on my PC and reflash it back to my N900.

When we started Maemo 5 we said: let's make the world's best pocketable computer, that is also a good phone! That is exactly what we've managed to do. And this is my vision of the future, too.

My impression is that if you read reviews and blogs, all of those that start with "Internet", "Computer", "Multimedia", "Networking" or any other such terms love N900. They think it's the best device out there. Those, who think it primarily just as a phone have more concerns.

Just as we planned! The best browser ever, the best conversation view, the best social network integration, very good camera & imaging capabilities, good multimedia support --- and a crips and well working mobile phone. And -- as a true computer- open and upgradeable by end users:

• Two firmware updates within a week. Over the air. Some glitches, mostly going well!
• Application store with good stuff in it
• MMS implementation coming in as an open source project (Frals, cool!!!).
• In addition to basic applications, a lot of other very integrated features, such as the Firefox browser, MSN and other IM plugins, codecs etc available as downloadables. Demonstrates the power of a true open Linux computer!
• + many so interesting apps ... hundreds already ....

Not bad, eh?

It's Friday afternoon and I'm still in a phone conference, as you can see in the picture below. I'm in a phone conf (on mute, of course) and on my Facebook at the same time -- and a card game going on ..... this late in Friday, I felt that I needed to post and brag a bit about it ;-)

Yesterday, Nokia announced the latest update to the Nokia N900. This is big update, hundreds of modules to be updated and megabytes of data. However, the update also moves some data out of the small root file system to the much larger regular file system.

Open Source means that you never have to wait for any company to release software in a rigid fashion. We are talking about the Nokia N900 and the Maemo platform.

There is no Google Maps for Maemo so far and we are doubtful if Google will even make one as they are concentrating on Android.  So here is a Browser based Google maps application for Maemo which has come from the Maemo Community. Its got almost everything even Google Latitude

Its basically the mobile version of Google Maps on Steroids.

Its got Directions, Layers , Latitude , MyLocation using GPS , Search and even traffic information

Do you notice the little red and yellow areas in the map below apart from the abundance of green ?

The steps which will get you Google Maps on the N900 with GPS

Grab maemo-geolocation v1.1.3-1 by Oleg Romashin which is a MicroB GeoLocation provider extension means your phone will get your GPS location within the browser using the phone’s GPS receiver

Visit http://www.google.com/maps/m on your N900 to use an Almost perfect google maps on your N900

Yodude from HoFo took this to the next level by adding Zoom Controls using some html

Grab this code which contains a pair of html files and you will see the + – zoom controls on the right

This is not a perfect solution as there are some limitations.  The maps are fixed and don’t expand to other areas if you drag on the screen like on other platforms.

This is a limitation of the mobile version of Google Maps . Hope that someone finds a workaround to get the desktop version of Google Maps to work fine this extension as its not working fine now.

A Native app would be cool but for now something is better than nothing.

via HoFo

Similar Posts:

• Google Maps v3.0 released.
• Apple ditching Google Maps on the iPhone for own Mapping solution ?
• Google Navigation will come to iPhone, but only if Apple approves
• Google Maps 4.0 gets released. Adds Support for Google Buzz
• Google Adds Turn by Turn Navigation. Releases Maps Navigation for Android 2.0

The Nokia N900 has everything going for it. Killer hardware that makes mouths drop, a great OS enabling you to be as connected as possible while out and about, all in a package that fits in your pocket.

This week, we can also add another feather in the cap, so to speak - the opening of the N900 OVI store. This has brought the N900 into the spotlight as a platform for commercial developers. The maemo.org community is sure to benefit from this as the platform finally has the 'public' cachet it deserves. We've been fortunate to have a large community developer-base, and this is a welcome addition to that existing talent. Expect fun games, eye popping whiz-bang gizmos, and who knows what else. I've already entertained myself with a few games like Airport and Discs. Meanwhile, it is fun to show off gizmos such as Anglemeter and Level. I received the comment last night that "no phone should have a protractor in it!", after showing off the Anglemeter application to a friend.

Maemo's future is looking great! Hopefully, in short time, the OVI store will be chock full of apps for our Maemo-powered handhelds. Whatever it is we desire, I certainly hope there will be an app - no, a .deb for that.

Well, you can’t go much further out than Pluto without leaving the neighbourhood altogether, so it’s back to Earth now…

We will conclude Season Two with a quick but much-needed reality check:

Does the system work ? Yes. Surprisingly well, one might say, for something that should not be possible by design.

Is it useful ? Definitely. Once you see it in action it tends to give you ideas for other uses: displaying digital images; a family agenda; sending short messages or reminders from outside to those at home, and so on. There is much potential in having a full-blown web app server on the remote-command side; using it just to display a menu of icons is admittedly trivial, but you can stray from that initial approach for more elaborate actions. Like HTML-scraping the target and displaying a custom version on the remote instead of the original page; forms for data entry; remote controlling a gallery; automatically displaying sites depending on the weekday and hour, cron-like. And certainly a lot more I just didn’t think of.

Fine, but did it solve my original problem ? Not really, because in the meantime an N900 joined the family, so I still have too many devices :-)

After this rather high-level view of the what and why, I plan (if there’s interest…) to follow up with a more technical, hands-on Season Three about the how: the innards of Hyakutake as an application, its various bits ‘n pieces, their installation, configuration, and even — gasp — actual code. And screenshots :-)

Any takers  ?

The Nokia N900 and Linux-based Maemo software platform attract a growing number of developers and brands signing on to create innovative applications that enrich the device experience.

Fusing PC power, the internet, and the mobile phone together with an intuitive user interface, Maemo and the Nokia N900 prove an attractive avenue for creative collaboration and distribution. The applications allow users to customize and personalize the device further to meet their needs.

The Associated Press announced that AP Mobile, the award-winning multimedia news portal that provides anytime access to international, national and local news, is availabl... .. .

Qik, the leading live mobile video streaming platform, expands their relationship with Nokia in developing a Qik application optimized for the Nokia N900 and Maemo software. Utilizing a new user interface, streaming live video from a mobile device is made easy with on-screen features including adding a title or adjusting the privacy settings.

With a high speed data connectivity over 3G or WiFi, a 5MP camera, dual LED flash and Carl Zeiss Optics, taking videos and streaming them with Qik has never been simpler than with the N900.

Qik lets anyone easily stream live video from their handset, sharing their moments in real-time with selected friends and family or the entire world. More than three dozen Nokia handsets are Qik-com... .. .

This is the post I wish existed when I was looking for how to do this simple thing. I spent hours reading around trying to figure out how to show my app is busy, but to no avail.

Continuing the ping pong legal battle between Apple and Nokia over patents and IP, Apple have filed with the International Trade Commission asking for a US import ban on Nokia products... mirroring the complaint Nokia made to ITC about Apple. While escalating quickly, this progression of claim and counter-claim is to be expected as both companies legal departments engage in brinkmanship before negotiation.

The N900's built in media player has a slightly eccentric way of handling playlists, but it is fairly easy once you get used to it. We've done a brief video to show you how it works, you can watch it embedded below.

I started using Palm devices back in 1997 with the Pilot 1000 and then spent several years moving through a full lineup of Palm devices. I still have a few Palm devices, including the Centro and Treo Pro. I purchased a Palm Pre on the day they were released last year, but had to return it because I just did not have a great Sprint signal and found the hardware to be a bit weak with a wobbly display. I found the operating system to be fantastic while app support was weak at that time. I asked several questions in the PreCentral.net forums and received some excellent responses from the readers there. With the Pre coming soon to Verizon Wireless with a MiFi capability I am going to take a serious look at the devices again because I have a special place in my heart for the Palm name. This week here on Nokia Experts I am taking a look at two Palm webOS device (the Pre and Pixi), the operating system, some capabilities & functionality, a quick comparison to S60 and Maemo, and some closing thoughts.

Hardware: Palm Pre and Palm Pixi

I had a Pre for 11 days and have to admit I miss it now and want to add it to my smartphone collection again. I loved that there was a hardware keyboard with a beautiful touch screen, along with a user interface that blows away what the iPhone provides. The first time I had a chance to see the Pixi was when Dieter brought one to the Smartphone Round Robin event. I was blown away by the miniscule size of the device, while still having a functional keyboard and display. I have a few thoughts on each device below, but recommend you visit the incredible reviews of both of these over on PreCentral.net. Dieter’s Palm Pre review is one of the BEST on the Internet and even includes 12 videos, found in the sidebar. The Palm Pixi review is also one of the few you will even find on the Internet and covers all aspects of this ultra-portable device.

If you have installed the new firmware update for Nokia N900, you have probably notice the new OVI Store Icon as we write about it on the early post although it was still useless. However, last Monday the story has changed and the OVI Store has opened for Nokia N900 and now presents Maemo platform support. As the Ovi Store for this device is under Beta Version, the application catalog is only available via the Nokia’s N900 web browser. If you have one in your hands, you could access to it ...

Hi Everyone,

there is less than two weeks left for this year’s LinuxTag Call For Papers.
The event takes place in Berlin, Germany during early summer.

The program committee hopes to fill some of the slots in the Mobile & Embedded
track with Maemo related talks. So feel free to submit a talk!

http://www.linuxtag.org/2010/en/program/call-for-papers.html

Software developer Joikusoft has announced, via their Facebook page, that 'JoikuSpot for Maemo OS' will be published soon. The software, which is already available for Nokia's Symbian devices, turns your N900 into a WiFi hotspot. Other devices, such as a laptops, connect to the N900 over WiFi, with the connection to the Internet provided the N900's cellular (3G) connection.

Proporta have been touting their Gadget Bag for a while now and I decided it was high time to give this accessory the ultimate test - give it to road warrior Ewan to fill/destroy. Here's his write-up, highlighting just how much stuff can be packed into the bag but also bemoaning the lack of internal loops and ties to stop your bits from rattling around. It's a positive review overall though and you can't argue with the price.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-01-11 through 2010-01-17

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-01-11 through 2010-01-17

Firefox for Mobile Creating a robust kinetic animation - http://stechz.com/2010... January 17 from Benjamin Stover - Comment - Like

After having received a firmware update weeks ago (read about it on our related post by clicking here) which it only fixed bugs problem, the Nokia N900 have finally received a new firmware update with major improvements. Under the code name 2.2009.51.1 or as we head up PR1.1, the update brings wide range of improvements as new features, bug fixes too and optimizes functionality and stability of the phone across many applications. As it’s described on the Nokia Conversations Blog: “First up is support for the Swiss keymat variant with hardware ...

For those who are interested in knowing how steep is your N900, or the
object that supports it. Meet the 4×4 inclinometer.

I developed it to use in my car, hence the name 4×4 inclinometer. Using this
application I can know the slope of the obstacles or the ground below my
car.

According to the manual of the car, it can be in an angle of heel of 45 degrees
with no problem, something higher than this is at my own risk. When I read
this information, just imagined the software for the N900:)

The current version depends on Qt 4.6 with the animation framework. The
animation is used to rotate the images of the car, smoothing the movement. I
am not an expert in gimp, so forgive me for the images poorly done. Next
version I will put a simple support for themes.

The intallations files are already in extras-devel, so you just need to
apt-get it.
And the sources are available at:

http://git.zimmerle.org/?p=inclinometer.git;a=summary

The car image and the application background are Trademark of Troller Veiculos
Especias S/A, http://www.troller.com.br

This morning my calendar told me there’s a new year available, so I created some quick & dirty statistics for my favorite bug databases: maemo.org Bugzilla 2009 stats GNOME Bugzilla 2009 stats

The last two weeks were a bit… stressful. First of all some Nokia-internal changes with regard to Error Management, then maemo.org Bugzilla moving to a new server. Unexpected side effect was data loss. Spent part of last Monday restoring what I still had in my bugmail. Still it leads to confusion and mistrust (“Why was [...]

My Nokia N900 uses Maemo5 in latest version: 2009.51.1 which still have many bugs open. Some (like 6541) were fixed already but users have to wait for next firmware drop from nokia Maemo team to get them. Of course date of such “gift” is unknown (it can even never happen) so how to solve problem now?

I spent some time digging in Modest git tree to gather changes which will fix #6541 bug. Result works fine on my device, patch is quite small (less then 2KB) but system components updates are not allowed to be pushed into Extras repositories on maemo.org website.

So how to share such useful update? I think that will create repository for such system updates. Maybe will add some other packages there (for sure my version of “mp-fremantle-generic-pr” will be present so updates will be installable without breaking firmware upgrades).

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz System updates repository for Maemo5? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. System updates repository online
2. Qt under Maemo is pain to develop with
3. Are Maemo5 developer tools obsolete?

Took me less time that I thought — Maemo5 updates repository is on-line.

How to use it? Instruction in few simple steps:

• Fetch GnuPG key which I used to sign repository.
• Add it to APT on Nokia N900: “apt-key add apt-key.asc“
• Add my repository to APT sources by storing following line in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/system-updates.list file:

 deb http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/download/maemo/repos/system-updates/2009.51/ ./
 

• Run “apt-get update” or use Hildon Application Manager (H-A-M) refresh function.
• Run “apt-get upgrade” or check did H-A-M listed some upgrades and tell him to install them.

So far my repository contains Modest with fix for bug #6541 and “Maemo 5″ metapackage altered to allow system updates to be installed. Sources of all packages are provided of course.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz System updates repository online was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. System updates repository for Maemo5?
2. Polish locale for OS2008
3. Localizing Maemo

For the last few weeks has Debarshi Ray contributed to Tracker’s Nautilus plugin and worked on Solang, a photo manager that will start using Tracker’s SPARQL capability to get a language to query for metadata about the photos and the photos themselves.

Debarshi explains it all very well himself on his own blog.

We’ll probably do a lightening demo during our Tracker presentation at FOSDEM about how Solang did this integration. We’re also planning to demo the code of a few other applications that are working on integrating with Tracker’s store.

Somebody should port Solang to the next version of Maemo!

I've been discussing this issue with some people before as hypothetical case, but now it seems that we run into it: Compiling and application against the PR1.1 SDK creates packages which can not be installed on earlier firmware releases.

In this case we have have a libosso version which is higher than the one in previous releases. As this dependency gets automatically added when compiling in the PR1.1 SDK this poses a problem.

The autobuilder uses the repository.maemo.org repository, so it automatically uses newer packages when they are available.

For Extras this means that install of an application which is compiled against the new SDK fails without any description we can expect an end-user to understand. This is something which should be prevented.

How can we work around this problem:

1: Only compile against the original SDK.

This prevents new features from ever be available to developers, but should work until there is real API/ABI breakage in a new firmware.

2: Use version specific repositories

This needs Application Manager support as we need to fetch from a separate repository every time. Also requires us to build against every sdk version known to man.

3: Depend on >= mp-fremantle-generic-pr | maemo-version

We would need a hack in the autobuilder to add depends to pr and maemo version. This way a user needs to upgrade to at least the required firmware image. I think this will make it easier for an end-user to understand what is happening.

We could, with help of the AM team, even detect in the AM that a firmware upgrade is required and give a the end user a nice warning/description.

Currently the AM doesn't have any means to detect which firmware version a package requires. Option 3 solve that issue at the same time.

If you have an alternative solution on how to go about fixing this
issue, then please let me know.

Discussions on the maemo-developers list or talk.

2G/3G Mode Selection Applet works exactly as it sounds. Installing this applet adds 3 buttons to the Nokia N900’s status menu that lets the user change between 2G only, 3G only, or Dual (3G priority) connection. This is a really quick way to change modes without going through other settings. I made a video to show you how it looks.

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

This is great for those who want to save battery by staying on 2G only connection, or prevent the phone from looking for an unsupported 3G connection. I personally keep the option on 3G only, because I don’t want my device to even bother looking for a 2G connection. This applet is developed by Faheem Pervez, the same person responsible for the awesome applet, Simple Brightness.

2G/3G Mode Selection Applet was available in Extras-Testing at the time of publishing this post, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it makes it to Maemo Extras by the time you read this. Confused? Read the guide to Maemo Extras first.

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Firefox for Mobile How to Install Nightly Builds on Your Maemo Device - http://ahdesai.wordpress.com/2010... January 18 from ahdesai » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Lately I have been bouncing between the Nokia N900 and Google Nexus One. The Nexus One is one of the slickest Google Android devices available and the application support is outstanding. After using it now for almost two weeks I am indeed finding that I am experiencing the 3G/EDGE poor connectivity issues where the device jumps between these two wireless data connections and at times even drops the connection all together. The Nokia N900 on the other hand has outstanding 3G connectivity and is a very solid performer. There are a few applications I want to see on the N900 and as I have talked about before Twitter is important to me. Back in December, I found out about Witter and while it is much more functional than Mauku, there were some parts of the application that were lacking in user interface elements. BTW, Witter has been developed by Daniel Would as a project to see what he could do with Maemo.

The power of the N900 continues to amaze me again and again. I’ve been a big fan of the gstreamer media framework since shortly after I got my N900 at the Amsterdam Summit, but the possibilites that this brings to Maemo are really extraordinary compared to every other handset. Here is the latest example:

The last few evenings, I spent putting together a very simple (one REC button!) recording widget called “recaller”. Now, it is available for test and comment in extras-devel (CAUTION – this is the repository for possibly highly unstable software). From the description:
A simple widget to record the current phone conversation (AAC, 1 MB/min). Please be aware of local laws guiding the recording of telephone conversations!

• Can also be used as a normal voice recorder.
• Press ‘REC’ to start recording, make your call or record anything else using the in-built mic, press ‘REC’ again to stop.
• Recordings are saved to MyDocs and can be played back through e.g. the File Manager.

Roadmap/ToDo (might get done someday):

• Make it look better
• Allow recording of bluetooth conversations
• Add option to choose saving location
• Add beeping option

Wishlist (no idea if possible or interest in doing it)

• Autostart
• Include contact info / phone number in filename

Once you have a good environment and package setup in place, making new Maemo widgets becomes easy :-) In the last 10 days, I’ve released a IR remote widget for the Nikon DSLR (“shutter”), a sleep timer for the Media Player (“sleeper”), and now “recaller”.

Time to polish or churn out even more? Ideas abound :-)

PS: If this is your first python-homewidget, you need to reboot before it will show up on your desktop. Sorry, not my mistake, but a bug in a library I’m using.

As of Mer 0.17testing10 we have an image that is fairly easy to try out on Nokia N900. This guide is for advanced users and there is NO WARRANTY. It might turn your N900 back into the crazy guy from this video or chew out your microSD, so be careful.

You will need:
* A microSD
* A SD/microSD card reader for your PC
* A Linux installation on your PC.
* A copy of a Mer rootfs for N900 (0.17testing10)
* A copy of the files in your /lib/firmware from your N900. This includes WiFi and Bluetooth firmware.
* PR1.0, PR1.0.1 or PR1.1 on your N900
* That you have installed fanoush's bootmenu (dpkg -i it and run 'Install bootmenu' application icon)

Instructions (must all be done as root):
* Partition your microSD to first partition being Linux and format it as ext3 using mkfs.ext3.
* Mount the ext3 partition on your PC, let's say in /mnt/mer.
* Make sure using 'mount' that your ext3 partition is -not- mounted 'nosuid' or 'nodev'
* cd /mnt/mer
* tar --numeric-owner -pzxf /full/path/to/mer-armel-n900-rootfs-v0.17testing10.tar.gz
* cd lib/firmware
* cp in the files from /lib/firmware from your N900
* umount /mnt/mer
* Make a file "mer.item" in /etc/bootmenu.d on your N900, containing:

ITEM_NAME="Mer (external SD, partition 1)"
ITEM_ID="mer"
ITEM_DEVICE="${EXT_CARD}p1"
ITEM_MODULES="mbcache jbd ext3"
ITEM_FSTYPE="ext3"
ITEM_FSOPTIONS="noatime,ro"

* Reboot your device, have the keyboard slid out. A bootmenu will appear where you can select Mer with the cursor keys.
* Mer booting.. wait for touchscreen calibration step
* And then you can run through the first boot wizard
* And a non-accelerated Mer desktop appears.

What works:
* WiFi
* Touchscreen
* Charging
* Watchdog handling

Of closed source blobs used in Mer (for N900):
* DSME (open source) with libcal (closed source) running from the Maemo5.0 rootfs
* BME running from the Maemo5.0 rootfs
* Firmware files for WiFi and Bluetooth chip amongst others.

Either way, I hope you enjoy playing with an alternative OS on your N900. Feel free to report bugs at http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Releases/0.17 and talk to us on #mer on irc.freenode.net if you'd like to contribute to Mer.

To shut down Mer, either sudo reboot or pop the battery.

Today, Nokia released the first public version of the office document viewer for the Nokia N900 phone. It was uploaded to the Maemo repositories. This version supports text files, spreadsheets and presentations in OpenDocument format (ODF) and Microsoft Office formats. The viewer requires the latest update (PR1.1) to the N900 software. You can install 'Office Viewer' by adding the maemo-devel repository to your N900 catalogues:

Catalog name:

Maemo Extras-devel

Web address:

http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel

Distribution:

fremantle

Components:

free

Then the application 'freoffice' will be available in the category 'Office'. The install is 9 megabytes.

With the viewer, you can open multiple files at once, open office documents from your e-mail, search in office files and copy and paste from your documents. A very nice feature is the ability to give presentations with the phone. Here are some screen shots of the viewer running on the N900.

The code for this viewer is available in the KOffice repository. New releases of the viewer will be uploaded to the repository as KOffice progresses towards version 2.2.

The viewer has a simple user interface and responds quickly to user input such as page changing and scrolling.

Today, Nokia released the first public version of the office document viewer for the Nokia N900 phone. It was uploaded to the Maemo repositories. This version supports text files, spreadsheets and presentations in OpenDocument format (ODF) and Microsoft Office formats. The viewer requires the latest update (PR1.1) to the N900 software. You can install 'Office Viewer' by adding the maemo-devel repository to your N900 catalogues:

Catalog name:

Maemo Extras-devel

Web address:

http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel

Distribution:

fremantle

Components:

free

Then the application 'freoffice' will be available in the category 'Office'. The install is 9 megabytes.

With the viewer, you can open multiple files at once, open office documents from your e-mail, search in office files and copy and paste from your documents. A very nice feature is the ability to give presentations with the phone. Here are some screen shots of the viewer running on the N900.

The code for this viewer is available in the KOffice repository. New releases of the viewer will be uploaded to the repository as KOffice progresses towards version 2.2.

The viewer has a simple user interface and responds quickly to user input such as page changing and scrolling.

Firefox for Mobile Prism 1.0 Beta 3 – Getting Closer To Final Release - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... January 19 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

The KOffice team proudly announced today that Nokia has packaged their cross-platform office suite for Maemo 5 platform and released the first public version of the office document viewer for the Nokia N900 phone.

This particularly means that KOffice is now fully compatible with the latest Maemo device but due the numerous bugs in this early Alpha stage it is only available through the Maemo Devel repository in a typical Linux’s 'release early and often' policy.

Viewer also requires the latest platform version (PR1.1) so in case you still didn’t update you N900 do it as soon as possible! Application uses a custom user int... .. .

Many times we have pointed out the Nokia’s N900 capacity to have the full internet right at the palm of your hand and the amazing experience that this gorgeous device provides. However, it seems that there would be a new application coming soon that would take advantage of it and would take it to the limit. The application is called JoikuSpot and is already known for other devices such as Nokia’s Symbian devices. Its particularity is that it turns the Nokia N900 into a Wi-Fi hotspot making it possible for other ...

We have been hearing from Chris on Twitter than he was working hard on his Nokia N900 review and we finally get a chance to read all about his thoughts in the Engadget N900 review. I enjoyed the review and appreciated what Chris and Thomas wrote and think they are spot on. The web browser is definitely the shining star of the Nokia N900 and if you are a T-Mobile customer who likes to tinker with smartphones it is an excellent choice. As Chris stated at the end, “it’s a computer with a phone, not a phone that can compute.” Then again, he does point out what I have been saying about how it is an excellent Skype device that works well over data connections.

I have been thinking what is the major difference of Maemo compared to many other platforms, and I think it is that it offers native Linux for developers. Instead of living in the limitations of javascript, Maemo enables you to do much more and enables you to use the full computing power available from this little computer. I feel that the train went already for Java, I was in the middle of the previous Java-bubble that pretty much exploded in around year 2000 depression. Been there, experience it first hand. Needless to say I don't believe in Java or .NET or similar hypes anymore. The future is for mixed offering including both native and high level environments. And that is what Maemo exactly is today, you can use both high level languages _and_ more importantly low level languages.

I have mentioned several times that the web browser is so good on the Nokia N900 that you can use it instead of having native applications. That is not to say that I don’t appreciate when I find a good native application to fill a need, such as Witter for Twitter. I finally got around to trying out the web browser method for Google Maps detailed on The Nokia Blog and I have to say it is quite impressive. Through the browser and its integration with your GPS receiver you can get a decent Google Maps experience. However, don’t forget that Nokia Maps was updated with the latest firmware so you now have a couple good mapping and navigation methods on the Nokia N900.

The steps for getting the Google Maps web browser version up and running on your Nokia N900 are as follows:

1. Launch the Application Manager and then find & install the maemo-geolocation plugin for the default web browser.
2. Restart your Nokia N900. Needed for the plugin to register in your browser.
3. Launch the web browser and go to this URL: www.google.com/maps/m

You can then tap on the blue dot icon to have the map move to the center of your position (just like the blue dot works on other Google Maps applications). You will find support for satellite, traffic, and Latitude layers enabled via the left Layers icon. Tapping the Menu icon gives you a pop-up for searching the map, getting directions (yes, you can navigate with the web browser and your GPS receiver here), clear the map, and view help & terms of Google Maps.

You can also enable mouse mode with the Google Maps site for more functionality.

I would still like to see a native Google Maps client, but given the rather small market for Maemo I highly doubt we will ever see a version for our N900 devices.

Nokia’s launch last year of the N900 mobile computer introduced a bit of disruption to their normal business model.  The ripple effect naturally propagated down to the lowest levels and had a huge impact on the semi-independent community, maemo.org.

At 3:35 am CST, Nokia announced that Ovi Maps Navigation will be free to all Nokia smartphone users FOR LIFE! This means tens of millions of devices across the world will have the same functionality of most typical personal GPS devices like Garmin and Tom Tom produce. While obviously a response to Google's free navigation offering on Android, it has far greater implications.

Nokia is throwing its massive reach and weight around. While Google Maps is free is the US and other locales, Ovi Maps 3.3 and its free services will be in tens of millions of devices immediately on a much larger scale.

This means Nokia will be able to provide voice and visual guidance to over 70 different countries with language localization for both drivers and pedestrians alike. This will also include Ovi's planned indoor navi... .. .

Some people are questioning Maemo as an application development platform. I claim that it is one of Maemo's strong points going forward.

We have always had a strong and productive maemo.org community that builds very interesting stuff. Their work has been available for more advanced Maemo users already for some time. I claim that the depth and coolness of those apps and compos beats almost any other mobile platform. Maemo is open and as a true computer OS it allows developers to create really nice applications, widgets, and extensions. If you want to experience them just open disabled repositories or go directly to maemo.org.

And now, Ovi Store for Maemo applications has been open for a week or two. It is the official Nokia supported application store where developers can distribute their work. You should defenately check it out.

Angry Birds is one of the many applications you can install to your N900 from the Ovi Store. This is what the developers of that entertaining game say: " In the first week that Angry Birds has been on the Ovi Store, it has been downloaded almost as many times as the iPhone version in six weeks. Given that most N900 users have not even used Ovi Store yet, we are confident that there will be many more downloads in the months to come, and are sure that the N900 version will be very profitable."

I suggest you read the whole interview and go to the Ovi Store with your N900. Get your apps there, too. And have fun!

Firefox for Mobile Perils of the viewport meta tag - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... January 21 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

There is a pretty slick new development tool for the Maemo platform out now called MADDE. It is aimed at the Maemo sweetspot: Qt development. It works on the big three platforms, though I have only installed it on Linux.

MADDE is designed to make cross compiling and generally building applications easier, and it appears to be doing just that. Installation went smoothly and the documentation is concise and clear. MADDE even provides a debian directory, which is my particular interest at the moment, so let’s take a closer look there to see how MADDE can help you build debs.

The first thing you notice when using MADDE is that when you create a project with it, it creates not just project files, but debian files for you as well. In that debian directory you’ll see a bunch of example files – things you can use if you are going to create a debian README file, man pages and the like. For Maemo, we don’t use man pages, so you can simply remove any file that ends in .ex that you don’t want or need.

There are of course a variety of details of packaging you can go into, but what is very interesting with MADDE is that the package building is included. This means that you can call ‘mad dpkg-buildpackage’ and MADDE knows what to do and goes ahead and does it. You don’t need to fiddle with your environment, unless of course you want to, MADDE saves you a great deal of time by including all the needed tools for packaging.

I will discuss the implications of MADDE and packaging further, and I also hope to dive into some of the source code. (Dear Nokia, please consider releasing your perl modules to CPAN.) But my first impression of MADDE is that it is a huge time saver, and a great maemo development environment – try it out!

Dell is bundling the Nokia N900 with their 15.6-inch Vostro 1015 laptop for $929. The specs are from their $499 ‘Economy Package’ configuration which gets you 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo T6570, Windows 7 Home Premium, 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, 160GB hard drive, dual-layer DVD burner, 2 MP webcam, integrated WiFi, GMA 4500MHD graphics and a 6-cell battery. This bundle means the Nokia N900 is worth $430.

Flip the laptop on eBay close to its listing price and you might come close to getting a really good deal for the Nokia N900. Unless of course you’re interested in keeping the Vostro. I’m not sure how long the discount will be available, but it started on the 21st.

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

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PyGTKEditor 3.0.9-2 is available in extras-testing. This new version include bugs fix and a new welcome screen instead of a new empty file.

The list of bug fixs since version 3.0.2 (the version available in extras) :

• Version 3.0.2 :
◦ Prefs : default language
◦ Prefs : default language
◦ Prefs : Auto rotate option
◦ Prefs : font and text size
◦ Prefs : enable or not word completion
◦ Fix Bug #6522
◦ Fix Bug #6547
◦ Fix Bug #7021

• Version 3.0.3 :
◦ Fix Help Bug

• Version 3.0.4 :
◦ Prefs : indent size
◦ Welcome screen
◦ Recent Chooser Change
◦ Prefs show lines numbers

• Version 3.0.5 :
◦ Fix 2 syntax errors

• Version 3.0.6 :
◦ Fix None default language : #8074
◦ Detect .txt as text file (no syntax hilight)

• Version 3.0.7 :
◦ Fix uncomplete preference file
◦ Fix icon in package
◦ Fix help windows title

• Version 3.0.8 :
◦ Fix syntax error

• Version 3.0.9 :
◦ Keep last opened folder when opening or saving file instead of going to MyDocs folder by default
◦ Remove saveas menu from welcome screen
◦ Fix Bug #8837
◦ Add errors message when not able to open or decode file
◦ Fix apply prefs for lines numbers
◦ Fix recent file change in main
◦ Fix back to begin search when there is 2 results only
◦ Fix order of recent files

Of course do not hesitate to report any bugs you get on http://bugs.maemo.org or vote for it on http://maemo.org/packages/package_instance/view/fremantle_extras-testing_free_armel/pygtkeditor/3.0.9-2

Nokia just announced a competition looking for hackers and modders in the US to submit ideas to transform the Nokia N900 into something else. The top three ideas will be chosen from the ideas submitted by a panel of judges, after which the finalist teams will be provided with a Nokia N900 and some support to actually build their mod. Cash prizes range from USD 3,000 to USD 10,000.

Here’s a video of some example hacks to get you started.

Examples from a previous competition held in October resulted in some cool mods, including a skateboard that tracks your tricks and lets you compete against friends with their own Nokia N900s, an N900-equipped kite that lets you control the camera from the ground, a spray can that brings light graffiti to the N900, a Nokia N900-outfitted belt that vibrates to navigate you in the right direction, and a Nokia N900 with arms that will draw what you photograph on an Etch-a-Sketch.

The final date for submissions is Noon ET, February 15, 2010. You can follow the progress of the project at blogs.nokia.com/pushn900/usa/

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Welcome to MaemoMagaizine.com! This site may seem a little barren content-wise, but don’t worry. I’m just getting started and hope to have a steady stream of Maemo-related content streaming in.

The plan for this website is to have it be a central hub for news, hardware and software reviews, tips and tricks on how to use your device better, interviews with both community and commercial developers and/or contributors, and just general Maemo-related content.

I hope you enjoy your stay!

A few days ago, it has been released an alpha version of Office Viewer for Nokia N900 called Koffice. This application would complement the mobile functionalities of the Nokia N900 as it gives to the users to carry with them any Office document such as text, spreadsheet or presentation. The Koffice is basically an application to view word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentation as it supports text files, spreadsheets and presentation in OpenDocument format (ODF) and Microsoft Office formats.  The most important features are the option to open more than one ...

Yesterday Nokia announced that Ovi Maps navigation was going free for all it smartphones. Initially this is available for Nokia's Symbian device models. However, Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President of Nokia, speaking at the London event said, "we will also be increasing support for this.. and certainly moving forward it will also support Maemo". However no commitment was made for specific Maemo models.

Nokia invites US tweekers and modders to submit their ideas for morphing the Nokia N900 into something entirely new. Whether it’s turning the Nokia N900 into a TV remote control or the brain of a fully functioning robot, the only limit is the contestants’ imagination.

The Nokia N900, which became available in the US this past November, is a powerful mobile computer that uses the open source, Linux-based Maemo Software to deliver a PC-like experience on a handset-sized device.

The top three ideas will be chosen from the ideas submitted by a panel of judges, after which the finalist teams will be provided with a Nokia N900 and so... .. .

Things have been a bit lumpy in the Maemo community this week. It started with the repositories crashing last weekend – and oddly, no-one was around to fix it till Monday. Even the host RevdKathy.com is on has 24/7 emergency service so I was a bit baffled. The whole event with tech things being unsteady has felt vaguely ... unprofessional. And as Nokia are the bill-payers for that end of things, it’s faintly worrying about the level of their genuine commitment.

Things have been a bit lumpy in the Maemo community this week. It started with the repositories crashing last weekend – and oddly, no-one was around to fix it till Monday. Even the host RevdKathy.com is on has 24/7 emergency service so I was a bit baffled. The whole event with tech things being unsteady has felt vaguely ... unprofessional. And as Nokia are the bill-payers for that end of things, it’s faintly worrying about the level of their genuine commitment.

Maybe I’m biased. Maybe Python-based applications aren’t a large-enough sector of the application pie to warrant consideration of inclusion into Nokia’s OVI Store. If this is the rationale that Nokia is using, then I strongly disagree.

Of course as long as everything remains the same, C will be the de facto programming language for Maemo devices. As a Python programmer, I had to fight through unstable API’s, lean documentation, and several bugs to be one of the first developers to program a Python application on Maemo 5.

But it was all worth it because I was using a high-level programming language that I could use to quickly create a feature rich application. For developers wanting to program Python for the device now, all those issues are resolved.

The only advantage C has now is: the Python libraries need to be installed as dependencies by the programmer since they do not come preinstalled on the device. This may not seem like a huge issue, but it can be:

Think about it from the user’s perspective: they see two applications in the App. Manager. Both are, let’s say, desktop widgets that show you how much free space you have on your SD card. One is written in C and is 35 KB’s. The other is written in Python and is 5 MB’s. The Python one has to pull in all the Python dependencies (python, python-hildon, python-hildondesktop, python-osso, etc.) because they aren’t preinstalled on the device. Of course, most of that stuff is Optified  so it doesn’t take up any additional space on the Root FS, but it doesn’t matter. A user will install the C application because it is so much smaller.

Although that’s an issue, it’s not the biggest one. The biggest one is how does one upload an Python-based application to the OVI Store? Are those dependencies going to be available from OVI?

Right now it is fairly simple to create and upload a Python-based application to maemo.org’s software repository, because the Python libraries are uploaded there. But how about when Python developers want to upload to the premier source for Maemo 5 applications? Will there be any support for them?

It would be great if there was Python support in the OVI Store. Even better would be to push all the common Python libraries in the next SSU, leveling the playing field completely.

What are your thoughts?

One reason the N900 has been launched only in select markets is because it can be considered as a phone for technology enthusiasts rather than normal consumers.  The N900 is the only phone powered by Maemo as of now but there are tens of Android phones. A mobile addict Brandon has managed to dual-boot Maemo and Android on the N900

He’s indicating that this is a Proof of Concept rather than a full blown solution. Considering the fact that the N900 uses a ARM Cortex A8 CPU,  the hardware can be more than enough to run Android.  There is no HOWTO guide as of now which gives you instructions on how to get Android on your N900. We assume that the hack is far from being stable.  Lets wait for the reaction from the Maemo Community

Video demo

N900 running Maemo and Android ©, .

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