Finally, I'm happy to push the latest Web Runtime (v1.1.0) for N900 to the extras-devel repository. Please note that this release is only tested against PR 1.3. There's no new features implemented compared to the previous release back in July, but only bug fixes. Personally, this is one of the last duties for me in the WRT project, and let's see what I would play with in the future ;)

What is Web Runtime?
It's a development framework with which you can write applications in standard Web technologies, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Also, a bunch of Device APIs are provided to grant you the access to native resources, e.g. file system, sensors, etc., using JavaScript.

To install WRT on N900, you should first enable the extras-devel repository.

If you have the previous release installed, you should first uninstall:
sudo gainroot
apt-get purge libwrt-experimental1

Then install the new release:
sudo gainroot
apt-get install qtwrt

Have fun and feel free to go to the public forum for more questions ;)

I would like to document my process for getting Meego Handset to run in a Maemo chroot on the N900 using Easy Debian, so you don't have to multi-boot your phone.

I’ve planned to get familiar with Qt Scene Graph for a several months now, but Gunnar Sletta’s presentation at the Qt Developer Day 2010 in…

As I see someone else posting another new Clock application I can’t help but wonder why.  Left me first say I love all the Maemo developers out there, as a Theme Maker I consider myself a developer.  I just don’t understand why everyone is making some many Clock/Timer apps.  Some of them are so close that I would almost say that people have taken someone else’s code and just changed the name of the application. 

I understand that for several people their first application might be a clock or hello world.  Just remember just because you write it doesn’t mean you have to release it to extras.  Since many/most of these clock apps are open source why are people not just working on one clock application and contributing the code.  If you took the time it took the dozen or so people who have made clock/timer apps and had all the programming knowledge in one application that would be the ultimate clock program. 

Maybe as we start to move on to Meego we will have better sharing and working together to make 1 or 2 great applications and now 12 – 24 just OK ones.  Also can we get at least one fart app?

The companion app to MaePad that has been announced some days ago is now available in Extras-Devel for your N900, with some nifty features:

• Fully edit the checklists in your database
• Native Maemo 5 look and feel in the browser (title bar, toolbar, lists, ...)
• Dynamic themeing based on current Maemo theme
• Per-session password for some security (inspired by MAD Developer)

This means that if you are using the NSeries theme, it looks like this, but if you are using Digital Nature, this is how it looks (and that should work for all themes). On your device, you will see a simple info window. Now, that's bringing the Maemo 5 UI to your Desktop computer's web browser. But does it work on mobile devices as well? Of course! Let me present you MaePadWeb running in the Symbian web browser on a N8-00:

If you think that this looks shopped, check out the video for further proof and to see the checklist editor view in action :)

This project brings together some great technologies: Python (for the backend) and HTML/CSS and JavaScript (using JQuery for convenience) for the frontend. Apart from the artwork, it does not depend on anything from Maemo 5/Hildon that isn't available in MeeGo already. In fact, Python with SQLite3 support is the only real dependency of this app on the backend side. With all the confusion on what to use for MeeGo Handset UIs (MeeGo Touch Framework, QWidget-based Qt, QWidget inside QGraphicsView, QML, Qt Components, ...), the HTML/CSS/JavaScript combo seems like a good cross-platform alternative (you still have to run the backend somewhere, but it can run on the same device, of course). All you need is a good browser/JS engine/rendering engine combo (Fennec/QtWebKit on MeeGo Handset, MicroB on Maemo). This also works on the N8x0 with MicroB :)

Nokia World 2010 played host to a number of mini exhibitions, including the inspiring and fun hacking competition, Nokia Push, which now includes the N8 alongside the N900. As well as ingenious and geeky N900 hacks, kite and skateboard mountings for both the N900 and N8 were on display. The latter were built to be given out to film makers so that they could use these Nokia handsets to obtain otherwise unobtainable camera angles. Read on for photos and more information.

I just pushed Maemo-org Theme 2.0.1 to Extras-testing.  Please vote by going here.  Changes for 2.0.1 include fixes for Pr1.2 Virtual Keyboard, minor bugs.   Plus an all new icon set created by shazosbourne and me.  Right now it includes over 300 icons and more everyday.  I play on releaseing an update atleast once a week with more icons and I ask that if you would like to have any applications icon redone to match the theme please post here.  If you can send a copy of the themes icon that would be great.  If not please just let me know what applicaitons you want icons done for. 

Maemo-org Theme was once the most downloaded theme on Extras and I want to make it that way once again, but I need your help go download and vote for the package.

3 Know bugs:

Calendar Applet Icon – White on White will be fixed next release
Alarm Times – Alarm times on all custom themes I tried are scrambled when not checked.
Phone buttons don’t have glossy look will be fixed in next release.

Screenshots:

Unfortunately nokia refuses to fix bug in USSD realization without any explanations. So I have to continue supporting my dirty hack.

читать далее

Just finished knocking out some bugs and 2.0.1-9 is now in testing.  Please post any bugs you find.  Fixed Media Player Buttons, returned phone dial pad keys to the older look.  Returned icon boarders to old look.  Also fixed calendar applet.  Plus MORE icons!

Vote Now!!

Firefox for Mobile What's new: Firefox 4 beta 2 for mobile - http://madhava.com/egotism... November 4 from Planet Mozilla: Madhava Enros - Comment - Like

Firefox 4 Beta 2 has been released and you can download it in 10 languages on your Android or Maemo device. The new version comes with a wide range of fixes and improvements.

Firefox 4 Beta 2 Now Available For Android And Maemo is a post from: Fone Arena

The astute, regular readers I manage to have might have wondered why I have recently been playing with Skia, Google's 2D graphics rendering library, notably used in Chromium and Android. Well, now that my experiment is in a semi-usable state, I decided that it's probably about time I let the cat out of the bag and started talking about what I've been doing.

In this post, I show you how to start the Meego Handset 1.1 "desktop" in a Maemo chroot, using Easy Debian and the image file you made using instructions in the last post.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-11-01 through 2010-11-07

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-11-01 through 2010-11-07

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-11-01 through 2010-11-07

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-11-01 through 2010-11-07

Front Page

Playing DVDs on N900 with USB hostmode

Normally videos don't make the front page, especially when the topic is covered by number of items. However, in the case of Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh's latest video - demonstrating USB hostmode - we've made an exception. Joerg Reisenweber's announcement on maemo-developers is covered in the `Devices' section. Mohammad's video shows him "playing DVDs on the N900 with a modified kernel and a custom mplayer build. [...] (Note: video is playing solely on CPU power, mplayer is not accelerated by the PowerVR, which explains the framedrops)" More information on USB hostmode is later in the issue.

Read more

Saturday before MeeGo conference: team-based lollipop stick bridge building

With a week to go to the start of the first MeeGo Conference, the community have been organising events (beyond spodding and drinking) for the prior weekend, for those arriving early. Dave Neary is organising a "Maker's Contest" where, instead of building funky Qt applications, teams have to build a pretty, load-bearing bridge out of lollipop sticks: "Each team will get 100 lollipop sticks and a glue gun with one glue stick. No other materials may be used for the bridge. Teams will have 1 hour to make a bridge which should span a 40cm gap." Dave is looking for local logistical assistance (including weights and rope for testing the bridges); so start forming your teams now!

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Playing DVDs on N900 with USB hostmode
   • Saturday before MeeGo conference: team-based lollipop stick bridge building
2. Applications
   • Use MaePad on Nokia N8 via mobile web interface
3. Development
   • Qt on Google's "Skia" graphics engine
4. Devices
   • Running MeeGo in Maemo chroot (part 2)
   • MeeGo 1.1 on a HTC Nexus One
   • USB hostmode on N900
   • Indamixx announces a MeeGo-based multi-touch tablet for music applications
5. Announcements
   • Peregrine is VoIP/video/IM chat for Qt & MeeGo
   • Radio RDS driver & decoder for N900

Some of you may be interested in a guest article I wrote for the VisionMobile blog reviewing the state of MeeGo eight months after its announcement: “The MeeGo Progress Report”

Some excerpts:

On the state of the MeeGo application developer story:

From the point of view of tools, documentation and software distribution channels, MeeGo is undoubtedly behind its primary competitors – but for such a young project, this is to be expected. The success of the project among application developers and the free software community will depend to a large extent on the project’s ability to fill these gaps and provide developers with an excellent development experience.

On the openness of the project:

[...] In the mobile platform development world, it is fair to say that MeeGo is second to none in terms of its open development model.

On comparisons with Android and iOS:

It does not feel fair at this point to compare MeeGo, a project which came into being 8 months ago, with iOS or Android, but this is the yardstick which will be used when the first MeeGo smartphone comes on the market. The project has come a long way since its inception, in particular in working towards an open and transparent development model. There is still some way to go but improvements have been happening daily.

KhtEditor 0.0.11

A new version of KhtEditor has been release to maemo extras-devel repository. This new version use now a QPlainTextEditor, and so improve the memory footprint, this version also fix errors due to accent in filename, as now filename are managed as Unicode as it should. I've also made some change how brace matching is displayed, so it s now faster too.

For those who don't know what is KhtEditor, it s a code editor designed for coding directly on your Maemo device. So it s try to be fast, and ease life of on-board developers. While it s mainly optimized for python developpers, it supports syntax highlight for many languages (see http://khertan.net/khteditor for more informations).

I'll use this version during a week, and if no errors occurs i'll probably push it to the extras-testing repository. Please do not hesitate to test it and report me error if one occurs. Suggestions are also welcome.

KhtEditor 0.0.11

A new version of KhtEditor has been release to maemo extras-devel repository. This new version use now a QPlainTextEditor, and so improve the memory footprint, this version also fix errors due to accent in filename, as now filename are managed as Unicode as it should. I've also made some change how brace matching is displayed, so it s now faster too.

For those who don't know what is KhtEditor, it s a code editor designed for coding directly on your Maemo device. So it s try to be fast, and ease life of on-board developers. While it s mainly optimized for python developpers, it supports syntax highlight for many languages (see http://khertan.net/khteditor for more informations).

I'll use this version during a week, and if no errors occurs i'll probably push it to the extras-testing repository. Please do not hesitate to test it and report me error if one occurs. Suggestions are also welcome.

Some may know that Clawmotia is my MythTV remote control which started back in the n810 days. For a bit of fun while recovering from jet lag I decided to port Clawmotia over to using QML and take advantage of some of the n900's capabilities such as the accelerometer. Shown below is controlling the playback speed by moving the device. Apologies for the flicking video, it seems mythtv doesn't like the mov file in software playback much, but the Bunny is free to use so he made the audition.

Controlling MythTV with an n900 accelerometer from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

The normal functions from the older qedje remote are also available on the main page shown in the video below. I have now put the cursor keys into a submenu which is opened by both the joystick and menu buttons, the latter first getting mythtv to open the menu and then changing the remote configuration to show the cursor key submenu. This explains the vacant positions in the grid in the new design -- submenu shuffle has given me a few extra spots to play with. Also the settings can be set in the program itself now instead of the old edit the launcher file and set environment variables. I would like to make the volume adjustment use a popup slider and also route the hardware vol +/- keys to mythtv, but I'm still working out how to do the later.

Clawmotia QML: The Qt MythTV remote control from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

Interestingly, the big "oh no" moments came when I tried to do trivial things from QML such as reading a file (the accelerometer in /sys). I would have thought that QFile was available but it seems not. Perhaps it is from dedicated javascript files or I'm just doing it wrong^TM. I also notice that the simulator doesn't update that /sys file so you have to test that on the device :/

I also bumped into other things like hooking up signals bidirectionally which would need pass by reference or similar to make it useful in custom QML elements. I might also make some data bound classes to use with QSettings, it seems like an idea for a QString like class to update the QSettings automatically when you assign new data to it.

I also tinkered in Nokias SDK environment for this but reverted to emacs and js-mode because there are just too many things my hands are used to happening that don't in the SDK editor. Though for QML stuff I suspect I need to update my elisp to have better "add property" support so the get/set/signal/member declarations are all added from a "QString foo" input. I have part of that done but need to revisit it.

Today I was at a Qt for N8 Training/Introduction here in Amsterdam. It was a small setup with people from Nokia Benelux.

The training covered Qt for Mobile platforms.
http://events.forum.nokia.com/invitation/qtforn8amsterdam/agenda

The Qt Mobile platform

There are great differences between Symbian and Maemo in terms of platform architecture but Nokia managed to create a single API that make most differences vanish. Credits go to the Qt toolkit. This single API might the key to the success this platform needs. It will also allow Nokia to focus on a single platform for developers. With The SDK I used today it is already possible to target the different platforms Nokia currently has without much effort. So What does that mean? It means that Nokia can offer one single attractive SDK (on windows,Linux and Mac) with different developers in mind (c++ and the HTML/js people) and this sounds like quite a good offering to me.

It must have been quite a huge effort already and we are not there yet. Linux users can't yet develop
for Symbian (as I discovered during the day) and windows user are pushed to use remote services to do the hardcore maemo debian packaging.

As I already did some Qt before I decided to focus a little QML and create a mock for the Linux OutLaws CrapAlert app (something like http://crapalert.org/). I managed to get a "UI" working very fast. After that things went down my n900 is dead and I unsuccessfully tried to install the application on the N8 from Linux.

I played with the N8 but things did not work as I expected. I even surprised myself by thinking "what are all these buttons for, do I really need to learn what they do" while I usually like lots of buttons. Overall the N900 is way better (as expected).

Still when going home I had the feeling to have learned about a useful platform with enough devices "in the wild" to make it very interesting.

Some notes I made during the day(I might be wrong here):
-I think the Qt Mobility API should not end up in Qt. it clutters the very nice Qt API's with non relevant stuff for a cross platform UI. (Effectively they are creating a cross platform platform...)
-Qt Lacks serious IPC/RPC functionality
-Bonus points for "forum Nokia", During the day I filed a bug in their JIRA database and did get an answer within 20 minutes. Now that is fanatical support!.

Get started here:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/Library/Tools_and_downloads/

Firefox for Mobile New Featured Mobile Add-ons: Phony and Bigger Text - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2010... November 8 from Missmobile's Blog » New... - Comment - Like

I’m a real newbie when it comes to OpenGL, but my personal plan is to try to learn as much as possible about OpenGL ES…

Dave Neary, the docmaster of maemo.org and long-time member of the GNOME Foundation, has written an interesting and well researched progress report of the MeeGo story so far. Over at the VisionMobile blog, he asks the question whether MeeGo should score an "A+" or a "D-"? This is a great write up for anyone new to MeeGo; he covers the story from every perspective: openness, user experience, developers, governance, OEM's and operators. Read on for quotes and commentary.

I wrote this guide to help someone get a icon theme package made and I decided to share it so anyone else who has a custom icon pack and get them into extras. This guide has been used to build the new Faenza icon pack so we know it works but please let me know if anything can be enhanced to make it better.

Guide to Building a icon source package.

This guide should work on any OS all you just make sure if you’re using windows you don’t edit the files using a standard windows text editor you want to use something like Notepad++ or SciTE.

Install Software

N900
-py2deb [ apt-get install python2.5-py2deb]
-Download build_myapp.py here
-Download index.theme here

Computer (Windows Only)
- Notepad++ or SciTE

Signup for Garage account here

Request Extras Repo Upload Permissions here

Prepare Icon Theme Source you need to setup the right folder structure so create the following folder inside of each other.

usr > share > icons > icon-theme

Edit index.theme replace [ ] and text on line 2 and 3

Place index.theme in icon-theme folder

Now place your icons that you are replacing in the same folder you found them in hicolor (ie 48×48/hildon, 48×48/apps, 48×48/mimetypes)

You only need to include the custom icons any icons you don’t include will be pulled from the hicolor folder.

Open build_myapp.py in text editor

Enter information anywhere you see [ ]. Remember to delete the [ ] also.

Connect N900 to your computer in Mass Storage Mode

Open File Manager and Navigate to N900 Drive

Create a folder named – Build

Open Build folder

Create a folder named after your icon theme (we will use the name icon-theme for ours.

Open [the newly created] icon-theme Folder

Upload your build_myapp.py file. [into the newly created icon-theme folder]

Upload your icon theme package icon [into /MyDocs/Build/icon-theme/]

Create folder named src [inside /MyDocs/Build/icon-theme/]

Open src folder

Upload your icon theme source [to this src folder, maintaining correct folder structure of usr/share/icons/icon-theme/64x64 etc ]

Close file manager and unplug N900

Open Terminal

cd /MyDocs/Build/icon-theme (replace icon-theme with your theme name)

python build_myapp.py

You will see a lot of stuff fly by and you will have to hit enter 4 times

You will see ~/MyDocs/Build/icon-theme when you’re done

Close terminal

Connect N900 to computer in Mass Storage Mode

Go to https://garage.maemo.org/extras-assistant/
Follow steps to upload source packages that are located in /Build/icon-theme folder on your N900 Drive.

Wait for email that the build is complete

Go to http://maemo.org/packages/

Search for the package name you gave.

Look and wait for it to be imported to extras-devel

Enable extras-devel

Install Package

Set with Theme Customizer

Enjoy.

There’s no doubt that Facebook is one of the key drivers of content on a mobile platform, and what Mark Zuckerberg has planned for his users will affect the mobile market. So Rob Jackson’s analysis of the announcement at the start of the month on the “Facebook Mobile Platform” makes for interesting background reading.

One of the hottest topics on the maemo.org wiki at the moment is preenv, a compatibility shim that makes it possible to play some WebOS games on the N900. Join in and update the game compatibility table!

I have been trying to reduce the number of dead-end pages, those with no links to other pages on the wiki, although this is slow work. You can join the wiki gardeners to help with the process.

The MeeGo development team have just announced the release of the MeeGo SDK 1.1 Beta. The release includes Qt Quick for Javascript based rapid application development. However, the main component of the SDK of course Qt Creator, although command line functions are available too. With MeeGo 1.1 SDK, developers can create, install and debug applications to run on the N900 and Netbooks running MeeGo. Although for developers without reference hardware, QEMU is provided for hardware emulation. Read on for more details.

Phoronix, the well known review and benchmarking blog for Linux users, has published an initial comparison of MeeGo 1.1 versus Ubuntu 10.10 for netbooks. In this test they pitted the two Linux distributions against each other on boot time, power usage, 3D performance, MP3 encoding, and file system performance. Read on for a summary of their findings.

This evening, I went to update any programs on my N900 that had new versions. One of which was kernel power. Kernel Power is a wonderful package for the N900. The parts I like most are the battery usage statistics, IPv6 support, different file system support, and the ability to run mobile hotspot.

That said, I like to push the limits of my N900 so I’ve also got multiboot and nitdroid installed. So, I’m not surprised when things break when I do an upgrade, and things broke when I tried updating the kernel power package.

After poking around for a while, I found a fairly easy way to get things back. First, I tried using various things like pressing 0 when multiboot came up to get a stock kernel boot. That didn’t work. I booted into Nitdroid, and tried to edit the files from Nitdroid. No luck.

Finally, I ended up with this as the best procedure I could come up with.

First, I reflashed just the kernel. I still had my image around from upgrading to PR 1.3, so it was pretty easy:

sudo ./flasher-3.5 -F RX-51_2009SE_20.2010.36-2.002_PR_COMBINED_002_ARM.bin --flash-only=kernel -f -R

At this point, I rebooted, and still had multiboot and all my other applications running. I pressed 0, and this time I got to a stock kernel. I logged in, and uninstalled multiboot, and reinstalled it. I also installed multiboot-kernel-maemo and multiboot-kernel-power.

apt-get remove multiboot
apt-get install multiboot multiboot-kernel-maemo multiboot-kernel-power

I started testing and everything is back in order. Nitdroid is also still working. Now, I need to find out what the updated kernel power really does for me and start messing around a little bit more with Meego.

I also am using Blessn900 with the fcam drivers, and at this point, they appear to be working properly as well.

Next, I’ve reinstalled easy-chroot and easy-deb-chroot. I had these around a few reflashes ago and it is time to retry them. Next, I’ll see if I can get Qole’s easy-meego-chroot running.

Whoa. I’m going to Dublin to MeeGo Conference!

This will be my first conference ever. I’m not quite sure what to expect.  One thing is sure. There will be a getaway quest for MeeGons using Tablet of Adventure. When or where, i haven’t decided yet, but there will be one, probably targeting beer

In my first post in this series, I walked you through making a Meego chroot image from the raw images provided by Meego. In the second post, I gave you some rough scripts for starting the Meego UI in a Maemo chroot with the assistance of Easy Debian. In this post I'll present my new Meego image with the newest Meego UI and all the pieces installed to run without Easy Debian. I also present new scripts that streamline and improve the process.

The Image
I have posted a new Meego image (lzma compressed) on qole.org for you, meego_1_1_b.img.ext3.lzma. This image has been updated with newer components, and so the UI looks a bit different, and I have installed Xephyr and xbindkeys. I have also copied over wmctrl and the keyboard focus binaries. These pieces now make it possible to just use the Meego image to do everything, without opening the Easy Debian image at all.

The Scripts
I have posted new scripts, meegoscripts2.tgz:

• I have improved the chrootmeego script to use variables, so you can customize how you run Meego.
• I have added a new syncmeego script that copies over the necessary files from Maemo to Meego. I got most of this script from this Meego wiki page, and I honestly don't know what effect the copied files actually have on the chroot (except the resolv.conf file, which we already knew about).
• I have enhanced the startmeegoui script, now called startmeegoui3. This script now starts the Xephyr nested X-Server inside Meego, gives it keyboard focus, and then starts the Meego UI. 
• I have added a new script, gomee (clever name, eh?), that opens the Meego chroot, syncs it, and then starts the Meego UI.

Some interesting bits in the startmeegoui3 script:

export M_USE_SOFTWARE_RENDERING=1

R. Burchell was kind enough to point out after my second post that this environment variable makes all Meego apps start with software rendering. Apparently, that was all that stood in the way of getting most of the Meego apps to run.

/usr/bin/mdecorator -software -remote-theme 2>/dev/null &
echo "sleeping..."
sleep 10
echo "...ok now"
/usr/bin/duihome --desktop -software -remote-theme 2>/dev/null &

The bold lines are new. Adding the sleep command seems to fix the strange white band that was appearing across the top of the Meego home screen. I'm not sure why, but it works, so... there you go.


Still To Do

The media apps (photos and videos) do not work yet. More precisely, they work, but they can't find any media. I suspect that someone needs to show us how to start the media indexer to get them working.
The phone app doesn't work. If you try to start it, it complains about ofonod not being started. If ofonod is started, then the phone app just never starts at all.

As Ryan and I - editors of MWKN - will be at the MeeGo Conference on Sunday evening, we'll try and find some space to get together to put together the issue. We'd love to have some help!

What's MWKN?

M* Weekly News is a weekly news digest from the MeeGo/Maemo worlds; inspired by LWN and Wine Weekly News.

Throughout the week, contributors ping over links and short titles to the @mwkn account on Twitter. These then get expanded with quotes, de-duplicated etc. on a Sunday evening for the issue to be published on Monday morning.

The idea is that the community is far too large for any one person to know everything going on, so we can crowdsource the interesting bits which are happening on IRC, the mailing lists, the fora, elsewhere on the Internet etc.

Want to get involved?

Getting involved as a contributor, or an editor (to help with putting the issue together), couldn't be easier; and we'd love to have more people involved.

Please feel free to get involved ahead of time or - if you're going to be around in Dublin on Sunday evening - let me know, and you can either come along and help edit the issue; give us moral support or just get a flavour of what it is we do.

As Ryan and I - editors of MWKN - will be at the MeeGo Conference on Sunday evening, we'll try and find some space to get together to put together the issue. We'd love to have some help!

What's MWKN?

M* Weekly News is a weekly news digest from the MeeGo/Maemo worlds; inspired by LWN and Wine Weekly News.

Throughout the week, contributors ping over links and short titles to the @mwkn account on Twitter. These then get expanded with quotes, de-duplicated etc. on a Sunday evening for the issue to be published on Monday morning.

The idea is that the community is far too large for any one person to know everything going on, so we can crowdsource the interesting bits which are happening on IRC, the mailing lists, the fora, elsewhere on the Internet etc.

Want to get involved?

Getting involved as a contributor, or an editor (to help with putting the issue together), couldn't be easier; and we'd love to have more people involved.

Please feel free to get involved ahead of time or - if you're going to be around in Dublin on Sunday evening - let me know, and you can either come along and help edit the issue; give us moral support or just get a flavour of what it is we do.

You have ssh'ed into a host via three others and just noticed a file(s) you would like on the laptop you started all this merriment from, what do you do? Of course you don't have a control connection or tunnelling already setup because its a "once off" multi hop connection.

A solution that is not quite as widely known as I'd thought is to use the sz and rz pair. Hurrah the zmodem programs are still just as useful today as they were in the years of yore. The snag is that your local terminal needs to have some knowledge of this, konsole works nicely and will pop up a dialog asking where to save files "sent" to it. So doing ssh server; date >/tmp/df; sz /tmp/df will result in a dialog appearing on your local display asking where to save the df file to. Note that this works over multiple intermediate ssh hops. Just perfect for when you have routed your way into a protected network via 4 hops and find out that /etc/foo.conf which is 8kb would be *really* nice to have on the laptop.

This is packaged as lrzsz for Fedora and I've made an lszrz tarball available in my n900 repository. Let the zmodem goodness rain down...

By the way, a group of  igalians, including myself, will be tomorrow in Dublin for the Meego Conference 2010. I’ll be at the Igalia’s exhibition stand with a demo of the Pandaboard running Meego and -hopefully- rendering on-line multimedia through Grilo.

I spent the day yesterday down at the Under the Radar conference in Mountain View. Awesome job once again by the organizers, who managed to pull together plenty of interesting companies I wasn’t yet familiar with and a great set of judges. I reconnected with a bunch of people I haven’t seen in a long time too, so awesome day all around.

What Ui toolkit I should use for mobile application development has been a top issue since Maemo5/Fremantle SDK alpha release. There were two choices available, GTK+/Hindon and Qt. The amount of choices has been increased since then and caused a lot of confusion among developers.

What Ui toolkit I should use for mobile application development has been a top issue since Maemo5/Fremantle SDK alpha release. There were two choices available, GTK+/Hindon and Qt. The amount of choices has been increased since then and caused a lot of confusion among developers.

As part of the early bird events before the MeeGo conference this week, I ran a lollipop bridge building contest last night at the conference venue. The rules were simple: 100 lollipop sticks, a glue gun, and you have to bridge a 40cm gap, and resist as much weight as possible. We had about 40 participants, and 10 bridges entered.

There were two awards: prettiest bridge and strongest bridge. Obviously, the prettiest bridge contest was judged first.

Before...

The results were really impressive! The prettiest bridge was designed by Team Symbio, Ville Kankainen, Ilkka Maki, Henri Ranki and Márton Ekler. It was a beautiful arch bridge.

Team Symbio working on the prettiest bridge

The winning bridge, made by the team “The Unbreakables”, Casper van Donderen, Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen and Sivan Greenberg, survived the shopping basket we used as the breaking tool, with 25 1L bottles of water on top – impressive! The bridge was eventually broken when Chani tried to hang off it.

The Unbreakables - looking very smug

Some of the bridges held quite a lot of weight – and broke very spectacularly!

...and after

Rafe and Reggie are at the MeeGo Conference in Dublin, which takes places at the Aviva stadium in Dublin from Monday 15th to Wednesday 17th. We'll be bringing you live coverage, with updates from keynotes, sessions and surrounding activities. Joining us in our live coverage is mobile analyst Julien Fourgeaud. We're using Cover It Live, which is embedded below, and lets you read the latest updates, view pictures, vote in polls and add your own comments and questions

I had toyed with the idea for a while, and even written a post some time ago suggesting that my next phone would like be an Android one. A couple of weeks ago my n900 decided to stop booting at all, and I had to send it away for repair. While it was away I borrowed a G1 from a friend, and got to spend a week with it.

At the MeeGo Conference in Dublin? Want to come and see how MWKN is put together every Sunday evening?

Come along to the D4 Ballsbridge, following signs for "MeeGo Conference 2010 Early Bird Event" and we're in the bar next to the ballroom.

You might want to bring a beer from the Dubliner, as the bar here's not (yet?) open.

At the MeeGo Conference in Dublin? Want to come and see how MWKN is put together every Sunday evening?

Come along to the D4 Ballsbridge, following signs for "MeeGo Conference 2010 Early Bird Event" and we're in the bar next to the ballroom.

You might want to bring a beer from the Dubliner, as the bar here's not (yet?) open.

I'm personally not attending to MeeGo Conference this year. Past two Maemo Summits have been great, so I'm sure this time things will be even Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger!

But in a way part of me is attending, as one thing I have been working with recently is a UX prototype called "SteelRat". It will be shown in Nomovok booth, running on top of MeeGo in different ARM development boards. This is what SteelRat looked like in Freescale i.MX51 during Qt Developer Days:



But anyway, wishing good times for all you attending!

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-11-08 through 2010-11-14

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-11-08 through 2010-11-14

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-11-08 through 2010-11-14

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-11-08 through 2010-11-14

Front Page

MeeGo Conference 2010 Early Bird Events

As MeeGo Conference 2010 attendees filtered into the D4 hotels the weekend before the conference, a number of informal learning and collaboration sessions, called "Early Bird Events," got underway in the Ballroom at Ballsbridge Towers. Sessions included Qt overviews, Qt Creator & QML tutorials, a hands-on Linux Developer tools seminar, hackathons, and UX design discussions, among other topics. Quite a number of the almost one hundred participants had one and a half days of pure development immersion. Expectedly, several people created their own round tables scattered around the hotel. The atmosphere was one of excitement and fun as everyone connected with old friends and talked about new possibilities. It is because of events like this - those that happen 'outside' of the regular conference schedule - that innovations withing the development community happen.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • MeeGo Conference 2010 Early Bird Events
2. Applications
   • Fixing broken Python Qt apps
3. Development
   • locationd - event-based notification of location proximity
   • Linaro 10.11 released
   • Valgrind on ARM
   • How to make modern mobile applications with Qt Quick components
4. Community
   • Maemo Community Council at the MeeGo Conference
   • MeeGo Conference bridge building competition
   • Maemo Meeting Minutes from Thursday, November 11
   • Get involved with creating next week's MWKN issue at MeeGoConf
5. Devices
   • In-car (IVI) demo of MeeGo
   • N900 MeeGo chroot, part 3
6. Announcements
   • Facebook Status Updater - effing
   • OSGB - show location in UK Ordnance Survey coordinates
   • Shortcut Stash: app launcher, bookmark & folder opening widget
   • mFakeCaller - spoof incoming calls for getting out of tricky situations, meetings, ...

I am at the MeeGo Conference in Dublin which takes place at the Aviva stadium from the 15th to 17th (Monday – Wednesday). Also, here are Rafe and Reggie from All About MeeGo and mobile analyst Julien Fourgeaud and together we will be bringing you the latest from the keynotes, sessions and all of the surrounding activities.

The MeeGo Conference is the follow up event to what used to be Maemo Summit and is being attended by just over 1000 people. You can also follow along on Twitter @TheHandheldBlog and at #MeeGoConf which is the official conference hashtag. Last, if you would like the watch the event yourself, a few sessions are also being live streamed.

Day 2

MeeGo Conference Day 2

Day 1

MeeGo Conference Day 1

Similar Posts:

• Registrations For The MeeGo Summit Finland Now Open: April 15-16
• MeeGo Conference, Dublin: In Pictures
• MeeGo Gets A Second Conference: May 23-25 In San Francisco
• The Maemo Summit Is Now Underway
• Nokia N900 PR 1.3 Firmware Now Available

Dublin, Ireland. Today at the MeeGo conference 2010 AMD announced that it would be joining the MeeGo project, alongside Nokia and long-time CPU rival, Intel. On stage were Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president, software development; and Chris Schlaeger, Director of AMD Operating System. Schlaeger said to the developers and press "we will provide our support in an open and not corporate way". Read on for more details.

It has been announced that Pelagicore AB has now joined the Linux Foundation. Pelagicore AB is a company who applies open source software to develop of automotive infotainment products. They have joined the Linux Foundation specifically to participate in the building of the MeeGo In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) reference design.

Also today, Rudolf Streif of the Linux Foundation, hosted a work-group session at the 2010 MeeGo conference in Dublin, to present they key challenges and considerations of MeeGo IVI. Read on for more details and our photo coverage.

At the MeeGo Conference in Dublin the second annual MeeGo Conference was just announced. Going forward, we will be seeing two conferences every year with the 2011 edition coming May 23 – 25 in San Francisco. MeeGo has two major releases every year and from now on  we will have a conference after each release.

By that time we should have also seen Nokia’s first MeeGo device and a great place to measure developer interest in the new platform. Around the same time, May 30 – June 1 2011, the world will also witness the MeeGo Summit in Oulu, Finland. Many details are not available yet, but if you are interested in MeeGo, better put those dates down.

Keep an eye on all the MeeGo events here.

Similar Posts:

• Registrations For The MeeGo Conference In May Now Open
• An Update On Nokia World ’09
• Live From The MeeGo Conference
• LG To Show Off Prototype Devices At Next Month’s MeeGo Conference
• MeeGo Conference, Dublin: In Pictures

You'll know David from his articles for All About Symbian and All About MeeGo over the last 12 months, but if you're interested in knowing more about him as a person then you could do far worse than check out this mini-interview with him over on the Ovi Blog. Did you, for example, know that he has a Masters in Quantum Theory? Must remember to chat to him about string theory and multiverses sometime....

My repository now contains a steaming ferris-sharing-plugin_0.2_armel.deb which will hook up libferris to the Nokia sharing system on the n900. This lets you click the funky Brussels atom building "sharing" icon from many places and copy images to flickr, 23hq, facebook.

There isn't much feedback at the moment, that is planned for "the future". You might also like to install the ImageMagick from my repo. Simply expand it to /opt and make a link /usr/lib/ImageMagick-6.6.0 -> /opt/ImageMagick-6.6.0/lib/ImageMagick-6.6.0. This gives you proper handling of exif orientation during scaling prior to upload with libferris.

I also have some tweaks to libferris itself which will be in the upcoming 1.5.1 release to help with annotations etc during upload. The next step is to get vimeo and youtube upload support happening too, since libferris can already upload to those.

There’s a huge geocaching scene around us that I can’t believe I just stumbled upon. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online. I was introduced to this treasure hunt by some of the attendees here at the Meego Coference. Here’s my first experience hunting caches around Dublin.

We used an app called GPXView on the Nokia N900. I don’t know if there are geocaching apps for Symbian, but there are definitely apps for Android and iPhone. GPXView is available for the Nokia N900 in the Application manager.

GPXView told us there were many caches nearby. The nearest one was only a couple minutes away. The app gave us the GPS coordinate, comments by others who previously found it, and even some hints. None of us had local SIM cards, but the app worked flawlessly on the streets of Dublin after preloading maps data with hotel wifi.

The first cache we found was attached to a green box in a random street. Inside was a log of people who found the item. After placing it back for another person to find, we went hunting for other caches. Another cache we found was under a bench with a great view of the Grand Canal Docks.

Geocaching is really fun and I’ll be playing it now every time I travel. I’ve included more photos below. Have you geocached yet?

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

• Live at Meego Conference 2010, Dublin
• Meego 1.1 SDK Beta Released Days Before Meego Conference
• Intel and Nokia Merge Moblin and Maemo to Create Meego

Zemanta

The queue for registration

Along with something like 15 other Collaborans, I’m at the MeeGo Conference 2010 in Dublin. I’ve somehow managed never to visit Ireland before, so I’m hoping to find some time to explore a bit while I’m here.

I’m giving a talk titled The Road to Telepathy 1.0 tomorrow at 9am (yerk!) in the Vavasour Suite. I’ll be sketching out a rough roadmap, or rather collection of related goals and schedules; also, there’ll be an update on ongoing feature development. Right afterwards, at 9.30, the inimitable Mikhail Zabaluev is speaking on Developing Communication Protocol Implementations in Telepathy, based on Nokia’s experience developing SIP, cellular and Skype backends for Telepathy over the past years.

Also, at the Collabora stand we’re demoing DSP-accelerated video calls on an OMAP board using GStreamer, and integration with various services in MeeGo Netbook via Telepathy. Collabora folks working on all kinds of projects will be around; see you there!

The queue for registration

Along with something like 15 other Collaborans, I'm at the MeeGo Conference 2010 in Dublin. I've somehow managed never to visit Ireland before, so I'm hoping to find some time to explore a bit while I'm here.

I'm giving a talk titled The Road to Telepathy 1.0 tomorrow at 9am (yerk!) in the Vavasour Suite. I'll be sketching out a rough roadmap, or rather collection of related goals and schedules; also, there'll be an update on ongoing feature development. Right afterwards, at 9.30, the inimitable Mikhail Zabaluev is speaking on Developing Communication Protocol Implementations in Telepathy, based on Nokia's experience developing SIP, cellular and Skype backends for Telepathy over the past years.

Also, at the Collabora stand we're demoing DSP-accelerated video calls on an OMAP board using GStreamer, and integration with various services in MeeGo Netbook via Telepathy. Collabora folks working on all kinds of projects will be around; see you there!

SMS is a fantastic service for person to person communication, but just about every other aspect of it is broken. Lately I’ve been paying a lot more attention to messaging because of the mobile web. It’s a current area of drastic disparity between native apps and web apps on mobile, and something that keeps folks tied to a particular platform. SMS sucking is why we have cloud to device messaging for Android and iOS and BlackBerry specific push APIs.

Rafe and Reggie are at the MeeGo Conference in Dublin. Here we have live coverage from day two and day three; we'll be bringing you live coverage, with updates from the sessions and surrounding activities. Joining us in our live coverage is mobile analyst Julien Fourgeaud and The Handheld Blog. We're using Cover It Live, which is embedded below, and lets you read the latest updates, view pictures, vote in polls and add your own comments and questions

I have had a Nokia N900 cellphone for almost a year now, and for me, it has been the best mobile device I’ve had yet. There are lots of interesting developments continuing to go on with the phone, even though it and its operating system appears to be reaching the end of its life. So, I thought this would be a good chance to look at what ideas from the N900 and other devices ought to be carried forward to future devices. This is, perhaps, especially relevant with Nokia now selling the N8 and MeeGo developers having a conference right now.
<!--break-->
First, I should note that everyone has different needs and desires of a mobile device. For some, simply making phone calls is enough. Others want texting, the ability to take pictures and videos, the ability to play music and games, the ability to run various apps, and some even want a device that is easy and fun to hack. As you add on more features, you also add on complexity and people who want simple devices may get frustrated with very complicated devices.

I like a lot of the concepts that the Aro Mobile folks lay out. Though their promotional video makes me very concerned about their future. Someone over there is horribly horribly out of touch. They’ve got a much more sane one up on their website, so I hope that youTube version was just a failed experiment.

A lot of the value that they’re delivering stems from contextual awareness, which is hardly a new concept. It’s just amazingly difficult to deliver. Most of the objections I’m seeing voiced in the press are related to security and privacy. Unfortunately that seems to be the bugaboo that gets thrown out there when they don’t have anything else to object to. That argument is boring and tired, I’m hoping we can move past it pretty quickly.

Me personally, I’m willing to share a whole lot of info to end up with a better mobile user experience. I just signed up for the beta. WANT! Aro Mobile folks, if you need data, I’m willing to share it. Contact lists, email, calendar, current GPS coordinates, retinal scans, bloodwork, whatever. If you can deliver on what you promise, I’m in.

Firefox for Mobile HomeSkin: A new featured add-on for mobile - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2010... November 16 from Missmobile's Blog » HomeSkin:... - Comment - Like

At the moment I’m at the MeeGo conference in Dublin, finally finding a bit of time to blog on what I have been working on for the past 2 weeks. The conference is really well organised and the location is a bit unusual but awesome. For me, the best thing about this conference seems to be the possibility of meeting so many people that I know because of GNOME, Collabora and Maemo/MeeGo. Considering that Collabora is now employing several KDE people, this conference is also a good way to meet more KDE developers while awaiting for the Desktop Summit in Berlin.

The Aviva stadium

Nowadays, Empathy uses libfolks to access contacts and to merge multiple contacts (called personas in Folks) into a single “meta-contact” (called individual).
On MeeGo, on the other hand, it seems that QtContacts (part of QtMobility) is the future. QtContacts is just an API and relies on backends for the actual access to contacts, so why not trying to have QtContacts using libfolks? In the last weeks I worked a bit on writing a QtFolks backed for QtContacts and a small demo written in QML to show what the backend can do.

The demo showing some of my XMPP contacts

Folks doesn’t just want to be a library for IM contacts, but a generic library to access all of your contacts. The next logical step was to add extra backends to access more sources of contacts.
If you use the Facebook XMPP server, you can already have access to Facebook friends and chat with them, but you don’t get all the information that are available through the web API. This is why I modified the Facebook libsocialweb plugin to also access Facebook contacts and added new interfaces to libfolks to expose this information. Moreover, we can rely of the Facebook ID to automatically merge the persona from the Facebook XMPP and the one from the Facebook web API into a single individual.

A contact with multiple IM addresses and information coming from Facebook too

Today is the ‘unconference’ day of the first ever ‘MeeGo Conference’ and thus much more relaxed. The last two days have had the Aviva Stadium abuzz with packed sessions, lots of energy and a ton of chatter about the future of MeeGo. Add to that that every attendee of the MeeGo Conference is being given away a MeeGo touting Lenovo IdeaPad and you can image what the atmosphere is like.

But instead of trying to convey what is going on in words, here are tons of pictures from day 1, 2 and 3. Time to put the ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’ proverb to the test.

Find the entire set on Flickr, or watch the slideshow below.

Similar Posts:

• Live From The MeeGo Conference
• MeeGo Gets A Second Conference: May 23-25 In San Francisco
• Registrations For The MeeGo Conference In May Now Open
• LG To Show Off Prototype Devices At Next Month’s MeeGo Conference
• Get The Default N900 Wallpaper For Your Device

It’s nice to see that Nokia’s strategy is slowly becoming clear to the mainstream media, as this article in the Wall Street Journal shows. While it does (eventually) get to the point, it starts as many articles do, from a false statement, magnified by Stephen Elop’s new role as CEO. Namely “his first decision was to go it alone and not adopt Android.” A statement that makes for a headline but has no basis in commercial reality.

Linpus have announced a tablet operating system based on MeeGo. The platform was on show at the Dublin MeeGo Conference this week, running both on a prototype tablet device and a netbook. The OS has been built upon the MeeGo 1.1 core, but with a bespoke multi-touch user interface and six custom made applications. The platform is aimed at OEM's rather than consumers, and therefore will undergo further brand-specific customisations before it reaches the market.

This tutorial is designed for those ones that need DBus but suffer a lot to find documentation even about simple things, such as how to pass a dictionary as parameter.

Initially, I had to invoke a Bluez method that needs a dictionary as parameter. But how could I do it? It not easy at all to find a detailed documentation about it and I had to look for a solution at BlueZ source code.

In this case, I'm using the newest BlueZ Health API (support for HDP/MCAP). The following piece of code shows

static char *start_health_session(DBusConnection *conn)
{

  DBusMessage *msg, *reply;
  DBusMessageIter args;
  DBusError err;
  const char *reply_path;
  char *path;

  msg = dbus_message_new_method_call("org.bluez", 
                                     "/org/bluez", 
                                     "org.bluez.HealthManager",
                                     "CreateApplication");

  if (!msg) {
      printf(" network:dbus Can't allocate new method call\n");
      return NULL;
  }

  // append arguments

  dbus_message_iter_init_append(msg, &args);

  if ( !iter_append_dictionary(&args, DATA_TYPE_VALUE, 
                                          ROLE_VALUE,
                                          DESCRIPTION_VALUE, 
                                          CHANNEL_TYPE_VALUE) ) {
      printf(" network:dbus Can't append parameters\n");
      dbus_message_unref(msg);
      return NULL;
  }

  dbus_error_init(&err);

....
}

A DBus dict type needs a message iterator, which is properly initialised before it is used.

Once the message iterator is properly created, let's open it and add tuples to it.

static int iter_append_dictionary(DBusMessageIter *iter, 
                                  dbus_uint16_t dataType,
                                  const char *role,
                                  const char *description,
                                  const char *channelType)
{
  DBusMessageIter dict;

  dbus_message_iter_open_container(iter, DBUS_TYPE_ARRAY,
            DBUS_DICT_ENTRY_BEGIN_CHAR_AS_STRING
            DBUS_TYPE_STRING_AS_STRING DBUS_TYPE_VARIANT_AS_STRING
            DBUS_DICT_ENTRY_END_CHAR_AS_STRING, &dict);

  dict_append_entry(&dict, "DataType", DBUS_TYPE_UINT16, &dataType);

  dict_append_entry(&dict, "Role", DBUS_TYPE_STRING, &role);

  dict_append_entry(&dict, "Description", DBUS_TYPE_STRING, &description);

  dict_append_entry(&dict, "ChannelType", DBUS_TYPE_STRING, &channelType);

  dbus_message_iter_close_container(iter, &dict);
}

At first, you have to open the container and specify the data type of each tuple. In this case, the dictionary consists of tuples , , , and . Once the value data type for each tuple varies (uint16 or string), we declare it as a variant. Therefore, the dictionary data type definition is:

DBUS_DICT_ENTRY_BEGIN_CHAR_AS_STRING
DBUS_TYPE_STRING_AS_STRING DBUS_TYPE_VARIANT_AS_STRING
DBUS_DICT_ENTRY_END_CHAR_AS_STRING

Finally, you simply add the basic data type to message iterator (the dictionary itself).

static void append_variant(DBusMessageIter *iter, int type, void *val)
{
  DBusMessageIter value;
  char sig[2] = { type, '\0' };

  dbus_message_iter_open_container(iter, DBUS_TYPE_VARIANT, sig, &value);

  dbus_message_iter_append_basic(&value, type, val);

  dbus_message_iter_close_container(iter, &value);
}

static void dict_append_entry(DBusMessageIter *dict,
   const char *key, int type, void *val)
{
  DBusMessageIter entry;

  if (type == DBUS_TYPE_STRING) {
    const char *str = *((const char **) val);
    if (str == NULL)
      return;
  }

  dbus_message_iter_open_container(dict, DBUS_TYPE_DICT_ENTRY,
                                   NULL, &entry);

  dbus_message_iter_append_basic(&entry, DBUS_TYPE_STRING, &key);

  append_variant(&entry, type, val);

  dbus_message_iter_close_container(dict, &entry);
}

Well, I'm back from Dublin. I'm sure there will be lots of really valuable reflection on the technical stuff, the marketing stuff and the code. But as a bear of very little brain, I thought I'd take a chance to reflect on the whole experience, the conference as a conference and my own reason for being there.

Well, I'm back from Dublin. I'm sure there will be lots of really valuable reflection on the technical stuff, the marketing stuff and the code. But as a bear of very little brain, I thought I'd take a chance to reflect on the whole experience, the conference as a conference and my own reason for being there.

The other day, over porter somewhere in Dublin, we were discussing people who run curses-based applications in the X terminal under Maemo, rather than using the GUI. (For example, some people run mutt rather than modest, irssi rather than xchat, and so on.) Sometimes people do this because they want or need to run the client on a remote machine, and they don't want to bother with X forwarding. Sometimes they just prefer the character interface.

The idea was then floated of having an escape sequence which caused the client to pop up a notification, so that even a curses-based application running on a remote server could alert you that you had new mail, or that someone had just said your name in channel.

So on the plane home, I hacked up an example implementation:



You can find the patches here:

• patch to vte
• patch to gnome-terminal
• the Python script used above to demonstrate

Further thoughts:

• it still needs osso-xterm integration, but that should be easy
• patches to mutt, irssi, and so on to produce these sequences would be useful
• we need to work out something to do with terminfo to report that this sequence may be generated
• it uses OSC code 55, which is otherwise unused in gnome-terminal, but I don't know whether anyone else uses it for anything.  (The relevant spec, ECMA-48, says that OSC codes are user-defined, but I'd still rather not tread on anyone's toes.)
• it only allows the sequence to be terminated by BEL; this is traditional, but ECMA-48 actually requires ST instead.  This will be trivial to allow as well.
• I'm not at all sure about min/max versions of libnotify

(Of course, there are also other ways to get the same effect.  But I think this is a good general solution.)

(Edit: naltrexone suggests appropriate Flann O'Brien parody.)

Your thoughts (and patches) are welcome, as always.

comments

The other day, over porter somewhere in Dublin, we were discussing people who run curses-based applications in the X terminal under Maemo, rather than using the GUI. (For example, some people run mutt rather than modest, irssi rather than xchat, and so on.) Sometimes people do this because they want or need to run the client on a remote machine, and they don't want to bother with X forwarding. Sometimes they just prefer the character interface.

The idea was then floated of having an escape sequence which caused the client to pop up a notification, so that even a curses-based application running on a remote server could alert you that you had new mail, or that someone had just said your name in channel.

So on the plane home, I hacked up an example implementation:



You can find the patches here:

• patch to vte
• patch to gnome-terminal
• the Python script used above to demonstrate

Further thoughts:

• it still needs osso-xterm integration, but that should be easy
• patches to mutt, irssi, and so on to produce these sequences would be useful
• we need to work out something to do with terminfo to report that this sequence may be generated
• it uses OSC code 55, which is otherwise unused in gnome-terminal, but I don't know whether anyone else uses it for anything.  (The relevant spec, ECMA-48, says that OSC codes are user-defined, but I'd still rather not tread on anyone's toes.)
• it only allows the sequence to be terminated by BEL; this is traditional, but ECMA-48 actually requires ST instead.  This will be trivial to allow as well.
• I'm not at all sure about min/max versions of libnotify

(Of course, there are also other ways to get the same effect.  But I think this is a good general solution.)

(Edit: naltrexone suggests appropriate Flann O'Brien parody.)

Your thoughts (and patches) are welcome, as always.

comments

I had in my original release of kQOAuth some pieces of code in the HMAC-SHA1 implementation that used C char pointers as data arrays instead of QByteArrays (you can blame my laziness for this...). These caused issues on non-UNIX based Qt platforms like Symbian but also on Windows, of course. I have now replaced those parts with pure Qt implementations.

Read more on kQOAuth now compatible with all Qt platforms...

Technorati Tags: kqoauth, oauth, Qt, symbian, windows

I've attended the MeeGo Conference 2010 in Dublin this week. Meeting people, playing werewolf or table tennis and discussing MeeGo Python are just some of the great things about this conference.

One of my burning questions for third-party app development ("QWidget? MeeGo Touch? QML? Which one of those?") was answered with "QML". I've played with QML before, and it's great, but right now, one has to work on a very low level (as in "design your own buttons") and without any UI style guidelines. Let's hope the Qt Components provide reusable UI parts there and that the style guidelines are published as soon as possible.

I've also got some gPodder feedback: Niels suggested subscription pausing and auto-deletion of episodes (both are already implemented and just need exposure as UI elements). Murray suggested a custom TreeModel implementation for the episode list, which I've started working on now. Mike suggested the often-requested multi-episode deletion feature, which is also something I plan for the next release.

On Wednesday, we had a Python BoF to discuss the state and future of MeeGo Python. I'm looking forward to using PySide for the QML UI of gPodder. A PySide/QML workshop is planned for the next PyUGAT meeting, so join in if you are in Vienna in early December.

Oh, and the IdeaPad that we got from Intel is great. Thanks a lot for that. Will come in handy for prototyping and testing Touch UI interfaces!

Hope to see you again in a future MeeGo event :)

The first MeeGo conference was held last week, in Dublin. This event was the first chance for students, developers, and people from the industry to get together and discuss advancing the platform. Our very own Rafe Blandord was there covering the event, and will be reporting on his experiences. In the meantime, here's a round-up of interesting and personal accounts of the event from members of the MeeGo community.

Please forgive the cheesy title :-) As everyone wrapping up the conference has said, it was a great place; well organised and a fantastic atmosphere. Here are some of my bullet point thoughts:

Please forgive the cheesy title :-) As everyone wrapping up the conference has said, it was a great place; well organised and a fantastic atmosphere. Here are some of my bullet point thoughts:

I'm hereby releasing a public beta of robotfindskitten version 2.0 for MeeGo. I've been sitting on it for far too long. This is a complete rewrite in Qt. It's only designed for the netbook; I haven't tested on the handset. It should work fine on the Lenovo machines distributed at the MeeGo conference.

Links:

• The RPM is here, mirrored here. Install it with rpm -i rfk-2.0.0-1.i586.rpm.
• Screenshots: the launcher, the front screen, a game in progress.
• The source is in git here, mirrored here.
• Doxygen of the source is here, mirrored here.
• If you know nothing about robotfindskitten, see robotfindskitten.org or Wikipedia's article.

If you lot like this, it will go into the Garage.  There are some issues I still need to consider; let me know what you think:

• Is it a good reimplementation of Maemo rfk?  Is it a good implementation of rfk in its own right?
• Is it playable?
• Are dialogue boxes a reasonable implementation of the popup messages?  On Maemo I used banners (thus), which were perhaps less intrusive.
• For those of you who know Qt and C++, I would appreciate some code review.
• On the handset it's still going to vibrate when robotfindskitten.  Do you think it should bleep or something (or miaow) on the netbook?

I think Planet GNOME will be getting this as well because my feed setup doesn't have tags specific enough; I apologise in advance.


comments

I'm hereby releasing a public beta of robotfindskitten version 2.0 for MeeGo. I've been sitting on it for far too long. This is a complete rewrite in Qt. It's only designed for the netbook; I haven't tested on the handset. It should work fine on the Lenovo machines distributed at the MeeGo conference.

Links:

• The RPM is here, mirrored here. Install it with rpm -i rfk-2.0.0-1.i586.rpm.
• Screenshots: the launcher, the front screen, a game in progress.
• The source is in git here, mirrored here.
• Doxygen of the source is here, mirrored here.
• If you know nothing about robotfindskitten, see robotfindskitten.org or Wikipedia's article.

If you lot like this, it will go into the Garage.  There are some issues I still need to consider; let me know what you think:

• Is it a good reimplementation of Maemo rfk?  Is it a good implementation of rfk in its own right?
• Is it playable?
• Are dialogue boxes a reasonable implementation of the popup messages?  On Maemo I used banners (thus), which were perhaps less intrusive.
• For those of you who know Qt and C++, I would appreciate some code review.
• On the handset it's still going to vibrate when robotfindskitten.  Do you think it should bleep or something (or miaow) on the netbook?

I think Planet GNOME will be getting this as well because my feed setup doesn't have tags specific enough; I apologise in advance.


comments

I stood there in the queue to receive my Conference Freebee Idea-pad fully expecting to be turned away. These devices were for the devs to work on, no?

I stood there in the queue to receive my Conference Freebee Idea-pad fully expecting to be turned away. These devices were for the devs to work on, no?

Thanks to the generosity of the Linux Foundation I flew out and attended Meego Conference this year as well as payed for a couple extra days to see Dublin.  This is my first time out of the United States (I did pop across the border into western Canada for 10 minutes but I don't think that counts).  I've been a Maemo user since the 770 but I never before attended any of the Maemo Summits.  This was a great experience.

Yep, I didn’t blog about MeeGo Conference yet. But come on, a lot happened during the last few days I barely had time to sleep really well (those that know me can tell histories about my sleep-walking and sleep-talking hehe).

However, just to keep everybody updated before I do a full post or read an article on the dot here it is a simple video that means a lot!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKdLCGCTu8w

Basically we put Plasma mobile to run on top of MeeGo and thanks to a lot of Marco’s work we already supported screen rotation! Besides the “fail” that drivers don’t properly report that the screen is being rotated on this device, pressing some keys we can make the view rotate and then comes the magic

Of course we also put the Plasma netbook to run on the device but the mobile one was really nice to play with our hands Keep your eyes on the Planet as I think more people have news to share

More about the sprint and the conference after the break

The enthusiasm at this conference was pretty impressive. It was probably the right boost for the MeeGo project at the right time as engineers of involved companies could get to know each other and hopefully now also understand a bit better the needs and expectations of the community with regard to openness. At least some of them. ;-)

(Compared to other conferences) I went to a lot of talks in order to get a better understanding of MeeGo.

After the initial keynotes and Dawn Foster’s “State of the community” talk I went to Eric & Stephen’s “Error management Tools and Processes” talk which helped realizing what we are after in the field of error management.

My second day started with Quim’s Marketing session and Dave Neary’s enjoyable “Community Anti-Patterns” (many of them already well known from Maemo). Didn’t manage to attend Stskeeps’ “MeeGo on N900” talk because of some chats in front of the venue and in the entrance hall. Continued with the insightful “MeeGo L10N/I18N upstream”, “Community Metrics” and “Community Application support”.

The “MeeGo Quality Approach” talk by Veli-Pekka Valula and May Xie was helpful to understand the complexity of QA and why help in improving the bug management is welcome. Also a nice opportunity to meet the Intel QA folks from the mailing list in person!

My own BoF session “Handling bug reports in bugs.meego.com” was on Wednesday morning right after the great Guinness party the evening before. Hence I incorrectly expected not to see many people around (and me being sleepy and tired) but according to feedback it went well and I think we had fun (well, I had!).
When I created my slides I had Josh Berkus’ “How to Prevent Community: Making Sure Your Pond Stays Small” in mind but I kept sticking to issues specific to bug management that could be done better in Maemo and MeeGo. Right now there are mostly bug reports by people with a technical background in the bugtracker but once MeeGo becomes more popular we will have to deal with user reports with different qualities and points of view.
I hope the video will soon be available somewhere here.

All in all I had a good time in Dublin that left me in a positive mood regarding the future of MeeGo.

The enthusiasm at this conference was pretty impressive. It was probably the right boost for the MeeGo project at the right time as engineers of involved companies could get to know each other and hopefully now also understand a bit better the needs and expectations of the community with regard to openness. At least some [...]

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-11-15 through 2010-11-21

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-11-15 through 2010-11-21

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-11-15 through 2010-11-21

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-11-15 through 2010-11-21

Front Page

Community OBS is live

David Greaves and Niels Breet announced, in their "Community build system" session at the MeeGo Conference, that the community build system is now live. Similar to the combined maemo.org Extras/Packages & auto-builder, one of the advantages it will give is the ability to have Ubuntu PPA-style personal repositories, replacing Extras-devel and reducing the risks of tracking the development of particular pieces of software.

I was shooting a lots of videos at the MeeGo conference with my HDSLR equipment and I managed to put the first ones online. I will upload more videos later, but I decided to get these published now that I have something in a timely manner shortly after the #meegoconf.

These first two do not feature any presentations or presenters, devices (like the Lenovo idea pad which I did not receive myself btw), they are just trying to illustrate the location and few attendants. The latter one has myself also for a short moment visible.

First one (not color corrected, no music, clips just joined together):
Raw footage from Aviva Stadium

Second one (color corrected, with music):
Aviva Stadium (with Music)

If you were there, I hope you like the imagery I captured and it will help keeping the first MeeGo Conference in your memories.

I may publish some of the videos later on Vimeo but because I am not plus member, I can't upload there more than one video per week, therefore these first ones are coming via Youtube (worse quality), sorry about it.

You'll remember that I've been evolving a number of theories on the subject of just what makes a 'smartphone' smart? I postulated that Nokia's definition (and mine) of a 'smartphone' differed rather wildly from that of the popular tech media, who are really talking about what we're now starting to term 'superphones'. In the feature below, I present more analysis of the mobile device world, showing that there are in fact four specific 'bands' of form and functionality - bands that will always exist - one size really can't fit all. 

AAS fans might like to note that our very own Rafe Blandford and David Gilson have been the guests on The Phones Show Chat podcast over the last two weeks, Rafe in chat 64 and David in chat 63, providing analysis with their own particular slant, notably with much mention of MeeGo, still prominent in the news following the conference last week, but also with masses of Symbian chat as well. Worth a listen to one of them over your lunch-hour? Also, see below for an important URL change for 3-Lib and The Phones Show - my old web server is disappearing up Sky's tailpipe at the end of 2010!

Since the Meego Conference in Dublin, many members of the community have already presented their thoughts on the venue, presentations, social events, etc. Those summaries echo what I felt while there. It was a fantastic experience, larger and better than the Maemo Summit last year.

As a conference wrap-up, I'll share a few highlights and takeaways that I had:

Seeing Carsten Munk on stage during Doug Fisher's keynote was, I believe, critical for MeeGo - it highlighted the openess that the project is trying to achieve.

IVI --> In-Vehicle Infotainment seems like a challenging aspect for MeeGo, due to the integration of other devices/sensors into the mix. As some of you know, I have a 'passing interest' in aviation, and immediately saw the potential for MeeGo as a base for IFE Systems (In-Flight Entertainment). Other than the usual entertainment use-cases, I see new angles: being able to bring your own content from your phone/portable media player to the seat-back displays; sharing that content with other seat-backs; Instant Messaging with other passengers.

Media Panel --> Monday at 5:15 pm was the media-only panel session chaired by Jim Zemlin of Linux Foundation. It was personally rewarding to be considered a member of the MeeGo Media, and I was elated to have finally met esteemed bloggers Mark Guim (The Nokia Blog), Vaibhav Sharma (The Handheld Blog), and Rafe Blanford (All About MeeGo). In terms of the panel session, it was a reiteration of the themes introduced in the morning keynotes.

Handset --> Not much to get excited about yet, since the Handset UX is not usable from an end-user perspective. Many handset veterans (read: maemo.org folk) expressed that it is hard to get excited when you do not see the hardware/software in your hands. I agree - the N900's that were distributed at the Maemo Summit gave everyone an instant stake in Maemo - it is unfortunate that MeeGo based hardware from Nokia was not ready for Dublin.

IdeaPad Giveaway --> Thanks to Intel for the generous gift of the Lenovo IdeaPad. The MeeGo Netbook UX is not the ideal setup for this device due to its rotatable touchscreen. I would like to see something that handles both Netbook and Tablet UX on this device, which at this point in time, does not exist. If I were to chose one, I would go for the Tablet UX flavour for the Lenovo. But the Tablet UX seems to have disappeared from the MeeGo project! I expect we will see a usable solution for the IdeaPad soon, as there are people actively looking at improving the IdeaPad experience on forum.meego.com.

In closing, I extend my sincere thanks to the Linux Foundation, Nokia, Intel and other sponsors of the event. It was a fabulous time, and I look forward to MeeGo's maturity where I can use it as an everyday OS in my mobile life.

Today I activated my UbuntuOne account again and enabled mobile service + extra 20GB storage (such set is given free for Canonical people). Now I wonder did it had sense…

On my desktop I am running KDE 4.5.3 under 11.04 ‘natty’ development release. Why is it important? Because there is no client for such combination. It looks like you need to run GNOMEbuntu or Microsoft Windows to have some kind of U1 integration. Otherwise I need to run shell command (or use GTK app) to login.

But ok, I installed all required packages and it connected. Synced Tomboy notes from desktop and Conboy ones from my Nokia N900 so now I have them in sync (without a way to select which one I want where but that’s limit of apps). Then I decided to make use from synchronization of contacts. And here the fun begins… My phone is not supported by Funambol (syncml backend used by Ubuntu One) so sorry — all I can use is one bug on LaunchPad.

So what’s left? Files — good to have 20GB of storage for something. Maybe will start using it one day. Now I spend time mostly at home so wifi/ethernet connection works and I have access to all media on my machines. Other is bookmarks — but only Firefox is supported (by extension) and I switched to Chromium few months ago.

But who knows… maybe it will have some use one day.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Ubuntu One — good or bad? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Funnily enough, someone was asking about virtual keyboards on gtk-list this morning.

Last week at the MeeGo Conference several people were talking about virtual keyboards, and the idea came up of doing predictive text, either by making more likely letters physically larger, or merely by increasing their sensitivity.

When I came home, I wrote a JavaScript mock-up based on a third-order Markov chain. It's quite fun to play with, especially on a touchscreen.

When I showed this to a few people at Collabora and elsewhere, Rob McQueen suggested avoiding reinventing the wheel by using the rather wonderful Dasher system as a back end. So, after a longish hacking session, here it is:



State of the keyboard after typing "FLO".

Click here to see a video of the keyboard in action

The front end shown here is just a custom GTK widget I threw together; in real life it would use an existing input method. I've exaggerated the differences between letter sizes for demonstration. (As I mentioned above, the physical letter sizes might not change at all.)

There is a wiki page about all this. Let me know if you'd be interested in helping work on this; I'll be releasing the code shortly, and adding a link on the wiki to it. (Odd thought: I wonder how useful another demonstration piece of JavaScript would be, pulling data from Dasher running as a CGI. Let me know.)

There is also an existing roughly similar system for Android, and, I hear, for the iPhone.

Update: An AJAX version you can play with.

comments

Funnily enough, someone was asking about virtual keyboards on gtk-list this morning.

Last week at the MeeGo Conference several people were talking about virtual keyboards, and the idea came up of doing predictive text, either by making more likely letters physically larger, or merely by increasing their sensitivity.

When I came home, I wrote a JavaScript mock-up based on a third-order Markov chain. It's quite fun to play with, especially on a touchscreen.

When I showed this to a few people at Collabora and elsewhere, Rob McQueen suggested avoiding reinventing the wheel by using the rather wonderful Dasher system as a back end. So, after a longish hacking session, here it is:



State of the keyboard after typing "FLO".

Click here to see a video of the keyboard in action

The front end shown here is just a custom GTK widget I threw together; in real life it would use an existing input method. I've exaggerated the differences between letter sizes for demonstration. (As I mentioned above, the physical letter sizes might not change at all.)

There is a wiki page about all this. Let me know if you'd be interested in helping work on this; I'll be releasing the code shortly, and adding a link on the wiki to it. (Odd thought: I wonder how useful another demonstration piece of JavaScript would be, pulling data from Dasher running as a CGI. Let me know.)

There is also an existing roughly similar system for Android, and, I hear, for the iPhone.

Update: An AJAX version you can play with.

comments

Nokia has announced it has appointed Jerri DeVard as Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. A new Marketing and Communication organisation will be formed under the CMO, which will bring together Nokia's Marketing, Brand Management, Communications and select Industry collaboration activities. DeVard will sit on the Nokia Group Executive Board, underlining the seniority and importance of her position, but will report to Niklas Savander, EVP of Nokia's Markets unit.

I originally started this blog for one reason: I felt that I needed to communicate the strategies we were executing especially in the area of open source. I was responsible for the most part of it at Nokia, and I thought you wanna hear it from me. Thank you for all the feed back. All of it!

From the early days of Nokia 770 everything has changed. We did turn the company around and put both open source and MeeGo into the center of Nokia. We released Nokia's first Linux and open source based smartphone, the Nokia N900, and participated the creation of the Maemo community. We then joined forces with Intel and others and created MeeGo operations to continue that work we started. And my dear colleagues and community members continue doing that. It will be a great success!

But I moved on. I started at HP / Palm 3 days ago. I'm exited and thrilled about this opportunity. I've always been a great fan of webOS and I'm now proud to be a part of this great team. One of the first things I did even before joining was to install and try out the SDK. I was impressed to see how easily I got started with it!

I do not know yet what are my future needs for communicating through this channel. Palm seems to have good publicity actions going on, such as developer days and sites. But we will see .... talk to you soon!

Further to my previous post:

Here's a live AJAX-based version you can play with. It's not very fast unless the word is cached, and it only takes at most a word of context (unlike the real thing, where the context is everything you've ever typed), but it should serve to demonstrate the principle.

Now to release the code, and to look into patching existing VKB systems.

comments

Further to my previous post:

Here's a live AJAX-based version you can play with. It's not very fast unless the word is cached, and it only takes at most a word of context (unlike the real thing, where the context is everything you've ever typed), but it should serve to demonstrate the principle.

Now to release the code, and to look into patching existing VKB systems.

comments

I’ve had a few days now since the first-ever MeeGo Conference ended to jettison the jet lag and sort my thoughts, so it’s time to run through experiences there.  This will come from a purely personal viewpoint; later I’ll do a more objective analysis of the event.  Apologies in advance for the epic length.

Sleepless, browsing through the internet. Noticing that someone in  Singapore is on their way home. Joining the adventure just for the fun of it, not moving out from my bedroom

Kudos to the web programmers and the rest of the team at GSM Arena, who have produced the really rather cool 'Photo Compare Tool'. Essentially they've taken a large number of recent phones and smartphones and shot the same three test photos with each (ISO 12233, Grey and Colour). You can then choose which three phones you'd like to compare using the drop-down pick lists and click any of the offered crops to show the full photo in the main window. Oh heck, just go try it, you'll see what I mean. Curiously, the Symbian-powered camera champions, the Nokia N86, Samsung i8910 and Sony Ericsson Satio aren't represented, but there's still plenty of other Symbian (and Maemo) interest. Full list below.

Next Wednesday will have the annual Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions member meeting and the Helsinki MeeGo Network meetup held together in Hotel Scandic Continental. The COSS meeting starts at 4pm, continuing with the MeeGo meetup at 6pm.

The event will be keynoted by Nokia's MeeGo Developer Advocate Ronan Mac Laverty. Register now!

Version 1.9 of MaePad is out, with a new translation into Catalan, updated Finnish (thanks to Marko Vertainen) and German translations, a "No items" indicator in empty checklists and full auto-rotation support (detailed changelog).

The File Transfers application seemingly does some weird things to "Open file" dialogs in other apps (not only MaePad, but reportedly also Xournal), so MaePad now conflicts with it until the problem is fixed (this means you can't have both "File Transfers" and "MaePad" installed at the same time). Test and vote for MaePad 1.9 in Extras-Testing!

Also new is MaePadWeb 2.1, which adds a missing dependency on python-simplejson. The app worked fine for me since the initial release, so I'm also promoting it to Testing now. Test and vote for MaePadWeb 2.1 in Extras-Testing!

And as a third release this week, I noticed that Trophae, the PS3 Trophy Viewer app, didn't get its newest release (6) uploaded to Fremantle Extras-Devel for two months, so I've re-uploaded it, and also put it up for testing. And even though the code is lame, it's now published in a Git repository if you want to hack on it. Test and vote for Trophae 6 in Extras-Testing!

A new release of your favourite podcatcher is coming in the next few days. There is still time to submit updated translations :)

Earlier this year, arising out of a conversation at GUADEC, I wrote a nautilus plugin to upload images to imgur.com. (This is useful because imgur doesn't require an account: you can just install, hit "upload", and off you go.)

Here is a copy of the same thing as a MeeGo RPM, suitable for use on the Lenovo machines distributed at the MeeGo conference. Once this is installed, you can select a .jpg image in the file browser, press the menu button, and choose "Post to imgur" from the resulting menu. Equivalently, you can choose the same option from the Edit menu. The image will be uploaded, and the web browser will pop up at the new URL.  Then you can send it to your friends, embed it in a blog post, or whatever you like.

The source is here.

Things I would like to do with this:

• Add a similar menu option to the image viewer (which is currently Eye of GNOME).   I haven't looked into how easy it is to extend eog.
• Add an icon to the launcher which brought up a file chooser.
• Separate out the uploading part to a DBus service.
• Do this as a libsharing plugin for Maemo.  I would do this, but I have broken my scratchbox and have no tuits to fix it.
• Have some app which remembered the images you'd uploaded and helped you find them again.  Especially, if you try to upload the same image twice, it should just take you to the previous copy.

Let me know if you use this, what feedback you have, and whether any of the above would be useful to you.

comments

Earlier this year, arising out of a conversation at GUADEC, I wrote a nautilus plugin to upload images to imgur.com. (This is useful because imgur doesn't require an account: you can just install, hit "upload", and off you go.)

Here is a copy of the same thing as a MeeGo RPM, suitable for use on the Lenovo machines distributed at the MeeGo conference. Once this is installed, you can select a .jpg image in the file browser, press the menu button, and choose "Post to imgur" from the resulting menu. Equivalently, you can choose the same option from the Edit menu. The image will be uploaded, and the web browser will pop up at the new URL.  Then you can send it to your friends, embed it in a blog post, or whatever you like.

The source is here.

Things I would like to do with this:

• Add a similar menu option to the image viewer (which is currently Eye of GNOME).   I haven't looked into how easy it is to extend eog.
• Add an icon to the launcher which brought up a file chooser.
• Separate out the uploading part to a DBus service.
• Do this as a libsharing plugin for Maemo.  I would do this, but I have broken my scratchbox and have no tuits to fix it.
• Have some app which remembered the images you'd uploaded and helped you find them again.  Especially, if you try to upload the same image twice, it should just take you to the previous copy.

Let me know if you use this, what feedback you have, and whether any of the above would be useful to you.

comments

Sooner or later it will be necessary to create a QML UI for gPodder if it is to integrate nicely with devices on which Qt is the "native" toolkit for third party apps. At the moment, the reusable UI elements that can be used with QML (Qt Components) have not yet been officially released (the Git repository is available on Gitorious, though), and there are no UI style guidelines for Harmattan out (yet?). I'm also not able to locate UI style guidelines for QML apps on Symbian^3, and there are only a few small sample QML apps out right now.

Let's look at what we have on Maemo 5 right now. Here's a simplified overview of the current Maemo 5 UI of gPodder:

You can also check out the full-size image (~ 3.5 MB).

The UI follows the Maemo 5 Style Guide where it makes sense and tries to come up with better solutions where the Style Guide does not have a definitive answer. I'd like to hear your opinion about the current UX of gPodder and how these concepts can be translated into a QML app that integrates nicely with "future" UIs (Harmattan, S^3). The new-style episode list that can be seen in this picture will be made available with the next release that will be out Really Soon Now™.

The following address summarizes the Maemo Community Council's take on MeeGo Conference 2010 and Maemo's Role in the Future Development of MeeGo...

The six of us laughed out loud as we filed into the sound-proof broadcast room that peered over the dark green expanse of Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Ireland. The irony of a private meeting between an otherwise open group of people was understood by all. Still, the only way that the current Maemo Community Council (along with Nokia employee, Tero Kojo) was going to find any sense of relief from the constant conference noise turned out to be in a room designed to keep others out. Privacy wasn't the point of this meeting, though. First, these sorts of events are the only time that the Council is ever able to meet face to face. Second, there weren't a whole lot of people at MeeGo Conference 2010 who would care much about what we were talking about. But, in our opinions the subjects which we discussed were quite important to our corner of the open source world, and may impact the future of Maemo quite extraordinarily. Glasses of wine and pints of beer accompanied a conversation that was both highly interesting and very fun.

I reflashed my device and the biggest annoyance after restoring the backup was recompiling the sharing-cli plugin as it was not in any repository. Now it is.

It has been working for me for several months without issues, although I’ve been sharing only medium size images over a decent connection. It might not succeed in sharing videos over GPRS.

For hints about the usage, see the previous post.

When my older daughters were young, I told them they could play any game on the computer that they could write. While I did not make this a strict hard and fast rule, we did take it somewhat seriously at it helped establish a more creative approach to the use of computer games.

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-11-22 through 2010-11-28

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-11-22 through 2010-11-28

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-11-22 through 2010-11-28

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-11-22 through 2010-11-28

Front Page

State of Maemo, Q3 2010.2

The latest post on the Maemo Community Council (of which one of your editors, Andrew Flegg, is a member) blog from Tim Samoff looks at some of the issues facing the maemo.org and the Maemo Community in the coming months and years after the MeeGo Confernce. "Over the next weeks and months, some of the things the Council discussed will be further investigated within the Maemo Community. Other items of interest will just begin to happen. But, the main thing to understand is that Nokia is still very interested in supporting this community and allowing us to carry forward in exciting ways. There are still plans to sponsor the community infrastructure (website, paid employees, etc.), ideas about opening various pieces of Maemo source code that are still closed, and helping us to develop a successful community SSU. Likewise, there are still plenty of Nokia employees -- even those who have been permanently reassigned to MeeGo -- who want to continue helping us to be a world class open source software community. If you're unsure of what MeeGo means for Maemo, understand that the Maemo Community's job is not complete. We may be entering a new phase of life, but there is still more to come." There are certain to be interesting times ahead both for Maemo and mobile open source in general and the Maemo Community is still positioned to be significantly involved in the changes taking.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • State of Maemo, Q3 2010.2
2. Applications
   • gPodder UX poll
   • MaePad updates
   • Moving Maemo 5 app UIs to MeeGo, Harmattan & Symbian
   • gPodder running with desktop UI & Maemo-style pannable areas on IdeaPad
3. Development
   • Getting started with OBS on MeeGo
   • Using Shed Skin to compile Python to C++
   • Qt Creator 2.1, with Qt Quick features, gets release candidate
4. Community
   • MeeGo Summit: Oulu, Finland May 30-June 1
   • Meegolandia 2011, Tampere, Finland Apr 15-16
   • Social News & Planet for MeeGo
   • MeeGo musicians assemble
5. In the Wild
   • Virtual keyboards, and dasher
   • ARM Cortex A9 demo from Sony Ericsson running MeeGo
6. Announcements
   • New N900 "Easy Debian" image available
   • Command-line sharing plugin now in Extras-devel

As promised last week, a new release of gPodder is out. The package for Maemo 5 is already in Extras-Testing, so test it and vote for it. The package for Maemo 4 has already been uploaded to the autobuilder and should be available shortly.

This new release brings yet another round of UI improvements, and it also incorporates the feedback that I got at the MeeGo Conference:

• Expose "Pause subscription" in UI
• Multi-delete in episode lists (Maemo bug 5182)
• Setting for episode auto-delete on startup
• Custom episode list model (faster loading)

You can find a detailed ChangeLog at gpodder.org/changelog/2.10.

If you are not yet a user of gPodder, why not take the opportunity to try it out? You could subscribe to the MeeGo Conference 2010 Video Podcast (Yahoo Pipe) and (re-)watch the sessions on your device. Of course, audio and video podcasts are supported as well, as are YouTube user channels and Soundcloud users.

With apologies to Dave Neary for stealing his excellent word, 'antipatterns', from his talk at MeeGo Conference.

This is an opinion piece. Feel free to skip it if you already know what you're doing when writing code.

We all have things we dislike in code, sometimes it's indentation, sometimes it's a bit less trivial. One of my current pet hatreds is excessive nesting.

For those of you that don't know what I mean, if you see something like this:

void foo(bool bar, bool lol, bool hax, bool meep)
{
    if (bar) {
        if (lol || hax) {
            if (meep) {
                // do something
            }
        }
    }
}

Then you're probably a victim of excessive nesting.

If you're writing code like this then all I can say is you're probably doing it wrong.

That above example might be written better like so:

void foo(bool bar, bool lol, bool hax, bool meep)
{
    if (!bar)
        return;

    if (!lol && !hax)
        return;

    if (!meep)
        return;

    // do something
}

Generally speaking, you want your code to be like a river: to flow from one point to another, and branch off gracefully, but still continue flowing nonetheless.

In more technical terms, this makes it a lot easier to take appropriate actions at any of those junctions (if, say someone wants logging added for all of those returns in future) and makes your code a lot easier to read.

Please stop and think about what you're doing, and refactor if necessary rather than blindly adding another conditional. It might be easier to add another level of nesting, but you'll suffer in the long term. Think about it.

As a general rule of thumb, I personally think if you have more than three levels of nesting, you might need to think whether you need a new method, or whether you need to rethink your code's flow.