As some might have noticed, bugs.maemo.org was upgraded from ancient version 2.22 to 3.4 last week. This means we now have a version running that is maintained upstream, a design that fits to the rest of maemo.org, less noisy comments, a frontpage that now states “This is a community issue tracker, sponsored by Nokia, not [...]

I was writing some tests for a project at Igalia and I need to mock the convert-frame playbin2 element action. The code to invoke it is something like this:

GstElement *pipeline = /* get pipeline */;
GstCaps *caps = /* create caps to adapt the conversion */;
GstBuffer *buffer = NULL;
g_signal_emit_by_name (pipeline, "convert-frame", caps, &buffer);

When you are writing tests, what you want to do is testing just your code and not to depend on something external, so in this case the idea would be providing a fake implementation for that GStreamer element action.

The way you can do this kind of things is providing the symbol in your code so that the linker when doing its job does not look any further and uses that instead of the one in the external library, so the natural solution coming to your mind would be rewriting g_signal_emit_by_name. The problem with this is that though you are not using it in your code, it is too general, so it is not a good idea.

I thought I could replace the convert-frame action in the playbin2 class, so I wrote this code:

typedef struct
{
  GstPipelineClass parent_class;
  void (*about_to_finish) (gpointer playbin);
  void (*video_changed) (gpointer playbin);
  void (*audio_changed) (gpointer playbin);
  void (*text_changed) (gpointer playbin);
  void (*video_tags_changed) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  void (*audio_tags_changed) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  void (*text_tags_changed) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  GstTagList *(*get_video_tags) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  GstTagList *(*get_audio_tags) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  GstTagList *(*get_text_tags) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  GstBuffer *(*convert_frame) (gpointer playbin, GstCaps * caps);
  GstPad *(*get_video_pad) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  GstPad *(*get_audio_pad) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  GstPad *(*get_text_pad) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
} GstPlayBinClass;

static gpointer
gst_play_bin_convert_frame (G_GNUC_UNUSED gpointer playbin,
                            G_GNUC_UNUSED gpointer caps)
{
    GstBuffer *buffer;

    /* Create my own GstBuffer with the data I need */

    return buffer;
}

void
simulator_gst_reset(GstElement *new_pipeline, GstBus *new_bus)
{
    /* ... */

    GstPlayBinClass *klass =
        G_TYPE_INSTANCE_GET_CLASS(new_pipeline, GST_PLAY_BIN_TYPE,
                                  GstPlayBinClass);
    klass->convert_frame = (gpointer) gst_play_bin_convert_frame;

    /* ... */
}

First I declared the GstPlayBinClass copying it from the GStreamer code. I didn’t change any parameters order, just replaced some pointers with gpointer as we don’t need them. This way you don’t break the ABI. Then you can declare your own element action code and finally you get the Class, assign the method and voilà!.

As I said, the solution is far from being the best, but if you know a better way, drop me a comment.

Last weekend almost all of us gathered together in what we call an Igalia Summit: a 2-day event where we discuss new ideas, relax, play music, and basically have fun and the opportunity to meet each other in person, something which is increasingly more difficult as Igalia becomes more and more global.

This time we also used the summit to invite some friends and celebrate our 9th anniversary dinner.

Although it sometimes feels like yesterday we started, 9 years is already a lot of time, and the feeling of looking back at our beginnings it not something that can be easily expressed with words. Of course things were very different back then and the company has changed a lot during all these years.

The core ideas, however, remain unchanged. One of them is our passion for free software, and that’s what we’re known for to most people. But there’s another key value that is equally important for us, and that is our flat structure.

For Igalia democracy is an essential value so we take it seriously. We think our people are the most important thing that we have, and thus deserve our highest respect. That’s why we not only like to hear their opinions: we also want them to propose, decide and participate in all affairs, so we give everyone a voice and a vote in all decisions.

If there’s something we have learnt during all these years is that when people can decide for themselves they are much happier and more committed to what they do. And when people are happy and committed we take the next logical step: we make them shareholders. Everyone who stays in the company long enough and is willing to continue can become a partner. We make no exceptions.

In November, 4 Igalians became partners of the company: Alejandro Piñeiro (API), Xabier Rodríguez Calvar (Calvaris), Javi Muñoz and Mario Sánchez. They’re all good friends and I’m very happy to have them with us.

2010 has been a good year for Igalia, and we’ll hopefully be celebrating our 10th anniversary soon. Free software has evolved a lot in these 9 years. We tried to make our contributions and we met lots of friends on the way.

We’re glad to be here for 9 years already and we’re also very proud to be part of this vibrant community.

Firefox for Mobile The Firefox Mobile Add-ons Cup has arrived! Develop a mobile add-on for Firefox and showcase your innovation to millions of mobile users. We’re looking for... - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2010... December 2 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

#leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top: 60%; left: 70px; } #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { height: 30px; width:50%; padding-top:1px; } #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height: 30px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; } Recently I’ve started (finally) realising my idea of creating application for Nokia N900. Since PR1.3 update is already available and Qt 4.7 is supported by N900 it’s easier to make new application. With Nokia Qt SDK it’s even easier, since it has possibility to test directly on your phone. First of all you need to install [...]

I've been playing with PySide and QML this week (more on that soon), but here's something that might be interesting to the Maemo community: Using the native Hildon look and feel of Maemo 5 in QML.

This QML demo uses the current theme graphics of Hildon and provides QML components that can be used just like their Hildon counterparts, but inside QML UIs. This is not a complete library, just a test of what could be possible in case anyone wants to step up and create and maintain a Hildon library of QML components. Here's a video:

The code for this demo is on Gitorious - you can try it out on your N900 using qmlviewer.

Firefox for Mobile Add-on Training at Add-on Con - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... December 5 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

On the recent trip to Dublin for the MeeGo Conference, I noticed that I had to spend time to reorganize the desktops and other settings of the N900 to be friendly for carrier roaming. In my carrier's home zone, I have unlimited data, but while roaming, the data costs rack up quickly.

My roaming setup is:

1. Turn off all widgets that update themselves (OMWeather, Twitter, Facebook, RSS)
2. Set Mail for Exchange to Manual Updates
3. Turn off all IM and VoIP accounts
4. Use the 'mobile' HTML sites for GMail, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

There is no easy way to switch between my normal setup to this roaming setup and back again. So, after returning from my trip, I had to spend more time to put the desktop back to its normal state.

I recently stumbled upon 'Desktop Activity Manager' which allows you to setup different desktop profiles. This works fine for the desktop, but still requires manually setting MfE and IM/VoIP to off. I currently use 3 desktop profiles for 'normal', 'roaming' and 'car'. The car profile has only one desktop view with a few icons that are needed.

In a perfect world, while in my car, I would also like all IM to be turned off to reduce distraction, keep VoIP on so that I can receive calls, have the Phone and Maps applications started, and set the master volume to maximum. I wish I had an easy and reversible way to do this !!

Customizable profiles for the N900 would be a very useful feature for me. Not only in setting the look of the phone, but also it's functionality. Visual clues could be given to remind you what profile you are in: custom backgrounds, color schemes, or status bar icons. Switching between profiles could be accomplished via status bar icon.

No two users are alike, so any system would have to be flexible enough to allow deep customization.

Perhaps a talented Maemo developer will bring this to light someday!

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-11-29 through 2010-12-05

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-11-29 through 2010-12-05

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-11-29 through 2010-12-05

Front Page

Using Maemo Hildon UI elements in Qt Quick

Qt Quick's primary language, QML, provides a new rapid development methodology for Maemo, MeeGo and Symbian. However, it's yet to get a core set of UI components. Qt Quick Components is the official answer; but is currently under development. There's also the community-developed Colibri; but there's now a third option: using the current theme's own elements to provide widgets which match the look & feel of the rest of the system. Thomas Perl explains, "This QML demo uses the current theme graphics of Hildon and provides QML components that can be used just like their Hildon counterparts, but inside QML UIs. This is not a complete library, just a test of what could be possible in case anyone wants to step up and create and maintain a Hildon library of QML components." A video of Thomas's experiments is available, and the source code is in Gitorious for further collaboration. Later in the issue, there are photos of the same code; with a Hildon theme; running on the Nokia N8 (a Symbian phone).

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Using Maemo Hildon UI elements in Qt Quick
2. Applications
   • GPodder 2.10 released
3. Development
   • QML tutorials
   • How QML's Scene Graph will get silky, velvety smooth animations
   • Hildon-esque QML on Nokia N8
4. Announcements
   • RadioTimeToGo: Internet radio directory and playback
   • Bluetooth/USB mouse support on N900
   • First beta of PySide (Python for Qt) released, with Qt Quick support
   • RectBlock - Web Runtime-based game

TwimGo, the best Twitter client for the Nokia N900, was just updated to version 2.0.15. It now includes old and new retweets, and the ability to view original tweets when viewing reply details. You can download the new version at twimgo.com, but make sure to remove older versions before installing the new one.

TwimGo is a clean and simple Twitter client for your Maemo-based Nokia N900. Tommi Laukkanen, the developer of the app, says that it runs on Qt Web Runtime and we might see it running on other devices in the future. Download the app if you haven’t tried it yet and let us know what you think.

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

• Witter For Nokia N900 Updated to 0.1.1-9 – Twitter App Steadily Improving
• How To Install Power Twitter on Nokia N900 Web Browser
• Hahlo is an Awesome Twitter (Web) App on the Nokia N900

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To get myself accustomed to PySide UI development using Qt Quick (aka QML) and to check out what works already and what does not, I've experimented with creating some common elements that I'd use in an application (i.e. a QML version of gPodder - a blingy demo already exists) and decided to share my experiences and results as tutorials.

Here are all the tutorials in their current state:

• Selectable list of Python objects in QML
• Multi-selection lists in Python with QML
• Defining and using constants from PySide in QML
• Using QtWebKit and QML with PySide
• Updating QML content from Python threads
• Utilizing Qt Quick Colibri in PySide
• Filling and reading QML UI forms from Python
• Auto-generating QObject from template in PySide
• Using QtMobility sensors and QML from PySide

Screenshots are available on Flickr:

I'd like to get some feedback on whether or not the tutorials worked for you and were helpful and what else you would like to see. You can try out all the examples on your N900 today! Just install python-pyside and python-qtmobility (for the last example) from Extras-Devel and copy the examples from the Wiki. The usual disclaimers for software in Extras-Devel apply.

In related news, there will be a PySide/QML workshop at the December meeting of the Python User Group Austria, so if you happen to be in or around Vienna on Sunday, 2010-12-12, stop by at the Metalab and meet fellow Pythonistas.

Some time ago I stopped following Maemo news. For me N900 became “just a phone” which I used for calls, checking email in crappy Modest, browsing web from time to time and to read Twitter (if any application for it works) or Facebook (by web browser cause there are no apps for it).

But recently I got one tweet which pointed me to “State of Maemo” post. For me it looks like Nokia decided to finally abandon sinking ship and leave Nokia N900 users alone. Qt will probably get some updates to show that they care about cross platform support. How many MeeGo Qt apps will work on Maemo5? No one knows probably but one thing is sure — they will have to be recompiled because Harmattan will be hard-float (confirmed by Nokia developer during UDS-N). But for rest community will have to care about.

OK, there was told that there are “ideas about opening various pieces of Maemo source code that are still closed” but what it will be? No one knows. I would like to get Calendar opened but when it will happen I will probably do not have N900 anymore…

And today I read total “please ignore our ,but ignored by us, platform” message:

Last week we spoke with Nokia. We were actively discouraged from developing for Maemo any further. There are lots of things we love about Maemo, including an awesome user community so we’re disappointed to see it EOL’d. It’s frustrating to have put so much effort into an app only to see the platform it’s on be terminated. Whether we reappear on MeeGo — the successor to Maemo — depends in part on Nokia. In the mean time, our conversation with Nokia has led us to deprioritize the update we were working on, though no final decision has been made yet as to whether or not it’ll ship. I’ll keep you posted.

Somebody wants to buy my N900? I am going to move to Android because this looks like a platform where OS vendor care at least on some of devices by providing system upgrades. And there are communities which provide updates for abandoned devices. And no, I do not plan to buy device running MeeGo — enough money spent on Nokia devices.

Related content:

1. Maemo -> MeeGo
2. Going to Android
3. System updates repository for Maemo5?
4. Qt under Maemo is pain to develop with
5. Nokia N900 discount

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Is this the end of Maemo5? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

But it happened that it was early October and that I felt like diving into MeeGo bugtriaging. After some public whining, Carsten (who’s always a huge help) and Dawn were kind enough to point out the existence of the meego-qa mailing list. I subscribed.

But it happened that it was early October and that I felt like diving into MeeGo bugtriaging. After some public whining, Carsten (who’s always a huge help) and Dawn were kind enough to point out the existence of the meego-qa mailing list. I subscribed. At that time there also was a wikipage with a list [...]

From the Neary Consulting blog:

One of the most common issues I have seen with experienced professional software developers who start to work on community software is a reluctance to engage with public communication channels like mailing lists. Understanding the reasons why, and helping your developers overcome their timidity, is key to creating a successful and fruitful relationship with the community you are working with.

In my experience, common reasons for this timidity are a lack of confidence in written English skills, or technical skills, nervousness related to public peer review, and seeing community interaction as “communication” or “marketing” (which are not part of their job), rather than just “getting stuff done” (which, of course, is part of their job).

Read more…

GrandCentral Dialer Dialcentral started its life as Grand Central Dialer for the 770.  I got involved by adding support for desktop Linux (which also made possible porting to future versions of Maemo).  Soon after the name change to Dialcentral (out of trademark paranoia) I took over maintaining it.  Google Voice support was added while maintaining Grand Central support as long as possible.  Over time other features were added like texting and group texts.  Eventually I provided an alternate way of interacting with Google Voice through a telepathy connection manager called The One Ring.


DialCentral 1.0.7 This port to Qt has taken longer for many reasons.  The backend has slowly become more compartmentalized over time but the complexity grew faster.  I ended up needing to rewrite everything but the direct wrapper around Google Voice.  Besides some other misc parts of life during this time I was also contacted by a recruiter from a very good company, an opportunity I felt I shouldn't pass up.  My interests have have focused on system programming, programming practices, and software architecture and so I've ended up ignoring algorithms a bit too much.  Their process spread over 2 months which I spent refreshing and expanding my knowledge of algorithms rather than working on Dialcentral.  After a couple trips out seeing the company and the office's city I came to the conclusion that Austin and the company I work for are the place for me to remain for now.  Location was the biggest clincher to me and that was after I researched all of their branch locations and interviewed for one of two I found that I had a chance of liking.

DialCentral 1.2 Beta I'm still putting some finishing touches on this port.  I'm cautiously testing the waters with releasing this to extras out of concern that Google might break the brittle unofficial API and i have to do an immediate release.  I released a snapshot and have moved on to putting it in extras-devel with dire warnings especially since if an issue arises I might start having the GTK/Qt versions leapfrogging each other (joy of not having PPAs or a stable API).

For me the interesting part is this was my first Qt app that involves threading.  Related to this is that I want to maintain as much common code with The One Ring as possible.  Also with more UI work comes more insight into the better ways of doing things.  I try to keep all of my UIs fairly simple but this is one of the more involved ones.

The MeeGo project has launched a new website for the developer community, developer.meego.com. Currently the website is in a private beta, but is usable and ready receive ideas and content. The new site already hosts a wide range of content. For example, developers will find guides for writing original code and for installing MeeGo on compatible devices. Also on offer are development tools like the MeeGo 1.1 SDK, and UI development guidelines. Read on for more.

Today I was thinking...that it's time I keep my phone in sync with my Google stuff (e-mails, contacts and calendar)I started by clearing up my Google Cntacts (https://www.google.com/contacts) as they'll be later loaded into the device and because it's much easier to work from a desktop than from the device itself.If you already have (and most probably that is the case here) contacts on your

This is a bit of a catch-all post to go back over some previously covered items with some new things learned.

TreeViews


HTML Delegates I previously couldn't find the way to do custom cell renderers.  In part the oddity is that they provide default ways to render that are meaningless when you provide Delegates.  I did some searching and found an example HTML Delegate.  It had some issues with dark themes so I had to fix several bugs in it.



Simple heirarchy Next I wanted Dialcentral to have letter separators in the contact list.  I never messed with hierarchical views in GTK before so I can't really compare.  My first time branching out to applying this to Messages and History turned out bad because it seems to have the parent items' columns aligned with the child's columns.  The original History view had 3 columns with the left two scrunched together.  These didn't provide much space for the parent row's text.  When I switched to a condensed history view this became moot.

Condensed history view, allowing the parent text to fit. When learning about hierarchical views I found out that the root expander decorator is given space by default even if there are no children and it isn't shown.  This saved some space in the UI and will clean up the look of my other applications.

Layouts

The only real comment I have for layouts regards QGridLayout which I've not used before this.  Early on I was looking at using my pie menus for the buttons which had some issues, so I setup the alignment.  This didn't help but when I switched to buttons I eventually found out that it caused the buttons to fit to their minimum size rather than expand.  I probably fixed the pie menu issue without realizing I had thwarted myself.

Combo Box

The only real trouble I ran into with QComboBox was when I wanted it editable.  I was going to use this to allow choosing an existing GV configured callback or a custom one.  On the desktop the only way I've gotten it to insert into the list the item I'm creating is when there is nothing else to capture the enter key press.  Otherwise what gets activated is the "Apply" button (or worst "Clear Account" button when I remove the "Apply" button).  I've not found my way around this issue yet.

Callback Combobox caused problems on desktop Qt

...and brought me a brand new, unlocked, SIM-free HTC Desire Z today. Yay! Seems like Santa was taking very close look to my rant about Android vs. N900/Maemo I wrote less than two months ago - thanks Santa! Anyway, I am going to use Desire Z as a primary phone from now on, yet I'm not letting my beloved N900 anywhere either and let's say I'm putting it in "standby" mode as a secondary phone. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see how these two devices directly compare and what I'll specifically miss from Maemo world in Android.
Read more »

…and brought me a brand new, unlocked, SIM-free HTC Desire Z today. Yay! Seems like Santa was taking very close look to my rant about Android vs. N900/Maemo I wrote less than two months ago – thanks Santa! Anyway, I am going to use Desire Z as a primary phone from now on, yet I’m [...]

There won't be any new articles on the Internet Tablet School for the next couple of weeks, but we'll be back after that with new tutorials. You can of course browse our archive of previous tutorials.

If you're interested, you may want to follow Nokia's announcements at the upcoming CTIA 2008 trade fair from the 1st to 3rd of April. One announcement will probably be the "N810 WiMAX Edition", which is a normal N810 tablet that also has WiMAX compatibility. WiMAX is a very new kind of wireless network which works like Wi-Fi but has a much longer range. However, there aren't very many WiMAX networks yet, so this isn't quite as exciting as it sounds, but things may change in the future of course.

Incidentally, we do know Nokia have some other interesting tablet-related announcements too, but we can't say what they are yet! ;-)

So this is a bit more boring of a post.  Pretty much everything went as expected.  The only annoyance  as part of my zeal to avoid concrete inheritance was that Maemo 4.1 seems to have too old of a version of Qt to avoid inheriting from QThread.  That page has some better practice listings for QThread.

DialCentral original used threading to be lazy about startup and to avoid the slowest of operations from blocking the UI thread.  I've now pushed all blocking operations to a thread.  The main question was what approach I would take to  threading in PyQt.  I was tempted to keep using Python threads using GObject callbacks but I keep to one toolkit for simplicity.

In The One Ring I had some code that used generators to trampoline code to the worker thread.  I just had to refactor it so that there were toolkit specific and toolkit agnostic components.

I was glad that python logging works smoothly with QThreads.  The messages get marked with some kind of distinguishing identifier.

See, nice and boring.  No real issue which to me is a plus.

I'm not sure why I like to wrap up each port with these meaningless results but here we go.

Qt Version

• Near feature parity with GTK version (no custom callbacks, not re-implemented Alarm UI, no rotation for now)
• Access to call cancel
• Divider on various lists (for time ones, tried to balance heavy/light phone users)
• Condensed history
• Changed SMS Entry letter count style from GV to Nokia
• Tabs are cached between launches
• Display when history/messages tabs where last refreshed
• 4,866 LOCs
• From August 18th to December 2nd

GTK Version

• 7,207 LOCs
• For forever :)

That is quite an impressive difference in size.   I think a lot of that is owed to a cleaned up design that only needs to worry about Google Voice and not Grand Central.

I've still got some things to clean up, a couple bugs to fix, and improving some UI glitches on Maemo 4.1.  After that my plan is to get all of my applications into the Community OBS so they are available for Meego.

As many readers already know, I tried to get local Maemo meetups going around a year or so ago, using the Dallas/Fort Worth (Texas, US) area as a prototype..  Just as the effort began gaining traction, the MeeGo announcement put an unwitting crimp in those activities.  So I was excited and relieved when the MeeGo community finally reached the critical mass necessary for local enthusiast groups.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-12-06 through 2010-12-12

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-12-06 through 2010-12-12

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-12-06 through 2010-12-12

Front Page

The State of Maemo - continued

In Dublin at the MeeGo Conference in November, the Maemo Community Council had a sit-down with Tero Kojo (Nokia project manager - and long-time Maemo community member - supervising maemo.org infrastructure). We covered Tim Samoff's summary of that sit-down in our November 29th issue, but discussion about issues raised by the post - broadly ranging from the future of maemo.org to N900 community support and MeeGo - has continued.

Marko Ahtisaari, SVP of industrial design at Nokia, was one of the guest speakers at this year's LeWeb Conference. He covered topics from dominant designs of smartphone user interface and collective intelligence with mobile devices. He outlined why he sees that there's plenty of work to be done in the world of mobile user experience, particularly in having mobile devices actually demand less of our attention. In his view, iOS is "beautifully elegant and fantastically constrained", while Symbian and Android actually share the same design pattern but differ greatly in their business models. Read on for a in-depth account of the speech and Q&A session.

One of my purposes for this year was collaborate with the gst-dsp project. But the JPEG decoder was not enough, as there are other released socketnodes by TI which are not yet wrapped in gst-dsp, such as, in this case, the AAC decoder.

gst-dsp is a project with only video decoding use case in mind, and audio streams might not be optimally handled by it. The biggest concern was about the memory mapping of small buffers, which could consume more CPU rather than the direct decoding. Nevertheless I decided give it a try.

These last two weeks I devoted them to pull out the dspadec element and it seems to perform quite good without any significant modification in the gst-dsp core. You can find the submitted patches in the gst-dsp mailing list.

These patches are still in review process and perhaps they will not land on the repository, nevertheless, I also updated the marmita’s recipes in order to provide an installable image for the beagleboard, so anybody could test this new element.

• Root FS
• uImage

Among other candies, this marmita snapshot brings libsoup and the souphttpsrc GStreamer element, besides all the alsa stuff for the audio rendering. Also gdb hit into the tarball.

Enjoy it!

These bytes were brought to you thanks to Igalia, who sponsored this development.

After the daily reports written by Diego in his blog, few more things can be told about the WebKitGTK+ hackfest hosted at the Igalia offices last week, but I’d like to comment anyway some impressions from my personal point of view, if you don’t mind reading them.

After the daily reports written by Diego in his blog, few more things can be told about the WebKitGTK+ hackfest hosted at the Igalia offices last week, but I’d like to comment anyway some impressions from my personal point of view, if you don’t mind reading them.

Nokia Data Gathering is released on a six monthly cycle. At the beginning of a new development cycle, community developers, NGO's and interested users gather to help shape and scope the next release of NDG (3.04).

The road mapping meetings are open to the public, but they are not conferences, exhibitions or other audience-oriented events. Rather, they provide an opportunity for software developers -- who usually collaborate online -- and technically orientated system integrators to work together in person on specific tasks related to the planning of the next Nokia Data Gathering release.

We were really fortunate for 3.04 that the University of Nairobi allowed us to hold the meeting at the Computer Science Department and that so many passionate staff, students and users came along and made the meeting so special. I think we all (well I am sure I did anyway) learned a powerful lesson about software development.

Build features which people want, need and will actually use rather than what we think people want.

We came with many great shiny new ideas for data gathering but it was simplicity, accessibility and security which were requested.

When that new feature I wanted to build (to scratch my own itch in all reality) falls over and a field worker in Liberia for example cannot send a Birth Registration Form no-one recognizes that child as a member of society able to receive medical treatment, go to school or find legal work. I can sleep well hungry, penniless, lonely or cold but I cannot sleep well knowing that is because of me.

Maybe itch scratching is an easy trap to fall into after working for so long on free software projects but it nearly bit me here and I am eternally grateful to Africa and to our community for the heads up and guidance. A big shout also must go out to Peter Wagacha and the rest of the team at the University for giving us this chance to learn and finally special congratulations and new mobile phone go to Bryann for the winning proposal for the release name. The next release will be called Brave Batian and it promises greatness!

The peak of Batian (17,057 feet) is the highest peak on Mount Kenya, the second highest mountain in Africa. Mount Kenya has a girth of about 95 miles at 8,000 feet, from which it rises boldly to its restricted summit zone. Mount Kenya is the source of the name of the Republic of Kenya.

Over two years ago I was thinking about next cellphone and wrote that it would be something with Windows Mobile. There were comments that I should go for Android which was not on a market yet. In first week of 2009 I switched to Nokia E66 running Symbian. There were apps for this device (I even bought one: ProfiMail) and community existed with lot of tricks, hints, suggestions.

Tomi Ahonen has been an industry commentator on the smartphone for a long time (and we’ve linked to a fair number of his pieces) but his recent article about "Some Symbian Sanity" (and a fair bit about MeeGo) is not only a long and in-depth look at Nokia’s strategy, but goes over many reasons why Nokia are far from out of the smartphone game.

Khweeteur 0.1.0

A new release of Khweeteur is available in Maemo Extras-Devel repository. Of course warning of using extras devel apply here :) There are major changes :

• It use now the PySide binding instead of the PyQt one. Secondly
• I've change signal and slot to use the more pythonic way called 'new signal style'
• Some changes have been made in the cache format for a faster twitter api answer parsing

So this new version haven't real new features for end user, but bring more speed, less bandwith use, and more stability ( except for using the PySide 1.0.0 beta binding).

So if you don't fear having a breaked version of Khweeteur, do not hesistate to use it, and report bug on the bug tracker. Else wait a bit that bugs are found and fixed.

In the same time, if your company or you heard about a company, which are looking for a python developer. I'm looking for a new job opportunitie in Paris (France) or with teleworking possibilities. Do not hesitate to contact me by email.

(tl;dr: Nokia should provide updated Qt packages as official SSU for Maemo 5.) Before I start, here are some facts (correct me if I'm wrong):

The Cloud - by web@kstp.com

Firefox for Mobile Mozilla puts people first - http://dailythemes.wordpress.com/2010... December 15 from Daily themes - Comment - Like

At this time of year, the hardest thing to hear is a relative asking “what would you like for Christmas?” So I've come up with nine top gift ideas that you can handily print out, then ring one (or two) of them with a big marker pen before casually leaving it on the dinner table. Want a smartphone Christmas? Here’s what you need.

Firefox for Mobile Mobile Add-on Development - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... December 16 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

We reported recently that the MeeGo 1.1 SDK had been released for Ubuntu and Fedora Linux distributions. In addition to those releases, the MeeGo project have released a beta version SDK for Windows as well. Documentation is available at the MeeGo Wiki. There are some hardware compatibility issues that need to be taken into account before installing, and there is only a limited number of run-time targets that have been verified for Windows. Also, Windows Vista is not support. Some research before installing is recommended!

So it happened - after almost a year spent with Nokia N900 as a default phone, I have now switched to Android in the form of HTC Desire Z. Being long-standing user and fan of Maemo (since N8x0), immediate switch to whole new platform naturally brings incentive for direct comparison, so here it is.

Read more »

So it happened – after almost a year spent with Nokia N900 as a default phone, I have now switched to Android in the form of HTC Desire Z. Being long-standing user and fan of Maemo (since N8x0), immediate switch to whole new platform naturally brings incentive for direct comparison, so here it is. Software [...]

There was a time when cell phone operating system Symbian was on a roll. Utilized by numerous device providers and championed by global giant Nokia, it provided the basis for a smartphone revolution.  And appeared unstoppable.

Reposted from neary-consulting.com

Like last year around these dates, last week some of the WebKitGTK+ hackers gathered in the Igalia offices to spend a few days hacking the good hack, eating tortilla and playing Street Fighter II.

As promised in some of my previous posts about SeriesFinale, I have finally ported it to GNOME.

For the ones who don’t know about this pet project of mine, SeriesFinale is a TV shows browser and tracker application that was originally developed for Maemo Fremantle. While I use it all the time in my N900, I have been asked to port it to GNOME and I also thought it’d be a good thing to have it in my favorite desktop.

The source code for the port can be found in the “gnome” branch of the SeriesFinale project in Gitorious, hopefully I’ll find time to clean the code a bit and prepare Debian and RPM packages. This means that you can try it and install it from source by cloning the git repository, pulling the “gnome” branch and install it “the Python way”:

# python setup.py install
(warning for non-Pythonistas: there is no setup.py uninstall but you get to see where the files are copied to by running this command)

If you find some bugs, you can file them in the Maemo Bugzilla for now (be sure to specify the platform).
Let’s see if we come up with some sort of synchronization for SF in the future so you don’t have to be marking your episodes twice.
For now, if you want to start with the SF information you had on your N900, just copy the series.db file under “~/.osso/seriesfinale” in Maemo to “~/.seriesfinale” in GNOME.

Here is a screencast to show you how it looks like:

SeriesFinale for GNOME from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

Hope you enjoy SF on GNOME!

A new version of gPodder is out. If you are having problems with YouTube downloads recently, this release is for you. There are also some other minor changes and fixes (detailed changelog for gPodder 2.11). No translation updates or major new features, though. Grab the new package from Extras-Testing. The usual disclaimers apply. If you can, please test and vote for gPodder 2.11-1 in Extras-Testing, so other users can enjoy the fixes as soon as possible.

As always, a new Diablo package has also been uploaded and should be available in Diablo Extras for all N8x0 users soon.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-12-13 through 2010-12-19

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-12-13 through 2010-12-19

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-12-13 through 2010-12-19

Front Page

The Qt promise and what Maemo 5 needs

Thomas Perl argues that Nokia should provide official updates to Qt on Maemo 5 to support their cross-platform development message and vision, despite them being unlikely to release future "PR" updates to Maemo 5 itself: "We are stuck with Maemo 5 on the N900. And that is a good thing! Lots of useful apps, a helpful community and a polished OS. Sure, there's room for improvement, and lots of open bugs that should be fixed, but that's another issue (which will ideally be solved by open sourcing closed components with bugs that Nokia isn't interested in fixing anymore and by the Community SSU). This one is about Qt."

Read more

Maemo Community "Service Pack" for Qt fixes?

Thomas' blog post was inspired after Ville Vainio suggested the community could take on a small meta-package for a couple of Qt bug fixes; and then encourage Qt application authors to add a dependency on this package: "It would make sense to have a single metapackage (community-service-pack, or something to that effect) that we would expect everyone to have installed. Applications that need it could have it as a dependency, instead of enumerating every unbreak-my-platform patch ever developed." The response was not unanimously in favour, but a single meta-package seems likely to bundle the Qt dependencies - and it is difficult to see the harm when its scope is so limited.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • The Qt promise and what Maemo 5 needs
   • Maemo Community "Service Pack" for Qt fixes?
2. Applications
   • Hacking on N900 Ovi Maps' JavaScript & HTML
3. Development
   • developer.meego.com wants real developer feedback
4. Community
   • Process for getting news onto official MeeGo project Twitter account
5. Devices
   • Should MeeGo error messages refer to the system in the first person?
   • Switching between MeeGo Handset and Netbook UXes
6. In the Wild
   • Nokia N900 is Google Zeitgeist's 5th most popular consumer electronics term
7. Announcements
   • Khweeteur 0.1.0 moves to PySide; gets speed boost

SMS Spam is a glowing menace, but if you own a N900, you won’t have to live with it anymore. Giovanni Cognome‘s Auto Remove SMS written in Qt and C++ lets you delete text messages based on their text, sender or the received date. The application is a free download and even has  a background version that can be scheduled with the Alarmed app to auto remove SMS.

AutoRemoveSMS should be available in the extras-devel repository, if you don’t know what that is, read this. If you want to install it directly, use the links below.

Download (install): autoremovesms.install (click from the N900′s browser to begin installation)

Download (deb): autoremovesms_0.3.3_i386.deb (The actual app, you can download this on the computer and then install on the N900, but this will you will not be notified on updates)

[via: @alextootchie]

Similar Posts:

• How To Enable Application Repositories On The N900 With One Click
• How To Create A Physical Task Manager Button For The N900
• Turn Your N900 Into A PS3 Controller & More With BlueMaemo
• BootScreen Lets You Change The N900 Boot Video With One Click
• Portrait SMS Comes To The N900

Firefox for Mobile Firefox 4 beta 3 for Mobile - http://madhava.com/egotism... December 21 from Planet Mozilla: Madhava Enros - Comment - Like

I've blogged about it already, and even showed some code during an Interview at Nokia World, but there have not been any releases of That Rabbit Game so far, mostly due to Ovi Store QA not understanding what Optification means and requesting that the version number of the application appears somewhere in the app UI (after 15 days in QA). I've made the requested changes, added scoring and pushed new releases (of version 1.2) for both Symbian and Maemo 5 to Ovi QA.

Until the game gets published on Ovi, I decided to release packages on the website so you can download and enjoy the game right away - and maybe even provide some feedback. Please don't mirror/redistribute the packages, but link directly to the website. Download That Rabbit Game for Maemo 5!

Controls are via accelerometer (to tilt the rabbit head left/right) and via touchscreen (tap to flap your wings - the longer you tap, the harder the wings flap). The goal is to lose 10 coins in 90 seconds by getting shot 10 times. After that, the next goal is to lose the 10 coins in as little time as possible. Yes, you control the rabbit head, and not the crosshairs.

Updates and changes will be announced via @thatrabbitgame on Twitter, so follow it and tell your friends. Enjoy!

Most Android devices out there waiting for Android 2.3 update. But the unexpected Nokia N900 Linux SuperPhone got its Android 2.3 unofficially. Nitdroid.de posted a week later that the port of 2.3 is on the ...

Nokia N900 gets Android 2.3 Unoffically is a post from: Fone Arena

Main view with live feed from AR-Drone camera and telemetry

Main view with live feed from AR-Drone camera and telemetry

Firefox 4 Beta 3 has been finally released for Android and Maemo smartphones. The new version comes with a new Android-style menus, improved support for Android keyboards, support for uploading files, improved audio performance and so on.

Firefox 4 Beta 3 Now Available For Android And Maemo is a post from: Fone Arena

Firefox for Mobile The Next Release of Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo is Now Live! - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2010... December 23 from Missmobile's Blog » The Next... - Comment - Like

I've been looking at QML today. Here's a little Christmas present for you all: an adventure game in QML.



This is probably really ugly QML because I'm still learning it. It uses the Gnusto just-in-time compiler as the back end.

You can download this and play with it here (please! play with it and extend it as you see fit): qml-gnusto-0.01.tar.bz2

(And if you like adventure games, you might also like today's poem.)

comments

I've been looking at QML today. Here's a little Christmas present for you all: an adventure game in QML.



This is probably really ugly QML because I'm still learning it. It uses the Gnusto just-in-time compiler as the back end.

You can download this and play with it here (please! play with it and extend it as you see fit): qml-gnusto-0.01.tar.bz2

(And if you like adventure games, you might also like today's poem.)

comments

Introduction Protecting your device/mobile phone is always a big issue. No matter how careful you are with it, there is always a chance that it can suffer a few scratches, knocks and cuts. Another issue is the extra bulk that covers and cases add to your device thus making the device uncomfortable to use. This … Continue reading "Review – ZAGG Invisible Shield for Nokia N900"

The post Review – ZAGG Invisible Shield for Nokia N900 first appeared on Fone Arena.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-12-20 through 2010-12-26

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-12-20 through 2010-12-26

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-12-20 through 2010-12-26

I have never developed anything on Symbian platform and the reason for this is that I couldn’t care less about the Symbian before. I have always been more into about Qt and gadgets that run Linux rather than Symbian. Now the things have changed a bit – it’s possible to develop Qt applications for Symbian [...]

I have been so happy with my Nokia N8 (and Windows Phone 7 device) that I forgot about my Nokia N900. I just received the news that SPB TV is now available for the Maemo platform so I pulled out my N900, charged it up, and installed the new software. It also gave me a chance to update other pieces of software and discover the N900 really is a fantastic piece of work.

SPB TV is the first streaming TV application I have seen for Maemo and with the integrated kickstand on the device it does give you a nice viewing option. SPB TV is available on virtually all of the mobile platforms now and offers some decent content for free. There are actually now more than 150 channels from over 20 countries. SPB Software reported that there are more than 2 million users as well.

As listed in their press release, the main features of SPB TV for Maemo include:

• Full Screen TV player with picture-in-picture mode
• Unique TV browser with fast channel launching and switching
• A wide selection of public live TV channels
• Integrated TV Guide with a list of current and upcoming TV shows
• On-screen control panel
• Video quality switcher
• Advanced Video Codec support

Most of the stations are foreign stations, but I do enjoy the Christian stations and a couple that have football and rugby coverage. Have you tried out SPB TV and if so, what do you think of it?

It’s nice when a post with such a grandiose title like "The Unbearable Inevitability of Being Android, 1995" actually delivers. It takes a look at the number of “Android will crush everyone in 2011” articles and ponders what that actually means. Not directly for the industry as a whole, but what it means for Google as a business, and the hardware partners who have tied themselves to the Mountain View company?

Tomi Ahonen is widely respected for his macroscopic analyses of the mobile world, so it's worth noting this latest publication, exclusively in PDF/ebook form for 10 Euros. A "companion volume" to his Almanac, the new "Phone Book 2010 gives you 171 pages all about the handsets part of the industry, with over 90 charts, diagrams and tables".

My second new game this year - qw - has been released for Maemo 5 today. Version 0.1 (a tech demo, not a proper final release) gives you a sneak peek on the gameplay with 9 different levels and four-player support (if you hook up an external USB keyboard or get together really close for some N900 keyboard multiplayer action). The gameplay is simple: You need to control your player cursor (either via touchscreen gestures or keyboard) and enclose areas of the game with lines in order to fill them with a colored image. Beware of the enemies, as they will destroy your lines and split your points in half. If you enclose one or more small enemies, your points are multiplied.

A .deb for Maemo 5 is available from the qw homepage and packages for Symbian are also available. Try it out and send some feedback :) Enjoy!

An interesting few thoughts from Pat Phelan (Head of Innovation at Cubic Telecom) based around SMS. The starting point is the impending tidal wave of text messages of “congratulations and all the best” and the realisation that while he personally can’t stand them, for network operators this time of year is a license to print money. Is SMS usage going down? Yes, but not in a significant number. The simple reason is that there’s nothing easy to replace it.

The WebKit team inside Igalia is looking for some fresh blood. On the technical side we work on all things WebKit, from rendering, networking and accessibility to JavaScript, multimedia and the GNOME web browser. We have a strong commitment to the GTK+ port, but we are by no means restricted to it. On the social side Igalia practices workplace democracy, which in practical terms means that you’ll have, shortly after joining, a voice and vote in how the company is run, from the short term tactical considerations (should we do this project or hire this guy?) to the long term strategic investments (I tell you, this “Web” thing is totally the future).

If this sounds like something you’d like to do drop me a line to any of my multiple mail addresses (I’m sure you’ll manage to find at least one of them) with any background information that you consider relevant.

PS: We are extremely flexible in both location (ask me about my last 9 months travelling around the world) and how you distribute your working hours, so we should be able to accommodate pretty much anyone that is both human and living on planet Earth.