A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-01-25 through 2010-01-31
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-01-25 through 2010-01-31
The Bluetooth DUN package has been well received, but was hardly a profound programming endeavour. So, I’ve been trying to find suitable inspiration for a more substantial project. This morning, someone made a comment on the Bluetooth DUN page that there’s no way to tell if the phone has a tethered data connection or not – and he’s right: there’s no visual feedback on the phone, unlike Nokia’s Symbian devices or, I imagine, many other phones in the world. With that as a motivation, I decided to try and write a status indicator for tethering.
Continue reading Mac OS X 10.3 Installed On Nokia N900 Because It’s Possible at The Nokia Blog
I mentioned that I have a Pandora client loaded up on my Nokia N900 and then received a couple of Tweets from folks that had the same problem I had at first trying to get up and running with pyPianobar. When you first launch pyPianobar you will be prompted for your username and password. I entered what I thought was my Pandora username and password, but all I entered was the first part of my user ID and not the email username associated with my Pandora account. Unfortunately, I then ended up in a crazy loop where the program would try to restart 3 times and then quit so the application was unusable since there did not appear to be a way to reenter my username. I also found the white text on a white text entry field to be quite poor, especially when my N900 entered the first letter as a capital letter (discovered this later while looking at the config file).
I did a bit of research on the Maemo forums and discovered I could enter in X Terminal and edit the config file using Leafpad. I did this, but still experienced the same looping failure in pyPianobar so even entering the proper username and password into the config file itself wasn’t enough to override pyPianobar’s remembering of my correct credentials.
If you make this same mistake that I did then enter the following command into X Terminal (thanks to Fatalsaint for the help here) and you should be prompted again for your username and password:
rm. -f /home/user/.config/pianobar/config
Make sure to enter your Pandora username as the email address user name you have with your account. I recommend you visit the Pandora.com website on your computer and login to verify your username and password first so you get it right the first time.
Front Page
First edition of Maemo Weekly News
Hello, and welcome to the first edition of Maemo Weekly News. This, as the name suggests, is a new weekly digest of news and announcements from in and around the Maemo community. Our team of intrepid contributors are deeply embedded within all facets of the Maemo and 770, N800, N810 and N900 community; whether that's on IRC, talk.maemo.org, maemo.org Downloads, blogs, Twitter or the mailing lists. They read and process all the info, so you don't have to!
It is possible to add multiple instances to N900's desktop, but there is no documentation, describing how to do it. At least I couldn't find it. As far as such behavior would be must have for ussd-widget which I'm writing, I had to do some research.
If you haven’t seen me posting much here at Maemo Talk, it’s because I’ve been helping Andrew Flegg with his new project: Maemo Weekly News.
Maemo Weekly News is a weekly online publication that highlights Maemo specific news throughout the week. What’s good about it is that all the news are community contributed by sending a tweet to @mwkn. Editors (which I am a part of) and sub-editors will then flesh out all the tweets and the best ones will make to the weekly publication. More information here (link).
I will be posting the contents of each issue here at MT. Here’s the full list of the contents of the first issue:
Maemo Weekly News – February 1, 2010
- The One Ring – Google Voice properly integrated into Maemo 5
- Ovi store still selling DRM content the N900 can’t play
- Mac OS X iSync plugin for N900
- Finger friendly last.fm Vagalume in beta test
- pyPianobar Pandora client
- Community-built levels for Rovio’s Angry Birds
- Mac OS X running on an N900
- Paris3D preview
- Augmented reality with camera & OpenGL
- Proposal for micro-donations for authors via maemo.org
- maemo.org Extras definition of ‘free’ brought into focus
- Network connected apps should better support proxy
- Further design work on “badge” for CLI icons in Extras
- PyQt 4.7 released on all Maemo devices, for Qt 4.5/4.6
- MADDE: new cross-platform Maemo development environment in technology preview
- MADDE frequently-asked-questions
- Maemo Developer Day, November 2009 writeup
- Change chinook repos to ‘archive’ mode?
- Qt/3D Demos Running on N900
- UK development community used in Nokia marketing video
- Brainstorm – how do we make it useful, and manage it?
- Ask the Community Council
- FOSDEM 2010 just around the corner
- London Maemo meet-up
- Dist- and deb-master timesheets online
- Sheep: a community built game
- No clarification on Maemo 6 for N900
- N900 call volume fading out – hardware or software fault?
- PUSHN900 pre-London meet roundup
- SyncEvolution 0.9.2 announcement
- Download Assistant preview
- Catorise sorts your #N900 apps: now in Extras
- More iPhone games developers porting their wares to the N900
- WorldTV99 for N900 under development
- Qt-based language translation in -devel
Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.
while my last video already contained augmented reality and shadow mapping, it did not really show the potential of shadowmapping, therefore I created another video
other news are the tracking of multiple individual markers(quite obvious) and the camera relative light source. The latter is necessary to cast the shadow of all objects in the same direction.
As some of you wondered where the sense behind all of this is; I write the program as a project work at the university. The aim is to create an easy way to create and modify 3D scenes.
One of most annoying things in N900 is lack of USSD queries. They are mostly used for activating different services and displaying information, for example about balance, minutes or text messages left. In Russia most part of contracts are prepaid, so balance information is essential. Ability to see your balance on desktop can be useful in such case. USSD widget was developed to solve this problem.
USSD-common is a command line utility for making USSD queries from n900. It is used as a backend by ussd-widget and ussd-pad. You can use it manually or utilize in your scripts.
As part of the Extras Q&A process, the Maemo Community created a Testing Squad, in order to kick start the the testing process and provide better software for the Maemo users.
We’re correctly looking for some more testers, before start refining the Q&A processes, so if you like to test new shiny apps from our community developers, feel free to join the team, if you don’t feel ready or without enough skills for this task, you still can keep following the group activities and doing some testing in the easier areas.
Initial announcement and discussion: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=42055
Last Thursday, Claes Norin asked me if there's going to be an app like Maemopad+ for Fremantle. "Neat idea", I thought, and started hacking, overhauling the whole UI, refactoring some ugly parts of the code and making it generally shine and be usable as every day productivity companion on the N900. Claes was kind enough to provide me with valuable feedback and the necessary artwork. Now, let me introduce you to... MaePad!
Due to the big changes in the UI and source code, MaePad is only available for Fremantle at the moment, but I hope to be able to provide it for Mer as well when it becomes available for the N800 and N810.
If you are feeling adventurous, please try out MaePad 1.0, which is available from Maemo Extras-Devel now.
I will be attending FOSDEM this weekend as part of my work on maemo.org developer documentation. Come and talk to me about Maemo, developer documentation, wiki.maemo.org or even Maemomm. I will also be going to the keysigning event, so come along with some photo ID to get yourself into the web of trust.
The PyMaemo team has prepared a short tutorial with an actual example on how to access APIs for which there are no Python bindings yet. libosso-abook was used as an example, but in practice, you can access any C libraries using the same approach. This technique can be used while we do not finish implementing the full Maemo API.
Enjoy.
The Popular first person shooter Doom explodes its way onto the N900!
Doom is back in the form of prBoom for maemo 5, crossing over from its linux and windows based beginnings and into our palms. The game keeps all of its original graphics and enemies, and is fully customizable through several menus accessed using the backspace key, in which the player can change controls as they wish.
The status bar is also fully customizable, the player can select when to be warned of low health and even how the enemies AI ...
The front camera on the N900 will be useful after all! Did you know that you can use the N900 to video chat via Gtalk? As it appears from the following thread, the N900 cannot initiate a video chat, however if the person you are chatting with does so, you can enable video from the N900 and can have your very own video chat.
A number of people have confirmed that this works, unfortunately I have had to send my N900 review unit back and am still awaiting the delivery of the N900 I bought – so I cannot test this myself.
Here is what Besides from Maemo.org did to get video chat to work:
I didn’t do anything special:
1. I added a Gtalk account under Voip and IM Accounts in Settings. Entered credentials and Saved.
2. Edited my buddy’s contact entry in Contacts. Added a field and selected Gtalk and entered his Gmail address.
3. Clicked the Status area, connected to my wifi, and changed my Availability.
4. My buddy signed into chat on his PC. He instantly appeared Available in my list – green dot beside his nameWhat we tried:
1. I called him using Gtalk from his entry in my Contacts. Voice only. I could not initiate a Video call. Worked great but it sounded a little worse than Sjype.
2. He called me – Voice chat. As before. Good.
3. He called me – Video Chat. I picked up and shortly saw him. I clicked the Speaker button and activated the Speaker Phone so I can look at the screen. Then I clicked the camera button and then we were both displayed on my screen. At that point he also started seeing me. It was possible to view me full screen but the quality was not great. Still, pretty amazing.
Video chat, directly out of the box with no 3rd party apps needed. I hope this functionality will be perfected with a new firmware. The N900 doesn’t cease to impress me. Check back for my review soon.
[Screenshot via Anidel]
The hack week continues with some goodness for your ears (and the undisturbedness of people sharing the subway or bus with you): headphoned 1.6 adds support for Bluetooth headsets, so when you disconnect your Bluetooth headset, playback of music will automatically pause, which seems to be a much-requested feature. Thanks to Alan and Faheem for making this possible. Again, now that the package is ready, it's your turn to test and vote the package into the Extras repository.
Now that headphoned supports Bluetooth headsets, the only problem is that you still need to get your device out of your pocket to start playback. That's why I quickly hacked some automatic playback start goodness into Panucci (which is of course optional). The (due to space constraints irritatingly named) "Auto-play on headset" option will automatically start playback in Panucci when your Bluetooth headset or your wired headset with microphone is connected:
(Yes, I'm a big fan of the Marina Theme...)
I'm not promoting the new Panucci version yet, as I want the previous release (0.3.9-1) to go through Extras-Testing first. The version with headset support (0.3.9-2) is already in Extras-Devel, and I'll promote it to -Testing after the first one got through (thanks to all of you who have reviewed and rated the package in -Testing).
In short, this means that you will be able to keep your N900 in your pocket and simply connect/disconnect your Bluetooth headset to control playback, which I think is quite nice... (no support for BT headset buttons in Panucci so far, as I can't really test this myself - send patches and/or D-Bus logs)
A couple of days ago I mentioned that I was part of the beta test group for Barriosquare on the Nokia N900. Barriosquare is a Foursquare application that will hopefully soon find itself in the Maemo repositories and Ovi Store for the N900. I am very impressed with how fast the developer, Chris Burris, rolls out updates and at this time I have version 0.1.23 loaded on my device. It has actually been quite fun to mess around with X Terminal and figure out some commands and geeky aspects of the N900. As you can see in the screenshots below, Barriosquare is actually quite a good looking and functional application that easily beats many of the apps we already see in the Maemo repositories.
What the heck is Foursquare?
For those of you unfamiliar with Foursquare, I recommend you check out the Learn More page. Foursquare is a social networking service that is both a game and an information tool with ties into Twitter and Facebook. You “check in” to various locations and then can have your location sent to Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook friends. You can add “shouts” when you check in to add a statement along with your check in. It is an easy way to see who else in your friend list is in the area and even cooler you can leave and find tips that are location based and live in the cloud as virtual tags. I have found this most helpful at restaurants where people have left tips on what is good to eat or what you should avoid ordering. There is some huge potential here for expanding this tips capability and even having venues give you coupons if you login or other incentives to play the game.
During the Christmas holidays I managed to find some time to write a couple of small programs related to the address book on the N900; they are nothing too fancy (no UI, no proper packaging, not the best code quality, etc.) as I wrote them for my personal use, but I still think it could be useful to share them with other people.
The one I’m talking about today is a simple command-line utility that adds an email address to your contacts based on the Jabber ID (or on the ID of other protocols). This is very useful to me as in Collabora we all have a roster automatically filled with the other Collaborans, this way I can automatically have their email addresses in my address book.
This cannot be done automatically for all the contact as, usually, it’s not true that a Jabber ID is also a valid email address (for instance it’s not true for jabber.org users), but it’s true at least for the GMail and Collabora servers.
If you want to try jid-to-email get the already compiled arm executable or the source code. Remember to take a backup before trying it, I don’t want to be blamed if something goes horribly wrong 
.
The program accepts two arguments: the vcard field for the IM protocol and a regular expression. For instance, if you cd to the directory where the program is and do “./jid-to-email X-JABBER @collabora.co.uk”, an email address will be added to all the contacts that have a Jabber ID containing “@collabora.co.uk”. Similarly “./jid-to-email X-JABBER ‘@g(oogle)?mail\.com’” will add an email address to all the contacts with a Jabber ID containing “@gmail.com” or “@googlemail.com”. You could also try using “X-MSN” to do the same thing for contacts that use their GMail address as MSN ID.
Please, let me know if you know any other server where the Jabber ID is always a valid email address.
By the way, this week-end I’m going to Brussels for FOSDEM: hope to meet a lot of GNOME people there!
We have been talking a lot about the N900 which runs on the fairly new Maemo 5 OS . While we will be publishing an in-depth review of the device shortly, here are some pictures of the N900 for your viewing pleasure.Although the phone comes with a stylus you might rarely need one. Viewing the display is a treat ! Now let the pictures do the talking – N900 In All It’s Glory !
The face of the phone
QWERTY Keyboard
5 MP Camera – Megapixel Madness
Kick Stand
Simple yet Cool Maemo UI
Although its big i fits nicely in the hand
Multitasking FTW !
Here is how the N900 looks next to the iPhone and Omnia HD
We will posting more comparison pictures shortly !
Do you like these pictures or the N900 ? Let us know in the comments
Nokia N900 in All its Glory – Photo Gallery ©, .
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- Nokia N900 Comparison Pictures
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- Nokia N900 Unboxing Pictures
- Nokia N900 Photo Gallery And N810 Comparison
Back when the Ovi Store launched on the Nokia N900, I mentioned that Angry Birds was my favorite game and that everyone should download and play it now. I have since completed all the levels in the game and was looking to buy the next pack from Rovio. Unfortunately, there seems to be an issue with the Ovi Store and priced applications so at this time we cannot even pay to get more levels even though I am willing to do so. I hope this gets resolved soon, for both the developers and my sake. In the meantime, I read over on ZOMG its CJ that a Rovio employee was able to get clearance for custom level creation and the folks at NomandsNirvana.com have created a new level pack with 10 custom levels.
I remember back in the days with my Pocket PC that there was a war game where people could create custom levels and it was a pretty big hit. It is great to see a level editor available for Angry Birds and I imagine we may see a virtually unlimited number of levels for this game soon. I do hope that the developers are able to somehow make some money on this though since I want them to continue development of Angry Birds and hopefully more excellent games in the future. I understand that Angry Birds has been downloaded 6 times more than the same game on the iPhone. This tells me there is indeed a market out there for excellent games on the N900.
I just followed the instructions and now have many more levels of Angry Birds available that are accessed in the game by simply tapping the big 2 in the center of the level selector.
The gitorious repository now contains a broken mms-manager, a non functional mms-ui (because I changed the DBus interface ;-)), a preliminary mms viewer and a broken network connection manager. How pretty is that ? ;-)
I've been redesigning the DBus interfaces and I think I reached something. The UI can be easily adapted after that.
However, I'll be on vacation until the end of February. I can't work on mms until I'm back.
I'll try to commit and push the code I have on my laptop but the stuff will still be broken.
This is just a quick status.
Good wishes for the newly married couple ;-)
If you haven't already tried it, the TV Out feature of the N900 is potentially very useful and quite a neat party trick too. Despite its analogue signal, the output still looks reasonably good on a large screen. All About Maemo has done a short video aimed at beginners illustrating the basics, embedded below.
Well, it has been a long time since my last post and a lot of stuff happened during that, specially regarding work and that explains a little bit why I was so “offline” last days (month).
After all the stuff that happened in my professional and personal life last month we can extract some technical bits 
GUPnP AV 0.5.4 released
Download source tarballs from here
GUPnP Vala bindings 0.6.4 released!
Download source tarballs from here
Changes since 0.5.2:
- Gracefully handle empty or no 'res' node.
- Function to get the list of descriptors from DIDL-Lite objects.
- More complete comparison for LPCM mime types.
- Fix incorrect type conversion of DLNA flags.
- DLNA flags should not default to a specific DLNA version.
- New APIs to deal with contributor-related properties in DIDL-Lite objects.
- Remove redundant construction methods.
- Add forgotten header to the meta-header file.
- Add and fix gobject-introspection annotations.
- Lots of documentation fixes.
- Many minor non-functional fixes/improvements.
Bug fixes in this release:
1935 - Incorrect conversion while parsing primary DLNA Flags
1934 - DLNA Flags should not default to a specific DLNA version.
1933 - Content type matching fails when additional parameters exist in LPCM
mime-type
1814 - Add "artists" property to GUPnPDIDLLiteObject
All contributors to this release:
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
Yakup Akbay
Zachary Goldberg
Download source tarballs from here
GUPnP Vala bindings 0.6.4 released!
Changes since 0.6.2: - Require and adapt to gupnp-av 0.5.3. All contributors: Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
Download source tarballs from here
It’s been almost two months since my last blog post so here’s a quick update on the things I’ve been doing lately.
Vagalume 0.8.3
The first thing that I’d like to mention is the upcoming release of Vagalume 0.8.3 (which will probably happen during this weekend). The only changes in this version are that menus and dialogs have been fremantlized using the Hildon 2.2 style. It’s not an enourmous change, but it was about time 
Here’s a screenshot of the new preferences dialog (click to enlarge):
Note that this release is only interesting for N900 users. There are no significant changes in v0.8.3 compared to v0.8.2 for other platforms.
Hildon development
There’s been quite a few changes in Hildon during the last weeks. The maemo.org Bugzilla has been working reasonably well and I’m glad to say that some important bugs that have been fixed lately were reported directly by end users.
Apart from tons of bug fixes and speed improvements, perhaps the most easily noticeable change in Hildon that you’ll see in the upcoming Maemo update is the new “live search” feature for tree views.
You’ve seen it in the “Contacts” application and Claudio talked about it some weeks ago. There’s been a lot of tuning since then (including the support for icon views) and now it’s essentially ready. I hope it’ll make the overall user experience of the N900 a bit better.
FOSDEM 2010
Last, but not least, tomorrow I’m flying to Brussels to attend FOSDEM 2010.
Some fellow Igalians are giving talks there (Joaquim about OCRFeeder and SeriesFinale, Victor about the dspbridge for OMAP3 and Philippe about multimedia in WebKitGTK+ with GStreamer).
We’ll arrive soon so we’ll be at the beer event on Friday night.
See you there!
Super Tux is a Super Mario clone for the N900 in which the player controls “Tux”, the penguin from the Linux logo, through a variety of snow filled levels, collecting coins and a variety of player upgrades.
As in the original Mario, Tux starts the game as a small penguin, with no defences, who can only be hit once by an enemy before he is killed. Tux becomes less vulnerable by picking up power ups hidden in certain question marked blocks dotted around the levels. The first pick up, I assume ...
Nokia launched a PUSH campaign for the Nokia N900 globally a while back, but recently they launched a new contest specifically for folks in the U.S. of A. The U.S. PUSH contest is the same – submit your idea for something outlandish and creative that you’d like to do with the Nokia N900 that’s completely new. Results from the international contest include a trick-tracking skateboard, N900 kite, and others.
The contest closes on February 15, so you have until then to put your thinking cap on and come up with something cool to do with the N900 that’s not currently being done. There’s a grand prize of $10,000 waiting for the winner, and remember you need to live in the U.S. to be eligible for this contest. Finalists will be flown to Las Vegas, Nevada for CTIA to demo their PUSH modification, so there’s quite a bit at stake here.
What’s your idea? You can submit directly to the PUSH N900 IN THE USA site here, and best of luck!
Related Posts
In a few days we’ll release Epiphany 2.29.90, so this is a good time as any to show a few of the new cool things it will bring.
The big one is, without doubt, good enough support for HTML5 video tag for the Youtube HTML5 beta to work. Pretty much all of the credit goes to the dynamic duo of Sebastian Dröge and Philippe Normand, which have been working tirelessly to improve our media support all across the board. As you probably know we use GStreamer for all our media needs, so if you happen to have the right codecs installed stuff will just work out of the box, like it should. Here you can see it in action, playing one scene everybody should know and love:
Another recently fixed bug is support for windowless NPAPI plugins, contributed by Brian Tarricone. For those of you still enslaved to plugins it should fix a few annoyances, not to mention that it allows for the plugin content to be manipulated alongside the rest of the web content, since it’s rendered directly in the browser window.
The world-famous Diego Escalante, who is doing an internship in our company with the mission of fixing as many Epiphany bugs as he possibly can, reimplemented EphyEmbedPersist on top of WebKitDownload , which will have the visible effect of making those mysteriously broken save-related context menu items work again.
On the same “kill all regressions” mood I spent some time implementing acceptance policies for cookies in libsoup and hooking the new APIs here and there. The result? This pesky items in the preferences dialog should do something again:
When I was not doing that or losing my youth in the depths of WebKit chasing some nasty bugs I’ve also been spending some time on the GObject DOM bindings for WebKit. I’m happy to say that a couple of preliminary patches have been already committed, and the first big-step patch of the process is under active review and hopefully will be accepted shortly, so you should begin to get some exciting new APIs to manipulate web content in a not-so-distant release!
There are just a few of the latest things we have been working on. I’ll, as usual, keep you more or less up to date here, but if you want the gory details of the day to day business, or even get your hands dirty on the stuff yourself, don’t hesitate to join our IRC channels (#epiphany on GimpNet and #webkit-gtk on FreeNode) or mailing lists. Happy hacking!
Tonight, Nokia hosted the PUSH N900 event in London, showing off various interesting uses for the Nokia N900, including a trick-tracking skateboard, N900 kite, and more. However, the stars of the show were easily the pole-dancing robots, apparently controlled by none other than the Nokia N900!
My friend Ilicco was kind enough to snap some photos of these sexy bits of machinery, as well as a video for your viewing pleasure. If you don’t watch another video all weekend, watch this one.
I’ll have to confess, I would likely rip off my own arm to have one of these in my office, just cause.
Related Posts
Over the last two weeks I have been lucky enough to have the Nokia N900 on loan from WomWorld. This device has seen quite a bit of hype recently so I was really pleased to have the opportunity to see what all the fuss was about, and guess what, it doesn’t disappoint!
Having been something of a Symbian fanatic for the last nine years or so, I was eager to see if this new operating system could satisfy my needs, both in day to day usage and when the mood takes me for a spot of tinkering under the hood.
I’m not going to give you a mile long spec sheet, show you a pile of photos taken by its average camera, or tell you why I think it is better than the iPhone, you can read a million and one reviews that already do that, I’m simply going to te.... .. .
As I have mentioned before, unlike Nokia’s Symbian devices, the N900 does not have a code that you can enter to format the device and restore it to the factory state. However, if you like playing with software in the extras-devel repositories, chances are that sooner or later you will like a fresh start and want the N900 to be restored to the state in which you first picked it up.
A month ago, we offered a first tech preview of a new cross-compilation toolkit for Maemo5. Madde is a command line tool, which makes the development for Maemo much smoother. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac, is easy to install and contains the Qt 4.5 libraries by default. Further there is a first preview of a client for the N900 available, which helps to transfer and test the code on the device.
Since then we received a lot of positive feedback. Especially Windows users like the idea of being able to develop and cross-compile applications within their native environment. The feedback helped us to improve the software further. Now there is an updated version of Madde tech preview (0.6.14) available for download. The biggest changes are the updated target to PR1.1 and the change of the toolchain, which matches now the Maemo5 SDK. Here are all the changes and improvements, compared to the “X-mas-edition”:
- Fremantle target updated to PR.1.1
-
Toolchain changed for Fremantle. Now it matches with Maemo5 SDK. cc command fixed.
- Windows target creation performance improved.
- Maemo Desktop files added to Qt example and base64 command added to support that.
- Qt library example fixed.
- Following https://bugs.maemo.org/buglist.cgi?component=madde bugs fixed.
- 8415 Cannot install MADDE to different directory than the default
- 7637 pscreate writes a localized, invalid trailer line into de…7821 Library search path wrong
- 7350 MADDE 0.5’s dpkg replacement does not work with –search …
- 7774 Can’t run GLES applications under madde environment
- 8623 hildon-1 pkg-config configuration broken.
- Minor buf fixes and improvements.
With this new preview, we want to keep you up-to-date on the development process. Please feel free to give it a try and to let us know, what you think. You can do that on different channels – Bugzilla has a component called Madde and there is a talk-thread, where Madde developer are active and open for your comments.
Recently, I wrote about using 3rd party applications to stream Pandora and Last.fm on your Nokia N900. Previously, I took a look at streaming music via the web browser and at that time I mentioned I was unable to get my favorite streaming client, Slacker, up and running due to pop-up and other issues. I figured it was time to try it out again since there have been updates to the N900 since my last test and I am pleased to say that Slacker works like a champ on the Nokia N900 default web browser!
I think the reason it works now for me is that I first signed in to Slacker Radio Plus, which is a subscription-based option that removes audio and banner ads that may have been causing the problems for me before. Slacker Radio Plus also gives you unlimited song skips, complete lyrics, unlimited song requests, and a mini player. You can subscribe for $4.99/month billed monthly or $47.88/year (works out to $3.99/month). Slacker states they have four times the amount of content over other leading streaming clients and I personally find their service to be the best for me.
Readers here, and SPE editors, know that the Nokia N900 is more computer than phone and the things you can do with it are pretty astounding. I just read an article over on Engadget where it has been shown you can connect a Sony Playstation wireless controller to your N900 via Bluetooth and then control the SNES emulator with the N900 connected via TV out to have a kick butt retro gaming platform. I don’t have a PS3 controller, but I do have Wii and XBox controllers and wonder if either of these will work. I may just have to pick up a PS3 controller to get this setup working on my N900 since there are some SNES games I really enjoyed playing when I was younger and would love to have them in hand again.
Check out this video below showing the setup and gaming on the big screen.
Continue reading Conversations on Nokia N900 Adds Support for Facebook Chat, AIM, MSN & More With Extra Protocol Plugins at The Nokia Blog
Okay, so did you know that there are Maemo based devices that Nokia doesn’t make? If not, its time to meet the Optima OP5-E, a MID that is made by China Optima. The device was primarily made for the Chinese market, but the company not has plans of making a HSPDA variant for the rest of the world as well.
It incorporates a SIM card slot and is telephony capable, much like the N900 but is its OS is no where as pretty Nokia’s Maemo 5. Although the specs hardware wise are pretty impressive:
- 4.3″ 800×480 resistive touch screen
- 806mhz Marvell PXA310+ ARM processor
- 128MB RAM,
- Built-in 3G CDMA, HSDPA expected
- Built-in GPS, Bluetooth
- A 2600mAh battery.
- Expected price around $500 unlocked
- Support for voice, SMS and VOIP.
Here is a unboxing and overview of the Optima OP-5 if it has managed to pique your interest:
Want to see more of it? Click here for some pictures and info and here for a video demoing application installation on the Optima.
Last night I came back from PUSHN900 event in London. Once I've received an invitation few days ago, frankly I didn't exactly know what to expect, so I went there with pretty much clear mind about this. However, what I've seen there was absolutely amazing and I was stunned by the ideas that people in teams from around the world have put up together.
Read more »
Read more »
Last night I came back from PUSHN900 event in London. Once I’ve received an invitation few days ago, frankly I didn’t exactly know what to expect, so I went there with pretty much clear mind about this. However, what I’ve seen there was absolutely amazing and I was stunned by the ideas that people in [...]
Hello internet! I am at FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels. I tried the fosdem-maemo schedule application for my Nokia N900, and decided to write an alternative app which is easier to use with my fingers, and looks more like a Maemo application.
The result is foschart. It’s just something I knocked together in a few hours yesterday, but it’s pretty usable already. It supports showing talks grouped by track, by room, and just in chronological order, and a list of favourites. It’s all happily kinetic-scrollable, etc., and is very snappy once it’s started.
There’s no proper release or package yet; if you want to package it up properly, please do! But for now, apt-get install python-hildon, then copy foschart.py and schedule.xml to /opt/foschart, and foschart.desktop to /usr/share/applications/hildon. Then it should show up in your application list, and away you go. As ever, patches welcome. Enjoy!
Update:
The illustrious Jonny Lamb has made a package!
Hello internet! I am at FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels. I tried the fosdem-maemo schedule application for my Nokia N900, and decided to write an alternative app which is easier to use with my fingers, and looks more like a Maemo application.
The result is foschart. It's just something I knocked together in a few hours yesterday, but it's pretty usable already. It supports showing talks grouped by track, by room, and just in chronological order, and a list of favourites. It's all happily kinetic-scrollable, etc., and is very snappy once it's started.
There's no proper release or package yet; if you want to package it up properly, please do! But for now, apt-get install python-hildon, then copy foschart.py and schedule.xml to /opt/foschart, and foschart.desktop to /usr/share/applications/hildon. Then it should show up in your application list, and away you go. As ever, patches welcome. Enjoy!
Update:
The illustrious Jonny Lamb has made a package!
Software Spotlight is a series that will be debuting on MaemoMagazine.com that will take a detailed look at exceptional community and/or commercial software available for Maemo-based devices.
In line with what I usually do at conferences, I lost my glasses at the GNOME Beer event this year. If somebody found it, and maybe even has it, please let me know. It’s kinda hard to see presentations without it.
Firefox Mobile was released for the Nokia N900 recently. Here is an official video tour of the app running on a N900
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxO6W06LzvM
Interesting features of this software include
- Awesome bar
- instant bookmarks
- Specific search engine search
- Open tabs on left
- browser controls on right
- awesome bar automatically stows away
- double tap zoom
- Download manager – can download any files to N900
- Add on support
- Weave Sync synchronizes your desktop FireFox with Mobile Firefox. Syncs open tabs from computer to the desktop, as well as history and saved password!
- Manage bookmarks with tags
via MyNokiaBlog
Video : Firefox Mobile for the Nokia N900 ©, .
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I’ve been reflecting this week on the extent to which I am a different person from the one who took delivery of My Mo.
I’ve been reflecting this week on the extent to which I am a different person from the one who took delivery of My Mo.
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-02-01 through 2010-02-07
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-02-01 through 2010-02-07
Front Page
BBC tech correspondent covers Nokia still ruling in face of iPhone & iPad
Rory Cellan-Jones is the BBC's senior technical journalist and, as with all the mainstream media, is often engrossed by Apple's product launches. However, he takes a closer look at the figures and points out that Nokia - as a worldwide company - are hoping to sell around 21 million smartphones in a quarter - as many as Apple might hope to sell in a year. Also note that mention of "mobile computers" in this category - Nokia is trying to point out, ever so quietly, that it's already in that new category described by Steve Jobs on Wednesday. He hasn't yet played with the N900, but mentions it as a sign that Nokia don't want to "get caught out again". The comments on the article also feature largely positive comments about the N900.
Read morePUSH N900 US competition launched for hardware hacking
Following on from the success of the PUSH N900 invention competition in Europe (see the articles in the 'Wild' section for more), we’ve swung open the virtual doors once again, launching a whole new PUSH project dedicated to all the US hackers, modders and designers. [...] Now we want to see what the American hacker community can come up with. A panel of judges will choose the top three ideas from everything submitted, after which the finalist teams will be provided with a Nokia N900 and support from Nokia, to actually build their mod. Then, in March, a representative of these three winning teams will be flown to CTIA in Las Vegas, where they’ll get the chance to demonstrate their hack for final judging and the chance for their team to win cash prizes of $10,000, $5,000 and $3,000. Submissions can be made until noon (Eastern), 15 February 2010.
Read moreIn this edition...
- Front Page
- BBC tech correspondent covers Nokia still ruling in face of iPhone & iPad
- PUSH N900 US competition launched for hardware hacking
- Applications
- Ken-Young on Orrery, bringing more stars into view than you can see
- Hands-on Mozilla's pocket-sized Firefox mobile
- Browser Switchboard makes it easy to define alternative browsers as default
- ...and 8 more
- Development
- Forum Nokia Developer Conference, 2nd March, Sydney Australia
- Akademy KDE/Qt conference call for papers
- Debian Etch rebuilt for Maemo
- ...and 3 more
- Community
- Testing Squad for maemo.org Extras created
- February maemo.org sprint meeting minutes & actions online
- Devices
- Porting Maemo's base to other chipsets/devices
- Device quality assurance inside look
- Maemo in the Wild
- 2009 Engadget awards - N900 nominee in 2 categories
- A quick round up of the PUSH N900 Showcase last night
- PUSH N900 London party pole-dancing robot video
- Announcements
- Subscribe to MWKN to ensure you never miss an issue
- Marina theme for Maemo 5
- Hoops Frenzy available for $1.99
- ...and 5 more
Nokia is planning to develop the operating mode of its Salo plant to ensure production is focused fully on the high-value smartphone market, especially in Europe.
The plans will result in the introduction of new and highly specialized manufacturing methods and also entail changes to personnel at the facility.
The planned new focus for Salo is expected to affect a maximum of 285 employees involved in production and in related support functions at Salo. Today, Nokia's Salo facility employs approximately 2 200 people. Nokia will support alter... .. .
Continue reading Nokia N900 Trailing in the 2009 Engadget Awards at The Nokia Blog
This week’s issue of Maemo Weekly News (MWKN) is now out. Some items I would like to highlight are the following:
- PUSH N900 US competition launched for hardware hacking
- Hands-on Mozilla’s pocket-sized Firefox mobile
- Forum Nokia Developer Conference, 2nd March, Sydney Australia
- February maemo.org sprint meeting minutes & actions online
- Porting Maemo’s base to other chipsets/devices
- 2009 Engadget awards – N900 nominee in 2 categories
- Maemo 6 Platform Security software home now in gitorious
- Maemo’s cellular software components’ home now in gitorious
Below is the full list of articles in this week’s issue:
Maemo Weekly News – February 8, 2010
- BBC tech correspondent covers Nokia still ruling in face of iPhone & iPad
- PUSH N900 US competition launched for hardware hacking
- Ken-Young on Orrery, bringing more stars into view than you can see
- Hands-on Mozilla’s pocket-sized Firefox mobile
- Browser Switchboard makes it easy to define alternative browsers as default
- Foursquare social networking/geolocation service & game
- More info on community-designed levels for Angry Birds
- Low-level recovery tools: TestDisk and PhotoRec
- MaePad notepad/jotter for Maemo 5
- Comic widget in early development
- Nokia N900 running emulated SNES controlled with PS3 SIXAXIS controller
- Extension enables Flash for YouTube on Firefox Mobil
- Showtime – TV listings app
- Forum Nokia Developer Conference, 2nd March, Sydney Australia
- Akademy KDE/Qt conference call for papers
- Debian Etch rebuilt for Maemo
- PyGtkEditor: On-device syntax-highlighting editor designed for Maemo
- Windows: Python & Qt for Maemo development in half an hour
- Elena Reshetova interviewed before FOSDEM about Maemo 6 security
- Testing Squad for maemo.org Extras created
- February maemo.org sprint meeting minutes & actions online
- 2009 Engadget awards – N900 nominee in 2 categories
- A quick round up of the PUSH N900 Showcase last night
- PUSH N900 London party pole-dancing robot video
- Subscribe to MWKN to ensure you never miss an issue
- Marina theme for Maemo 5
- Hoops Frenzy available for $1.99
- Magnetic Scrolls adventure games interpreter in Testing
- MADDE tech preview updated for PR 1.1
- Maemo 6 Platform Security software home now in gitorious
- Maemo’s cellular software components’ home now in gitorious
- mStatus updates multiple social networks’ status
Year ago when I was going to FOSDEM I took my Nokia E66 phone preloaded with Belgium maps to not get lost in Brussels. It was working quite good. This year I took Nokia N900 as the only device to use (no laptop, no other phone) and BUG to show something.
How did N900 worked as navigation device? Terrible! The problem started before travel. I installed whole set of map applications which were available:
- Ovi Maps
- Maemo Mapper
- Maep
- Mapbuddy
- Navit
Only first one had support to preloading map data (by using Nokia Map Loader under MS Windows). Maemo Mapper had such functionality in OS2008 but newer version has something totally broken. Navit required use of extra tool for conversion but after looking at UI I decided that will not even try. Maep and Mapbuddy always fetch from network so roaming costs would kill me.
So I used Ovi Maps as less bad then others. Lacks of offline POI support suxx, lack of adding own ones suxx even more as in Symbian version I just added few interesting places at home and used them during walking on streets of Brussels. Nokia needs to spend lot of money and developer time if they want to make it usable.
So software was more or less disaster but I managed to get to the ‘peeing boy’ so (after seeing’ peeing girl’ year ago) that part of tourist attractions is done. Would be nice to have some way of preloading AGPS data as without network connection it takes ages to get fix.
All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Maemo5 and (lack of) navigation was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website
Related posts:
TMO member Fake has just announced his latest invention — a laser-cut stand for the Nokia N900.
The 3-piece acrylic or wood stand is now for sale for only $10, $15 if you buy two, and $20 for three (shipping included). Details on how to order, more stand pictures, and the long discussion is over at talk.maemo.org.
After a week of initial testing of MaePad 1.0 in Extras-Devel and some very helpful feedback from users, MaePad 1.1 "The Large Hadron Collision" hits the street (or more precisely, Extras-Testing). You can read the list of changes or go straight to the package page to test it.
In other news, gPodder 2.2 "LA X" (release notes on gPodder.org) was uploaded to Extras-Devel at the end of last week. This new release includes the promised UI changes and some other under-the-hood changes, but there have been some minor regressions (broken streaming for example) which have since been fixed in the development repository. Please test gPodder 2.2 (on the package page) and report bugs against it in the bug tracker, so that any issues can be fixed before the next package version.
Again, please report any bugs you find to the bug tracker, and don't go whining in the forums - it's a hassle to search and hunt for bug reports on the web, and your "bug report" forum post might never be seen by any of the developers of any given app.
gPodder 2.2 is of course also available for Maemo 4, and has been pushed into the Diablo Extras repository already. Starting from this version, no Chinook builds will be provided for gPodder anymore, but due to the interpreted nature of Python code, you can install the gPodder package from the Diablo repositories should you really need to run gPodder under Chinook. If you are reporting bugs against gPodder for Maemo 4, be sure to mention "Maemo 4", "Diablo" or "N8x0" in the bug report.
Ready to go into Maemo Extras during this week: Panucci 0.3.9-1 and headphoned 1.6 (thanks to all the testers for taking the time to test, review and rate these packages).
I still don’t know how to submit my slides into the FOSDEM website, so I’m linking them here by now:
I hope a few people wondered why my blog looked a little bit neglected in the past few months. Well finally I can say that I have been busy with several larger projects I was not supposed to talk about. For two projects I am involved in there are related press releases from our customers and business partners.
One project is the Linux port to the Höft & Wessel skeye.pos mobile – I really like the press release because it mentions the fact the supplied devices are running Linux and what the devices are used for. The filesystem on these devices is built with OpenEmbedded and is based on an older Angström release.
The other big project is closely related to both my job for kernel concepts and OpenEmbedded which is one of my favourite open source projects. The µCross distribution will support chip- and device vendors who are going to ship Linux-based solutions. The main idea is to combine the power OpenEmbedded and its large community with a good portion simplicity and a few additions. I do not want to mention too many boring details here so I will just introduce the basic concept: The idea is to offer customers binary packages matching their target architecture, matching toolchains and tools for assembling and configuring filesystem images for their devices.
There is not really an offical announcement yet but one of our business partners just announced a nice SBC module which will come with a µCross-based SDK. The TK71 is a QSeven format module powered by a Marvell 88F6281 SoC (Sheeva core based).
A third project that gained some love is the updated Linux port to the Toshiba Topas910 and TopasA900 boards. I am trying to maintain an upstream compatible and up to date Linux port to these devices here – for the people who do not want to use several year old kernels or this strange Aura stuff. The latest achievement is that I got some patches to make NAND flash work which is vital for the TopasA900 because its small NOR flash can’t keep a decent filesystem image with GUI.
Ok now I’m done with showing off and I should return to do something useful… such as writing a short report about FOSDEM!
Some welcome news for all Qt on Maemo developers out there: Nokia intends to deploy the currently in Beta Qt 4.6 to all devices via software update — most probably already with the next major update PR1.2. Currently, Qt 4.6 (available from extras-devel) is completely optified and resides in /opt/qt4-maemo5. That will change with PR1.2, where it will move to the rootfs, replacing the community-supported Qt 4.5. What does this mean for Qt applications?
- Qt 4.6 applications: If all goes well, nothing needs to be done. Deployed applications should pick up the libraries in /usr. You might need to edit your build scripts so they won’t look in /opt/qt4-maemo5/bin if you’re using qmake.
- Qt 4.5 applications: This one is trickier. The Maemo5-specific parts in Qt 4.6 are neither API nor ABI compatible with the ones in Qt 4.5. This means that you’ll need at least a recompile, and probably also do source code modifications if you’re doing anything Maemo5-specific. Qt 4.5 applications on device will stop working until there is a Qt 4.6-based update available.
So all you Qt 4.5 users out there, install libqt4-maemo5-dev in scratchbox and start porting. :)
Some people have already complained about the way GMail IMAP works. With great power comes a great responsibility. Google guys, you have one of the largest email services in the world, so this means that you have to care a lot about users and clients. Dape recently reported and error in how GMail creates the body structure of some particular messages and still got no answer.
Now I found that it does not return the full bodystructure of a multipart/mixed with two refc822 messages in it. If this sounds strange to you, it’s basically how Mozilla Thunderbird creates an email with two other emails as attachments. GMail simply will not tell you about the structure of the two attached emails.
Bodystruct support in Modest is working in most cases although these problems with GMail will most likely mean that it won’t be shipped with the next software update for the N900.
FOSDEM was really nice this year. Still too many interesting presentations to attend than our physical condition allows but that’s life.
Like I announced on my last post, I gave two presentations there and I am glad with both of them. People seemed really interested in OCRFeeder and I hope they try it out, send me feedback and spread the word about it.
I could personally meet P. Christeas, who had send me a patch for it, and listen to the questions and suggestions of people about how OCRFeeder works.
I must say the most impressive presentation I attended was by Professor Andrew Tanenbaum himself, about MINIX 3, what a beautiful piece of software it seems.
If you have not attended it, maybe you can watch the video recording once it is available.
Later on I had a nice chat with him regarding web browsers on MINIX and the real portability of applications that are said to be multi-platform.
Here are the slides for the presentations I gave:
OCRFeeder, documents conversion on GNOME View more presentations from Joaquim Rocha. Seriesfinale, a TV shows' tracker for Maemo 5 View more presentations from Joaquim Rocha.Looking forward for FOSDEM 2011!
This (super) cool .NET developer and good friend came to me at the FOSDEM bar to tell me he was confused about why during the Tracker presentation I was asking people to replace F-Spot and Banshee.
I hope I didn’t say it like that, I would never intent to say that. But I’ll review the video of the presentation as soon as Rob publishes it.
Anyway, to ensure everybody understood correctly what I did wanted to say (whether or not I did, is another question):
The call was to inspire people to reimplement or to provide different implementations of F-Spot’s and Banshee’s data backends, so that they would use an RDF store like tracker-store instead of each app its own metadata database.
I think I also mentioned Rhythmbox in the same sentence because the last thing I would want is to turn this into a .NET vs. anti-.NET debate. It just happens to be that the best GNOME softwares for photo and music management are written in .NET (and that has a good reason).
People who know me also know that I think those anti-.NET people are disruptive ignorable people. I also actively and willingly ignore them (and they should know this). I’m actually a big fan of the Mono platform.
I’ll try to ensure that I don’t create this confusion during presentations anymore.
Second tutorial for PySide, this time focusing on Qt's signals and slots system, trying to provide a simple example of how they can be chained together to provide simpler code.
# Written by Robin Burchell
# No licence specified or required, but please give credit where it's due, and please let me know if this helped you.
# Feel free to contact with corrections or suggestions.
#
# We're using PySide, Nokia's official LGPL bindings.
# You can however easily use PyQt (Riverside Computing's GPL bindings) by commenting these and fixing the appropriate imports.
from PySide.QtCore import *
from PySide.QtGui import *
#from PyQt4 import *
#from PyQt4.QtCore import *
#from PyQt4.QtGui import *
import sys
class MyMainWindow(QWidget):
def __init__(self):
QWidget.__init__(self, None)
vbox = QVBoxLayout()
# Let's create two sliders widgets.
# http://doc.trolltech.com/4.6/qslider.html
sone = QSlider(Qt.Horizontal)
vbox.addWidget(sone)
stwo = QSlider(Qt.Horizontal)
vbox.addWidget(stwo)
# Link the first slider to the second.
# Think of this as an event and listener system - a signal is an event, and it can have multiple listeners.
# A slot is a listener to an event.
#
# Signals are generally used whenever an action occurs which might require a reaction, or feedback - for example,
# a user clicking on a button, or a slider value changing.
#
# A signal can provide one (or more) parameters, which can then be used in the corresponding slot(s).
#
# In this example, we're linking the valueChanged signal to setValue on the second slider, meaning that whenever the
# first slider is moved, the second slider will move with it.
#
# This might look strange when compared with the .NET and other typical methods of doing it, but it
# really is much more natural and easier to express.
# See also:
# http://doc.trolltech.com/4.6/signalsandslots.html
self.connect(sone, SIGNAL("valueChanged(int)"), stwo, SLOT("setValue(int)"));
# Set the layout on the window: this means that our button will actually be displayed.
self.setLayout(vbox)
if __name__ == '__main__':
app = QApplication(sys.argv)
w = MyMainWindow()
w.show()
app.exec_()
sys.exit()
Seam Carving is an algorithm for image resizing introduced in 2007 by S. Avidan and A. Shamir in their paper “Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing“.
Miyako Island, Okinawa, Japan.
The principle is very simple. Find the connected paths of low energy pixels (“the seams”). This can be done efficiently by dynamic programming (see my post on DTW).
Same image in the gradient domain showing the vertical and horizontal seams of lowest cumulated energy.
The seams of lowest cumulated energy can be seen as the pixels contributing the least to an image. By repeatedly removing or adding seams, it is thus possible to perform “content-aware” image reduction or extension. The resulting images feel more natural, less “streched”.
Height reduced by 50% by seam carving.
Height reduced by 50% by traditional rescaling.
Although seam carving doesn’t need human intervention, in the original paper, a graphical user interface (GUI) was also developed to let the user define areas that can’t be removed, or conversely, that must be removed.
In my opinion, seam carving is simple and elegant. No sophisticated object recognition algorithm was used, yet the results are quite impressive.
You can find my implementation in 250 lines of Python in my git repo:
$ git clone http://www.mblondel.org/code/seam-carving.git
Unfortunately, it’s too slow to be real-time.
Something was wrong with FOSDEM this year: The weather – it was (comparably) warm and the sun was shining all the time! Apart from this it was a great event like always. I attended it representing the OpenEmbedded project with a small booth. From the OE project perspective FOSDEM was a great success. Apart from meeting people working on other projects that do use or could use OE we had a lot of interest from various other visitors at the booth.
Visitors at the OE booth
Some things I noticed during my time at the booth is that we have to improve the presentation of the project a little bit. For many visitors even on a developer event like FOSDEM OpenEmbedded is a quite uncommon project and hard to present. We showed a set of different devices at FOSDEM but we always need to explain that these devices are just samples for possible OE target devices. It’s not really obvious how to communicate this… One improvement could be to add sheets with OE information to the devices we show. We should list things like this:
- Name
- CPU Architecture
- Useful OE targets
Another thing I miss is a kind of poster or info sheet that summarizes OE achievements in some lists and numbers. But anyway I think we are getting better and become more and more popular.
Device collection
We have to thank all the project members who helped with our booth – most notably Alessandro, Robert, Marcin and Henning for spending a lot of time at the booth. Special thanks should go to Ulf (from Atmel) and Vladimir (from Archos) who made it possible to have some more interesting devices to show. I think this is the first time we didn’t have a single Zaurus at the booth… :-)
One more project / booth I think is worth to mention is Rep Rap / Makerbot. The bots for turning 3D models into real things you can touch and use gained quite some attraction.
Bots at the booth
Bot detail
Did you notice? You can even use these bots make parts for another one… I think it is worth following these projects. They might become quite important to us in near future.
A working Makerbot - just finished a job
I would have some more things to write about – there were a lot of interesting things going on at FOSDEM but like always time is lacking. More as soon as I manage to write some more lines…
MugenPowerBatteries have been in the business of making hi-capacity batteries for quite some time and they have been working on a battery for the Nokia N900 which ships only with a standard 1320 mAh battery. The stock battery lasts a day for average use but who does not love using a gadget for ever without charging ?
Mugen informed us that they are shipping a 2400mAh battery for the N900 starting this march and they are starting to take pre-orders for the same now.
Although this battery is bound to give close to double the normal battery life, the powerpack increases the thickness of the already chubby N900. A replacement battery cover ships along with the battery.
This battery can be yours for 87.95 USD and this is a discount pre-order price . Normal pricing is 96.95 USD
They are offering free worldwide shipping !
Nokia N900 gets a 2400mAh Battery , available for pre-order ©, .
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After a couple of great days in Helsinki last week and a busy weekend I finally had time to implement some of the great suggestions I got. I’m completly stunned by how easy and obvious things are after sitting down with a bunch of great designers. 
Only big feature missing right now is auto-setup of APN as well as autoconnecting regardless of active connection. As these are quite complicated problems it might be a while before it works flawlessly for everyone, however there is a proof-of-concept available in iapconnect.py for the connection part.
Regardless – I’m quite happy with how far fMMS has gotten in just over a months time!
Thanks for reading (and testing fMMS) – pictures of the updated UI after the break!
First, the improved main view, now showing direction of the message, who sent it or who’s receiving it.
The new “Composer” – it’s in the git repo but not yet packaged.
Contact search (by pressing “To” in the composer).
Composer with an image attached.
Received message (“Viewer”).
DOSBox is a free, open-source cross-platform MS-DOS emulator that uses the SDL library to emulates CPU:286/386 realmode/protected mode, Directory FileSystem/XMS/EMS, Tandy/Hercules/CGA/EGA/VGA/VESA graphics, SoundBlaster/Gravis Ultra Sound cards and makes possible to run many programs originally written for MS-DOS under Linux.
The emulator has been largely developed for use with old games and offers countless hours of reliving the classic games that newer systems may have a problem running but it can also be used to run many non-game DOS programs, including Windows 95!
The original source code has been forked to provide compatibility on a number of non-x86 PC computer platforms, including the Palm OS, PlayStation Portable, Internet Tablet OS 20... .. .
I can’t give you proper reviews of Nokia devices if I don’t try other phones from other manufacturers for comparison. I’ve been using the Google Nexus One in the past 30 days and have been really enjoying it. I’ll share my review of the Nexus One with lots of comparisons to Nokia’s current superphone, the [...]Continue reading Google Nexus One Review from a Nokia Lover at The Nokia Blog
One of the tasks I've been doing in the last couple of months has been to try and refresh the openness data for Fremantle. This has actually been quite a challenge as I've had to retrieve a lot of different sources to make a proper description of what is actually open and what is not.
The openness reports
The openness reports
Liam says “broombroom soon Stinky Mama Papa mit”.
That means that we will be flying in an airplane on Friday to Helsinki. I’ll be around for work stuff on Monday and Tuesday too. Most afternoons are planned out already, and evenings are generally difficult with a child, but I hope to see random Nokia/Maemo people, maybe at lunch. I shall be pinging you.
We are looking forward to seeing old friends who we don’t get a chance to see often enough.
I have just submitted a couple of patches (this and this) to Tinymail that add Moblin to the list of supported platforms.
Basically the main addition is the TnyMoblinDevice, it’s an object that allows every application that uses Tinymail to use the connectivity services provided by Moblin’s Connection Manager.
In order to build Tinymail for Moblin you just need to use --with-platform=moblin in the configure process.
While Apple fans are all silent, Maemo guys have had a serious reaction to previous post, Apple’s iPad is meant for drivers, not mechanics.
Facebook (FB) announced on Wednesday that they’ve made FB chat available everywhere using the Jabber technology, an open messaging protocol supported by most instant messaging (IM) software. Guess what? The Nokia N900 supported Jabber out of the box since it was launched! I’ll show you how you can add FB chat on the N900 without [...]Continue reading How to Add Facebook Chat On Nokia N900 Out of the Box at The Nokia Blog
Reading about [Nokia's UI Extensions for Mobile](http://www.johanpaul.com/blog/2010/02/nokia-ui-extensions-for-mobile-compiled-in-ubuntu-and-maemo-5-sdk/) ([sources available](http://qt.gitorious.org/uiemo)) I wanted to quickly try it myself.
So I looked at the provided examples, and [this video is the result](http://taschenorakel.de/media/beerchooser/orbit.ogv) of what I came up with (well, of course it is [FOSDEM](http://www.fosdem.org)-induced). The provided API allowed me to easily apply my previous Qt knowledge, which is a nice touch. Sources for the example in the video app can be found [here](http://taschenorakel.de/media/beerchooser/main.h) and [here](http://taschenorakel.de/media/beerchooser/main.cc). Happy hacking!
**Update:** The UI Extensions for Mobile will *not* compile on 64bit architectures.
Sorry about the posts here being light this week, but I have been extremely busy with my normal day job and haven’t been able to spend much time with this hobby site. I spent some time cleaning up my Facebook contacts the other day to try to keep it limited to high school, college, local friends, and those who I consider my closer friends while keeping Twitter more open to online aquaintances. I then started looking around at ways to chat with these Facebook friends from a mobile device and Mark Guim made a timely post on how to enable this capability on the Nokia N900. While the N900 may not have a lot of slick looking apps like Android and the iPhone, integrated service functionality like this is quite compelling.
Follow the directions Mark posted to get Facebook chat enabled through the Jabber client on your N900. I keep bouncing between the N900 and Nexus One and on the Nexus One I actually have Nimbuzz loaded up for Facebook chat support.
It was my first time at FOSDEM this year, and it was pretty fun. I got to chat to people about Maemo (although there were not many Maemo-specific talks), and managed to have a good meeting with Dave Neary about my work on maemo.org developer documentation. It was good to see Zeeshan again, and staying in the same hotel as Lennart meant that I got to steal his guidebook pick his brain about good places to eat.
The GNOME Color Manager talk was fun, although nothing particularly new. Hopefully some cross-desktop participation can help that. Greg Kroah-Hartman's talk on writing a kernel patch was interesting, and might finally encourage me to fix my sound card driver (incorrectly-mapped output controls). I went to my first keysigning party, which was weird but fun. Michael Meeks' bootchart2 talk was excellent, and funny of course. Probably the best thing of the conference was the GNOME tshirts, with a GNOME coat of arm and monkeys. Hopefully I get the chance to go to FOSDEM again next year.
The GNOME Color Manager talk was fun, although nothing particularly new. Hopefully some cross-desktop participation can help that. Greg Kroah-Hartman's talk on writing a kernel patch was interesting, and might finally encourage me to fix my sound card driver (incorrectly-mapped output controls). I went to my first keysigning party, which was weird but fun. Michael Meeks' bootchart2 talk was excellent, and funny of course. Probably the best thing of the conference was the GNOME tshirts, with a GNOME coat of arm and monkeys. Hopefully I get the chance to go to FOSDEM again next year.
"How do I install Skype on it?" - If you or someone you know has been asking this about the Nokia N900, the answer is you don't need to install anything as Skype is built-in. In another video aimed at beginners, All About Maemo goes through how to set up a Skype account, and shows how it is fully integrated into the N900.
Tonight I could not attend band rehearsal so I used the time to play with the new QML language. There is a nice tutorial online and a good screencast.
Tonight I could not attend band rehearsal so I used the time to play with the new QML language. There is a nice tutorial online and a good screencast.
QML allows one to write flashy applications with little code. My first QML program is a metronome. The N900 has a metronome program but it is rather boring. It does not look and feel like a real metronome. So I set out to write one in QML and managed to do so in 56 lines of QML. The interaction is simple: tap it to toggle between on and off and slide up and down to move the cross-bar on the metronome which will adjust the tempo in the range 40 to 208 beats per minute.
Without further ado here is the code. You can run it in qmlviewer. Two things are lacking at the moment: a nice SVG image of a metronome and of course the ticking sound. I am keen to find out how to make the metronome produce sound to make it useful.
import Qt 4.6
Rectangle {
width: 640
height: 480
Rectangle { // metronome bar
id: bar
x: 320; y: 100; width: 30; height: 300
color: "#aaaaaa"
property double tempo: 120
Rectangle { // weight on metronome bar that determines the tempo
x: -15; y: parent.tempo; width: 60; height: 30
color: "#aaaaaa"
}
transformOrigin: Item.Bottom
rotation: 0
rotation: SequentialAnimation {
id: anim
repeat: true
NumberAnimation { to: 35; easing: "easeInOutQuad"; duration: 60000/bar.tempo }
NumberAnimation { to: -35; easing: "easeInOutQuad"; duration: 60000/bar.tempo }
}
}
Text { // tempo indicator
x: 0; y: 0;
font.pointSize: 24; font.bold: true
text: bar.tempo
}
MouseRegion { // logic for tempo tuning and turning metronome on and off
anchors.fill: parent
property int start: -1
property bool moved: false
property bool wasrunning: true
onReleased: { // start or stop the metronome
anim.running = (moved) ?wasrunning :!wasrunning
bar.rotation = 0
start = -1
}
onPositionChanged: { // adjust the tempo
moved = start != -1
wasrunning = (moved) ?wasrunning :anim.running
bar.tempo += (moved) ?(mouse.y - start) :0
bar.tempo = (bar.tempo > 208) ?208 :bar.tempo
bar.tempo = (bar.tempo < 40) ?40 :bar.tempo
anim.running = false;
bar.rotation = 0
start = mouse.y
}
}
}
I just bought a Sprint Overdrive 3G/4G device last Friday and have been very happy with the speeds of the 4G network in the Puget Sound area. I just read this morning that Joikuspot beta for Linux Maemo (N900) is now out as a free application. I immediately downloaded it to my N900 and started testing my PC connected in WiFi mode. Keep in mind that this software is in beta and you will most likely experience issues. I am personally seeing my N900 restart the first time I connect a device with it working just fine after the restart and this is a known issue with this beta.
On T-Mobile 3G here in Seattle I am seeing 1810+ kbps download and 0 kbps upload on my iPhone 3GS using the Speedtest.net application. I believe the upload limitation is a Joikuspot beta limitation and is not helpful if you want to use WiFi to send email, etc.
The application is easy to setup and use. You will see two dials on the main screen to give you indication of the amount of data going up and coming down on your N900. I included a couple of screenshots of the application.
Joiku announced the availability of Joikuspot on Friday for the Nokia N900. It’s still beta and may contain bugs, but users can try it out for free and report such findings. Joikuspot turns your N900 to a secure WiFi Hotspot which your laptop or other devices can use to connect to the internet. There are [...]Continue reading JoikuSpot Beta for Nokia N900 Now Available – Turns your N900 To WiFi Hotspot at The Nokia Blog
A companion video to the Skype one, this is another beginner's guide showing how the N900's Accounts system allows you to activate third-party VOIP and messaging services without having to install any extra software.
It was just over a year ago when I followed all the Smartphone Experts coverage of the Smartphone Round Robin and then contacted Dieter to ask if I could start up a Nokia site so that Nokia could be part of the next Round Robin and it is a bit surreal now that I have completed my first Round Robin event. I want to thank Dieter and all the other Smartphone Experts editors for allowing me to participate and being so open and willing to give S60 and Maemo a try on various devices. I think I opened up the eyes of quite a few people who were previously unfamiliar with Nokia’s offerings since they have such little influence here in North America. The Smartphone Round Robin is now over and the winner chosen here on Nokia Experts has been notified. It will be interesting to see which device David chooses as his prize and I personally recommend the Nokia N900 for T-Mobile and Nokia E72 or N97 mini for AT&T.
Probably many of the readers of this blog have noticed that Nokia released a preview of UI Extensions for MObile aka Uiemo this week. In…
Between watching events in the Olympics, I played a few games on my Nokia N900 and it occurred to me that the game waiting to be made is the #N900 Bobsled run. Let me present a few videos to give you an idea about what I have in mind.
First, there is this video of the bobsled run from a first person point of view:
Then, there is this sample game that comes on the Nokia N900:
Could Bounce evolve to use a Bobsled track? Even better, could it evolve to use various Bobsled tracks from different virtual worlds? This idea comes from reading about the announced release of Naali, an open source virtual world viewer that might port nicely to the N900. Of course the Naali viewer would need enhancements to take advantage of the accelerometer. Discussions about this are already taking place.
To push it even further, what about slalom racing in virtual worlds where the competitors use accelerometer enabled mobile devices? I want to go the sports bar where people bring their N900’s and race each other this way. Each racer sees their own view of the track on their N900s and the participants watch the race on a big screen over the bar.
What I like about OpenSim, the virtual world platform often used with Naali, Naali itself and the N900 environment is that they are all open source and combined they could provide an great platform for an incredible open source mobile virtual world experience.
The N900 has instant messaging and VOIP totally integrated into the interface, but officially it only supports this integration with Skype, Google Talk, Jabber/Facebook and Ovi. Unofficially though, more services including MSN / Live, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, QQ and others can also be used in an integrated way. The video below shows exactly how to activate them, it only takes a minute and you only have to do it once.
Some of you might have a hunch of my interest in aviation and airplanes, so it's no wonder I wanted to help our aviation club a little. The two-seater trainer aircraft was in a desperate ned of a new paint, and we wanted to have a new color scheme at the same time to freshen up the appearance. There were some restrictions for simple financial reasons, so the plane was to have a white base paint and all the color stripes would be done with stickers. Nevertheless I am pretty happy with the result.
I first went to the airport and took some pics of the her side profile with my N900 and sketched some ideas with pen and paper and finally in Inkscape where I opened a 5.5 meter by one meter canvas... 
The flight manual of the plane contains a three-way view of the aircraft, so scanned the page and used Inkscape's excellent tracing tool to turn it into a base for my design, and resized it to the corrent size of the aircraft.. This must have been the largest canvas size I have had so far in a design project... 
Design work done in Inkscape
The design evolved a quite a bit and I always had a bunch of the latest sketches in my N900 to show to club members who gave me good feedback... And eventually we had something we were happy with, and a PDF file of the design was sent to the paint shop a while ago. Stripping a plane from the old paint is quite a lot of work, and takes a while, so they sent us back some photos of the work in progress..
Aircraft partially disassembled before paint stripping
Paint stripped, masked for spraying
Empty canvas!
And finally today we got the much anticipated message in our mailboxes, the work was nearing completion!
Stripes in place!
It's always nice and rewarding to see a design work transform from bits and bytes into something physical. Even better if you can strap yourself into it and go flying...
First, I downloaded Evernote, I really didn’t figured it out, for what it was good to. I installed it on my N900, on my macbook and on my work-pc.
I’m kind of an old school note writer. Ideas, sketches, things I have to remember, I used to write down my every day notes on my writing pad, which I was carrying with me, always.
Now with the app installed, I just started to make my notes, on my N900, my mac and pc. On the N900 it isn’t really an app yet ...
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-02-08 through 2010-02-14
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-02-08 through 2010-02-14
The N900's media player application has an internet radio section which contains lots of radio station bookmarks, but no obvious way of adding more. The video below gives an example of how to add more stations to the list, and how to remove stations too.
Front Page
Nokia Qt 4.6 to replace Community Qt 4.5 in PR1.2
Nokia will be launching official Qt 4.6 support for Maemo 5 with the PR1.2 release. Nokia intends to deploy the currently in Beta Qt 4.6 to all devices via software update — most probably already with the next major update PR1.2. This may signal an accelerated timeline for pushing Qt support in Maemo 5, which will give a clearer migration path for existing applications to Maemo 6 and allow developers to start preparing for the transition to Harmattan.
Given that the largest criticism for the transition to Qt as the mainstream supported toolkit came from the lack of a developer migration path, this goes a long way in continuing the moves made at the summit to ease that transition. Combined with tools like Qt Creator and MADDE, cross-platform development and deployment with rich tooling support is finally becoming a reality for Maemo.
Read moreCouncil election timeline
Dave Neary has posted the timeline for the March 2010 Maemo Community Council election, with 2nd March being the deadline for electorate karma, and 23rd March marking the opening of voting. Since we're announcing the election dates now, anyone who does not yet have 10 karma, or hasn't let linked their maemo.org and talk.maemo.org accounts, now has a few weeks to do so before the election process starts. Users interested in voting should be sure their Talk and maemo.org accounts are linked before 2nd March - indeed, given it can take 26 hours for a full karma recount, the sooner the better.
The Community Council are the primary interface between the Maemo community and Nokia but, beyond that, they're also responsible for facilitation within the community; making sure that a random developer on IRC is connected with someone on talk.maemo.org or the mailing lists.
Read moreIn this edition (Download)...
- Front Page
- Nokia Qt 4.6 to replace Community Qt 4.5 in PR1.2
- Council election timeline
- Applications
- Maemo 5 themeing on Windows for dummies
- Video how to on using MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, ICQ and more with the Maemo 5 Telepathy system
- How to use Facebook Chat via the built-in instant messaging
- ...and 5 more
- Development
- Battery status graph for analysis using battery-eye
- TI collaboration on getting 3D acceleration drivers for N8x0 progressing
- PySide (Python + Qt) tutorials
- ...and 5 more
- Community
- How to avoid "me too" replies to bugs
- Should maemo.org have a "mascot" in addition to the community-sourced logo?
- Efforts to launch a maemo.org store of branded caps, mugs etc.
- Devices
- Desktop stand for N900
- XMPP credentials vulnerable to MITM attacks
- Mer with working 3D acceleration on N900 with open source kernel (closed libraries)
- Maemo in the Wild
- maemo.org group on LinkedIn hits 1,000 members
- Running Windows 95 on the Nokia N900
- Announcements
- Diablo & Fremantle openness reports
- Quick Brown Fox font viewer in Testing
- wizard-mounter allows browsing of remote filesystems (incl. SMB & NFS)
With the mobile industry gathered in Barcelona, MWC Day 1 is underway. In this post, we'll be bringing you live coverage from Nokia's event. The event kicks off at 10:30am GMT and we'll be covering both the press conferences and some of the follow up events and interviews.
Nokia and Intel took to the podium at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona today to announce that their respective Linux projects, Maemo and Moblin respectively, will be rolled together to create a new Operating System to be called Meego.
Intel and Nokia announced on Monday that they are merging their popular Moblin and Maemo platforms to form Meego, a Linux based platform that will support a vast range of devices including netbooks, tablets, phones, and more. Devices from Nokia and other manufacturers are expected to be launched later this year. Intro Videos The Ovi [...]Continue reading Intel and Nokia Merge Moblin and Maemo to Create Meego at The Nokia Blog
“MeeGo is an open source, Linux project which brings together the Moblin project, headed up by Intel, and Maemo, by Nokia, into a single open source activity.”
Ari Jaaksi has written a very informative announcement. Read it.
Some Highlights:
- “The development and integration will be open, too. Everybody can invest in MeeGo and participate. It is a genuine open source project.” (Ari Jaaksi)
So, I hope to see the build system open also…
- Use the Qt Creator to create your applications: How to create a basic meego application.
In a significant development in the convergence of communications and computing, Intel Corporation and Nokia are merging their popular Moblin and Maemo software platforms.
This will create a unified Linux-based platform that will run on multiple hardware platforms across a wide range of computing devices, including pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems. Called MeeGo, the open software platform will accelerate industry innovation and time-to-market for a wealth of new Internet-based applications and services and exciting user experiences. MeeGo-based devices from Nokia and other manufacturers are expected to be launched later this year.
This announcement strengthens the Nokia and Intel relationship, and builds on the companies' broad strategic collaboration announced in June 2009. Intel and Nokia now invi... .. .
In what is huge news coming out of the MWC, Nokia and Intel have come together to create Meego, a mashup of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin. You grab the press release here, but to give you a better idea of the direction Nokia is going to, read the following extract from Ari Jaaksi’s post.
MeeGo is an open software platform – an operating system – for a wide range of devices. It’ll run on X86 and on Arm based hardware. It will be developed as an open project hosted by the Linux Foundation.
Joint development
We will merge Maemo and Moblin projects. Their architecture is already very similar. They share many components but sometimes use different versions. But they build and integrate releases independently. And while Maemo is for ARM, Moblin is for X86. Now we merge them to get the best of both. A good Moblin build and integration, Maemo’s mobile optimizations and ARM support, Qt etc. We can also now make the bright engineers of Intel and Nokia to work close together.
And even more. I invite all active Moblin and Maemo community members to now join the MeeGo project. It’ll give you all a much bigger pond to swim in. And it’ll get your work into much wider use than either of these projects separately.
Freedom
MeeGo is free. Code will be available for everybody under proper open source licenses. No strings attached other than making your contributions also free. The development and integration will be open, too. Everybody can invest in MeeGo and participate. It is a genuine open source project. Free for everybody to participate, contribute, and enjoy. Free. No papers to sign. Just show up!
Compatibility
MeeGo offers the broadest possible compatibility for application developers. It uses Qt as the framework and toolset for application developers. It means very good tools and possibility to run your apps in a wide range of devices. Code once – deploy everywhere.
MeeGo also means compatibility and full compliance with leading open source projects. We will not fork projects if we can possibly avoid it. We will work with leading open source projects using the open source best practices.
A perfect target
MeeGo will aim high. Nokia and Intel are the biggest investors in mobile Linux based technologies and now – together—even more significant. We will put all our force behind making MeeGo THE operating system.
So, for chip-set companies, hardware vendors, software companies, application developers, device manufactures, operators … this is the place to go. Make you stuff work under, inside, or on top of MeeGo and you get your stuff deployed all over the place. Nokia will ship tons of MeeGo devices, Intel, too. And others will use MeeGo in their devices. It is open, free, powerful and compatible.
Devices
So what’s with Maemo6? Maemo6 will be MeeGo compatible…..consider Maemo6 already a MeeGo instance.
Nokia and Intel has announced today the MeeGo Project, a new open source, Linux project for both Maemo and Moblin. The new Qt development environment will feature easy to use and flexible UI for a better app development experience. The Linux Foundation in turn will handle the open source project organization. MeeGo aims to target netbooks/entry-level desktops, handheld computing and communications devices, in-vehicle infotainment devices, connected TVs, and media phones.
Below are several videos about the announcement:
Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.
Wee..! Big news – Intel and Nokia joining their open source software platforms Maemo and Moblin into a single one: Meego
So what does this mean for developers and device manufacturers? One thing is for sure: The new platform will become the “grown up” version of Maemo and Moblin. Especially for the Maemo part this means that the focus will change from targeting a very few devices and a quite well-defined software stack to a more generic way to support multiple hard- and software environments. And this is good – only a portable and easy to support platform is attractive for the device makers while the availability of multiple devices is important for its attractively among software developers.
It looks like we have interesting times ahead…
We’ve been busy with our friends @ Intel.
We decided to expand the relationship we started already last spring. We merge Maemo and Moblin projects into one single project called MeeGo. MeeGo is an open software platform – an operating system – for a wide range of devices. It’ll run on X86 and on Arm based hardware. It will be developed as an open project hosted by the Linux Foundation.
So what does it mean? Many things.
Joint development
We will merge Maemo and Moblin projects. Their architecture is already very similar. They share many components but sometimes use different versions. But they build and integrate releases independently. And while Maemo is for ARM, Moblin is for X86. Now we merge them to get the best of both. A good Moblin build and integration, Maemo’s mobile optimizations and ARM support, Qt etc. We can also now make the bright engineers of Intel and Nokia to work close together.
And even more. I invite all active Moblin and Maemo community members to now join the MeeGo project. It’ll give you all a much bigger pond to swim in. And it’ll get your work into much wider use than either of these projects separately.
Freedom
MeeGo is free. Code will be available for everybody under proper open source licenses. No strings attached other than making your contributions also free. The development and integration will be open, too. Everybody can invest in MeeGo and participate. It is a genuine open source project. Free for everybody to participate, contribute, and enjoy. Free. No papers to sign. Just show up!
Compatibility
MeeGo offers the broadest possible compatibility for application developers. It uses Qt as the framework and toolset for application developers. It means very good tools and possibility to run your apps in a wide range of devices. Code once – deploy everywhere.
MeeGo also means compatibility and full compliance with leading open source projects. We will not fork projects if we can possibly avoid it. We will work with leading open source projects using the open source best practices.
A perfect target
MeeGo will aim high. Nokia and Intel are the biggest investors in mobile Linux based technologies and now – together—even more significant. We will put all our force behind making MeeGo THE operating system.
So, for chip-set companies, hardware vendors, software companies, application developers, device manufactures, operators … this is the place to go. Make you stuff work under, inside, or on top of MeeGo and you get your stuff deployed all over the place. Nokia will ship tons of MeeGo devices, Intel, too. And others will use MeeGo in their devices. It is open, free, powerful and compatible.
Devices
So what’s with Maemo6? Maemo6 will be MeeGo compatible.....consider Maemo6 already a MeeGo instance.
So aim at MeeGo. We will!
We decided to expand the relationship we started already last spring. We merge Maemo and Moblin projects into one single project called MeeGo. MeeGo is an open software platform – an operating system – for a wide range of devices. It’ll run on X86 and on Arm based hardware. It will be developed as an open project hosted by the Linux Foundation.
So what does it mean? Many things.
Joint development
We will merge Maemo and Moblin projects. Their architecture is already very similar. They share many components but sometimes use different versions. But they build and integrate releases independently. And while Maemo is for ARM, Moblin is for X86. Now we merge them to get the best of both. A good Moblin build and integration, Maemo’s mobile optimizations and ARM support, Qt etc. We can also now make the bright engineers of Intel and Nokia to work close together.
And even more. I invite all active Moblin and Maemo community members to now join the MeeGo project. It’ll give you all a much bigger pond to swim in. And it’ll get your work into much wider use than either of these projects separately.
Freedom
MeeGo is free. Code will be available for everybody under proper open source licenses. No strings attached other than making your contributions also free. The development and integration will be open, too. Everybody can invest in MeeGo and participate. It is a genuine open source project. Free for everybody to participate, contribute, and enjoy. Free. No papers to sign. Just show up!
Compatibility
MeeGo offers the broadest possible compatibility for application developers. It uses Qt as the framework and toolset for application developers. It means very good tools and possibility to run your apps in a wide range of devices. Code once – deploy everywhere.
MeeGo also means compatibility and full compliance with leading open source projects. We will not fork projects if we can possibly avoid it. We will work with leading open source projects using the open source best practices.
A perfect target
MeeGo will aim high. Nokia and Intel are the biggest investors in mobile Linux based technologies and now – together—even more significant. We will put all our force behind making MeeGo THE operating system.
So, for chip-set companies, hardware vendors, software companies, application developers, device manufactures, operators … this is the place to go. Make you stuff work under, inside, or on top of MeeGo and you get your stuff deployed all over the place. Nokia will ship tons of MeeGo devices, Intel, too. And others will use MeeGo in their devices. It is open, free, powerful and compatible.
Devices
So what’s with Maemo6? Maemo6 will be MeeGo compatible.....consider Maemo6 already a MeeGo instance.
So aim at MeeGo. We will!
In terms of branding? Uncertainty. Otherwise? Potential.
- First things first, if you are not sure Meego is, I suggest you read this post – What is MeeGo?
- Back to Maemo. We already know that Maemo 6 will be completely compatible with MeeGo, and according to Ari Jaaksi, we even can consider Maemo 6 already a MeeGo instance.
- We also know that the MeeGo announcement will not affect the Maemo 6 rollout schedule.
- The one interesting thing is that Nokia has still not decided if they want to call Maemo 6, Maemo 6 or MeeGo something. Nokia has already spent considerable time and money populating the Maemo brand name, it may still not be as visible as Symbian or Android, but it is a well known commodity among the geeks at least and a small fraction of the mainstream users.
- Changing to MeeGo will mean that the last six months’ work will go down the drain and leave people even more confused with the sheer fragmentation.
- We also know that the Maemo.org community and the Moblin community will be aggregated at MeeGo.com, the new home of the open source OS.
- Two lines that stood out for me in Ari Jaaksi’s post were, ‘We will put all our force behind making MeeGo THE operating system‘ and that ‘Nokia will ship tons of MeeGo devices‘. A re-branding exercise seems inevitable after reading this.
- MeeGo builds upon the Moblin core software platform and reference user experiences, adding the Qt UI toolkit from Maemo. Maemo was based on ARM, while Moblin on the X86 architecture. This merger will mean that users get the best of both worlds.
I am sure we all would like the Maemo brand to stay, it definitely sounds better than MeeGo, but if you consider the fact that Intel is giving up Moblin, this possibility seems even more remote. Calling Nokia’s MeeGo iterations Meamo MeeGo or MeeGo Maemo sounds silly and it looks as if the community will have to get over the brand.
In its new form, Maemo (MeeGo) is sure to improve by leaps and bounds. Nokia’s MeeGo devices will be powered by cutting edge hardware that will deliver superb speed, multitasking and everything that you need in the palm of your hand. Since MeeGo is targeting not only mobile devices but also Connected TV’s, in-car infotainment systems, Media phones and so on, the reach will definitely grow. Will you see MeeGo on your N900? I don’t think so. Should you get excited about MeeGo? Yes, but now’s not the time for that.
It will be quite sometime before we see the Maemo go away completely, but one thing is sure – Maemo is dead. Long live Maemo.
At last year’s Maemo Summit, we released a limited technical preview of the upcoming Harmattan UI Framework.
Today, we are releasing the entire UI framework as Open Source with a permissive LGPL license. The Harmattan UI Framework highlights include:
- A fully finger optimized UI with kinetics and multitouch
- Built on the latest Qt technologies, including the Qt Graphics View and Animation frameworks
- High performance OpenGL application rendering and window composition
- Support for cross platform application development wherever Qt runs, today this includes Linux, Mac OS X and Windows
- Developed in an open source manner
We are quite excited about the last point in particular. As the Maemo 6 UI Framework is still a work in progress, not only will you be able to follow the progress, you have the possibility to influence and contribute to the project as well. The day-to-day development will take place in full public view, at qt.gitorious.org/maemo-6-ui-framework
The components released today include:
- libdui, the UI framework library
- duitheme, the development UI theme(s)
- duicompositor, our window compositor/manager
- duihome, the homescreen application
If you have a Nokia N900 and are feeling brave, there are now packages available in the extras-devel repository of Widgets Gallery, our Maemo 6 UI components demo application. Libdui and the included demo application can also be compiled on standard Linux, Mac and Windows desktops provided Qt 4.6 is installed. So try it out, and let us know what you think!
Intel and Nokia have just announced that mobile Linux operating systems Moblin and Maemo are merging. The new OS is called MeeGo. Details are still emerging, but from the looks of it Intel will provide most of the core while Nokia is responsible for the UI (which will be based on Qt). One important bit of information already known is that MeeGo will use RPM packaging. So Maemo developers, better start reading.
According to the MeeGo architecture diagram, GTK will still be supported, although it is not clear to what extent. Two distinct user interfaces are referenced, called “MeeGo Handheld UX” and “MeeGo Netbook UX”. How does Maemo fit into all of this? Speculate away in the comments.
Below is the full list of articles in this week’s issue:
Maemo Weekly News – February 15, 2010
- Maemo 5 themeing on Windows for dummies
- Video how to on using MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, ICQ and more with the Maemo 5 Telepathy system
- How to use Facebook Chat via the built-in instant messaging
- JoikuSpot for the N900
- User interface improvements in fMMS
- AdFlashBlock-CSS in testing
- WayFinder licences start expiring, not renewable
- EasyPark for re-finding your parked car
- Battery status graph for analysis using battery-eye
- TI collaboration on getting 3D acceleration drivers for N8×0 progressing
- PySide (Python + Qt) tutorials
- Open sourcing of Maemo components queue & workflow
- Maemo 6 Platform Security: FOSDEM slides
- Maemo 6 Platform Security: FOSDEM video
- Maemo book for WRT/Qt/QML – request for content suggestions
- TpSession, simplified Maemo 5 SMS & messaging API
- How to avoid “me too” replies to bugs
- Should maemo.org have a “mascot” in addition to the community-sourced logo
- Efforts to launch a maemo.org store of branded caps, mugs etc.
- Testing squad getting started
- Desktop stand for N900
- XMPP credentials vulnerable to MITM attacks
- Mer with working 3D acceleration on N900 with open source kernel (closed libraries)
- Diablo & Fremantle openness reports
- Quick Brown Fox font viewer in Testing
- wizard-mounter allows browsing of remote filesystems (incl. SMB & NFS)
It sounds really cool Nokia marketing its N900 flagship with navigation on board. Meantime everone of N900 owners know, that what we realize as navigation is not exactly what Ovi Maps on the N900 offers.
So I tried what the so called “navigation” on the phone is really good for. Having an appointment about 100km away, I started the Ovi Maps from the desktop shortcut. It takes its time to startup, but once on your screen, it has a nice environment, and really easy use UI. Tapping the first letters of ...
Greetings from the Nokia party here in Barcelona. I'm blogging on my N900 which really makes me the geek of the party!
MeeGo is the next step fro Maemo. Natural evolution. Gets us much wider adoption. So it is not at all about forgetting Maemo. It is about merging most significant open source mobile projects together.
Nokia roadmap will be accelerated. Maemo6 plans have not changed. We are workingd days and nights to get it out.It will be Qt based and MeeGo compatible.
We will absolutely not forget N900 users and developers. If you are a developer, develop on N900 with Qt and your apps will run on MeeGo devices. If you are an N900 owner (or an owner wannabee) this is all good for you. All the MeeGo and Qt momentum will give you many more interesting applications to run on N900. Now and in the future.
I only had a very few free minutes today I was able to spend following the discussions and reading released information about MeeGo. For some reason the most intensively discussed fact among the community members seems to be decision to use the RPM package system. This one is followed by the Qt vs. GTK+ discussion I cannot remember when it started but I still remember it even started before I wrote the first line of open source code :-) I have seen a lot of questions about currently existing devices (N900 mostly) and software - if they are likely to become supported in future MeeGo releases – at least for the N900 and Maemo 6 there is a statement by Ari Jaaksi already. The other technical questions… well, in an ideal world these should not even be relevant for the developers because there would be the perfect tools that create the packages you want and assist you to create user interfaces without thinking much about the toolkits you use. Again – this is the theory – we all know that the real life for development is quite different. But in the end or customers / users will decide which platform and with this which applications they are going to use. Users will not care about the package format used in the platform or the toolkit that is used by some application. In fact many (mostly Linux/Unix based) platforms do not expose the software package file format to an average user any more while some quite popular ones still do (e.g. Symbian and Windows). For users the availability of a consistent and widely used software platform with a high amount of available applications is likely to be the most important criterion. Ok, I admit that the availability of sexy hardware is quite important too :-)
Nokia has published a demo application for N900, available in extras-devel repository, that shows a preview of Maemo 6 (Harmattan) user interface. Here there are some screenshots of the demo:
Demo application main window
Question dialog
Text entry dialog
Progress indicator
Information banner
Event banner
You can find more pictures in my Flickr album. Please note that installing this demo will also install Qt 4.6.2 on the N900 and about 52 Mb are required.
Rafe and Ewan McLeod are hard at work bouncing around Barcelona, and they caught up with a number of companies at the MWC MobileFocus evening. One of those companies, Swype, promises a “faster and more efficient way of entering text on a touchscreen device”, as Rafe finds out in this Video Report with Mike McSherry and gets his hands on an alternative input system.
The Nokia N900 has received a new firmware in the form of PR 1.1.1 (version 3.2010.02-8). This looks like a minor update and is available as an image from N900 firmware section as well as over the air if you search for updates. The OTA option is a 16.2 MB download and looks like a precursor to the major PR 1.2 update.
This update adds a number of regions to the N900, as quite a number of countries were earlier missing from the N900’s list. Apart from that there is no changelog available. I will update this post if I see something new.
The changelog is now available here, this firmware fixes the battery drain issue when connected to WIFI and browser improvements among other minor things.
Update: If you get a memory error while trying to update the N900 over the air, trying rebooting the device once. If that still doesn’t solve your problem then disable the Extras-Devel and Extras-Testing repositories and try again.
Update 2: The update is also available via the Nokia Software Updater, however when you update using it, you will loose your applications and settings, while the contacts and other data including photos will remain intact. So please make sure you backup before you update.
[via: Sittiphol and Maemo Club on Twitter]If you enjoyed this, you might also like:
- How To Enable Application Repositories On The N900 With One Click
- How To Turn Your N900 Into A Flashlight
- How To Hard Reset The N900 To The Factory State
- New N900 Firmware v1.2009.41.13 Coming Soon
- Rant: Why Did Nokia Take Away The Clear Device Mode On The N900?
Thanks to the guys over at talk.maemo.org, a new fw update is on its way to everybody. Also on Twitter there is a word on this 2 steps update: first will come this minor one(16.2 MB) starting today, which will prepare the room for a second, major update (that will hopefully bring QT on board).
There is no changelog yet and supposedly it won’t be until the major 1.2 update at the end of Feb. Some of the lucky guys who were able to see and update their N900 are saying MicroB is moving smoother and the media player is louder
(courtesy to justcallmet, talk.maemo.org)
These are the updated packages:
“osso-wlan
libas-protocol-0
tablet-browser-controls
cmt-firmware-rx51
nolo
osso-applet-lanuageregional
apt-transport-https
Maemo5
osso-accounts-plugin-skype
tablet-browser-daemon
hildon-application-manager
apt
locale-resolver-data
libconbtui0
libgles2-sgx-img
libicd2
tablet-browser-view
wl1251-firmware
icd2
flasher
operator-wizard-settings
tablet-browser-ui
posix-locales
libconnui
connui-conndlgs
opengles-sgx-img-common
rtcom-call-ui
librtcom-call-ui0″
(thanks jrox at talk.mmaemo.org)
What you need to know / do:
1. You will need more space: disable and delete all the repos but the first 3 (which are read only, anyway) – this way you’ll gain up to 10-12 MB of rootfs; uninstall any major hogs like “OpenArena
2. You will need to backup everything
This update should be available over-the-air and from here: http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/nokia_N900.php
Don’t expect too much from this update:
- No wi-fi battery drainage addressed
- No video call
- No OVI maps improvements
- No free navigation
- No USSD (so keep using USSD widget)
More information on talk.maemo.org and here
Edit 1 : Changelog here
Browser
- History images do not match actual URLs under them
- New browser windows contents are not updated when page loads in background
Connectivity
Core
Settings and Maintenance
System software
Telephony
EDIT 2:
Media Player process priority has been balanced: no more music pauses while browsing or chatting
Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin are merging to form MeeGo, a development environment for a new class of internet-connected devices ranging from smartphones through netbooks to TV sets. This may be finally what provides the free software world with a consistent and modern alternative to the iPhones and iPads that the proprietary world has come up with, the "magical user experiences" Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin was asking for.
Jussi Makinen has previewed yesterday two apps they’re working on, at Nokia Conversation YouTube channel.
One is the 3D Roller Coster, which seems to have the same engine as Bounce from Rovio, the other one is Zen Bound, which looks very promissing as a 3D developement.
Here is the Youtube you’d be looking for:
At the MeeGo announcement there wasn’t much clarity on whether Nokia was going to keep the ‘Maemo 6′ brand for now and then transition into MeeGo, but a simple post from Quim Gil, of Nokia’s Maemo Division requesting the renaming of the Maemo 6 / Harmattan sub forum at Maemo.org to MeeGo / Harmattan has brought much needed clarity to the picture.
In our latest AAS podcast, Insight 105, Steve and Ewan discuss the news and announcements from Barcelona, including the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro, Symbian^3, Skype for 5th Edition, Nokia's Maemo/Moblin deal, Windows Phone 7 Series Pocket Pro Mobile (or something like that) and anything else which we thought of interest and relevance.
Fresh from the ovens of Igalia‘s Industrial Web Hackery division I bring you what all of you were waiting for: support for the DOM methods window.{moveTo, resizeTo, moveBy, resizeBy} in WebKitGTK+, and the corresponding fix in Epiphany. What does this mean? It means that Browser Pong now works in Epiphany!
What? Browser Pong? Yes: Browser Pong.
Go nuts, this is better than World of Warcraft.
Because all the cool kids blog about it these days..
- Follow the FHS (get rid of workarounds such as Optification)
- Remove Maemoisms and Scratchboxisms
- Follow freedesktop.org specifications (at least bugs 657, 1303, 3817, 3818, 3828, 3822, 3913, and 4766 according to this wiki page)
- Allow many different UI toolkits and languages (it's OK if you decide to provide official support for only a few of them)
- Make sure other UI toolkits integrate nicely (mostly covered by following wm-spec, icon-naming-spec and systemtray-spec and not inventing "MeeGo"-specific technologies and non-standard implementations)
- Make sure notifications work from other toolkits (libnotify-based vs. Qt-only notification widgets)
- In general, follow the ideas from the Mainstream Linux Aligment wiki page (the page is broken atm, but you'll be able to see the bug IDs)
If any of these specifications/standards do not meet the requirements, please work with freedesktop.org or other related institutions to get your extensions discussed, fixed and then integrated into the relevant specifications.
People will still develop mobile UIs specifically for whatever device will come along in the future, but porting from/to "mainstream" Desktop Linux should be as easy as possible.
There's a lot of awesome open source Linux/UNIX (GUI) software out there, it just needs some UI love to be usable on mobile devices. Don't make it harder than it should be.
(And with that I mean that it's easier to relayout a GTK+, FLTK, wxWidgets, Swing or Tk UI than to port everything to "the one true toolkit".)
This is especially true since open source developers usually develop in their free time, and porting an app to a new toolkit/environment is something that can't be done in two afternoons. Relayouting UIs can be done in that time.
Adding paradigm-shifting cool new UIs will still work without breaking backwards-compatibility and without restricting developers to one language/toolkit.
Oh, and Mer solves most of these issues by basing itself on a "standard" Desktop distro and only changing stuff that's really necessary.
As of sometime this week, I’m shutting this site down. I’ve followed Nokia’s Internet Tablets since the 770, through the N800 and N810, and spent several months with the N900. I’d be lying if I said that Nokia hadn’t made some significant progress with the N900 – for some folks, it’s likely the perfect mobile device. For me, it’s terrible.
I’m happy to share with you the video which we shot last week to promote Maemo 6 UI Framework.
Don’t forget to choose 1080p or 720p. Enjoy!
Tomas and his colleagues announcing the open sourcing of Harmattan UI Framework:
Harmattan UI Framework video
(Sorry video is unavailable temporarily)
Tomas already posted a blog entry for the open sourcing announcement so I am not talking about that in detail, you can see more in the video. You can read the blog post by Tomas Junnonen from here.
The UI Framework team members approached me if I could make a video for their Harmattan UI Framework Open Sourcing announcement. So here is what we came up with the pretty tight schedule for shooting and editing and this is why I did not sleep much on last weekend. Go to the link to see what they want to say.
We were shooting these clips on evenings to very late, up to around 22:00. The editing was enormous task too with about 400 gigabytes of material and rendering time being over 8 hours, but I think it was worth it, it looks pretty cool now.
Please remember to select either 1080p or 720p from Youtube to see the video how it was intended to be seen, in high definition.
And many thanks to everyone on the video for their contribution and thanks for the possibility for letting me to shoot this, while it was a really hard work, it was also a lot of fun.
I have enough material on the hard disk that I might be also able to make a tutorial video from the same material, so if you liked this video, stay tuned, I might post another a bit later.
A part of the tutorial is already showing behind Sergiy on this video.
Like the new toolkit libraries are free software, so is this video including its sound track (that I did by myself). The license is Creative Commons Share-A-Like.
Comments are open for 2 weeks in my blog for your feedback about the video. Your feedback is very welcome.
The Nokia N900 received an update Tuesday morning to version 3.2010.02-8. It seems to be a minor update since users haven’t noticed any new features. An official changelog hasn’t been shared yet either. The software update is available through the app manager so go ahead and check your N900. There’s a big thread on the [...]Continue reading Nokia N900 Firmware Updated to 3.2010.02-8 at The Nokia Blog
I wish TheGuru would not have that a strong argument while leaving the Maemo / MeeGo community.
I wish this argument wouldn’t have been possible to be hold against Nokia.
I wish he would have been wrong.
To Nokia:
“To Nokia – make a freakin’ commitment. Commit to the developers who are constantly having to rewrite their apps every time you release a device. Commit to the consumers who are trying to get excited about purchasing a $500+ device that’s going to be incompatible with the next version. Commit to not make each device incompatible with the next version of your platform. Commit to developing the product line beyond ‘ooooh, shiny’ with each release.”
To Maemo community:
“(…)you’ve made a *big* change towards welcoming new people. Yeah, I’ve noticed, and you should be congratulated for improving so much in that regard. Keep it up. I hope for Nokia’s sake that you stick around”
The entire article here
There's been a lot of chatter recently about the Maemo+Moblin merger, particularly, a lot of fear from N900 owners about the future of their devices, and how MeeGo fits into that. This isn't anything new, I might add - there has been a huge storm on talk.maemo.org the past month about Maemo 6 on the N900. From my perspective at least, this is all fairly ill founded, and I think that a measure of patience and calm is needed.
There isn't a lot of technical reasons why it won't happen with either of them, and with MeeGo at least, it is fully open and community driven, so there should be no *other* obstacles to people teaming up and making it happen. There has already been discussion on #meego about making this happen, and it's only day two!
In the meantime, more updates for Maemo 5 are sure to follow - PR 1.2, the next reasonably sized update is being talked about increasingly on #maemo on freenode, which hopefully means it isn't too far away.
It's very easy to be pessimistic, it's very easy to worry that your device won't be unusable.
Don't take the easy route: fit into the MeeGo community and make things happen.
There isn't a lot of technical reasons why it won't happen with either of them, and with MeeGo at least, it is fully open and community driven, so there should be no *other* obstacles to people teaming up and making it happen. There has already been discussion on #meego about making this happen, and it's only day two!
In the meantime, more updates for Maemo 5 are sure to follow - PR 1.2, the next reasonably sized update is being talked about increasingly on #maemo on freenode, which hopefully means it isn't too far away.
It's very easy to be pessimistic, it's very easy to worry that your device won't be unusable.
Don't take the easy route: fit into the MeeGo community and make things happen.
Hopefully I've helped settle a few minds with this post to meego-dev.
After a lot (and boy, do I mean a lot) of reading, writing, and
discussing the RPMvsDEB scenario ad nauseum, and a more recent
discussion, I thought it might be good to put some positive energy
into the discussion, so here goes.
I'm sorry to add yet more fuel to this fire, but hopefully this will
help douse the flames, rather than raise them higher.
RPM - Why?
----------
Full disclaimer - I am not a packaging expert, but am writing this to
try summarise what I know for the benefit of the community as a whole
so that we can all channel the energy that has been devoted into this
issue into something more productive and exciting.
I would welcome any commentry on this. Should it be seen as suitable,
perhaps it might be an idea to put something similar to this up as an
FAQ item, as this certainly has been asked frequently.
--
A lot of discussion and questions have arisen over the past few days
through the Maemo and Moblin merge into MeeGo, with a lot of it
centering around one particular issue: that of RPM vs DEB packaging.
The current state of things is as such - Moblin uses RPM, Maemo uses
DEB - but this issue is not as simple as a packaging format, it's an
entire toolset. I'd also like to very quickly and emphathetically note
that this is purely addressing RPM and DEB, not Fedora and Debian, or
yum vs apt-get, or anything like that.
Maemo's toolset, in the form of scratchbox, sbmock, autobuilder and
co) has a number of kinks which have caused all sorts of fun issues,
but at the end of the day, have worked.
Moblin's toolset has equivilents to do package building - but then, a
lot more, which is not currently available for Maemo. There are
various other tools which are needed to further aid development, such
as the image creator
(http://moblin.org/documentation/moblin-image-creator-2/using-moblin-image-creator).
With this in mind, it is clear that Moblin's toolset has a number of
more capabilities to add that will infinitely benefit development and
QA, which is definitely an advantage to MeeGo, unfortunately, some
elements within this chain do not work with RPM.
It may of course be theoretically possible to rework these tools to
work with a different format (or multiple formats), but let us take a
step back and consider how pragmatic a decision that is, when at the
end of the day, we are talking about a format - both of which bear a
lot in common.
While possible, perhaps - just perhaps - there are other more
important priorities to focus on, and a bigger picture - above the
religious warfare - to keep in mind: that while we have gained RPM, we
have also gained organisation, a solid process and great tools built
to engage the wider community.
I popped my SIM into my Nokia N900 and turned it on this morning to discover that a Maemo 5 update was available. The new firmware is version 3.2010.02-8.002 and is 16.2MB in size. Unfortunately when I tried to install it on my N900 I received an error that there wasn’t enough memory available to install the update. I went into the application installer and saw that the Firefox browser consumed something like 40+MB so I uninstalled it and tried again with the firmware update. Again, I received a pop-up that there was not enough room in the target location. I went into Settings>General>Memory to check out what I had available and saw there was 1.63GB available for installable applications, 18.04GB available on the N900 memory and a full 14.27GB on my 16GB microSD card. I then had to do a bit of hunting around to discover that I needed more space in my rootfs directory. Following the tip from synplex in this Maemo.org thread I disabled all the extra catalogs I had in my Application Manager and the update worked like a charm.
You are prompted to create a backup, but I like to live on the ragged edge so I went ahead and installed the update without a backup. Actually, I figure this is as good of a time as any to reload up apps I like and clean up my device.
There doesn’t appear to be any official changelog yet so I am not sure what was updated with this firmware. I will test out my device and keep an eye out for any official information on what was changed, but if you already did the update please feel free to post if you find anything too.
UPDATE: One noted change comes from plaban: “Just noticed one change. Now it is possible to install .deb packages without xterminal,just open the .deb file using file manager.”
Just want to give everyone a quick heads up that Nokia has rolled out minor firmware update (3.2010.02-8) for Nokia N900 and you can get it as Firmware Over the Air (firmware over the air) through the Application manager or with Nokia Software Updater As well but in that case you'll lose all settings and apllications as well so be sure that you have valid back up before update.
If you haven’t been warned yet, than enable internet connection and refresh app manager and you should see the 16.2 MB large Firmware version 3.2010.02-8. It should be available for most of the generic product codes but owners of branded devices might have to wait a bit longer.
Although there is no detailed change log it is still highly suggestible to get it as it usually brings dozens of minor bug fixes and improves reliability of your pho... .. .
Some time ago, I discovered Pixelpipe and installed the plugin on my N900. First you need an account on www.pixelpipe.com, but you can use your Ovi, or Twitter usernames and passwords to login, so you don’t have to create another “new” account.
Once you logged in, you have to create pipes. Just choose the services you want to connect and fill in your passwords. There is almoust a complete list of all services, that are popular and most used, and also the possibility to add blogs of your choice accessorily. At ...
The source code for many components of Harmattan release have been released yesterday at gitorious. That is great if one is interested in digging through the code or compiling it. For those who just want a quick test drive there is demo available for N900. It is actually rather simple:
- Click this link.
- Follow the installation steps
- Launch “Widgets Gallery” from launcher
Easy, enjoy, but beware, this is rather heavy, prefer WLAN.
Remember the last call? After less than 5 months we can see apparent success, and a lot more than a proof of concept.
Apaprently, Qt Lighthouse was used for porting the QtGUI module.
From the Author:
"You don't have to write your own jni<=>java connections, all the magic is done from java by com.nokia.qt package, take a look to examples/android/QtTest/src/com/nokia/qt"
I can only say, Kudos to BogDan! And of course I still cannot believe how flexible Qt architecture is. I bet we can expect more ports this year.
Dig for more details... and leave what you discovered in the comments below.
Remember the last call? After less than 5 months we can see apparent success, and a lot more than a proof of concept.
Apaprently, Qt Lighthouse was used for porting the QtGUI module.
From the Author:
"You don't have to write your own jni<=>java connections, all the magic is done from java by com.nokia.qt package, take a look to examples/android/QtTest/src/com/nokia/qt"
I can only say, Kudos to BogDan! And of course I still cannot believe how flexible Qt architecture is. I bet we can expect more ports this year.
Dig for more details... and leave what you discovered in the comments below.
Are you a developer and are you interested in messaging API (on your N900)?
Kate Alhola recently released a very interesting blog post about the API she created and it seems that it got under the flood of the MeeGo related posts. So here is her great article, please go and read it if you are interested on this, I think it is worth it:
Easy to use SMS and Messaging API to Maemo 5
Kate Alhola recently released a very interesting blog post about the API she created and it seems that it got under the flood of the MeeGo related posts. So here is her great article, please go and read it if you are interested on this, I think it is worth it:
Easy to use SMS and Messaging API to Maemo 5
In other news, the drivers was uploaded to TI extranet yesterday - this is something people have waited for, for a long time. And you need to create a TI (my.ti.com) account for this. For those who want to have access the SDK need to send a mail to gamingonomap@list.ti.com stating your need for the SDK mentioned below.
You need to then click "Extranets" on my.ti.com and then WTBU-OMAP Gaming SDK and then OpenGL®ES Graphics SDK for OMAP2420 Nokia N800 OpenGL ES v1.1 and OpenVG 1.0 SDK based on Linux kernel 2.6.21
A fair warning: These drivers are not for the weak at heart. You need to flash a new kernel. You may need to fix up some build scripts and run some mysterious commands. They will not work that easily out of box.
While I kinda assume this will be drowned out in Meego announcements and discussion, well, I got the mail last night
Thanks to qwerty12, javispedro, lardman, the TI guys (Girish, Ameet) and the Nokians helping out to make this reality and others.
__________________
maemo.org distmaster & Mer lead developer, Join the MeeGo project!
You need to then click "Extranets" on my.ti.com and then WTBU-OMAP Gaming SDK and then OpenGL®ES Graphics SDK for OMAP2420 Nokia N800 OpenGL ES v1.1 and OpenVG 1.0 SDK based on Linux kernel 2.6.21
A fair warning: These drivers are not for the weak at heart. You need to flash a new kernel. You may need to fix up some build scripts and run some mysterious commands. They will not work that easily out of box.
While I kinda assume this will be drowned out in Meego announcements and discussion, well, I got the mail last night
Thanks to qwerty12, javispedro, lardman, the TI guys (Girish, Ameet) and the Nokians helping out to make this reality and others.
__________________
maemo.org distmaster & Mer lead developer, Join the MeeGo project!
The impact that MeeGo will have on the mobile computing world should not be underestimated. It is a shot across the bow from two of the biggest names in computing. The message is simple: those who can develop, deploy, and market the best, win.
Why would Intel and Nokia bundle up some of their most crucial “intelectual property” and give it away to the Linux Foundation? Why else would they let in fierce competitors? Why else would they let in applications and frameworks and not keep complete control? The reason is that these companies feel they can compete with their competitors on a level playing field and win. They may in fact be right.
There are some losers in the whole switch from Moblin and Maemo, specifically those who have a lot at stake with keeping things as they are. As someone who’s worked with Maemo technology, the move from a debian environment to a rpm environment is a big move. I’ve worked with rpm previously however and have been working with the Moblin toolchain for a couple months now so I don’t feel like the rug has been pulled out from under me. Community and governance issues will be big though – there is an established Maemo community that just does not exist in Moblin. Moblin is software mostly, designed to run on Intel’s Atom chipset, there are not many devices that have inspired a loyal following like the Maemo devices have. It remains to be seen if Intel, the Linux Foundation, and Nokia can handle this community transition. I suspect they are not so interested in the community per se, as long as they can attract developers who in turn attract hardware buyers.
I am impressed to see a lot of the Maemo community joining in MeeGo immediately, they have sort of swamped the MeeGo infrastructure, but what role the Maemo council and the Maemo paid staff, such as myself, will play is going to be interesting to see. I think our role will be greatly diminished because I think the focus of the MeeGo project is going to be much more technical. I think sites like talk.maemo.org will live on but separate from the more developer-centric MeeGo.
So, as I mentioned in my previous entry (http://blog.rburchell.com/2010/02/future-of-n900-what-meego-means.html), there isn't a huge need to worry about MeeGo.
After doing some more reading around the internet, I thought I'd best address another facet of this - that of application compatibility.
A lot of people seem to be of the assumption that MeeGo will be completely incompatible with everything out there, and really, this isn't the case.
For starters, take Maemo. MeeGo has a very similar stack to Maemo. It's basically Linux. It has X, Qt and Gtk+, and all the other things you're used to. Software using it will continue to work. It might need some packaging work, but that's not a big deal, and better minds on mine will hopefully come up with ways to minimise the amount of work needed here.
For Qt applications, this will already be very minimal with tools like MADDE helping cross compilation and packaging, and one can only presume that this *will* get better. In fact, Qt if anything, as with Maemo, is *helping* application compatibility, as software written for totally different platforms is easier to get running, due to Qt doing most of the heavy lifting for just about all parts of an application (audio, video, graphics..).
Again, I'd like to appeal for some sanity and a sense of calm here. This isn't the end of things, it's the start of something *much* bigger, and we're all a part of it.
After doing some more reading around the internet, I thought I'd best address another facet of this - that of application compatibility.
A lot of people seem to be of the assumption that MeeGo will be completely incompatible with everything out there, and really, this isn't the case.
For starters, take Maemo. MeeGo has a very similar stack to Maemo. It's basically Linux. It has X, Qt and Gtk+, and all the other things you're used to. Software using it will continue to work. It might need some packaging work, but that's not a big deal, and better minds on mine will hopefully come up with ways to minimise the amount of work needed here.
For Qt applications, this will already be very minimal with tools like MADDE helping cross compilation and packaging, and one can only presume that this *will* get better. In fact, Qt if anything, as with Maemo, is *helping* application compatibility, as software written for totally different platforms is easier to get running, due to Qt doing most of the heavy lifting for just about all parts of an application (audio, video, graphics..).
Again, I'd like to appeal for some sanity and a sense of calm here. This isn't the end of things, it's the start of something *much* bigger, and we're all a part of it.
I don't know if it's just a case or if I'm the only one who had these problems, but I'll report them anyway, maybe somebody had my same problem and we could try to prepare a proper bug report to make the Maemo team fix them.
Infinite boot loop after upgrade
First of all I have to say that before upgrading to PR 1.1.1 I checked if I had enough space on the rootfs. I only had 27 Mb and so I decided to remove some unused applications, deleted some *.deb in /var/cache/apt/archives and disabled extras repositories. Of course I also did a backup of all my configuration. After the cleaning operation I had near 60 Mb free on rootfs, enough to install the upgrade.
I closed all running applications, started the application manager and began the upgrade. After the upgrade was completed, the device did a reboot... then another one, then again, again.... until I had to remove the battery to stop it.
Conclusion: I had to re-flash the device with the latest image to make it work again.
mafw-dbus-wrapper taking all the CPU
I was watching a video (using subtitles) and after some minutes the whole UI became unresponsive. Strange because I already did this before without having any problem. I tried to check the problem using "top" utility from terminal and I saw that there was a mafw process (mafw-dbus-wrapper) that was taking 80-90% of CPU. My fault is that normally there are at least 3-4 , mafw-dbus-wrapper processes and I didn't check which one was causing the problem. Anyway I made a screenshot, just in case it can help.
I hope this short report can be useful to help Maemo team to fix or at least investigate what happened. Just leave a comment or contact me if you need more informations.
The recent announcement about Nokia and Intel planning on merging Maemo and Moblin into MeeGo has generated a lot of interesting discussions online. What does this mean for the future of the N900? What does this mean for developers wishing to write for Maemo or Moblin? Perhaps the biggest discussion has been about the packaging system. On the MeeGo FAQ page, they say “MeeGo will use the .rpm format”.
You got lots of videos, films or tv-shows stored on your Pc? Or your favorite music, cd collections and mp3 compilations?
I was pretty excited about the possibility to hear music or watch videos on my N900 over my network while cooking dinner, exercising on the home trainer (I do not really do that) or even sitting in the bathroom .
All you have to do is to setup an UPnP server. UPnP is short for Universal Plug and Play and runs over an IP network with standardized devices. On ...
Today I was thinking...too much.Too many news in the last few days. Coupled with my imminent relocation to Canada. Coupled with Xournal demanding more and more time.Anyway.. I gave up thinking. MeeGo didn't Go, it Came and it's going to stay.Maemo went. And I say goodbye to it. I will miss the brand.So now, as Maemo developer and as Maemo community member I need to choose.And I suppose the answer
Those of us who live in the West generally look a little mystified and uneasy when there’s talk of arranged marriages. Living in a society where at best people choose their own spouse and at worst marry for the sake of the children, we somehow feel superior.
Those of us who live in the West generally look a little mystified and uneasy when there’s talk of arranged marriages. Living in a society where at best people choose their own spouse and at worst marry for the sake of the children, we somehow feel superior.
The word "widget" has been used in so many contexts in computing and elsewhere, it can sometimes be unclear what exactly it means. On the N900, widgets are simple applications you can add to the desktop, and the video below goes through all the basics.
Hello once again dear readers! Before writing any of my major articles, I always try to approach the same problem differently for additional challenge, otherwise – where’s the fun?
The idea behind this particular article was to stress test the imaging capabilities on the two top of the line Nokia smartphones, and a special thanks is in order to the helpful people at WomWorld/Nokia for providing me with a spanking new Nokia N97 mini to pit against the N900 in all it’s glory!
What have you come to expect from a 5 Mpix camera on your high-end smartphone? Perhaps your expectations are set too high, or maybe they are unjustly low? Is pixel count an actual way of navigating through the maze of countless camera equipped phones, or are there any other variables to look o.... .. .
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During last few days I was offline for most of time. Those who follow me on Twitter noticed that I was traveling. Imagine how surprised I was when I read about Maemo + Moblin -> MeeGo movement.
First I thought that finally Nokia decided to get rid of terribly maintained base system used for Maemo5 in favor of something working. But wait… Maemo5 is already buried — Maemo6 is on a way. But wait… what is Maemo6? MeeGo rather etc, etc, etc…
After some reading (on N900 by GPRS mostly + some public hotspots) it looked more clearly but added new questions. What about Nokia N900 support? Will it be added by vendor and supported or rather let community do it? Done by company would be better as this would obligate them to keep development alive (and merge kernel stuff into mainline).
One is sure: MeeGo will bring many changes. Base system will be updated (good), packaging will be changed to RPM (not so good but acceptable), Qt instead of GTK+ (good), less Nokia developers (very good). Too bad that whole rush to get it done before MWC made few things unclear and that there is nothing to download to play with. There is no information how much code will be free and open (Maemo5 has lot of closed components) and what is a policy for closed components.
What do I feel after reading blog posts, mailing lists? Time will show. Looks like N900 can have nice future, new applications backported from MeeGo but for it we need to wait as for now nothing is known yet (no code to look at).
All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Maemo -> MeeGo was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website
Related posts:
- Is this the end of Maemo5?
- Qt under Maemo is pain to develop with
- System updates repository for Maemo5?
I released maemo robotfindskitten 1.41 to extras-testing last night.
What’s new:
- portrait mode
- tapping on the screen works more like the iphone port (thanks to Will Thompson for suggesting this)
- the screen has markings to show where to tap
- the demo button
- the help is in-process rather than spawning the browser.
Go! Find kitten!
In a country with freedom of speech, one has to say something to every happening, right? So here is my try:
Basically the merge of Maemo and Moblin is logical and consequent as Nokia and Intel already collaborated with ofono and merging helps joining the efforts. This is quite necessary as neither Maemo nor Moblin could survive on their own in a world where everybody else uses Android and soon will start using Chrome OS. There was also a need to make Moblin more like Meamo to be able to compete with the iPad.
That sounds greet so far, right? Joint efforts, bigger community, open to everybody… But the problem is the way the merge is going to happen. Moblin is more or less a huge techdemo so far – everybody who I know uses Ubuntu Netbook Remix on their Netbook, as it is more production ready and end user oriented. The same also applies to Maemo.
It is a bit sad that the next Maemo/ MeeGo Harmattan will be Qt based though, at it means that all the currently working applications have to be rewritten without gaining an immediate benefit. But considering that Qt is technically more advanced than GTK and that it allows deploying your application on the different OS Nokia uses this is understandable.
What is less understandable is that MeeGo will be based on RPM/ Moblin/ Fedora. And at least for Fedora the official motto is merging new features as fast possible, which is nice for developers but less nice for end users, as the distribution is less stable. So while it is logical to base a tech-demo like Moblin on Fedora, I would not base anything that is supposed to be stable on it.
But this is exactly what shall happen with MeeGo. This means Maemo has to abandon its Debian roots and rebase everything to RPM. By everything I mean the huge amount of packaging experience gained during the last 5 years, the build infrastructure and of course the core package management applications. This has also an impact on the community infrastructure, downloads, karma are coupled to the DEB format too.
So what do we gain by rebasing to RPM? Maybe the Moblin interface which is indeed nice? Actually no, as it is Clutter/GTK based while MeeGo will use Qt – besides the Moblin interface was packaged by Ubuntu as deb too. Ok the Moblin community will not need to change its infrastructure, but is the Moblin community actually that big?
As I really wonder why we switch to RPM I started a wiki to collect the arguments, and as it does not look too good for RPM also a brainstorm vote.
There are two main methods for installing applications and games on the N900: through the free software catalogue built into the App Manager, and through Nokia's own Ovi Store application shop. Both of these methods are demonstrated in the video below, which is intended for beginners.
This fine small application allows you to take control over your pc in your network, from everywhere you want. Vnc viewers are generally used to support customers desktop computers, servers, workingstations, etc. for example in large companies, so the technician won’t have to be locally at the device itself. He is able to solve problems directly from his workstation, what is an efficient way to save costs (by the way).
Before you can start, you have to install a VNC server on your desktop computer, such as UltraVNC or TightVNC (Mac ...
I’ve just stumbled on an incredible application for the N900 that can translate text from images into various languages. So in a foreign country you can simply take a picture of a boarding/sign/menu, put a box around the text and the application will extract that text and translate it for you.
The knowledge about the existence of this app comes from a video uploaded by CybercomLab on YouTube, this does not look like a community project and my guess is that we should be seeing it on the Ovi Store soon. Here’s the application’s ‘official’ description from the YouTube page:
Imagine yourself walking on a street somewhere in a foreign country and you face a warning sign, but you have no idea what it says. Just take a picture of the sign and open it with PhotoTranslator, crop the text in the sign and PhotoTranslator translates the text to your language. In addition the PhotoTranslator can be used also for translating copy/pasted or typed text, not just for text from pictures.
Enjoy!
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How many times have you wanted your Nokia device to pause the media player when the headphones are pulled out? Not only does this keep your music taste private, it also saves you from possible embarrassment when the headphones come out accidentally and the phone starts blaring loudly.
Fortunately there’s a small application called ‘Headphone Daemon’ that lets you do just that. I’ve tested the application on myself and it works perfectly, the music player is paused instantaneously. It doesn’t even play for an extra second. To download this app, enable the extras-devel repository on the N900 if you already haven’t. (Here’s how to do it with one click.)
Look for ‘Headphone Daemon’ under ‘Multimedia’ and install it. Enjoy. Kudos to Thomas Perl for the hack. It works with the default Media Player, Mplayer and Panucci.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:
- How To Use Mplayer On The N900 To Play Unsupported Video Formats
- BootScreen Lets You Change The N900 Boot Video With One Click
- How To Enable Application Repositories On The N900 With One Click
- How To Block Unwanted Callers On The N900
- Turn Your N900 Into A PS3 Controller & More With BlueMaemo
Morpho QuickPanorama showed up in the Ovi Store for the Nokia N900 this week. It lets you take panoramic photographs by only moving the camera to capture a wide landscape. Users don’t need to snap multiple pictures and join them later on. The ease of use will definitely attract more people towards panoramic photography.
The movement detection engine based on the Morpho’s unique algorithm only requires users to move their cameras to an area to be paranomically photographed. All the complicated works such as positioning and image pasting are processed within the Nokia N900. All the processing is performed in real time, so the users can preview the panoramic image of a photo while being taken.
My first attempt is included below. Click on the image for the original size.
The missing section on the right side of the image is the result of moving the camera up or down from the horizontal line.
The version of QuickPanorama currently available in the Ovi Store shows a message that it is a trial version with a limited capture size of VGA (640 x 480). I’m assuming that a paid version can capture larger sizes when it becomes available. Try it out and share links of your panoramic photos from the Nokia N900 in the comments below!
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Over the last couple of days there’s been a range of discussions about who and what exactly MeeGo is (are). Discussions have begun about whether there will be a council, a summit and what, if anything becomes of the forums. Full discussions can be found in the t.m.o community forum.
Over the last couple of days there’s been a range of discussions about who and what exactly MeeGo is (are). Discussions have begun about whether there will be a council, a summit and what, if anything becomes of the forums. Full discussions can be found in the t.m.o community forum.
I don’t decide about Tracker’s release. The team of course does.
But when you look at our roadmap you notice one remaining ‘big feature’. That’s coping with modest ontology changes.
Right now if we’d make even a small ontology change all of our users would have to recreate their databases. We also don’t support restoring a backup of your metadata over a modified ontology.
This is about to change. This week I started working in a branch on supporting class and property ontology additions.
I finished it today and it appears to be working. The patches obviously need a thorough review by the other team members, and then testing of course. I invite all the contributors and people who have been testing Tracker 0.7’s releases to tryout the branch. It only supports additions, so don’t try to change properties or classes, or remove them. You can only add new ones. You might have noticed the nao:deprecated property in the ontology files? That’s what we do with deleted properties.
Anyway
Meanwhile are Martyn and Carlos working on a bugfix in the miner about duplicate entries for file resources and on a timeout for the extractor so that extraction of large or complicated documents doesn’t block the entire filesystem miner.
Jürg is working on timezone storage for xsd:dateTime fields and last few days he implemented limited support for named graphs.
By the looks of it, one would almost believe that Tracker’s first new stable release is almost ready!
After a successful participation in Google Summer of Code ’09, the Maemo Community intend to apply this year again, in order to have a strong proposal we need everybody’s help. We are currently looking for project ideas, mentors and backup mentors.
Do have a killer idea for a Maemo application ? Add it here: http://wiki.maemo.org/GSoC_2010/Project_ideas
If you want to help as a mentor or co-mentor, read this instructions: http://wiki.maemo.org/GSoC_2010/Mentors
For this year, we intend to concentrate the students effort around end-user applications, but improvements to other projects under the Maemo umbrella are also acceptable and welcome.
Follow the discussion here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=535538
The last round of news regarding Enlightenment were pretty nice, but one thing that we could see from the community feedback is that there are lots (and I do mean lots) of people out there who do not know its current state. Mostly this is caused by our serious public relations issue (lack of official news, etc.), and we’re planning on fixing this.
There have been several firmware updates since the N900 was released, and more are on the way. The video below is intended for beginners who need a little help with updating their device. You don't need a PC, the update can be done entirely on the phone itself.
Thanks to the hackfest time Igalia gently gives me every week I could resume the work I had previously started to add ENVELOPE support to tinymail.
What’s this stuff about? Well basically what we can do now is ask the server for ENVELOPE instead of fetching a random set of headers (like ‘From:’, ‘Subject:’ …). Why is this cool? For several reasons:
- Speed: IMAP servers do cache
ENVELOPEinformation so they do not have to inspect every email message to extract the requested headers. They can give youENVELOPEblazingly fast (I run a rough test and downloading a folder with ~1500 headers from AOL IMAP server lasted twice the time of downloadingENVELOPEandBODYSTRUCT, and this means minutes). - Bandwidth:
ENVELOPEis smaller in size than headers as the name of the headers is not transmitted over the network - Future: RDF storage support in tinymail is now closer
You can find this new feature in trunk.
Recently, big news arrived: The MeeGo project. But let me start with some history. In May 2009 some key members of the Mer project met up for the first time 'in real life' at the Mozilla Maemo Danish Weekend. At this event, we got some very characteristic t-shirts - very very red ones, which we since have worn proudly when we were meeting up again at various events and countries, as we could recognise each other.
Qt 4.6.2 for Maemo 5 was released this week. Due to some changes prior to the final Qt release, PySide users might have seen this error when trying to use QtQui:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: /usr/lib/pymodules/python2.5/PySide/QtGui.so: undefined symbol: _ZNK24QAbstractKineticScroller10metaObjectEv
To fix this, we rebuilt the PySide 0.2.3 packages against the Qt 4.6.2 release, and now it should be working again. So make sure you are using the latest PySide packages on Maemo 5 (0.2.3-1maemo3) and enjoy!
A new version of mafw-gst-eq-renderer has been released: 0.1.2009.47-1-1.
mafw-gst-eq-renderer is a renderer plugin for MAFW, the multimedia framework used in Maemo 5. It is a fork of original MAFW renderer plugin which adds an equalizer.
This release integrates all changes from original mafw-gst-renderer v0.1.2009.47-1 plugin. So it should have all features as original (and unfortunately all bugs too).
If you want to use it with the default mediaplayer, I suggest to install MGR flavour.
Installing mafw-gst-eq-renderer
Installing mafw-gst-eq-renderer (I’m assuming you want to install MGR flavour) is very easy: download it and from a terminal, install it, uninstall original mafw-gst-renderer and reboot the device.
For those that need a detailed step by step:
- sudo gainroot
- dpkg -i mafw-gst-eq-renderer_0.1.2009.47-1-1mgr_armel.deb
- apt-get remove mafw-gst-renderer
- reboot
Uninstalling mafw-gst-eq-renderer
If for any reason you want to uninstall it, it is easy too: you must restore original mafw-gst-renderer and then remove the fork.
Again, step by step:
- sudo gainroot
- apt-get install mafw-gst-renderer mp-fremantle-generic-pr
- apt-get remove mafw-gst-eq-renderer
- reboot
After this, everything should work fine.
MæPad 1.2 is out now, and includes (apart from bugfixes and usability fixes) some cool new features such as word wrapping, mass-removal of all checked items and the often requested "share your sketches" feature that allows you to upload sketches to Flickr or send via E-Mail or Bluetooth.
Sadly, the "share your sketches" feature makes MæPad build-depend on the "sharing-dialog-dev" package, which is not available in the auto-builder. Anyway, with MæPad 1.2 you can upload useful or even pointless sketches directly to hosting services:
If you want to get MæPad 1.2 into Maemo Extras, please vote for bug 9070. Alternatively, you can grab the armel .deb for MæPad 1.2 from the MæPad website.
In other news, the MæPad Git repository and MæPad on Transifex are now online, so if you want to contribute code or translations, please feel encouraged do so (send me your Transifex username, so I can add you to the MæPad project there to allow uploads).
After some time spent with new phone or any mobile device most of us come up with personal habits like naming contacts in favourite way, placing specific shortcuts on homescreen or adding some websites to bookmarks. I tend to do similar thing with every device I have. In case of computer I always change some of keyboard shortcuts to pause the music when it’s necessary, to switch windows easily, to simply make life easier and work more efficient. Now lets try to customize N900 in similar way.
I’ve had situations when ...
Sometimes, when you on the “road” with your Macbook, you may want to connect to the internet, for instance to check your emails or just to surf some sites on a “normal” screen size, what ever. Or maybe your WLAN connection fails and you desperately want to make a money transfer. There are many reasons for the need to connect to the net with your N900.
First you have to download the Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking App from the appmanager on your phone. Follow the install routine.
The next step is to establish ...
Few days ago I published some notes about my personal experience with PR 1.1.1 firmware upgrade in Nokia N900. In particular my device got an infinite reboot loop after upgrading the firmware and I had to flash the firmware image from scratch to fix the problem. Today I was kindly contacted by Max Waterman (I suppose he works for Nokia) and he explained me what was the problem. It was caused by a little bug in Harmattan UI demo and they fixed it (the fix is already available in extras-devel).
No surprise for me: extras-devel contains unstable packages and if user enables it, he does at his own risk. The most important thing is the fact that the official firmware without any unstable application doesn't suffer of this problem at all. The thing that really impressed me so much (in a positive sense) it's that I was contacted privately by a Nokia developer apologizing for the bug (no problem man, it's part of the game if someone want to test extras-devel software) and explaining that they already fixed it.
This is what I like of Maemo (or should I already call it MeeGo?), I really feel to be a part of it!
The Nokia N900 has a secret FM radio receiver which is not on the official specs. Although it's hidden by default, you can unlock it by installing a special unofficial application, as shown in the video below. The video also briefly demonstrates the N900's FM transmitter which lets you listen to music files and internet stations on any nearby FM radio (which is quite handy in a car).
The shock of the Maemo + Moblin = MeeGo development has subsided and I think I’m now ready to offer some analysis as I see it.
The third PySide tutorial here (part two: signals and slots available at http://blog.rburchell.com/2010/02/simple-pyside-tutorial-2-signals-and.html and part one: basic introduction/hello world: http://blog.rburchell.com/2010/01/simple-pyside-pyqt-tutorial-aimed-at.html), we're going to delve into something a little more involved and unique than the last two tutorials.
Although there is still much to be done, Firefox for the Nokia N900 launch was an important milestone for Mozilla as they extend its browser beyond the desktop environments.
Now, two weeks later, Firefox reached an important milestone on its way to provide an alternative for millions of mobile web users and is pleased to announce availability of the mobile version of Firefox browser in Nokia’s Ovi Store.
To celebrate and commemorate this achievement and the partnership between the Mozilla and Maemo commu... .. .
Ever since the announcement that Moblin and Maemo would be merging into MeeGo, there has been a raging discussion about whether rpm or deb packages should be used. At times, this has led to some good discussions about the technical merits of different packaging and distribution systems and the package formats they support. However, more often, it seems to be a heated exchange of religious viewpoints. Initially, I thought this was simply a traditional open source religious feud, but I’m beginning to think that it is much more than that. I now believe it is a battle for the third estate of mobile devices.
Since some people don't follow talk.maemo.org, this is to let them know I wrote a quite interesting piece to help calm some of the worries people have been having about N900 future with Maemo6 and MeeGo based on my previous experiences both as community member and as maemo.org distmaster.
You can read it at http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=45213 and it is very well received so far and covers four questions we should be asking instead of panicking.
You can read it at http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=45213 and it is very well received so far and covers four questions we should be asking instead of panicking.
At MWC 2010 we bumped into folks behind Rightware Kanzi -- a cross platform 3D UI platform. Here is a video of the UI in action on a Nokia N900 running on the Maemo platform. There is even gesture detection using the front video calling camera . Watch the video to see it in action
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdF1uAye548
The platforms supported are Android, Blackberry, Linux, Maemo, Moblin, iPhone OS, Palm Web OS, Symbian OS, and Windows Mobile. Kanzi solution is built on top of OpenGL ES graphics API.They are offering a SDK for developers to create the interfaces for the Kanzi platform.
ARM has outlined about the Kanzi engine and looks like a lot of ARM processors including the Cortex-A8,Cortex-A9 are compatible.
Kanzi is looking to license the UI to cell phone manufacturers and other consumer electronics products. It does look pretty cool and has even multi-touch. Can we ever see it on consumer electronic products ? Only time will tell
Video : Rightware Cross platform 3D UI on Nokia N900 ©, .
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Personalization never ends for me. New ideas appear time to time, sometimes when I meet a problem, sometimes when I see new piece of interesting software under development. Thats why I customize my N900 more and more almost every day.
Another hardware keys customization may be found in Shortcutd. This is also set of configuration for camera button (half pressed as for focusing) and proximity sensor (hidden in the corner near Nokia logo). Variety of actions isn’t too big, but going to dashboard, launching phone or going back in browser without ...
As promised, I’ve added the original air dates of the episodes to SeriesFinale.
This feature had been requested since people first knew of SeriesFinale and it is quite useful. It will tell you, by the color and actual date information, when a show’s episode was first aired in its network. Of course if you happen to watch a show on another network (usually this happens if you’re not from the same country as the TV show itself), then you won’t need this date to warn you to go sit and watch it but at least you see which episodes were already aired on their original country.
This release has not many changes apart from the date thing plus a couple of bug fixed and the Spanish translation (thanks to Juan A. Suárez Romero).
(By the way, as I write this, TheTVDB seems to be down so you are likely to have some trouble updating your shows and getting the air dates on it but I hope it will be up again soon)
Here are a few screenshots:
Today I found the application MaStory in the Maemo download section. The description sounded very interesting and so I thought I should give it a try and installed it directly to my N900 from the application manager.
Normaly when I write or edit my text I use my notebook, but this app is phenomenal. I am writing these lines straight from my N900 for the first time and I am really astonished. It does not need any explaination, everything is logical and on the right place.
Create an account with your logins in the ...
I've written enough about MaePad in the last few weeks, so today I'm announcing something for all the Maemo 4 fans out there: Maemopad+ 0.36 has been released, and with it comes a nice search function (the code for which has been written in 2008) and updated translations. We also added a Git repository and the updated website to the mix.
Here's a request for all the Maemo 5 lovers: Please don't forget to give some Extras-Testing QA love to the following packages: gPodder 2.2-2, Panucci 0.3.9-2 and headphoned 1.7. These packages already have passed their 10-day quarantine (or will do so during the coming days), and are just waiting for enough votes to be allowed to go into the Extras repository, so all end users can profit from the updates. Thanks for you help!
I’ve recalled about my old Shishen Sho game, originally developed for N810 (Maemo4) and I was wondering if it would compile for N900 (Maemo5). Well, after some minor corrections to make it work in a more recent version of Vala, it compiled. You can downloaded it here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/7573/shishensho_0.3.1-maemo5_armel.deb
Disclaimer: It’s compiled “as is”, with no adaption for sliding menus, no new hardware keys and no new fancy features. It just works and will let you have a good time while waiting for the bus.
The story of the N900 and other operating systems continues, after running Android, Win NT 4.0, Win 3.11, Win 95, Win 98, Debian & Mer it has taken on Ubuntu Mobile this time, Ubuntu Mobile 9.04 with LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) desktop specifically.
The port has been carried out by @lifenexus by modifying the N810 method. It is running on top of Mer, and has been installed natively on the micro SD card. The phone offers a bootmenu at startup where you can choose whether you you want to boot into Mer or Maemo. Unlike some of the other OS’s this one’s running at a pretty reasonable speed as well, charging, WIFI and limited keyboard operation is present, and obviously you cannot make calls within it. At this rate whether or not Nokia decides to give MeeGo to the N900 will become immaterial, the community will take of itself.
Note: This is not Ubuntu Mobile per se, but more of MER + LXDE.
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A couple of weeks ago, I bought myself a Promise NS4600 to replace my old Promise NS4300n NAS. These Promise devices are not particularly special but are cost effective and the new one performs well. As you might expect, both the old and news ones run Linux, but Promise do not allow direct access. Some people found ways in to the NS4300n and even worked out how the plugin format worked so you can extend its functionality fairly cleanly. Initial work had been done on the NS4600 but no one had documented the new plugin format or produced any plugins. So, I took it upon myself to do exactly that – I put together a guide and have linked to my initial plugins from there.
The NS4600 is pretty neat because it’s actually x86 compatible – it uses an Intel EP80579 SoC with a Pentium M core; it’s not a common sight (we’re drowning in high-end Atom based NASs) so the novelty is neat and being able to compile and run code easily is a plus.
The guide is here.
Enjoy!
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-02-15 through 2010-02-21
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-02-15 through 2010-02-21
In the previous tutorial (http://blog.rburchell.com/2010/02/pyside-tutorial-model-view-programming.html), we covered the basics of how to create a read-only model, with multiple views presenting the data.
N900 users have been able to change their boot screens for a while, but earlier it involved tinkering with code and that meant you needed to know how to use the terminal to get this to work, not anymore. Valério Valério has published an application called BootScreen that lets you change your N900 boot video with a single click and requires no hacking skills.
All you need to do is install BootScreen from the extras-devel repository in the N900 Application Manager (here is how to enable it with one click), transfer the boot video you want to set to the N900 and select it from within the application.
- Simply transfer the boot video of your choice to the N900, then select options by tapping the ‘BootScreen’ menu and click on add.
- Next select the boot video from where you have saved it. Make sure it has a one word name only.
- You will see it added in the list. Here you can move it up or down to set play order if you want to play more than one boot video. To select a video for playback on bootup, it has to be selected/highlighted. Tapping on the video name toggles the highlight.
- You can even choose to have a random boot video from the options or remove one altogether.
- There are a number of N900 boot videos on the internet, YouTube has previews to a lot of them and a download link in the sidebar. Here’s the one I am using, and a link to download it.
- Here are links to a few others – 1, 2, 3 and you can lookup this thread for more.
If you enjoyed this, you might also like:
- Tweakr Helps Add Custom Profiles To Your N900
- The Comprehensive Beginners Guide To The N900
- How To Block Unwanted Callers On The N900
- First Look: TweetGo.net – Twitter Web App For The N900
- How To Wirelessly Update the N900
Front Page
Maemo and Moblin "merge" to form MeeGo
On Monday, just after the release of our third issue, Nokia and Intel held a joint press conference to announce that the roadmaps of Moblin and Maemo were converging. The resulting operating system, MeeGo, would target phones, tablets and netbooks and be held under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation as a fully open source OS: We are taking the best pieces from these two open source projects and are creating the MeeGo software platform. Both teams have worked for a long time to support the needs of the mobile user experience - and MeeGo will make this even better. We want it to be fun, focused, flexible, technically challenging and ultimately, something that can change the world.We all use mobile devices every day. The power and capability of handhelds has reached astounding levels - netbooks have been a runaway success - and connected TVs, tablets, in-vehicle infotainment, and media phones are fast growing new markets for devices with unheard of performance. Our goal is to develop the best software to go with those devices. The teams behind Maemo and Moblin have plenty of experience and even more ideas on how to make things better - and together we will create something special. The announcement dealt with the technical and governance aspects but the large Maemo community was thrown into turmoil. What was the impact on Maemo 6, due out later this year with pre-release SDKs expected shortly? What about the Maemo Community Council and the summit? What about talk.maemo.org; was MeeGo just for "techies"? The timing was unfortunate for our issue, but we never claimed to be timely - just to try and encompass the broadest range of news about Maemo! So, the last week has provided many of the answers:
Wordpress bloggers will be interested in the Open Sourced blogging client being developed for Maemo and Symbian using Qt. The blog for the client can be found here, along with the relevant downloads for the latest version. The software is still being developed, but you can get the latest builds and contribute to the project at dev.nokia.wordpress.org.
My first Maemo 5 creation, 100 Boxes, is publicly available for download on maemo.org catalog (also known as Maemo Extras).
Do you hate to open your facebook site on your computer or even on the N900 just to chat with your friends, or just to see who is online? Sometimes I quickly want to chat or sent a message to a friend, who has f.e. no skype or other account but is registered in facebook as my friend.
Now I figured out, that means I found a possibility to connect to my facebook chat account with my N900 out of the box. And I love it. All my facebook contacts ...
In less than week there will be the Mobile Dev Camp 2010 in Helsinki. The event is all about mobile devices and as well about Maemo. Planned activities from our side are:
Workshop:
People from Maemo Devices and Forum Nokia will be present in the Nokia workshop room during the entire event. Come around to ask questions, chat, ask for demonstrations and discuss about topics around the development environment. There won’t be a fixed schedule, but everything around your questions. Showing how to set-up the environment, small code-snippets, how to start developing for Nokia devices etc. The goal is to get the hands on Qt-development for mobile devices and have some fun. For the people who are working on applications for the competition, there will be support for all your questions.
Competition:
Around the event there will be a competition and Nokia will arrange one category. The basic idea of the competition is to implement a Qt application, which runs either on Maemo, on Symbian or on both and to do that in 48 hours. We offer basic support at the event. The topic about what you have to implement, we will be published on Thursday 17:00 (UTC) in the maemo.org wiki. Check out from there, where to sign up and what you can win.
We are looking forward to seeing you there. So if you can manage to be at the event, take the challenge and sign up for the competition!
Introduction
My name's Andrea Grandi, I'm italian and I'm a Maemo user/lover/contributor since the Nokia 770. I love Python as development language and few months ago I also gave some contributions to the PyMaemo project.
In these days I had the idea to start writing a Twitter client for Maemo with a precise direction in my mind. I'll try to explain all my reasons here. First of all I've to thank the author of Mauku client. I use it since its first version and I'm quite happy with it. Then, why do I want to write another one?
- Maemo (MeeGo) is moving to Qt and for this reason I'm going to use Qt, while Mauku uses Gtk.
- I'm learning Qt and what is better than writing a complete (but not too complex) application to learn better?
- Mauku is not free as lot of people could think. Reading the source codeyou find this "You are NOT allowed to modify or redistribute the source code.", while I want to write a client and release it under GPL2 or GPL3 license.
- Mauku is not updated since some months and we have no news about it.
- I love Python and I like to write free software in this language.
- I want to give to Maemo a stronger contribute.
My request for help
Before lot of people start writing their own client resulting in 4-5 twitter clients for Maemo, why don't we join our strength and work to a common project? I'm not a Python expert nor a Qt one, but I've some experience as project/team leader and since this is not a complex project, I would be glad to lead it. So, I'm looking for Python developers, Qt developers, UI designers and whoever want to contribute to this project. I still have to find a good name and logo for this application.
Who want to help me?
I have my own Protracker module player written for Maemo5. I used Qt because I am familiar with it and like it. But Maemo5 makes simple things harder…
First thing: which version of Qt? Yes — there are two of them:
- 4.5.3 which was ported by community, does not follow Maemo5 look & feel but is present on each Nokia N900 by default
- 4.6 ported by Nokia, follows Maemo5 look & feel as much as possible but present only in extras-devel repository
I used Qt 4.6 because of proper look and working Phonon.
Second problem: moving API. Ok, I know: it is extras-devel so not safe for devices but why I have to rebuild application after each “apt-get update/upgrade” cycle? First it was removal of QMaemo5KineticScroller, then rotation code changed.
Rotation is 3rd problem. In recent packages there is support for automatic rotation without any code other then setting window attribute for it. It is even documented. But it does not work — even in official example. From one commit to qt/maemo5 repo I got a feeling that automatic rotation needs to wait for next firmware update :(
Good thing is that my application is small so adapting to changes takes small amount of time. And I hope that PR1.2 will finally give working Qt without many changes.
All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Qt under Maemo is pain to develop with was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website
Related posts:
You want a particular character or accent but can't find it on your N900's keyboard. What do you do? Well, there is actually a built-in character and accent menu, but it seems some people have been missing it, so we present below a short-and-sweet video showing how to accesss it.
There is no call blocking application for the N900 yet, but that hasn’t stopped Vinu Thomas from coming up with a hack that lets you do just that. He clearly mentions that this is a stop gap arrangement until until steps up to create a real application with this functionality. What I’d like is an SMS blocking app as well, as SMS spam has really increased over the last one year or so.
Anyway, if you are being plagued by unwanted callers and have had enough, here’s how to get rid of them.
- The first thing you need is root access. So go ahead and download rootsh from the application manager or use this link.
- Next, if you haven’t installed a Python application in your phone, you’ll need to install maemo-python-device-env from extras-devel (here is how to enable extras-devel with one click).
- Now download this script. Inside the zip is a file callblock.py. Once you open it in notepad or whatever you like, it will look like the picture below.
- Now edit the ‘Blocklist’ in the script and put in the numbers you want to block. You can add as many number as you like, just make sure that you enclose the numbers within the quote and separate each with a comma. Also, do not have a trailing comma after the last number.
- Save and transfer this file (callblock.py) to the MyDocs folder on the N900.
- Open terminal on the device and enter the root mode by entering:
root
- Next start the call block hack by entering:
python /home/user/MyDocs/callblock.py &
That’s it. All your unwanted calls are now blocked. You will need to run this script everytime you restart your device as there is no auto start functionality yet. Edit the block list in the callblock.py file anytime you want to change the blacklisted numbers. In case you have any doubts, hit Vinu’s My Nokia World to ask him.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:
- How To Hard Reset The N900 To The Factory State
- TweeGo Is A Great Looking N900 Twitter App
- Details: Skype On The N900
- How To Turn Your N900 Into A Flashlight
- How To Enable Application Repositories On The N900 With One Click
Recently I’ve met some comments under my posts asking where to find this or that. I understand not everyone may be such devotely commited to Maemo and N900. I was waiting for this phone for about half a year. After first information about GSM stack for Nokia Linux-based device, that came around Mobile World Congress last year I was anxiously digging web for any news about upcoming release. Finally when I got it from pre-order I started to install everything I could find, including stuff from extras-devel and extras-testing repositories, ...
Yesterday, MaePad 1.3 was released. Apart from updates to the Finnish translation and a new Hungarian translation, this release adds Vim-like keybindings to the UI, which allows you to be very productive when managing lots of checklists.
The enabler here is the hardware keyboard that allows for indirect multi-touch interaction with good, tactile, haptic feedback (something that no touchscreen to date can provide - you can't type "blindly" on any touchscreen).
Watch the demo video here:
The package is available as binary .deb from the MaePad homepage and the source is available in the Git repository (no package in Extras until Bug 9070 is fixed). Leave feedback in the forum thread, including ideas for additional shortcuts.
Bossa Conference, an event about mobile development with free software technologies will be held on March 7th-10th in Manaus, Brazil. This year I'm speaking about using Midgard as a replicated storage layer in mobile applications, with examples for multiple programming languages and toolkits.
The idea behind the Midgard content repository is that instead of coming up with your own file formats you can just keep working with objects and signals, and let the repository deal with the rest.
It is always fun to go to Brazil and meet the vibrant free software community there. The plan is to fly over this weekend, spend a few days in Sao Paulo and then head for the Amazon. Feel free to ping me if you're around.
Another release in the stable 0.4.x series. Changes since 0.4.10: - Fix desktop file. - A few fixes to satisfy latest valac (0.7.10). - Adapt to new libxml Vala API. All contributors to this release: Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) Andreas Henriksson Philip Withnall
Download source tarball here
The first release in the unstable 0.5.x series. Changes since 0.4.6 that were
not provided by any subsequent 0.4.x releases:
- New URI generation scheme that avoids problematic characters which makes some
crappy renderers choke.
- Allow creation of new media items and tranfering data into existing ones (
upload). This is relavent to, and works for both MediaExport and Tracker.
- Implement GetTransferProgress and StopTransferResource actions.
- Advertise:
- support for connection stalling.
- live response to be sender-paced.
- Rewrite SearchCriteria parser to make it more reliable.
- Tracker:
- Port to the Tracker 0.7 APIs.
- Provide richer & more intuitive media hierarchy.
- Signal container update on changes to subjects.
- Act on config options allowing user to define which categories to share.
- Support for search by URI.
- Descriptive IDs for containers.
- MediaExport
- Implement custom search that translates to an SQLite query and therefore
performs much faster than before.
- Print message on console when harvesting is done.
- Don't modify DB if harvester was cancelled.
- Cancel harvester before starting new one.
- Lots of non-functional improvements and fixes.
All contributors to this release:
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
Jens Georg
Download source tarball from here
In a report published today, market research and advisory company Gartner said that Nokia as well as Symbian still lead worldwide mobile phone sales while Android and other Linux-based mobile operating systems creeping up slowly.
According to Gartner, worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totalled 1.211 billion units in 2009, a 0.9 per cent decline from 2008, according to Gartner, Inc. In the fourth quarter of 2009, the market registered a single-digit growth as mobile phone sales to end users surpassed 340 million units, an 8.3 per cent increase from the fourth quarter of 2008.
"The mobile devices market finished on a very positive note, driven by growth in smartphones and low-end devices," said Carolina Milanesi, research dire... .. .
Here is the promised “Part 2″ of the Home Media Streaming with the N900. In this short tutorial I will show, how to setup Windows Vista for the use as an UPnP server, so that you can stream all kind of media (with some exeptions – read more about in the maemo.org talk section, link in previous post) with your N900 over the air. In Windows 7 it will work similar. Unfortunately I cannot describe the setup for the use on Windows XP, but maybe a reader could add some ...
PUSH N900 MOD in the USA announced the three teams of finalists that will compete to win up to $10,000 in prizes. They will take apart and rebuild, or modify the Nokia N900 into something entirely new. A panel of judges from blogs you may be familiar with will select the final winner at CTIA in Las Vegas.
The three teams that will present their hacks are:
Niko the Robot. Create a robot that utilizes the Nokia N900 as its ‘brain.’ It will understand commands sent via Twitter to a specific handle, send feedback about the area around it as well as post pictures from the Nokia N900’s camera.
Pit Crew. Set up the Nokia N900 to be the brains behind a slot car in order to compete against human competitors. The Pit Crew thinks they can have a Nokia N900-controlled car beat a man-controlled car.
Bike Dashboard. Turn the Nokia N900 into a car-like dashboard showing a speedometer, odometer, mapping your route with GPS and even a car horn.
You can follow the status of this competition at the official PUSH N900 MOD IN THE USA site.
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Following the recent launch of Nokia’s PUSH N900 project in the USA couple of week ago, Nokia was inundated with "hundreds" of cool, innovative and wacky N900 hacks and mods, from all four corners of the globe.
After a hectic week of reviewing all of the amazing PUSH N900 MOD IN THE USA submissions, PUSH N900 had a total of three teams of finalists that will all receive funding, assistance and N900 devices for their hacks. Now the fun part has really started, they’re actually bringing their designs to life and compete for up to $10,000 in prizes.
So, without further ado, the three teams that will be presenting their PUSH N900 MOD IN THE USA hacks to the judg... .. .
In part 2 of our MWC interview with Anssi Vanjoki, EVP of Markets at Nokia, there is discussion of how moving Symbian into the Symbian Foundation stops the platform being "fractioned by individual product programs [within Nokia]". We also touch on whether there is a future for the 'Nokia N95 form factor' smartphone.
In the second half, Anssi Vanjoki talks about Nokia's software strategy and how the common elements of Qt and common Web Runtime provide a unifying layer between Symbian and MeeGo. He then touches on the importance of open source as a new 'software making model' for Nokia moving forward.
MeeGo is the new mobile Linux platform developed by Nokia and Intel. As the community is forming up, we thought that it would be good to enable people to use their maemo.org identities also on the MeeGo web services (as well as on any other OpenID enabled website). For this, let me introduce Maemo's OpenID provider.
First of all, go to meego.com and click login:
Select the "Log in using OpenID" option, and provide your maemo.org OpenID URL:
Then the request will be redirected to maemo.org where the site will check your credentials and ask whether to relay your information on to meego.com:
And that's it, suddenly you can use your maemo.org account with meego.com!
The same OpenID provider component can also be utilized on any other Midgard-powered website.
The maemo.org Extras repository for community contributed software has reached 3.5 million downloads for Maemo 5. Software is offered through maemo.org free of charge and the repository is open to all developers. maemo.org Downloads is the web interface to the software available through maemo.org Extras.
We see the number of downloads grow every day. This makes the maemo.org Extras repository a great place for developers to get their software in the hands of end users. If you are interested in publishing your software through maemo.org, please visit the wiki.
We introduced improved download statics to show developers exactly how many downloads they received. The FM Radio Player application has received over 138000 downloads. FM Radio stats below:
The Extras repository has only been enabled on N900 devices by default in a recent software update. Before this update users needed to manually activate the repository in their Application Manager's catalog list. Also keep in mind that the Application Manager is not very easy to find, because of it being put in the 'More' menu.
Overall I think the number is quite impressive as these devices aren't available for a long time and a lot of people had problems even finding a device in their country.
If you are looking for a Google Reader application for the N900, I recommend giving Grr by Jan Dumon a try, considering that it has just been released it is a little short on functionality such as starring a post, sharing it and so on but it works well if you are looking for a speedy way to simply browse your RSS feeds on the go. It is in the extras-devel repository (here’s how to easily enable it, the usual warnings apply).
- Once you enter your Google Reader username and password Grr immediately loads your subscribed feeds with an indicator showing the number of unread posts from each website.
- You can set it to display only those sites while have new content, force a refresh or log into a separate account.
- Here tapping on the arrow next to the website’s name you get an option to mark all items as read. A simple tap, opens the relevant post.
- Text is loaded immediately, while the images take a little time depending on the connection you are on.
- Here you have the option of keeping the post unread or opening it in the browser. I would have liked at option to star posts as well, but that will probably come in a future release.
Hat tip to @alextootchie for the find.
If you enjoyed this, you might also like:
- First Look: TweetGo.net – Twitter Web App For The N900
- The N900 Includes An FM Radio – Here’s How To Make It Work
- New N900 Firmware v1.2009.41.13 Coming Soon
- Register & Log Into Meego.com With Your Maemo.org Account
- Video Demo Of Nokia Messaging On The N900
The people at http://www.womworld.com/nokia/ were nice enough to offer me a N900 trial. I gleefully contacted them to find out it was only a two trial. I almost declined it, but I am glad I accepted. It has been two days since I received the trial and I can’t stop playing. Please note this is [...]
In an effort to ease the process of migrating the Maemo.org community over to Meego.com, logging in via OpenID has been introduced. This way you will not need to create a new account on Meego and it would become easy to link your existing Maemo.org account to Meego. If you have already created an account on Meego, even then you can use Maemo.org’s OpenID to link your old account.
If you are wondering what OpenID is, check this link out.
Using Maemo.org account to create new MeeGo login via Open ID
1. Go to http://maemo.org/openid/ and copy your OpenID identity.
2. Go to http://meego.com/user/login and select Log in using OpenID
3. Confirm your identity at the Maemo.org screen.
If you have an existing MeeGo registration, you can associate your maemo.org ID to it.
1. Go to http://maemo.org/openid/ and copy your OpenID identity.
2. Log in to your http://meego.com account and go to My account
3. Under OpenID identities enter your maemo.org OpenID from step 1.
4. Press Add an OpenID button and then Confirm on the Maemo.org authorization screen.
Hat tip to @alextootchie for the find.
If you enjoyed this, you might also like:
- The Comprehensive Beginners Guide To The N900
- Gtalk Video Chat Is Possible On The N900
- BootScreen Lets You Change The N900 Boot Video With One Click
- Grr Is A Fast & Light Google Reader Application For The N900
- Tweakr Helps Add Custom Profiles To Your N900
So, I just prepared a nice post about the job we have been doing during Tokamak 4 and what happened this days but I really don’t want to spoil cool stuff before we can at least give you some screenshots and videos 
Keep reading this blog as the next two posts will explain all of this and give some pretty and nice screenshots and videos!
First of all I would like to thank Will Stephenson, openSUSE and KDE e.V. (and of course everybody who supports the KDE e.V.) for hosting this developer sprint. It was awesome to put together people from three different teams that develop stuff that have a huge overlap area (Plasma + KWin + Oxygen). Really, thank you very much. I’m proud that you’re part of the KDE community!
Weather has been good (compared to Oslo and Finland where I was spending the last weeks) and the office is really good to work on. We have a lot of different devices to hack on (big computers with touchscreens, small devices from Intel and Nokia and the regular notebooks and netbooks) and we were able to expose a little bit more of our work to the local community (as well as see some old pictures of a sprint that happened at this same place in 2002).
From my side I was planning to bump the Pastebin applet with some new ideas and work on Plasmate and shell mobile but it seems that in the end I was able to just stick with one of these three targets. Anyway I hope that I can finish at least one more of then until the release of KDE SC 4.5.
Here is everybody that joined our developer sprint and keep watching this blog because tomorrow I’ll have some cool stuff to show everybody! Again: thanks to our hosts and to the Plasma, KWin and Oxygen teams for being so great!
Tokamak Group Photo: Plasma, KWin and Oxygen teams
This is something to personalize your N900 device. Of course you can find a lot of sites which offers free wallpapers ready to download, but this short tutorial shows you how to make own backgrounds, and if you want, loopable too. Put your own pictures of your family or your own created graphics as background as you like.
As first you have to know (I suppose almost every one, who ones the N900 knows), that your screenresolution is 800 x 480 pixels. Always use native resolutions for best quality results. Either ...
Yesterday, members of the #meego community gathered in an IRC channel to discuss what sort of services the community needed. It was a well attended covering topics from build services and repositories to forums and mailing lists. Every once in a while the discussion would drift off into religious views about one system or another but the meeting was well run and rapidly brought back to the topic at hand.
Mobile Dev Camp is an event in Helsinki, which focuses on topics around the development of software for mobile devices. As announced before Nokia will be present there with a workshop and a competition. The idea of the competition is to implement an application on either a Symbian or a Maemo phone within 48 hours. From now on there are just 48 hours left and here are the rules:
To win the contest write an application in Qt for Maemo or Symbian, ideally for both, which:
- uses the QtNetwork module,
- integrates some aspect of the social web AND
- the general topic is “OUTSIDE”
Be creative! Interprate the rules! And start coding now!
The best application will be announced by a jury. Looking forward to seeing you on Saturday!
it is time for the next demo of my project, as I reached the beta status. (feature complete) I think you can see quite clearly now where this is going and which kind of interactions will be possible using this technique. The concrete features are described in the annotations.
If you use more advanced tracking methods and add some physics to this, you could easily port numpty physics to this kind of interaction or create an easy to use level editor. In case you missed my last video, here is the link.
It will still take some weeks until this hits maemo-extras as there are still some bugs left and I still want to get rid of keyboard use for interaction.
Writing desktop widgets for N900 using Qt is now possible, as Harald Fernengel explained yesterday in Qt Labs.
What I wanted to test based on this is that can desktop widgets be made also using QML? So I hacked together a Clock widget and with the similar technique also slightly modified Samegame widget:
Source code for the simple clock is available in my Gitorious branch so everyone can test and start to build cool Qt QML widgets in no time!
What I wanted to test based on this is that can desktop widgets be made also using QML? So I hacked together a Clock widget and with the similar technique also slightly modified Samegame widget:
Source code for the simple clock is available in my Gitorious branch so everyone can test and start to build cool Qt QML widgets in no time!
On Maemo 5, log output from your app isn't always accessible to the user. This has created problems for Miniature bug reports ([see bug #8124](https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8142)). To solve this, I created a "Game Log" screen which allows to filter the messages (by a given log level, I might want to allow combinations, too). It also has a nice fat "Copy all" button, so that the log output can be quickly attached to a bug report.
Now I "only" need to add useful log information =D
Thanks to [Openismus](http://openismus.com) for letting me work on this.
Some years ago a paper-and-pencil game had great success among school boys, in Italy at least. The goal of the game is to fill a 10×10 grid of boxes with numbers from 1 to 100. The rule is that you cannot use the same box twice, and if you move on the grid in horizontal or vertical direction, you must skip two boxes, while you must skip one box if you move diagonally. Simple game in theory, quite hard puzzle in practice.
Today, in computer and smartphone age, we can try to solve the puzzle practically anytime and anywhere. The game has been implemented for a wide range of platforms (actually, most implementations are by yours truly). Some versions even have an online high score table, to compare our own scores with those of players from all over the world.
Let’s list all the games here, so we’ll never miss the chance to try and reach the mythical 100. They are all released as freeware or free software, so read on and have fun!
Platform Name Link Online standings Java applet Puzzle 100 link No Palm OS 100 Boxes link No Windows Mobile Clockwork 10×10 link No Google Gadget 100 Boxes link Yes Opera Widget 100 Boxes link Yes Opera Mobile/Vodafone Widget (Windows Mobile, Symbian S60) HundredBoxes link Yes Maemo 5 100 Boxes link Yes
For me, 100 Boxes has been a sort of pet project since my brother taught me the game several years ago. It is usually the first thing that I try to make when learning to develop for a new platform. It is a quite balanced development exercise, and it is fun to see the game conquer new territory.
A word of caution: this game may give a great sensation of achievement when solved, but also a lot of frustration. I tried for several months version without success, then showed the game to a friend of mine. He solved it at his third attempt.
One really nice aspect of the the N900 is its four completely customizable screens, but setting them up sometimes becomes a problem. You keep wondering if there is nicer, more efficient or better looking way of placing your bookmarks, shortcuts, contacts and widgets.
For those of you who like a organized homescreen, the sheer fluidity of the setup process sometimes makes it difficult to align those icons symmetrically. This post aims to fix, that. First is an amazing application called Tweakr (available from the extras-devel) that allows icons to snap to a grid, you can even set the grid size.
Now that the grid layout is out of the way, lets get on to homescreen ideas. There is a wonderful ‘Show off your Maemo 5 screenshots‘ thread from where I have extracted the following homscreens to help spread a few homescreen setup ideas.
Complete credit to the original uploaders of the above screenshots. Have a layout you are especially proud of? Do share.
If you enjoyed this, you might also like:
- Tweakr Helps Add Custom Profiles To Your N900
- How To Turn Your N900 Into A Flashlight
- N900 Hack Pauses The Media Player When You Unplug The Headphones
- How To Use Mplayer On The N900 To Play Unsupported Video Formats
- How To Create A Physical Task Manager Button For The N900
As most of you may already know, N900 operating system is actually Linux. Maemo is based on Debian, to be exact, distribution well known in IT industry. When I was completely green with open source solutions the newest Debian version was 3.1 ’sarge’ in testing branch. To be honest I was a little scared after first try and switched to something simpler. After some time someone said ‘lets make Linux distribution for everyone’ and Ubuntu came to daylight, taking lot of it’s internals from Debian and became very popular. In ...
So finally we have brought SeriesFinale to Hell Diablo.
Some months ago I began a port of SeriesFinale to Diablo (Maemo 4), the software that rules Nokia N8x0 series. Working on it every now and then, finally I have achieved a first version which has everything I was using from Fremantle version.
After talking with Joaquim, the original author (and also my workmate), we decided to put this port as a branch in official repository.
What will you find in this port version?
-
It is based on SeriesFinale v0.2.1.
-
Some features have not been ported yet. For instance, adding series manually or edit information about episodes is not ported yet, and thus are disabled.
-
It is a multi-window application. Yes, in order to keep as much the same code as original version as possible, I ended up in a multi-window application: browsing through shows, seasons, and so on is opening different windows. Going back is as simply as closing the opened window. I know it is ugly, but my main goal was to have a functional version running in Diablo. And it does, indeed! :wink:
I expect to integrate new changes in Fremantle version, and also to implement all features that remain unported.
Regarding the multiple windows issue, I need to evaluate if it is worth to change it and use just one window with some browsing widget. The main point here is that whatever I do, it should make easy to integrate new features from Fremantle version. After all, Fremantle version is the “official” one :relaxed:
There’s paid software in the Ovi Store for the Nokia N900 again! Angry Birds Level Pack 1 was there initially, but was pulled immediately when some users found a way to bypass the payment gateway and downloaded it for free. Now that it’s back, I suggest buying it because it’s worth the $2.99 price tag.
Update: It got pulled.. AGAIN! It’s no longer available.
After the purchase, the store asks you to open the file in application manager to continue the installation. Angry Birds came with 21 addicting levels for free. The $2.99 Level pack 1 gives you 42 more to continue the addiction.
I’ve got all 3 stars on the first world already and I’m only 2 levels away from getting all 3 on the second world. I suggest staying away from this game if you have something important to do because you’ll keep saying “one more time,” once you start playing.
I hope this is a sign that more apps will start to show up in the Ovi store for the Nokia N900.
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Seekability when streaming contents involves almost all layers of a multimedia player and it is not a trivial issue. First, your interface needs to have a seekbar or something to do that. Of course, the media you are streaming has to seekable, meaning container and codecs used. And we cannot forget the transport either, this is, HTTP, local access and so on.
Thank Gods, GStreamer does a wonderful job making easier everything related to transport, decoding, containers, etc. But in the case of UPnP-DLNA, there is a extension saying if the media you are playing is seekable or not.
We did not have support for that in MAFW and we needed it, I added the request for the metadata key MAFW_METADATA_KEY_IS_SEEKABLE when requesting data to play media, so now we have duration, uri and seekability. Our approach had to be consevative (otherwise, GStreamer seekability would have been enough), and then if MAFW source provides the metadata key and media is not seekable, se just say it is not seekable. Otherwise, we rely on GStreamer, that has the final responsibility (which is logical, if it cannot seek, seeking is impossible). Of course, seekability depends on duration, meaning, if there is no duration, we cannot seek as we would not know the seeking limits.
About how to implement that in the sources, the only one needing it was mafw-upnp-source. In the other ones we just want to rely on GStreamer, but for UPnP, if we want to honor DLNA specification, we had to do that. Specification is fun itself and of course, adding that every vendor/provider implements what it wants makes it more difficult. A proof is that a friend of mine bought a TV claiming to be DLNA certified and it only works with the crappy server provided by the vendor, closed of course, and with a lot of missing features, like subtitles support, IIRC (yes Zeenix, I told him to use Rygel and Philippe, it was before you joining Igalia :-p). Now with new gupnp this was reworked, but when I wrote it, we had to check the DLNA_OP fields to know if it was seekable or not and it was a pain in the ass to decide what the default was depending on the missing options and so on.
Fortunately, it is working fine now, I think.
In part 3 of our MWC interview with Anssi Vanjoki, EVP of Markets at Nokia, we discuss the future. How "for the great masses of the world, the first computer they will have will be an extension of the phone based on Symbian". How MeeGo's rich contextual crossing of the real and virtual world will use a map-based user interface and will create "the possibility for people to live in the media."
In the second half, we hear about the three "buckets" (types) of competitors, the importance of open standards and ecoystems, and a three-fold answer to how we should judge Nokia's future business performance (KPIs).
This week we’ve finally moved Modest to gitorious:
The repository itself is called modest:
http://gitorious.org/modest/modest/
git://gitorious.org/modest/modest.git
Reasons are basically that gitorious is faster and better providing git services. So I hope the change is for good.
All the other services will still be in garage: mailing lists, wiki, and project web.
Implementation guide
Last weeks we’ve also been writing some information about how Modest has been implemented, in the wiki. You can find them in Modest architecture documentation. There you’ll find:
- Description of the classes in Modest implementation, and how they work.
- Sequence of events that implement some complex use cases.
Now I have digested an idea of MeeGo for few days, I decided to take a look at it little closer and write a small…
So finally we have brought SeriesFinale to Hell Diablo.
Some months ago I began a port of SeriesFinale to Diablo (Maemo 4), the software that rules Nokia N8x0 series. Working on it every now and then, finally I have achieved a first version which has everything I was using from Fremantle version.
After talking with Joaquim, the original author (and also my workmate), we decided to put this port as a branch in official repository.
What will you find in this port version?
- It is based on SeriesFinale v0.2.1
- Some features have not been ported yet. For instance, adding series manually or edit information about episodes is not ported yet, and thus are disabled.
- It is a multi-window application. Yes, in order to keep as much the same code as original version as possible, I ended up in a multi-window application: browsing through shows, seasons, and so on is opening different windows. Going back is as simply as closing the opened window. I know it is ugly, but my main goal was to have a functional version running in Diablo. And it does, indeed!
I expect to integrate new changes in Fremantle version, and also to implement all features that remain unported.
Regarding the multiple windows issue, I need to evaluate if it is worth to change it and use just one window with some browsing widget. The main point here is that whatever I do, it should make easy to integrate new features from Fremantle version. After all, Fremantle version is the “official” one 
On one of my wanderings through the internet again, I found the BlueMaemo for Nokia N900 application. I read the short instruction, but didn’t really figured out, for what it’s good for. The instruction describes something like using your N900 as a wireless controller for the Playstation over the bluetooth connection. For I have no Playstation, I wondered, if I could connect to my Macbook through BlueMaemo.
I downloaded BlueMaemo from the Extras-Devel and installed it on my N900 through the application manager. Start the application, choose “Wait for connection” on ...
The Symbian Foundation is already made up of a ton of awesome companies, but one more recently joined the ranks – SRS Labs. If you’re an audiophile, you’re likely already familiar with SRS Labs – their research in audio signal processing is well known, and they are currently featured in countless consumer electronics, including the majority of the brand-name HDTVs. Many computers also use SRS Labs’ technology to deliver a superior audio experience for users watching movies, enjoying music, or playing video games.
Now that it has joined the Symbian Foundation, SRS Labs has the opportunity to join the governance of the Foundation, and can also take over as the package owner for any number of sound-related parts of the Symbian platform. That’s definitely music to our ears.
My Symbian-powered phones already produce awesome audio through both the standard 3.5mm audio port and the built-in speakers, it’ll be completely awesome to one day, hopefully, have the added benefits of SRS Labs’ technology making that experience even better.
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Well I have discovered Hermes, why is this not a built in function/application? I was able to use Hermes to match my SIM contacts with my facebook contacts. It pulled all their facebook profile pictures, links to their FB profile and added their birthdates to their contact information. Good stuff. I also loaded all my [...]
Some time ago, we published a tech preview of MADDE as a new cross-compilation tool, which runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. MADDE is a command line tool, which allows to compile C/C++ and Qt applications for Maemo5. We got a lot of positive feedback, as the tool is easy to set up and to use. It smoothes the set up of the development environment, significantly for Windows-users.
Now the tech preview is extended by adding another feature. During the next week, we will give you instructions on how to integrate MADDE into QtCreator, step by step, and for each system – Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It will work with a preview of QtCreator, but all the instructions you will find in the maemo.org wiki. With today’s post we published already the instructions for Windows users. Check them out and feel free to let us know what you think about it.
Hopefully some of you find time to be at the Mobile Dev Camp in Helsinki tomorrow, to chat about your thoughts and experiences with Maemo development.
On the latest article we had a look on Maemo Internals, but regarding Nokia N900 software packages. This article is for Maemo fans and Linux users. If you use Linux on desktop computer you will eventually face situation when you will need to use console. In many cases it’s easier to copy-paste few lines from website to console and resolve problem in few seconds. It is also possible in Maemo 5 and after some time you will probably find it very useful.
For the start run X Terminal application, that you ...
Today I've released new version of widget, which allows to make USSD queries from your desktop. Mostly this is a bugfix release:
- Fixed typo, which caused crash on German messages
- You don't need to describe the beginning of reply in regular expressions
- Regular expressions are now miltiline and you can select, which matching group to use
- Language selection mowed to the bottom and a warning added.
For the last couple of weeks, my time on Witter has been spent refactoring the code to be more managable. And hopefully allow easier addition of things like multiple account support.
While the Samsung i8910 OmniaHD has been out for over a year, it is still an impressive phone based on its features. The massive 3.7-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display is basically unmatched, and its 8 megapixel autofocus camera and HD video recording are, too. Thanks to our friends at iUnlock.com, I’ve gotten ahold of a Samsung i8910 OmniaHD to use for a little while. This is my first non-Nokia Symbian phone, and I’m quite interested to see how the overall experience compares to say, the N97 Mini.
Here’s the unboxing video -- the packaging is quite simple, especially as compared to Nokia’s Nseries smartphones, but gets the job done.
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Overall, my first impressions of the hardware are good. The phone is large, but thin, considering all the guts it has stored inside. The build quality is awesome, although I’m not a fan of the high-gloss piano black paint job -- it traps fingerprints far too easily and results in a smudged-looking phone.
The Samsung version of S60 5th Edition is, as expected, mostly similar to what I’m used to on my 5800 XpressMusic or N97, with the exception of the icons and a few of the applications. I’ll be exploring more of the applications experience, as well as the multimedia, as I get the phone setup.
Unfortunately, one area in which Samsung falls flat on its face is with desktop support, specifically firmware updates. The i8910 was shipped to me with a slightly old firmware installed, so that I could have the user experience of trying to install a firmware update through Samsung’s PC Studio (which is basically a licensed version of PC Suite). Unfortunately, as I am on Windows 7, there was no easy way to get this to work. After countless hours and trying numerous workarounds (including a Windows XP virtual machine), I gave up, and simply used the ‘Symbian ROM Flashing Tool’, which is definitely not an official application.
It’s really sad that I had to go through such trouble simply to get an officially-released firmware update installed to my phone. Hopefully, if Samsung continues to release Symbian-powered smartphones, they make use of the OTA update feature and eliminate this silly need for desktop computers to update our mobile computers.
Now that I have the i8910 all updated, I’ll be using it as my primary phone for a few days, to get an idea of the real experience. What sorts of things should I be testing out? What would *you* like to know about the Samsung i8910?
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After several weeks, Nokia has finally released the highly-anticipated v40.2.005 firmware update for the North American 3G variant of the popular 5800 XpressMusic touchscreen smartphone. This update is rather huge, and brings a number of features that should have been on the 5800 XpressMusic to begin with. You’ll be pleased to find kinetic scrolling throughout the phone, autoswitch between numeric and QWERTY keyboards, and a new homescreen similar to the one found on the 5530.
The new v40.2.005 firmware update is currently available for the 5800 Navigation Edition, product code 0591814, but is being rolled out for the generic 0577454 shortly, as well. If you’re willing, you can simply change the product code on your Nokia Symbian-powered smartphone and then download the update through Nokia’s Software Update tool.
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It is perhaps comforting to know that some believe American Empire is not doomed to irrelevance. But much of American Industry seems bent on trying. Aside from their usual shabby treatment of their customers with lawsuits and wholesale purchase of politicians through lobby organizations, they love to write law that suits their complacency, hoping to snuff out competition through litigation.
If this application makes any sense or not, you have to decide by yourself. It isn’t even a real application. By tapping on the shortcut of Fizwoz you start an adapted website for the N900 browser to log in. The whole idea of this app is to shot pics or videos and upload them to the Fizwoz site from your Nokia N900. There you can prize your media and wait for bidders hopefully to buy just your pic or video. I followed Fizwoz some days, but there was not really ...
Reading this post you were able to watch a video about Plasma Mobile (actually, Plasma on all kind of devices) and see some screenshots. But if you don’t know the ideas and concepts behind that, you are just going to bash it as it’s just the bootstrap of the project and a lot needs to be done.
If you dont have discovered yet, your phone holds an extraordinary feature – the FM transmitter. We have before rumored about this, if the Nokia N900 would transmit over FM, we also looked at the Maemo FM Radio Player, and now let’s look at the FM Transmitter working on the Nokia N900.
I remember always when I wanted to have a radio for my car with an USB or audio input, to play songs from my mp3 player or even from my mobile harddisk. Not long ago this has been such ...