A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-02-22 through 2010-02-28
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-02-22 through 2010-02-28
During the 2010 Mobile World Congress, a company called Distimo gave a presentation, showing off their findings when comparing the top 6 mobile app stores. These include the Apple App Store, BlackBerry App World, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog, and Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Distimo compared numerous aspects, including number of apps, breakdown between free and paid apps, and average selling price of applications across the stores.
So, how does the Ovi Store stack up? Well, we all know it’s not the biggest – not by a mile. At the time of the study, Ovi Store boasted 6,118 applications – precious few compared to Apple and Android, but roughly the same as BlackBerry and Palm combined! Interestingly enough, Ovi Store has the fewest number of free apps – this is great for developers – Ovi Store users are conditioned to spend money – but bad news for users, as they’ll have to hunt harder to find free applications for their Symbian-powered smartphone.
The most interesting slide, however, is shown below – this compares the average selling price for paid applications across the various stores. Immediately you’ll notice that two stores stand out as over 2x as expensive as their peers – BlackBerry and Windows Mobile users should have their wallets at the ready. Apps on the Ovi Store sell for an average price of only $3.47. That’s $0.15 cheaper than the iPhone, and only $0.20 higher than the Android Market. The days when Symbian users overpaid for applications, it seems, are over. It should be noted that this study was looking at the U.S. versions of these app stores, specifically.
Distimo Mobile World Congress 2010 Presentation – Mobile Application Stores State of Play View more presentations from Distimo.
Related Posts
Front Page
ABI break, new SDK, extras fork with PR1.2
Maemo 5 PR1.2 will bring with it an ABI break between Qt 4.5 (in PR1.1) and Qt 4.6 (in PR1.2) that will require some fiddling to bring as seamless transition as possible to both users and developers. * Maemo 5 PR1.2 will ship with Extras enabled by default but will use distribution: fremantle-1.2
* 'older' devices will continue to fetch from distribution: fremantle
* Autobuilder will be updated when PR1.2 is released and promotion will Discussion about the specifics is still underway, so interested contributors should make sure they're subscribed to the Maemo Developers mailing list.
Read moreMaemo 5 Extras repo reaches 3.5m downloads
The Maemo 5 Extras repository has reached 3.5 million downloads. 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. The maemo.org Extras repository offers a robust distribution infrastructure for developers, which, considering Nokia's continued issues with the Ovi Store, is especially useful for both developers and users.
Read moreIn this edition (Download)...
- Front Page
- ABI break, new SDK, extras fork with PR1.2
- Maemo 5 Extras repo reaches 3.5m downloads
- Applications
- Great & fast google reader application:
- Development
- Developing Qt desktop widgets on Maemo 5
- Community
- MeeGo website & community meeting minutes
- Shared sign-on between meego.com and maemo.org using OpenID
- Devices
- Using Unison to get automatic seamless syncing between N900 and iPhoto
- Nokia's Explore and Share concept uses super fast, mystery wireless
- Maemo in the Wild
- PUSH Nokia N900 MOD in the USA Finalists Announced
- Announcements
- Official level pack 1 for Angry Birds now available and pulled again in Ovi Store
I’ve been using an Android-powered HTC Eris from Verizon for over a month now, and it’s been quite an interesting experience. I’ve wanted to check out an Android-powered smartphone for a while now, and honestly, I was dead convinced that after using one, I would hate Symbian forever. While that’s obviously not true, I have come across several things that Android completely dominates Symbian on, and wanted to share them with you.
Back in January, I've given a talk about Maemo Development at the Metalab Vienna. It's been up for some weeks now (the talk is in German, but at least I was using the N900 during the whole presentation. BTW: Is it possible to disable auto-rotate in the image viewer?): (direct link)
Maemo 5 "Getting Started" from metalab on Vimeo.
This upcoming weekend, the Nokia Mobile Developers Conference is taking place in Hagenberg, Austria, and if you happen to have time on March 5th and 6th, register for free (free shuttle busses are available from Vienna to Hagenberg and back). I'll be giving a talk about Open Source Applications on Maemo 5. Say hi if you happen to be there! :)
We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly - or not at all - because of a stifling bureaucracy.
– Letter by Warren E. Buffett to the shareholders of Berkshire, February 26, 2010
While browsing the web I’ve seen some discussions on what the N900 actually is. Some say it’s ‘obviously’ a smartphone, pretty advanced, based on Linux, but still smartphone. On the other hand it may be considered very small computer with phone application and hardware. All of this opinions have one mutual concept: Nokia N900 is mobile device. If it is, battery life is one of the most significant characteristics that people pay attention to.
Doing nothing with mobile device is the best way to let the battery live longer but I ...
Nokia’s built-in Software Update is a gold mine for new updates to preloaded applications on your Nokia device (like Nokia Messaging and Ovi Maps), but every now and then, some weird new applications make their way into it like the Memory Organizer for the Nokia N97. Today, while checking it on the Nokia E72, I found a new update available called “Single Sign-On Device Enabler”, a 644kb file that is said to provide a single sign-on functionality for applications using a Nokia Account.
A Nokia Support Discussions thread says that “It fixes a bug that makes OVI Maps V3.03 crash when you try and set it up with your Nokia account. It possibly cures a bug when setting up an OVI Mail account in Nokia Messaging as well.”
If that’s all that it does, I’m rather disappointed. I hoped that this application would finally take my sign-on Nokia Account credentials the first time I use them in any Ovi application, and apply them to all the others. For example, if I sign-in on Ovi Maps, it would automatically use my details on the Ovi Store, Nokia Music Store and Ovi Files. Yet I have no way of verifying if this is correct because I have my Nokia Account set on all these applications already.
Did the Single Sign-On Enabler appear in the Software Updater on your phone? If so, did you notice any benefit to having it installed?
Related Posts
Thomas Perl made a proposal for creating a command line sharing plugin for the n900. I had already planned to implement something like that so I joined the project.
I pushed the first “proof-of-concept” quality implementation to the GIT a month ago. I’ve been using it with the Irssi script (in the scripts directory) to get http URLs with meta information to IRC. The Irssi script needs to be modified to match the directories and IRC servers in use and both the script and the sharing plugin are still missing most of the error checking and extra functionality. Nevertheless, they’ve worked for me for the past weeks.
For the sharing plugin I’ve given something like the following command line:
scp %s kulve@foo.bar.fi:~/photos_incoming/%s
There’s two times the %s as the local temporary file name doesn’t match the actual file name to be copied. And that assumes the SSH keys have been exchanged so that no passwords will be asked.
The Irssi script polls the incoming directory for new images. For each new file, it moves the file to public WWW tree, gets the meta information with exiftool and prints something like this to the specified IRC channel:
Title: Description [tags] (GPS coordinates) http://foo.bar.fi/~kulve/imagename.jpg
I modified the Irssi script a bit before pushing it to the GIT, so no guarantees it works. And that’s my first Irssi script ever, so it may do something odd ;)
There’s no debian packages yet as neither the script nor the plugin have been tested properly. Comments, testing and patches are welcome.
As you may know, some colleagues at Igalia are developing a framework to gather, browse and query multimedia sources called Grilo. Of course it is no replacement for GStreamer as it is at a much higher level and we are focusing in gathering, browsing and querying so far.
We were an important part of the main developers of MAFW, so in this case we are trying to learn from the mistakes and try to create a more useful and easy to use framework.
One of my first steps, as a test, will be creating a MAFW pluging for Grilo, so that we can have all sources managed by Grilo running on the Fremantle official media player (as soon as bug 9361 gets fixed) with the consequence of having integrated important and interesting features as Youtube, podcasts, Jamendo, Shoutcast and so on.
This morning at CeBIT in Germany, Nokia unveiled what I would call its masterpiece – the C5. The Nokia C5 won’t impress many of our Symbian-Guru readers – it’s a small candybar smartphone with a pitiful 2.2-inch QVGA display and S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2. However, it’s loaded to the hilt with features, both hardware and software, and aimed squarely at the entry-level crowd that Nokia has been wooing with S40 handsets for years.
You know about those guys that use your software against huge datasets like their entire filesystem, with thousands of files?
We do. His name is Tshepang Lekhonkhobe and we owe him a few beers for reporting to us many scalability issues.
Today we found and fixed such a scalability issue: the update query to reset the availability of file resources (this is for support for removable media) was causing at least a linear increase of VmRss usage per amount of file resources. For Tshepang’s situation that meant 600 MB of VmRss. Jürg reduced this to 30 MB of peak VmRss in the same use-case, and a performance improvement from minutes to a second or two, three. Without memory fragmentation as glibc is returning almost all of the VmRss back to the kernel.
Thursday is our usual release day. I invite all of the 0.7 pioneers to test us with your huge filesystems, just like Tshepang always does.
So long and thanks for all the testing, Tshepang! I’m glad we finally found it.
Yesterday I shared with you 10 things that I’ve found Android does much better than Symbian. However, there’s more to the story, so today I have a list of 10 things that my Symbian-powered touchscreen phones do much better than my Android-powered HTC Eris, which is currently running Android 1.5. Obviously this isn’t a complete list, but it’s things that stand out to me after a few months of actively carrying both phones.
Rendering slides is a complicated business. Slides can contain tons of different features just like webpages can. People expect that presentations look the same in different programs. Perhaps not pixel-perfect but very similar nevertheless.
OpenOffice and KOffice (and the Maemo/Meego Office Viewer) both have ODF as their main file format. ODF is an open standard and this means exchanging data between these programs should be simple and lossless. To help the developers of these programs find differences in rendering of slides, I have written a program that loads a presentation and shows it as rendered by KOffice and OpenOffice.
As an added bonus, it also shows how these programs render PowerPoint files. PowerPoint files are converted to ODP first and then loaded into each of the two rendering engines. That gives four types of output:
- Converted by OpenOffice to ODP and rendered by OpenOffice
- Converted by KOffice to ODP and rendered by KOffice
- Converted by KOffice to ODP and rendered by OpenOffice
- Converted by OpenOffice to ODP and rendered by KOffice
You can see an example view in the screenshot and screencast below.
The code has been announced on the koffice mailing list.
Ogg Theora screencast of SlideCompare
Flash screencast of SlideCompare
Rendering slides is a complicated business. Slides can contain tons of different features just like webpages can. People expect that presentations look the same in different programs. Perhaps not pixel-perfect but very similar nevertheless.
OpenOffice and KOffice (and the Maemo/Meego Office Viewer) both have ODF as their main file format. ODF is an open standard and this means exchanging data between these programs should be simple and lossless. To help the developers of these programs find differences in rendering of slides, I have written a program that loads a presentation and shows it as rendered by KOffice and OpenOffice.
As an added bonus, it also shows how these programs render PowerPoint files. PowerPoint files are converted to ODP first and then loaded into each of the two rendering engines. That gives four types of output:
- Converted by OpenOffice to ODP and rendered by OpenOffice
- Converted by KOffice to ODP and rendered by KOffice
- Converted by KOffice to ODP and rendered by OpenOffice
- Converted by OpenOffice to ODP and rendered by KOffice
You can see an example view in the screenshot and screencast below.
The code has been announced on the koffice mailing list.
Ogg Theora screencast of SlideCompare
Flash screencast of SlideCompare
I was very curious about the Theme Maker. The new version 1.2.9, which supports also the N900 has been out for a while and I wanted to try making a theme of my own to use it on my phone. After downloading Theme Maker from the Maemo Garage section, there was no installing necessary, just unzipping the folder to the desktop. First I didn’t know how it could work, and the instructions are a little bit exhausting to read. I am also more the learning by doing type.
After getting more and ...
How long would it take you to find some who has “made a success” out of an application store for any mobile device? Not long, I would think, because these stories are picked up and passed around to “prove” that App Stores work. A case in point is this post on Into Mobile, highlighting the success of an app for Google Android with 6,500 paid for downloads, earning $13,000. But is that the way forward? Read on for my thoughts.
Thanks to Joaquim, he has uploaded SeriesFinale for Diablo to extras-devel.
I was disappointed with the text completion provided by the N900 (eZiText) that, on top of that, is closed and I wondered if it was possible to have an Open Source solution to provide text prediction and completion.
Establishing a common software framework across multiple devices, ranging from smartphones and tablets to netbooks, Intel and Orange will simplify access to an increasingly mobile and personalized internet and drive uptake of new and existing applications and services.
MeeGo builds on the capabilities of the Moblin core OS and its support for a wide range of device types and reference user experiences, combined with the momentum of Maemo in the mobile industry and the broadly adopted Qt application and UI framework for software developers.
Intel and Orange will work to increase the availability of Orange Signature Services, such as Orange TV and Orange Maps, which will be supported by the MeeGo environ... .. .
Establishing a common software framework across multiple devices, ranging from smartphones and tablets to netbooks, Intel and Orange will simplify access to an increasingly mobile and personalized internet and drive uptake of new and existing applications and services.
MeeGo builds on the capabilities of the Moblin core OS and its support for a wide range of device types and reference user experiences, combined with the momentum of Maemo in the mobile industry and the broadly adopted Qt application and UI framework for software developers.
Intel and Orange will work to increase the availability of Orange Signature Services, such as Orange TV and Orange Maps, which will be supported by the MeeGo environ... .. .
During last years, I’ve been collaborating in the development of the 5th version of Maemo. As you already know, almost everything in this version has been created using GNOME technologies, so these were my tools to help with the development.
But some time ago, Nokia announced that they have changed their mind, and that the new upcoming Maemo6 will be Qt powered. And a bit after that, this new Meego initiative was announced, as the fusion of Maemo and Moblin to create the “ultimate mobile technology that will rule them all”. Well, I must say that these movements attracted my curiosity, so I decided to rescue my Qt knowledge and give a look to what’s really being done in/with Qt inside Maemo. Of course, having some knowledge about the Maemo5 environment and being the proud owner of a N900 made me start with the “what can be done with Qt in Maemo5?” question.
You may (or may not) know that Qt4 is already in your N900 if you have installed the Nokia released updates. It’s the 4.5 version. Nothing new under the sun. But the most interesting stuff is not there, but in the beta 4.6 version that lives in the extras-devel repository (how to enable it?). A lot of work has been and is being doing there to (among other things) ease the development of Qt applications and to be able to use the Maemo5 Hildon widgets from it. You can find more information about it here and here.
So, what’s the cool stuff? For the lazy ones, who don’t want to read all the documentation, these are the main ones regarding app development:
- The Maemo5 style has been implemented so, by default, all the QWidgets you use will look maemized
- Panning support for almost every QAbstractScrollArea
- Qt based desktop widgets
- App windows can be told to behave as HildonStackableWindows
- Window’s QMenuBar is automatically shown as a HildonAppMenu
- Basic Maemo5 Hildon widgets or equivalences are available to use:
- … and much more stuff I’m not mentioning here
A coworker made me a USB power injector for my Nokia 770 (I'm useless with a soldering iron). Here it is in all its glory, next to the tiny USB keyboard I plan to use it with:
Five days later I discover that it doesn't work any more. Actually, it works, but the battery is dead. I left the battery connected to the voltage regulator, and that was enough to drain it.
Wikipedia says that carbon-zinc 9V batteries have a typical capacity of 400 mAh. ThoughtFix measured the circuit power readings at 4.62 mA with both USB ports disconnected. That's enough to drain a 400 mAh battery in 86 hours or 3.6 days. And here I thought it would last for months...
Time to buy a new battery. And this time I'll keep it disconnected when I'm not using it.
We finished a rather major restructuring of the internals of a system last week at work. I finally got to experimentally test Martin Fowler's refactoring techniques (small steps) on a big change. It was fun and I tended to stay late at work because I wanted to finish what I was working on. I missed that feeling. Oh, and Subversion is good, but merging is a big inconvenience.
During nights I worked on PySpaceWar: added sound effects, support for background music (but didn't look for freely redistributable soundtracks yet), some visual effects, some more configuration options. And once again playing the game became more interesting than coding it. I can beat the computer with 100 kills to its 50-60. I should release a new version soon.
Today I discovered the cause of a long-standing problem of random reboots of my Nokia 770. Turns out FBReader leaks file descriptors, and once the system runs out, some important process crashes and the device reboots. A patch and a fixed .deb are on my FBReader page (of course I also sent the patch upstream).
Meanwhile Nokia released the N800. *drool*. Twice as much RAM, twice as much "disk" space (flash memory, actually), faster CPU, two full-size SD slots, interesting software updates. I want one, but since Nokia only sells them in a few countries, I'll probably have to wait until somebody I know can bring one to me.
My sleep schedule is totally out of whack. I cannot sleep before 3 AM (sometimes I stay awake until 7 AM), then I cannot get up before noon.
As a result I have more free time for hacking. Today I tried to play around with Metacity's compositor, with some mixed success. I also built a patched FBReader with a numeric page indicator tweaked to the size and position of my liking (screenshot). Bzr rocks for maintaining branches!
eazysvn also got a facelift today. It is now installable with easy_install.
<rant>
I do not like easy_install. It wants to install stuff into
/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages. That location is reserved for Debian
packages. A sensible default would be /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages
or, preferably, somewhere in my home directory, with the caveat that I'll have to
set up PYTHONPATH myself. You can force easy_install to do more or less what
you want, but that involves reading tons of documentation, invoking arcane
multi-thousand line scripts, or sacrificing small animals. Not my
definition of "easy".
</rant>
Last night I submitted a patch to add a tiny help topic to bzr. Before that, nights were dedicated to zope.testing and pyspacwar.
In the mean time, actual paying work suffers. Karmic retribution for those three 11-and-a-half hour days I spent at work during the first week of January? No, just lack of willpower to force myself to go to sleep (or wake up) early instead of, for example, blogging.
Nokia kindly gave me a developer discount code for the N800 internet tablet, a few weeks ago. That was a very pleasant surprise. Actually buying the thing was complicated, to put it politely. I finally laid my hands on the device his Monday. Yum, yum!
Changes I like best: extra RAM, speed, storage space. The built-in stand. Position of the headphone and charget sockets. Screen (shinier, not as grainy, although I think it reflects a bit more ambient light than the 770 used to). The ability to reorder status bar icons. New Opera toolbar. Backup application that works without killing all other applications and entering offline mode. New themes. Battery time estimates.
Changes I'm not sure I like: new stylus (too short). Lack of hard case (without it I'm forced to lock the keys when I stuff it into my pocket, but the tiny power button is hard to press). The new shape (it's harder to hold it in my right hand while pressing the down button, which is how I like to read books sometimes). The tearing effects when panning in Opera.
The new Media Player merits a category on its own. It indexes all the media files (songs and videos) in ~/MyDocs and in all memory cards automatically. That's very nice when it works. It's frustrating when it doesn't. There's no way to force reindexing after you shuffle files around manually, and no indication when the automatic reindexing is finished. You just have to wait and hope that it will catch up. Also, sometimes the user interaction is very strange: bug 1056, bug 1063.
Overall, I like it better than the 770.
Weasel Reader had a feature: it would display marks for all the bookmarks in the indicator line. Handy when you're reading a collection of short stories and want to know how much you'll have to read until the next one.
Today I hacked up this feature for FBReader. Get the .deb in the usual place.
FBReader with Table of Contents marks in the position indicator. The book
is An
Oblique Approach by David Drake and Eric Flint, from the Baen Free Library.
While I was doing that, bzr decided to shake my confidence in it and started throwing assertion errors right and left (no link, the mailing list archive lags horribly).
The inability of Nokia to provide reliable web servers for repository.maemo.org and tablets-dev.nokia.com is annoying. I am unable to build packages for N810 because the apt repository that contains build dependencies is down, and apparently has been down for a couple of days already.
If you have python but not unzip (consider, e.g. a Nokia Internet Tablet), you can extract zip files with
python -m zipfile -e filename.zip .
... not having a headache.
In other news, my Nokia N810 Internet Tablet finally arrived. It looks better in real life than in pictures.
Strange quirk: the 2 gigs of extra internal flash memory (formatted as FAT32) are mostly unused (according to df) while at the same time being three quarters full (according to du):
/media/mmc2 $ df -h . Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/mmcblk0p1 1.9G 8.0k 1.9G 0% /media/mmc2 /media/mmc2 $ du -sh . 1.5G .
Ouch. Time to run fsck.vfat on it. Or perhaps just reformat, to avoid the other famous bug (attempt to access beyond end of device), which, let me check, yes, I also see:
[584959.868000] usb-storage: device scan complete
[584959.868000] scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access Nokia N810 031 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[584959.868000] scsi 3:0:0:1: Direct-Access Nokia N810 031 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[584959.872000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 3932160 512-byte hardware sectors (2013 MB)
[584959.872000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[584959.872000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 0f 00 00 00
[584959.872000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[584959.872000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 3932160 512-byte hardware sectors (2013 MB)
[584959.876000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[584959.876000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 0f 00 00 00
[584959.876000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[584959.876000] sdb: sdb1
[584959.880000] sdb: p1 exceeds device capacity
[584959.884000] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
[584959.884000] sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[584959.884000] sd 3:0:0:1: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk
[584959.884000] sd 3:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
[584960.240000] attempt to access beyond end of device
[584960.240000] sdb: rw=0, want=4013848, limit=3932160
[584960.240000] Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 501728
It would be interesting to know how this came to be. Do some N810s have more internal memory than others? Or was the filesystem image made too big for all of them by accident?
Thanks to Joaquim, he has uploaded SeriesFinale for Diablo to extras-devel.
In these following reviews, I will write about wallpapers specially made for the Nokia N900. Sometimes I will also post my own custom made backgrounds, and today I will start with one, which I made sometimes ago for my phone. I used Adobe Photoshop CS4 to edit a snapshot of my virtual bookshelf and cropped it to 4 pics with 800 pixels width and 480 pixels height. You can download the pics and use them if you like to.
Here’s a screenshot of how it looks on the phone:
I named this ...
When the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic launched, it was easy to see that the price point and feature set would have made it an awesome phone for Nokia to make some moves in the U.S. market. The full touchscreen, 3.2 megapixel camera, built-in GPS, and standard 3.5mm headphone jack all add up to trump most of the other smartphones, or at least match them. Unfortunately, Nokia wasn’t able to get either AT&T or T-Mobile to carry the phone, though that hasn’t stopped the 5800 XpressMusic from being extremely popular anyways.
Today, though, Nokia announced that T-Mobile has finally agreed to pick up the Nokia 5230, renamed to the Nuron. The Nokia 5230 is basically the 5800 XpressMusic with a 2 megapixel camera and sans WiFi, and Nokia has added support for T-Mobile’s funky 3G band, which is great news. The T-Mobile version of the Nokia 5230 passed through the FCC back in November 2009, and we’re glad to see it finally come to fruition.
Unfortunately, neither Nokia nor T-Mobile have released pricing information, and that’s going to be the key here. If the Nuron launches at $50 or less with a contract, it could stand to make huge waves. Also, I’m glad to see that T-Mobile is taking an open approach to the Nuron, choosing to launch it with Ovi Maps built-in, rather than locking the feature out. It will also have Nokia’s Ovi Store included, which gives access to thousands of apps that are, on average, cheaper than those found even on Apple’s App Store!
The Nokia Nuron is planned to be available from T-Mobile online and in their retail stores in the coming weeks.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch the newest videos before they go live on the blog!
Even though it seems quite old, given its target market, I think the Nokia Nuron will sell well. I’m anxious to see how T-Mobile markets the phone, though. Historically, AT&T has done a horrendous job of marketing their Symbian-powered smartphones as little more than cool dumbphones, but T-Mobile has done better, in the past.
Related Posts
I have been porting Maemo robotfindskitten to Qt. It's been quite impressively easy. You can find the repo here and the annotated docs here.
In Maemo robotfindskitten, you can control robot either by using the hardware keys, or by tapping on the screen. However, there are three things you can do with the hardware keys you can't do with the screen:
Also, in demo mode, dialogue boxes currently self-cancel after a few seconds. Maybe this should be the rule in ordinary mode as well. What do you think?
comments
In Maemo robotfindskitten, you can control robot either by using the hardware keys, or by tapping on the screen. However, there are three things you can do with the hardware keys you can't do with the screen:
- move in a random direction (R)
- move towards something interesting (demo mode, D)
- run (Shift)
- the centre of the screen
- the two positions of the rocker switch
Also, in demo mode, dialogue boxes currently self-cancel after a few seconds. Maybe this should be the rule in ordinary mode as well. What do you think?
Nokia’s Ovi Store is growing quickly, with over 6,000 apps and more coming in every day. We already know that the average selling price of Ovi Store apps is less than Apple’s App Store, which is awesome, but now there are two new reasons to hit up the Ovi Store on your Symbian-powered smartphone.
Today, Nokia announced that the official Skype client is now available through the Ovi Store, free to download. The new Skype client for Symbian, which we covered earlier, includes tons of great features such as support for text and voice chat, file transfer, and more. It doesn’t support video chatting as of right now, but it’s likely that’ll come with a future update, since pretty much all of Nokia’s Symbian-powered smartphones come with a front-facing camera.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch the newest videos before they go live on the blog!
Qik also announced an awesome deal, exclusively available on the Ovi Store yesterday -- Qik Premium. This is the first offering of a premium service from Qik and it offers users more powerful abilities, with the promise for more to be added soon. Qik Premium includes the ability to download your videos from the service, so you can back them up on your local computer, edit them, or do whatever you want with them. You also get a new high-definition encoding option, to upload better videos to the service from your Symbian-powered smartphone. You’ll also be first in line for new premium features coming later this year, such as the ability to upload videos taken with your phone’s native video camera application (in case you don’t have a connection, for instance. Qik Premium is offered exclusively on the Ovi Store for $4.99/year, and this special promotional price is only available through March 31, 2010, so don’t wait to scoot on over.
Bill Perry from the Ovi Store also released some stats yesterday, to give us an idea of just how fast the Nokia Ovi Store is really growing. Apparently, they’re up to 22 downloads every second -- that’s 1.5 million downloads a day, every day. Also interesting is that, on average, each registered Ovi Store user has downloaded 12 items from the Ovi Store. More than 60 different Symbian-powered smartphones are supported by the Ovi Store, and the most popular phones are the touchscreen ones like the N97 and 5800 XpressMusic.
Have you been using the Ovi Store yourself? What’s your experience been like?
Related Posts
Sorry for flooding Planet Maemo -- it was a side effect of changing this feed's URL to only include posts tagged "maemo". I'm not sure if the fault is PyBlosxom's or the aggregator's
As a penance, here's a Terminal trick for you:
LABELS='[Tab,Esc,Enter,PgUp,PgDn,F2,VKB]' KEYS='[Tab,Escape,KP_Enter,Page_Up,Page_Down,F2,Return]' gconftool -s /apps/osso/xterm/key_labels --type list --list-type string "$LABELS" gconftool -s /apps/osso/xterm/keys --type list --list-type string "$KEYS"
This changes the toolbar to have three extra keys (Enter, F2, and a key that acts like Enter when the hardware keyboard is open, and opens the virtual keyboard if the hardware keyboard is closed).
Update: added screenshot:
Nokia N900 Terminal app with new toolbar buttons
Sorry for flooding Planet Maemo -- it was a side effect of changing this feed's URL to only include posts tagged "maemo". I'm not sure if the fault is PyBlosxom's or the aggregator's
As a penance, here's a Terminal trick for you:
LABELS='[Tab,Esc,Enter,PgUp,PgDn,F2,VKB]' KEYS='[Tab,Escape,KP_Enter,Page_Up,Page_Down,F2,Return]' gconftool -s /apps/osso/xterm/key_labels --type list --list-type string "$LABELS" gconftool -s /apps/osso/xterm/keys --type list --list-type string "$KEYS"
This changes the toolbar to have three extra keys (Enter, F2, and a key that acts like Enter when the hardware keyboard is open, and opens the virtual keyboard if the hardware keyboard is closed).
Update: added screenshot:
Nokia N900 Terminal app with new toolbar buttons
Good folks from the Nokia Maps Team just announced the very first release of Nokia Map Loader for maemo devices.
Just like the version for Symbian devices, Nokia Map loader for N900 allows you to simply sideload maps to your phone directly from Nokia maps server through your computer, rather than over the air which is especially useful if you are planning on travelling to a new area you are unfamiliar.
This way, you can save a lot on your mobile data service costs and save time downloading map data over-the-air as yo... .. .
Good folks from the Nokia Maps Team just announced the very first release of Nokia Map Loader for maemo devices.
Just like the version for Symbian devices, Nokia Map loader for N900 allows you to simply sideload maps to your phone directly from Nokia maps server through your computer, rather than over the air which is especially useful if you are planning on travelling to a new area you are unfamiliar.
This way, you can save a lot on your mobile data service costs and save time downloading map data over-the-air as yo... .. .
As I commented in my last post, during my investigation about the state of Qt in Maemo, I decided to start implementing an idea I’ve had in my mind since I got my N900.
I guess I should start explaining that I’m a complete disaster managing my money. I don’t really know what I do with it, or where I spend it. And living in this global-crisis time, this is serious guys! I need a way to fix it.
So I thought: wouldn’t it be great if I could store all my expenses in my brand new N900, so I could not only know where I spend my money, but also be able to know my current state compared to the month budget???? Even more!!! once I have all that information stored, I could perform every kind of weird queries over it, like how much money I spend in coffee, food, beer (mmm… not sure if I want to know about this one
Nokia believes it should be easy to share information and content between your smartphone and other devices you use everyday such as your PC and the web.
This way it is easy to keep everything synchronized and ensure you always have access to the things you love, such as your music, and the services you use, such as navigation, whenever and wherever you need them.
The average person spends between one and two hours per day in their car. Given that their smartphone not only holds their favorite mu... .. .
According to an Associated Press report, a federal judge in Delaware has agreed to put on hold a patent dispute between Apple Inc. and Nokia pending resolution of their competing claims before the International Trade Commission (ITC).
A federal judge in Delaware has agreed to put a patent fight between Apple and Nokia on hold pending resolution of their competing claims before the International Trade Commission.
The judge signed an order Wednesday staying litigation in a lawsuit in which Nokia claims that Apple is infringing on sev... .. .
The Bluetooth 4.0 wireless specification could start to appear in devices such as headsets, smartphones and PCs by the fourth quarter, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group said on Wednesday.
The new specification will be able to be used in lower-power devices than previous versions of the technology, including watches, pedometers, smart meters and other gadgets that run on coin-cell batteries, said Michael Foley, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG standards-setting organization. Previous versions of Bluetooth could only go into devices with triple-A or larger-capacity batteries.
Bluetooth 4.0 low energy technology will enable small and simple wireless tags that help you keep in touch with your enviro... .. .
Nokia and Intel's joint announcement at Mobile World Congress brings new value to using the Qt cross-platform application and UI framework.
Nokia and Intel said they will work together to create MeeGo, a Linux platform that supports multiple mobile hardware architectures, including mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, media phones, connected TVs, and in-vehicle infotainment systems.
Qt is MeeGo's native development framework, meaning developers will be able to write MeeGo applications once, then easily port the... .. .
IMPORTANT UPDATE: one of users, Huschke, insisted on putting reasonable info on reliability of applications from extras-devel and extras-testing. I agree with what he is trying to say, these repositories are created for applications not yet approved by Nokia and Maemo community, even if hosted by Nokia and Maemo. These software packages are considered unsafe for your device! Before you add these catalogues please be sure you know what you’re doing.
Before I get to the point let me remind you about previous word on catalogues, where I’ve covered most of ...
Entries may be submitted in any of four categories: Eco/Being Green, Entertainment, Life Improvement, and Productivity.
The prizes will include cash awards of up to $30,000; spotlight placement in Ovi Store; a user experience evaluation; and a free one year membership in Forum Nokia Launchpad, a premier program to accelerate mobile development and elevate business visibility.
Several of the winning apps in last year's Calling All Innovators competition are now available for consumers to download in Ovi Sto... .. .
This month saw the start of the Microsoft Browser Ballot in EU countries. As part of the deal with the Competition watchdogs in Europe, Windows users are being presented with a randomised “ballot” screen of alternative browsers, including Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome, as well as the company’s Internet Explorer product. Is there any implication to the mobile market in this decision? Maybe...
Its time again for me to release another theme and here it is. The Picnic theme is based off of a winterboard theme I feel in love with a few years ago. Kids and woman will love it but even alot of guys will like it to. It uses very bright and loud colors, and every single part of the theme is customized. If you see any bugs like normal I ask you to let me know. In the next release it will have a full set of icons for alot of apps. Some screenshots below more on http://www.andrewblck.com
If you search the internet for some special functions of your Phone, you will find a lot of things, useful and useless just in a subjective point of view, of what you can do with your N900. Of course you will find tips and tricks on several sites described and discussed, but I will try to gather them all step by step here in our tips and tricks blog, so all these informations can be found easily, all in one place. It also will help to keep them in ...
I’m really proud to announce the release of Tinymail 1.0. New packages are available here.
It has been more than 3 years since the project started, and after all the hard work we think now it is time to release the first version of our beloved framework to build e-mail applications for mobile devices. Thank you very much to all contributors! Specially thanks to Philip, Dape, Dirk-Jan and Rob, you all rock guys!
It is already being mentioned in the official announcement I sent to the tinymail devel list but I would like to highlight the main achievements of this release since the previous 0.0.9 pre-release:
- New widgets to show the mailboxes tree as a plain list
- New widget to expose only the latest messages of a mailbox
- New download external images capability
- Complete rework of IMAP IDLE
- Improved namespace handling in IMAP
- Locking, security and connectivity improvements in POP3 code
- Improved MIME parsing (PGP/GPG parsing now works)
- New asynchronous methods for getting folders and messages
- Upated Vala & Python bindings
- Improved support for 64-bit architectures
For those of you having a Nokia N900 this release contains more or less the same code shipped within your device (remember that Modest, the email program, is tinymail powered). For all people that followed the progresses in tinymail I blogged about recently (here, here or here) you will have to wait for v1.2 release. I promise you won’t have to wait that much…
A little over a year ago, we hired our first batch of Openismus trainees. After an intensive year gaining knowledge and experience, I’m proud to say that David King and Michael Hasselmann have now graduated to regular work on customer projects. They’ve become solid developers in whom we have confidence, thanks to mentoring from all our other employees. Personally, creating these new development careers is one of the most worthwhile things I’ve done in my career.
So we need some more people to repeat our success. Here’s the text from the first time:
If you are smart and enthusiastic but you lack experience then we can provide the opportunity. You would work mostly on existing open source projects instead of customer projects, just to get experience with C, C++, GTK+ and Qt. Our developers would provide technical guidance and encourage you to work and communicate in a structured way, creating software that’s actually usable and useful.
This is also a great opportunity to move to Berlin – a wonderful city for young people. Munich may also be a possibility if necessary.
I’d also like to point out that we are very much an equal-opportunities employer. We get almost no applications from women or minority groups and that’s not good enough. We are a small company so every new person can make the place more like themselves.
Please send us an email telling us about yourself. Show enthusiasm and show us anything you’ve done in the open source world already. As before, I will filter out the least suitable candidates by expecting you to find the appropriate email address yourself. Unfortunately, as before, it’s unlikely that we’ll want to deal with visa paperwork if you are not already working in the EU.
Update: We think we have chosen our new trainees already. Stay tuned. Do bug me if I have not replied to you.
Tinymail’s co-maintainer Sergio Villar just released Tinymail’s first release.
psst. I have inside information that I might not be allowed to share that 1.2 is being prepared already, and will have bodystructure and envelope summary fetch. And it’ll fetch E-mail body content per requested MIME part, instead of always entire E-mails. Whoohoo!
I've been thinking for a while about an application for mobile devices that knows rail, bus, ferry, and magical flying eagle timetables and stops. The idea is to be able to glance at a mobile device and see it say "hey you are at foobar, its 9pm, I guess you want to go home/to hotel, and here's how you can do it, how regularly that happens and the last time you could do it today".
Of course, n900 guys will want to just use a web service for this. But as mobile data costs kidneys in some parts of the world, I'm more inclined to choose a design that precaches the data when free wifi is available. This also plays well for travelling with roaming charges etc.
If you are travelling, then the machine should already know where you are staying and when, so it can direct you to the metro line of interest from where you are to get there. Again for travelling, being able to wangle a timeline to move "now" forward and see that the app can suggest reasonable options as it goes is also a good idea. You don't want to rely on it to suggest and then find you are late for the jet.
I'm thinking perhaps Qt/Soprano for this, but the exact RDF vocabulary for the bus, train, etc timetables is not jumping out at me. There are many adhoc designs I've thought about, like a series or RDF list of ical entries for each bus run, perhaps with each entry using geo84 or some other ICBM assocation method. If you know of a good RDFS for this, please let me know. I don't know when/if I'll get to hack on the code, but the itch to do so is unlikely to go away by itself.
Of course, n900 guys will want to just use a web service for this. But as mobile data costs kidneys in some parts of the world, I'm more inclined to choose a design that precaches the data when free wifi is available. This also plays well for travelling with roaming charges etc.
If you are travelling, then the machine should already know where you are staying and when, so it can direct you to the metro line of interest from where you are to get there. Again for travelling, being able to wangle a timeline to move "now" forward and see that the app can suggest reasonable options as it goes is also a good idea. You don't want to rely on it to suggest and then find you are late for the jet.
I'm thinking perhaps Qt/Soprano for this, but the exact RDF vocabulary for the bus, train, etc timetables is not jumping out at me. There are many adhoc designs I've thought about, like a series or RDF list of ical entries for each bus run, perhaps with each entry using geo84 or some other ICBM assocation method. If you know of a good RDFS for this, please let me know. I don't know when/if I'll get to hack on the code, but the itch to do so is unlikely to go away by itself.
- An app to look up zipcodes.
- A sort of Python incubator: it would listen on a given port and there would be a program on the desktop that would upload Python scripts to it, and it would run them straight away. This is for use during development if you don't want to use scratchbox. (I may actually do this.)
- An app which knew all the feed lines and audience responses in Rocky Horror, so you could take it into showings with you and know what to call out, if you hadn't memorised them all.
There are not so many games available at the moment for the N900, and so I think it is really clear what the Top 3 games could be. Of course everybody has his own ambitions on games what is the best, but here are my Top three ones, although I don’t count me as an real game fanatic, I am more the just for fun and try kind of type.
On my personal third place I will place Bounce. This is really a quite cool realized 3D game which needs a ...
The worldwide market for touchscreen mobile devices will surpass 362.7 million units in 2010, a 96.8 percent increase from 2009 sales of 184.3 million units, according to Gartner, Inc. By 2013, touchscreen mobile devices will account for 58 percent of all mobile device sales worldwide and more than 80 percent in developed markets such as North America and Western Europe.
"Touchscreens are no longer the preserve of high-end devices and are now being included in many midrange phones as more companies have been driving the consumer market for affordable touchscreen phones," said Roberta Co... .. .
According to a recent article on TechRadar, the UK operators already expressed its disapproval regarding the availability of Skype on Nokia smartphones since it could threatens their existing revenue streams, especially because it allows users to make free long-distance calls, according to TechRadar.
It appears that the carrier sees the application as breaking the rules, through offering users the possibility of sending voice calls through data, and that it considers blocking the solution for customers!
'We do not as a general rule block access to voice over IP services on our network. However, in the case of unlimited data services suc... .. .
The Nokia and Intel joined hands for a open source platform called Meego. Meego is a combination Of Intel’s Mobiln and Nokia’s Maemo. The Meego official site has revealed that the first meego release for Nokia ARM based Nokia N900 and for Intel Atom based netbooks is coming soon.
Valtteri Halla, the Nokia member of the two-person Technical Steering Group (TSG) of MeeGo stated that
I guess this is something that finally will signify the real “Day One” of MeeGo project, a genuine merger of moblin and maemo. What is scheduled to be available then is the first and very raw baseline to a source and binary repository to build MeeGo trunk on Intel ATOM boards and Nokia N900.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyebXporGr8
We will get you more info when the baseline package is out. But looks like this release will be aimed at developers and not consumers. We’ll have to wait and see if Nokia releases a consumer upgrade for the N900 to MeeGo
Official Meego Release for Nokia N900 in the works ©, .
Similar Posts:- Meego Developer Event in Chennai
- Nokia and Intel Merge Software Platforms to launch “Meego”
- MeeGo v1.0 for Netbooks is out , coming to handhelds soon
- Meego UI Revealed in Screenshots
- Video : Quake 3 on Nokia N900
This week I decided to spend some time playing with something a little different on my n900. Namely optical character recognition.
After the very interesting Nokia Mobile Developers Forum in Hagenberg on Friday and Saturday (Petri Niemi did several interesting Qt introductory talks), I decided to play a bit with QGraphicsView again and this time try to come up with an app that actually does something: SketchyAetch!
Having not done much with C++ for several months, the GCC error messages (at least for C++) are still kind of cryptic. The fact that code gets pre-processed by moc does not help here, as the error messages might appear in a different location than where the real error/typo is. It should not be too difficult to get around these issues after some practice, and from that point on, getting things done (in C++) with the Qt libraries should be nice.
Already-drawn lines will fade away when you shake your device just like you would expect. The package is available in Extras-Devel.
Now something for the Qt fanboys out there: If you're running gPodder 2.3 on your device, you can try
python -m gpodder.qtui
for a PoC "yes we could use Qt for the UI layer". This is not something that we will be working on in the near future (after all, the Hildon-based Maemo 5 UI is perfectly fine and "native" and it will get some more fine-tuning with the next release), but it shows that it won't be too difficult to do a DirectUI GUI for gPodder on top of the existing podcast client for M6/MG. We probably get around to implementing a DirectUI GUI for gPodder later this year when it's time to think about "Maemo 6" support.
Looking back how strange the gPodder Fremantle UI looked back in June 2009 (and how much changed in both the Framework and gPodder until the first Fremantle version was released), there's no rush in switching to Qt or DirectUI (at least for existing applications). I just hope that good Python bindings will be available for DirectUI/Qt when it's time to support the new UI, but I'm sure the PyMaemo team will do a great job just as they did with Hildon/Fremantle.
Maemo 5 is very polished these days, and I expect it to be even more mature when PR1.2 is out. It's also nice to see the Qt bits fall in place, DirectUI widget demos being made available, and MADDE becoming integrated with QtCreator, so the tooling support is ready when it's time to write M6/MeeGo apps. Maemo 6/MeeGo is for later this year, now it's time to enjoy Maemo 5, the N900 and all the great open source apps :)
Some time ago I’ve mentioned Widgets Gallery, UI concept of Maemo 6. Even earlier you could have found series of Qt-based demos. Qt itself is application framework taken over by Nokia in 2008. Since then technology was developed to be available on every platform Nokia could reach, including Linux-based mobile phones, and Symbian. If to belive in Qt’s most important feature, portability, the code written in a good manner can be used to build application for Windows, Linux, Symbian, Mac OS and more.
I’m sure that in case of N900, the ...
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-03-01 through 2010-03-07
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-03-01 through 2010-03-07
Mobile Tablets! is pleased to present this interview with Peter Schneider, head of the global marketing team for Maemo Devices at Nokia. For those who have not seen Peter in person - suffice it to say that he is a passionate and charismatic individual, and is a true champion of the Maemo platform. Some have likened him to a rock star. As head of marketing for Maemo Devices, he is also very busy. Therefore, his participation in this interview is greatly appreciated.
This is Part 1 of a 2-part interview, and focuses on Peter's background, and the development of Maemo 5 and the N900.
1. Peter. can you give us an overview of your educational background?
This is Part 1 of a 2-part interview, and focuses on Peter's background, and the development of Maemo 5 and the N900.
1. Peter. can you give us an overview of your educational background?
Front Page
Maemo Community election: nominations open
The next Maemo Community Council will have their work cut out for them with the large shifts in Maemo caused by the MeeGo announcement. Dave Neary has opened the nominations for the next six-month term of the community council. Eligible candidates can be nominated by anyone in the community (although they have to accept the nomination to make it on to the ballot paper) or can put themselves forward as a candidate: "To nominate yourself or someone else for the council, please email the maemo-community mailing list with a clear email header. I encourage people to outline their vision for the council and their personal goals as a council member when nominating themselves." At the time of writing, only Randall Arnold and Andrew Black are candidates in the field. Nominations will be accepted until 16th March, but if you're thinking of standing - announce early and announce often!
Read moreIn this edition (Download)...
- Front Page
- Maemo Community election: nominations open
- Applications
- Command line sharing plugin allows SCP and private webserver publishing
- Quick Launch provides four shortcuts to apps on status menu
- OCR hack whilst waiting for PhotoTranslator
- Development
- New QA rules for command line applications wanting to get into Extras
- Mer^2 snapshot 40 - hackers needed to complete Fremantle backport
- Integrating MADDE & Qt Creator on Windows & Mac OS X for easy cross-platform Maemo development
- ...and 2 more
- Community
- Nokia's Maemo Developer Advocate is Ronan Mac Laverty
- Devices
- Hardware hacking to convert N810 to into cellphone
- MeeGo initial low-level build by end of month, targetting Atom & N900
- Home-made solar charger
- Announcements
- Prismic Wallpaper Manager
- Intel & Orange announce Atom-focused MeeGo services tie-up
- Array: stylish, simple, grey/black theme
- ...and 2 more
Nokia wants patent on self-regenerating phone batteries, piezoelectrics and much magic involved — Engadget., quoting Symbian-Freak
It seems Nokia has figured out to port the watches’ kinetic technology into its phones. This means you will be able to recharge the phone while walking, as you do now with your watch.
I’ve been using smartphones since first S60 and I can tell you these toys are really power greedy!
I can’t help imagining people running their buts in the afternoons in order to replenish the battery for an important call or email…
(thanks to www.crossfit.com)
Joikuspot Premium for the Nokia N900 came out of beta on Monday and is now available for sale at the Joikushop for EUR 7. When asked if we’ll be seeing it at the Ovi Store, they responded, “the Ovi Store process is already on-going. Typically it takes some days.” Joikuspot turns your Nokia N900 into a wifi hotspot.
Instructions explain you can purchase & install the JoikuSpot Linux Edition file to your Nokia N900, then reboot after installation to adjust WiFi drivers. JoikuSpot can be then found under the Nokia N900′s Applications folder.
If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...
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Announcing another maemo.org Bugday: Tuesday, March 16th, 18:00-03:00 UTCin #maemo-bugs on Freenode IRC No specific topic set – see the wiki for some ideas. Bugdays are about hanging out together on IRC, triaging/discussing some reports in maemo.org Bugzilla, and introducing new people into triaging. No technical knowledge needed, no obligations. Step by and say hello [...]
When Nokia and Intel announced plans to merge Maemo and Moblin into Meego, one of the great issues was what format of packages should be used, DEB or RPM. It prompted me to see if I could tweak my N900 to install RPM packages. I also loaded a memory stick with Moblin to boot up one of the laptops around the house to use Moblin. Since then, there has been a meeting of MeeGo community to discuss the infrastructure for the MeeGo community and some interesting discussions on different mailing lists.
I just LOVE making widgets for Maemo, but sometimes it’s hard to get back after the initial release to clean up and finalize the software. Luckily, I found the time and energy to do it last weekend for the Sleeper widget, which allows your N900 to pause the music player (or the Panucci audiobook player) after a defined amount of time, e.g. 15 or 30 minutes – It’s really handy when listening to music (or now audio books!) while falling asleep.
Therefore, you can now find version 1.1 in Extras-Testing, in desperate need for testing and votes :-) I think it’s well worth your time, as it now not only features Panucci support, but also extensive layout settings (orientation, number of sleep values/buttons) plus Help/Licence/Donate information buttons. I took the time to build me a nice framework based on the work done by Brent Chiodo with TouchSearch, as I really want to clean up all my widgets and add configuration options to a number of them (e.g. Multi DSLR brand support in Shutter).
In addition, this also made me do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: test using the maemo wiki as a help framework for applications. Therefore, I’ve created a wiki page for my app and am linking to that from the “Help” button using the Maemo browser. I will try to do that for all my apps from now on and believe something like that should be included with every app we do in the community. Having a help page is really valuable in many cases, and having it in the wiki allows other users to add help information / tutorials / tips & tricks.
And yes, I also added a Donate (through Paypal) button as an experiment – netting me my first 5 Maemo-Dollars in 24 hours :-) Thanks Ryan! Now to find a sharing agreement with tpl ;-)
Promises are debts, so I’ve been working on SeriesFinale for Diablo in order to finalize all features that I left unported in previous version.
So I’m happy to announce that SeriesFinale for Diablo reaches version 0.3.
Besides finalizing the port, this version also integrates all features that Joaquim provided to SeriesFinale for Fremantle v0.3.
I’ve uploaded the new version to Maemo Extras Devel, so if you have it in your repository catalogue, you’ll find SeriesFinale in the Application Manager.
Now, only a step remains to reach the head of SeriesFinale for Fremantle \o/
I present my second public release, Array, that is a really stylish black/grey theme for your N900. Its minimalistic style makes it non-distracting and easy to read. I tried to preserve the modern-ish look without sacrificing the legibility and simplicity. I always create all my themes from scratch to ensure the fact that they won’t look just like the stock themes, but something unique. Array is now available in extras-testing, definitely go check it out! I hope I’ll have more theme exciting releases in the future for all of you!
I don't know. But if you want to find out, then I have something for you.
I don't know. But if you want to find out, then I have something for you.
Altough there aren’t so many official applications which are available in the Ovi Store or in the Maemo download section (not mentioned the countless programs, that come with the testing and the devel section), I have already established three of my favorite apps to my own personal list. I have written about them in earlier posts, so you can get more information about the programs by clicking the links. I decided to list useful applications in my point of view, such I am using for my everyday job.
On the ...
After our successful year of training at Openismus, I thought I’d publish the rough bullet-point list that we used. Whoever we choose for the following year will repeat much the same process, with in-depth critique and a dose of reality.
I'm doing a talk today in the Bossa Conference about using Midgard as a content repository for mobile applications. As part of my presentation I wrote some simple example code for using the Midgard APIs in Python, and thought they would be good to share to those not attending the event as well.
Hi folks as we know Nokia N900 does not support sending DTMF request to the operator for credit check and other details.
Finally there is a way to do so with a click of a widget . The widget used to send DTMF request is called the USSD Widget. It is developed by Guseynov Alexey , Martin Grimme.
The widget has two ways of sending the DTMF requests one is by typing the DTMF in codes in USSD dial Pad.
And the other one is USSD Widget
So its now possible to see the DTMF response in the homescreen. This widget support automatic widget checking and many other customizations like font color, widget background colour etc..
The USSD widget need runtime components like
python-hildondesktop
hildon-desktop-python-loader
pexpect
ussd-common
And the USSD components like
Ussd-pad
Ussd Widget
You can Download the package with all components here.
Then transfer the contents of zip file to root of N900 i.e N900/
Then goto X-Terminal and Type
sudo gainroot
then
type cd MyDocs
place all the contents of downloaded zip file to root of N900 i.e N900/
then type
dpkg -i filename.deb
example:
dpkg -i python-hildon.deb
likewise install
python-hildondesktop
hildon-desktop-python-loader
pexpect
ussd-pad
ussd-common
ussd Widget
Have a look at the video tutorial for more brief explanation
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLvyjiWtnMo
Let us know how it worked for you..
UPDATE:
To enable root in Nokia N900. Goto App Manager in N900 ...
Promises are debts, so I’ve been working on SeriesFinale for Diablo in order to finalize all features that I left unported in previous version.
So I’m happy to announce that SeriesFinale for Diablo reaches version 0.3.
Besides finalizing the port, this version also integrates all features that Joaquim provided to SeriesFinale for Fremantle v0.3.
I’ve uploaded the new version to Maemo Extras Devel, so if you have it in your repository catalogue, you’ll find SeriesFinale in the Application Manager.
Now, only a step remains to reach the head of SeriesFinale for Fremantle o/
This article has been in my mind quite a long time already, but now I finally had time to test MADDE and write something about…
We are looking for the Browser Q&A specialist.
Do not wait! Apply now!
In an article titled 'Phones to offer X-ray vision' and published on the smh.com.au portal, an Australian professor, Dr. Christian Sandor, revealed that researchers at the University of South Australia working with Nokia to build an ''X-ray vision'' mobile phone application which it hoped could be introduced in the next two years.
Dr Sandor said the technology could not be used by peeping Toms to see into people's houses because only the exterior views of buildings and streets were held in the databases.
Christian Sandor explained the application worked by using the phone's camera. Users pointed the camera at a building and an image of it would app... .. .
We are looking for an experienced software engineer and an architect for the browser team:
Some time ago there was decision that BUG 1.x will not be supported with next version of BUG Linux. As a result I ended in situation when I worked on handling device which I never saw.
I've been cooking this post for a couple of weeks, but due to many reasons, I was not able to publish it; until now.
Since Feb 19th, I have left my job at INdT. I remember as if it was yesterday. Almost 5 years ago, I was moving from the Central region of Brazil to the Northeast, 2.500 km away from home, in search of new challenges in my professional career and also in my personal life. I was leaving a very good job in the technical center of one of the biggest (if not the biggest) bank in Brazil to try something new and very exciting.
The proposal was to join a selected group of highly skilled people, whose task was to ramp up an arm of Nokia here in Brazil, focused on research and development, which I had never heard about before. That was how I met the Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia, or simply, INdT. The thing that really caught my attention was the possibility to work directly with FOSS, while getting very well paid for that. What could ever be possibly better than that? ;)
By the time, besides of being a Linux user at home and having programmed using Open Source Software since the college, I had never actually contributed any single piece of code, documentation, translation or whatever, to an upstream project. Mostly because I had not yet understood the actual dynamic of developing software in the open. I was simply afraid of what was waiting for me on that corner.
I think those were new seas for INdT as well. Some of the guys that joined by that time, already had prior experience on the area, but a big part of us didn't. For this, and many other reasons, every day at the office was a different, joyful and exciting learning experience about the FOSS universe. That is something I am very thankful for.
As it happens very often with any company, it is necessary to make important decisions and focus on given areas. Unfortunately, and important to say, in my very own point of view, I realized that my piece of contribution to INdT had already been given. I really hope that it was useful somehow.
Time has come to find new opportunities, motivations and challenges in both professional and personal life. I'd like to thank very much and wish all the best to everyone I had the opportunity to work with during all this time. See you around!
Bookmarklets are bookmarks in the browser designed to add one-click functionality to a web page. On our desktops, we save bookmarklets by dragging a links to to our browser’s toolbar. It’s different on mobile devices. I checked the Nokia N900, Nexus One, iPhone, and the Nokia N97 mini and noticed only the N900 can quickly save bookmarklets.
bit.ly bookmarklet on the Nokia N900
A couple of bookmarklets I use a lot are the Bit.ly sidebar and
WordPress Press This. Here are 100 more that you might find helpful.
You can also watch this video in HD on Youtube. Subscribe to the channel to preview the latest videos before they get published on the blog.
To save a bookmarklet on the Nokia N900, long-press on the link and add as a bookmark. You can access it later by clicking on the bookmarks button on the lower left corner. That’s it!
It’s not that easy on other devices. Saving bookmarklets on the iPhone requires syncing with a computer. There are other ways, but again, it’s not as intuitive as the N900. I also tried saving a bookmarklet on the Nexus One and the Nokia N97 mini, but failed.
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Nokia is currently transforming itself from a hardware company to a hardware+services (solutions) company. At MWC 2010, we spoke to Tero Ojanperä, EVP of Services, in order to get an insight into current progress. Over a wide-ranging interview we cover a number of topics around Nokia's service strategy including how Ovi fits into Nokia's software platform strategy, the thought processes that led to free navigation, the importance of services compared to phone hardware, getting content onto the Ovi Store, the importance of partners and much more.
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July 2009 saw a glorious moment for Maemo unfold - one that was met with great enthusiasm by the community - the creation of the 'Maemo Devices' organization within Nokia. Melding both software and hardware under one corporate umbrella was a very welcome sign for the future of the Maemo platform, and its importance within the Nokia corporation. Maemo 5 and the Nokia N900 were the first fruits of the Maemo Devices organization, as the Linux OS was brought into mainstream spotlight.
Just a few weeks ago I wrote about the beta version of JoikuSpot for the N900 and was able to use it for downloading data when connected to my computer. I spent the last couple of weeks bouncing around with a Sprint Overdrive and Palm Pre Plus with Mobile Hotspot, but tonight when I needed a connection I ended up putting my T-Mobile SIM back into my trusty Nokia N900 and firing up Joikuspot. I then discovered that the beta version had expired and JoikuSpot graduated to a full version, called Premium, for the N900. The great news for those who are reading this site and are probably one of the early adopters is that you can buy JoikuSpot Premium Linux (N900) Edition for just 7 EUR, which is less than half the regular price. This launch price is only available to the first 1,000 people who purchase the application. BTW, this works out to about USD$9.50.
I purchased the full version immediately and am actually posting this entry from my MacBook Pro connected to the N900 wirelessly. With the fast T-Mobile 3G data signal, this solution is awesome and will result in me not needing to turn on the Verizon HotSpot option on the Palm Pre Plus. If you have a Nokia N900 on T-Mobile I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you go buy this application right now.
“Unlock” your phone to a few new cool settings. Tweakr has to be standard in every N900, it should be integrated into the OS. But for now it can be downloaded in the Maemo testing section and it will install itself to your phone settings as a new menu called extras. Scroll down after opening the phone settings to setup tweakr.
First there is the wonderful and long waited setting option to “clean” and trim your desktop. Finally you can arrange your shortcuts and bookmarks on your desktops with “Snap icons ...
With few exceptions, the product talk around the upcoming MeeGo mobile operating system has highly-focused on netbooks and cell phones, and understandably so. Intel’s legacy contribution to the joint effort, Moblin, was designed for the former while Nokia’s equivalent, Maemo, has been the foundation for the latter.
I just got an email from ProClip USA that their Nokia N900 vehicle mounts are now out. You can choose from three different tilt swivel holders:
- Plain Holder with Tilt Swivel – $34.99
- Charging Holder with Tilt Swivel and Cigarette Lighter Adapter – $59.99
- Charging Holder with Tilt Swivel and Straight Power Cord for Fixed Installation – $79.99
Note that along with the holder, you also need to purchase a vehicle mount specific to your vehicle.
Visit ProClip USA.
Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.
Due to lot of questions that people are asking through comments in the mafw-gst-eq-renderer related posts, I have set up a new mailing list: mafweqrenderer-list@garage.maemo.org.
Feel free to join it.
Due to lot of questions that people are asking through comments in the mafw-gst-eq-renderer related posts, I have set up a new mailing list: mafweqrenderer-list@garage.maemo.org.
Feel free to join it.
DISCLAIMER: This software is located in extras-devel package, so it’s considered unsafe for your N900. Moreover it’s altering low-level system settings. If you want to use this software be sure you know what you’re doing!
This time I’ve found another interesting piece of software from extras-devel that helps you customize your N900. This time you can alter behaviour of LED notifications on incoming messages, charging etc. LED Pattern installs additional settings applet with a list of all available notifications.
Let’s start from the very beginning, N900 has ability to use 3 luminescent ...
… suspicious of carrying illegal dependencies XD
You may know form my last post, that I’ve released the 0.2 version of siggy. During these days I’ve been performing all the paperwork to put available to the world: creating the project at garage.maemo, creating the packages so you could download them, and also uploading them to the extras-devel repository.
After doing so, I was happily going to promote the package to extras-testing, when the border guard came and stopped me: the piggy may not go beyond here, son, he said. What does this mean? Easy: siggy depends on the 4.6 Qt libraries (to be ble to use the Maemo5 widgets). These libraries are been developed and available from extras-devel, but with different package names than the 4.5 ones (libqt4-maemo5-* instead of libqt4-*), and different installation path. This was done so the users could test the new version on the libraries without mixing them with the system 4.5 ones. But at some point, these packages will be removed from extras-devel and they will replace the 4.5 ones (this is planned for the next major update AFAIK). So, as siggy depends on those about to dissapear libqt4-maemo5-* libraries, once the next update was released, it would stop working.
I must say that I was already aware about this, and I had planned creating a new release with the new libraries as soon as the update was available, but I guess the policy of non promoting the applications to extras-testing makes sense as well
People in this thread have found out, how to add dbus listener, which would be triggered on incoming SMS. But SMS is encoded in-to a PDU string so it has to be decoded first. I've added support for this in-to latest (0.0.9) gsmdecode.py from ussd-comon package.
In the past weeks ProFUSION coworker Gustavo Padovan was hacking on bluetooth support for Enlightenment ecosystem using the BlueZ stack.
This module follows my previous ConnMan module and is built upon the same base. Since BlueZ and ConnMan are both developed by almost the same developer group, the DBus APIs are very similar. The current module is quite simple, yet useful and allows pairing devices. The idea is to further extend it to be a full Bluetooth Agent, allowing different authentication and authorization methods, maybe go even further and send files using the OBEX protocol.
The infrastructure is available as ebluez inside e_dbus, so it is easily accessible to all EFL applications. The infrastructure exposes just a handful methods that were required by the module, but it is easily extensible as most methods are similar and the helpers do most of work, just need to specify the method names and convert types.
ProFUSION is also working on oFono support. Stay tuned to see the module João Paulo is cooking, the e_dbus code is already in SVN.
I have just release a new version of SeriesFinale.
For this 0.4 version there is a very useful and requested feature: Update All!
Now you will be able to update all the TV shows by just clicking a button instead of having to go show by show and waiting for each one to be updated. As you see on the screenshots below, the shows view now also displays the next episode to watch plus, when updating the shows, feedback on the shows that are finished updating is given by a banner.
You’ll also notice that initializing and quitting the application is now much faster. This happens because as for the shows’ updates, the loading and saving of the database is now run on a different thread.
There was also a bug when manually editing an episode, which is now fixed.
Another bug you might have experienced was duplicated episode entries. It usually happened when there were placeholder episodes named “TBD”, since SF was using the episodes’ names to compare them, when the “TBD” episode was updated with the correct but different name, a new episode would be added instead… I removed the name checking from the comparison and now two episodes are the same if they have the same number and same season number.
Also, you might have noticed that the TV shows view scrolls really slowly. Today I found why such happens and will try to have it fixed for the next release.
As usual, you can find SeriesFinale code on its Gitorious project and expect this new version to appear soon on an AppManager next to you.
I hope you like this version as much as I do!
Some operators return balance in SMS messages instead of USSD replies. Now USSD-widget can rule this out. Changes:
- SMS listener
- RegExp groups can be used in parsers
The Nokia N900 is a special device. It's the first phone running on the Maemo 5 OS. Geeks love the N900. It's the power of Linux in the palm of your hands. The device like a hacker's tool, it's not perfect , but does somethings wonderfully well - web browsing for instance. Presenting an exclusive photo gallery comparing the N900 to some popular devices in the market !
Nokia N900 next to the E72
N97 Mini, N900 ,E72 , N86 8MP
Some of the best mobile displays hanging out together iPhone N900 and Omnia HD (the HD2 was mysteriously missing from our garage and Wave was not yet launched at the time of this shoot )
iPod Touch, E72 , iPhone 3GS, Omnia HD , N97 Mini, N86 , N82 and N900
N900 next to big brother Nokia Booklet 3G
N900 boasts of a QWERTY keyboard too
How many of you like the N900 ? 
Rodrigo and I were invited to talk about Ubuntu Mobile at the Bossa Conference this year in Manaus.The finished presentation is here but what follows is a short rundown of what the Lucid release means for Ubuntu. Some highlights are
- Rootstock/Rootstock gui – integrated with oem-config
- Qemu-arm-static
- ARM/Thumb2 support - the archive in lucid is built for the ARMv7 architecture with thumb2 support.
- EFL 2D Launcher
Rootstock is a graphical (and command line of course) set of tools to create a fully configured tarball or VM image of an ubuntu rootfs from scratch
The binfmt-misc module in the Ubuntu kernel makes it possible to execute binaries of foreign arches under linux. This means it is possible to have an arm eabi enabled chroot on a i386 system :) - this is as simple as running
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install qemu-arm-static
$ build-arm-chroot karmic eabi-chroot
ARM/Thumb 2 is the instruction set underlying the ARM Cortex
architecture which provides enhanced levels of performance, energy
efficiency, and code density for a wide range of embedded applications.The whole Ubuntu archive is being ported to Thumb 2 and we still have some some build failures- if you can help with ftbfs (failed to build from source) please help out here.
This has already been covered extensively elsewhere but the new UI for ARM based Ubuntu devices will rock hard for Lucid. The tool will detect hardware and if a device does not have 3D capabilities it wall fall back to the EFL launcher 
Exciting times.
At the hwa meeting in February Mark Baker demonstrated an interesting arched stand with finialed box. I figured I would have a go at making one. I sliced up a chunk of spalted beech on my bandsaw to provide the arch. Mark had ebonised his arch and left the box contrasting, I thought I’d try the other way around, since the spalted beech was so interesting.
I decided to glue a spiggot on to help hold it and use the tailstock to pin everything in place whilst I turned the outside profile.
I refined the outside profile and cut a recess that would ultimately be the hole my box sat in. But would also allow me to reverse the piece and expand my 4 jaw chuck into the recess to turn the underside.
Here you can see that it’s quiet easy to judge thickness because it’s ‘winged’ you can see a translucent effect of the wings seeing the outside and inside profile
This made life fairly easy and at 2000rpm it was fairly smooth cutting despite big sections of any rotation being free air.
It’s fair to say I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as things were going well.
Then, just as I was reaching my desired thickness, just as I cut through the bottom of the recess…BANG! it exploded off the chuck, hitting the back wall and shattering in to smaller pieces.
At times like these I am glad I wear a full face shield. Not that anything hit me, but it’s easy to see how it could have. Always wear protection!
So far I’ve only actually found half of the pieces, I have no idea where the other half went.
Clearly the wood was simply not strong enough against the expansive force of the chuck once I’d removed most of the weight of wood.
And Mark made is look so easy….
Filed under: project, woodturning Tagged: dangers of woodturning, exploding, full face shield, hampshire woodturners demonstration, spalted beech, Winged stand, woodturning
Long long time ago in a galaxy far far away a great war begun. Or maybe not so long ago, around mid-70s, when both sides arised on soil of Unix development. Vi and Emacs are text editors for Unix-like systems, widely used by developers, administrators etc. Many users that got used to one of the editors was claiming that this one is the best, which caused many discussions and even flame wars all around internet. This how the Editor war begun and was waged over many years. Today I’d rather ...
Themes, what about themes on the N900. As there are not so many themes available, my top 3 are relatively easy to list. For the N900 being such a short time on the market and no easy theme creator tool available yet (please read my post about the thememaker), it will take a while before there will be a considerable quantity of themes to choose.
A theme not only contains wallpapers as background, but also all the buttons, icons, layouts, etc. can be modified to a new theme. It needs really ...
A handful of people with ties to the maemo.org community have been kicking around the idea of a new podcast. I’m not going to go too deeply into the proposed format at this time but rather will present the technical wishes discussed so far and solicit input from the readers on how to address them.
Io ha movite le blog a un nove adresse: http://blog.mardy.it. Si vos ha mi sito in vostre lista de sitos preferite, vole ben actualisar le adresse.
Isto essera le ultime message in www.mardy.it
In ultra, io ha decidite de scriber plus frequentemente super cosas computatorial, e io va facer lo in lingua anglese (le ration del selection del lingua es que iste articulos technic pote esser includite in altere sitos plus grande, que totevia permitte le usage del sol lingua anglese). Si vos crede que vos essera enoiate per iste articulos, que pote esser in numero multo major que mi articulos in interlingua, alora usa iste adresse: http://blog.mardy.it/search/label/interlingua
I moved my blog to a new address: http://blog.mardy.it. If you have my website in your bookmarks, please update the bookmark to this new address.
This will be the last message in www.mardy.it
In addition, I decided to increase the number of posts about information technology, and I'm going to write them mostly in English (the reason why I chose English is because I might submit these posts to some feed aggregators, and in most cases no languages other than English are allowed). If you only care about this technical stuff, or are interlingua impaired, bookmark this address: http://blog.mardy.it/search/label/english (RSS feed is at http://blog.mardy.it/feeds/posts/default/-/english)
Damn! While I was working on the port of SeriesFinale v0.3.6 from Fremantle to Diablo, hoping to reach the upstream version of it, Joaquim announced SeriesFinale v0.4. Well, do not worry. I’m just one step back to reach him :smile:.
What will you find in this new release? Almost the same as in Fremantle version, except the cool colors Joaquim added. Main reason is that he is using a feature in Fremantle that is not available in Diablo. Actually, a minor issue, as remaining features have been ported.
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-03-08 through 2010-03-14
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-03-08 through 2010-03-14
Front Page
Diablo community SSU up and running for beta-testing
After months of discussion, a community-run update site for Maemo 4 devices like the N800 and N8x0 is now available for beta-testing. If successful, this will provide a mechanism for providing application bug fixes and updates to Diablo users without requiring Nokia to ship an update. Lucas Maneos has set up and signed an initial repository so that the kinks in the process can be worked out: "Note also that this is not the final repository and depending on how testing goes you may have to reflash back to the official 5.2008.43-7 in order to install the "official" community SSU when it arrives (though I will try to avoid that if at all possible)." Testing this is vital to ensure that the upgrade path for end-users is seamless (the "S" in "SSU"). If successful, it should pave the way for the community to pick up upgrading other superseded devices in future.
Read moreNokia stressing importance of Maemo Community Council elections: stand now before time runs out
The nomination period for the next Maemo Community Council ends on Wednesday, 17th March. With only four names in the fray, the number of candidates is the lowest it's ever been. Quim Gil, Nokia's community manager, explained the importance of the community council to Nokia, "The council is seen by Nokia and the people pushing the MeeGo project as a very interesting asset and characteristic of the Maemo community. It can't be translated directly to the MeeGo context but everybody agrees that having an elected body canalizing an agenda complementing the strategy and work of the MeeGo technical infrastructure would be useful and worth trying." There are hundreds of eligible candidates, and the only responsibility is to carry on what you're already doing!
Read moreIn this edition (Download)...
- Front Page
- Diablo community SSU up and running for beta-testing
- Nokia stressing importance of Maemo Community Council elections: stand now before time runs out
- Applications
- JoikuSpot 1.0 for Maemo released
- RaeMote: desktop widget for turning N900 into Apple Remote
- Erminig-NG: 2-way sync with Google Calendar with GUI configuration
- Development
- Dummy and USB network modules for icd2 open sourced
- Bug tracker requirements for Extras packages: discussion about valid entries and requiredness
- Qt Creator 2.0 alpha includes Maemo support
- ...and 2 more
- Community
- MeeGo community working group status update
- UK midlands (Birmingham) N900 meetup
- Devices
- N900 vehicle mounts now available
- Maemo in the Wild
- Interview with Peter Schneider, head of Maemo marketing
- Interview with Peter Schneider, head of Maemo marketing (pt. 2)
- Ari Jaaksi explaining MeeGo at Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, April
- Announcements
- Randall Arnold (Texrat) running for council
- Andrea Grandi (andy80) running for council
- Andrew Black (andrewfblack) running for council
- ...and 2 more
Damn! While I was working on the port of SeriesFinale v0.3.6 from Fremantle to Diablo, hoping to reach the upstream version of it, Joaquim announced SeriesFinale v0.4. Well, do not worry. I’m just one step back to reach him :).
What will you find in this new release? Almost the same as in Fremantle version, except the cool colors Joaquim added. Main reason is that he is using a feature in Fremantle that is not available in Diablo. Actually, a minor issue, as remaining features have been ported.
After some migration work, now we have Tinymail repository completely migrated to gitorious.org:
I’ve rescued all the branches available in our svn and tried to keep the proper authorship attributions.
So, from now on, the development should happen in gitorious, and, if you want to keep updated with the latest changes, this is the source to get the information.
I’ve also updated as much as possible the tinymail wiki with proper references to the gitorious.
I know I’ve just announced moving modest to gitorious, but modest was already in git. This time the change in tinymail is bigger as we’re also moving to git from svn! Big change, bigger benefits.
I just realised this morning that after a very long call for participation period, we’re now in the last week before the call for participation deadline for GUADEC – you should have proposals in by 23:59 UTC on March 20th to be eligible for selection (although a little birdie tells me that might get extended to the end of the weekend). Of course, I knew that the deadline was sometime in the end of March, but I didn’t realise that we’d gotten so far through the calendar!
So get your proposals in about all things GNOME, GNOME 3, GNOME Mobile, usability, accessibility, webability, open data, free services, scaling the community, developer tools, whatever – but get them in quick. It’s better to get a poor proposal in now & improve it next week than wait until next week to polish what you have now.
For guidelines on a good talk proposal, I really like the OSCON guidelines as a list of good dos & don’ts for conference proposals – in general, make the proposal (and your presentation, if accepted) not about you or your project, but about your audience and what they can do with your project – so clearly identify the target audience & why they would attend, and make the title short & action-based, rather than vague, weird or overly clever.
Good luck to teuf and his merry band evaluating all the proposals!
This morning got off to a roaring start, as a fast-filling thread plopped onto maemo.org seemed to have it from an authoritative source that there will not be a version of MeeGo to run on Nokia’s N900. The fear, uncertainty and doubt spread like wildfire, naturally igniting the ideal 140-character vehicle for misunderstandings, Twitter.
Many times during my studies I was in urgent need of small, primitive computer-like device that would help me solve simple math problems, device known as calculator. Many phones have built-in applications for really basic calculations, so what can we expect from N900?
Maemo 5 has it’s own built-in calculator, rather simple, with basic look-and-feel. There is possibility to switch to ’scientific’ calculator, but still number of operations you can perform is relatively small, but it may be enough for everyday use.
If you don’t really need any sophisticated math algorythms you ...
So, once more I'm in the Amazon, but this time not for any fancy jungle trip, but instead for the great Bossa Conference! The conference has been really great, with a focus a bit different that other conferences as the focus is on socializing, getting to know people, and actually getting stuff done.
It was really nice to meet my friends from Qt again, as well as meet my fellow WebKit hacker, Ariya Hidayat, who has since moved on to Qualcomm. The conference spotted a lot of technical talks about everything from audio details, bluetooth to now we should develop UI widgets in the near future.
This year is the first year that I did any presentation, so I started out by doing two :-) Here you have the first one, enjoy.
Connecting Technology for Great Experiences - How does QML and Web fit together?View more presentations from kchristi.
It was really nice to meet my friends from Qt again, as well as meet my fellow WebKit hacker, Ariya Hidayat, who has since moved on to Qualcomm. The conference spotted a lot of technical talks about everything from audio details, bluetooth to now we should develop UI widgets in the near future.
This year is the first year that I did any presentation, so I started out by doing two :-) Here you have the first one, enjoy.
Connecting Technology for Great Experiences - How does QML and Web fit together?View more presentations from kchristi.
Some time ago we published an article and a YouTube video about the PhotoTranslator application which we have developed. We were surprised of the attention it gained. Many people asked us, when will it be available and we have decided to release an alpha version of PhotoTranslator. So if you want to test it, you can install it directly from Maemo extras devel repository AT YOUR OWN RISK.
PhotoTranslator Alpha Features
As you probably have understood already, the PhotoTranslator is not a final version yet and it lacks features. It may, or it may not work as you expect, but as stated before, use it at your own risk. We also needed to remove bunch of languages from the application because they increased the package size to 95M. PhotoTranslator supports only the following languages from tesseract i.e. the languages that it can read from the images (OCR) at the moment:
- English
- Finnish
- German
- Spanish
- Portuguese
NOTE: This means that you can translate, but you can only use the OCR for the languages listed above. The workaround for this is that you can write the text manually and then translate it.
PhotoTranslator Beta Features
For beta version we are planning to implement the following set of features:
- Separate package for each supported language
- User can download different language packages via PhotoTranslator
- Disabled buttons for languages that are not installed
- Support for capturing images with PhotoTranslator
We are also investigating if we could open source the application at some point. More details will follow later.
Installing PhotoTranslator
The only thing you need to do is to enable extras-devel repository from your application manager. Check the details below.
In the Application Manager:
- Navigate to the application menu (tap the title bar)
- Select ‘Application catalogs’
- Select ‘New’
- Enter a catalog name of ‘Maemo extras-devel’
- Enter a web address of ‘http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel’
- Enter a distribution of ‘fremantle’
- Enter components of ‘free non-free’
- Select ‘Save’
Feedback
We would like to receive feedback of your user experience. You can give your feedback about PhotoTranslator in comment section. We will also later provide an email address, which you can use to send your feedback directly.
Thank you for reading our blog.
The great Mozilla's Firefox Mobile Add-On Challenge has returned! They've announced second mobile add-on challenge, starting on March 11 and ending Monday, April 12.
Add-on developers are challenged to develop a compatible Firefox mobile add-on that shows innovation and considers the mobile context (small screen size, touch screen, out and about, etc.)
At the end of the Challenge period, Mozilla's panel of judges (consisting of members from the Mobile and Add-ons teams) will select ten winners who will rece... .. .
Our latest MWC video is a tour around the Qt stand, looking at some of the Qt-enabled devices - from phones to printers and appliances. Mobile developers and users have been hearing more and more about Qt in the last 18 months. It is the future application framework for both Symbian and MeeGo (Nokia's two open platforms going forward). However, as this video demonstrates, Qt is already a well established technology and the 'Qt everywhere' slogan has already been realised.
The election period has started for the next Maemo Community Council election and we have a number of excellent candidates, including - even if I do say so myself - me ;-)
The election period has started for the next Maemo Community Council election and we have a number of excellent candidates, including - even if I do say so myself - me ;-)
The Qt 4.7 Tech Preview has been released a while ago, and we’ve gotten a lot of requests to package it for the N900.
Read on if you want to live on the bleeding edge 
Want to help the Maemo Community ? Want to learn about our QA/testing process ? This call is for you.
Next Saturday(Mar 20) from 2pm onwards(UTC/GMT) we’ll host a testing marathon at #maemo-testing@Freenode, in order to make more awesome community applications available for the end users.
If you’re a developer, make sure your applications are in good shape before the testing marathon.
Here’s a small FAQ about the marathon:
What is a testing marathon ?
Basically is a ‘testing party’, where people get together to test software, report bugs, talk/send feedback to developers in order to improve our community applications.
Do I need to be a developer to take part of the marathon ?
No, even if you can’t judge all the criteria in the QA checklist, you’re more than welcome, every small help has big value for us.
Do I need to be in the irc channel during the entire marathon ?
No, you can join/leave at anytime, but it’s recommendable to be in the channel at the beginning of the marathon, if you need some help or have some doubts.
I can’t attend the marathon, can I help in some way ?
Of course, you can test and evaluate applications at any time. Please follow our community QA process and checklist and vote the packages under: http://maemo.org/packages/repository/qa/fremantle_extras-testing/
Still have doubts, want to discuss something ?
Join the discussion here.
I previously gave you a short tour of Barriosquare on the Nokia N900 and told you about the beta opportunity. We just received word that Barriosquare is now available in the Extras-devel section of the Maemo repository so it is much easier to get it loaded onto your device now. You no longer have to use terminal commands and be a member of the beta test group to install and use Barriosquare.
Today we improved journal replaying from 1050s for my test of 25249 resources to 58s.
Journal replaying happens when your cache database gets corrupted. Also when you restore a backup: restore uses the same code the journal replaying uses, backup just makes a copy of your journal.
During the performance improvements we of course found other areas related to data entry. It looks like we’re entering a period of focus on performance, as we have a few interesting ideas for next week already. The ideas for next week will focus on performance of some SPARQL functions like regex.
Meanwhile are Michele Tameni and Roberto Guido working on a RSS miner for Tracker and has Adrien Bustany been working on other web miners like for Flickr, GData, Twitter and Facebook.
I think the first pieces of the RSS- and the other web miners will start becoming available in this week’s unstable 0.7 release. Martyn is still reviewing the branches of the guys, but we’re very lucky with such good software developers as contributors. Very nice work Michele, Roberto and Adrien!
BarrioSquare, a FourSquare application for the Nokia N900, left private testing on Monday and is now available at the N900′s App Manager. You may have to enable the Extras-Devel repository. This is great news because now more Nokia N900 users can start using this app. Watch my quick overview of the app.
Checking in on Foursquare everywhere we go
You can also watch this video in HD on Youtube. Subscribe to the channel to preview the latest videos before they get published on the blog.
I like this application on the Nokia N900 because it helps me find the places nearby to check-in, instead of manually looking for them through the mobile Foursquare website. My only complaint so far about BarrioSquare is that lists sometimes scroll too fast. A workaround is to drag your finger diagonally instead of up and and down.
Update: Chris, the guy behind Barriosquare, answered some questions I sent him shortly after the release.
What triggered the decision to finally put BarrioSquare in the Maemo repository?
I figure it was better to get the app out to the general public sooner, rather than later, and given the entire uncertainty of ovi store publishing (dependency issues with python-qt4) I figure might as well just get it out there now that it is in a fully functional state.
Any features to look out for in upcoming releases?
- Ability to search for friends
- Ability to see nearby tips
- Ability to get a “popup” alert whenever friends check into a venue nearby
- Venue (and nearby) specials
What other apps do u have planned for Maemo?
- Google Maps type app using Google Maps flash API, PyQt-Webkit
- Maybe a gowalla app?
- Also building a reusable UI toolkit library to speed up application development
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Since I read somewhere in the Maemo community, that Nokia Map Loader is now available for our beloved N900, I tried and tried to find the way to install it and use it. It’s not easy to find the download for the Map Loader on the Nokia site, sorry, for me it wasn’t. Finally I found it here, thanks to the german blogsite www.pocket.at, but you can find it also on the national Nokia site, if you willing enough to.
You will find also two versions, one for the PC and ...
After merging changes from SeriesFinale v0.4 for Fremantle, it’s a pleasure to announce SeriesFinale v0.4 for Diablo. This way, both Fremantle and Diablo versions have the same features.
Even the colors that v0.3.6 added in Fremantle but were not added in Diablo have been added too.
I thank Joaquim for this veeery cool application, probably one of the most used applications in my case.
The Qt 4.7 Tech Preview has been released a while ago, for all those cutting edge folks that want to try out the newest stuff .
The 4.7.0 TP is the first step of the 4.7 release cycle, and the main goal is to showcase newest technology (such as Qt Quick) and solicit feedback. Although the quality isn’t at production level quite yet, it should be good enough for demonstrating the new features they have in mind for 4.7 final.
The good news is that the Qt for Maemo 5 repository got a 4.7-fremantle branch that contains a relatively up to date Qt 4.7 with all Maemo 5 cha... .. .
Over the last couple of weeks the MF Moderators, Admin and Members of the Dev team have discussed what to do with the SF/MF’s 'Member Of The Month' award and we came up with some great ideas on how to improve it and what is even more importantly, how to involve more participation in process of nominating, voting and awarding.
But that's not all, for the first time we are running the Member Of The Year Competion and offering some really cool prizes for the winner as well as for the voters. It is time to let you all decide who will be our first SF/MF Member of the year and to win either 16GB microSD card orfree softw... .. .
So yesterday I've skipped the chance to watch some "exciting" QML demos in Helsinki. This was quite surprising to some of my KDE rooted team mates. They didn't understand how I could not show the slightest sign of excitement.
Well, but actually I wonder for months: What's actually the fancy and awesome, the brilliant new, the exciting part of QML? It doesn't seem to be rocket science. It's nothing new. Declarative UIs are done for ages. To name some very few implementations there are Windows and PM/Shell RC files, Glade, GtkBuilder. You want to mix declarations with managed code? XUL and XAML have visited that land. You want to use JavaScript for your UIs? Flash, XUL, Dynamic HTML and Web Widgets, GObject Introspection.
So what am I missing except that Qt finally catches up to its competition? It's a welcome addition, but why should I be overly excited and die of excitement?
I’m almost 100% sure this video is fake, but I know the Nokia N900 can do a lot of crazy things when it is hacked. Here’s a video of a guy controlling a real helicopter using the Nokia N900′s accelerometer. Check it out.
Real or fake?
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Sygic has finally announced the public availability of Sygic Mobile Maps with Turn-by-turn navigation for the Nokia N900 Maemo devie. It's available for purchase for around 60 euros and you need to download around 1.8 Gigabytes of maps data to your phone !
Official Press Release Below
The first turn-by-turn voice guided navigation application for Maemo phones has just got available for European Nokia N900 users at Sygic web e-shop. With the full set of navigation features, multiple user settings, fast route calculation, user-friendly operation and the latest maps situated on-board of the device, Sygic Mobile Maps turns Nokia N900 into a full-featured personal navigation device, and provides for superb user experience and reliable navigation.
The first available region, launched today, is EUROPE. It costs EUR 59,99, it has no time limit on use after purchase, and it includes countries of Western Europe and Eastern Europe as follows:
- Maps included: Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, Vatican.
- Maps ...
After merging changes from SeriesFinale v0.4 for Fremantle, it’s a pleasure to announce SeriesFinale v0.4 for Diablo. This way, both Fremantle and Diablo versions have the same features.
Even the colors that v0.3.6 added in Fremantle but were not added in Diablo have been added too.
I thank Joaquim for this veeery cool application, probably one of the most used applications in my case.
The first turn-by-turn voice guided navigation application for Maemo phones has got available for European Nokia N900 users at Sygic web e-shop.
With the full set of navigation features, multiple user settings, fast route calculation, user-friendly operation and the latest maps situated on-board of the device, Sygic Mobile Maps turns Nokia N900 into a full-featured personal navigation device, and provides for superb user experience and reliable navigation.
We truely appologise for delaying this official information by one day - yesterday the demand for download hit our server infrastru... .. .
One of the first questions I came up against when I started working with the Nokia N900 was, “Can it run Java?” According to the Java page on the Maemo Wiki, the answer was, “It’s not supported, but here are a few things you can try.” So, I poked around and made a little progress.
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I figured the best starting point would be Sun (Now Oracle)’s Java, so I went to their Java SE for Embedded Downloads. There, I went through the steps to download ARMv6 Linux - Headful (Early Access), EABI, glibc 2.5, Hard Float (VFP), Little Endian. I figured I would start with a headful installation, and if that failed, try the headless install.
RaeMote is a N900 desktop widget that turns your N900 into an Apple Remote that can control your Mac Mini, MacBooks and iPod docks via IR. RaeMote has been developed by Thomas Perl and is available for download in the extras testing repository. The widget works as expected and has surprisingly good range.
I was able to control my Macbook from around 5-6 meters away without having to align the device and this worked from wide angles as well. Here is a video of the application in action. If you haven’t enabled extras-testing, here’s how to do it.
If you enjoyed this, you might also like:
- Turn Your N900 Into A PS3 Controller & More With BlueMaemo
- How To Enable Application Repositories On The N900 With One Click
- Huge: Nokia’s Maemo & Intel’s Moblin Combine To Become Meego
- Maemo Select: Applications, Themes & Wallpapers For The N900
- How To Create A Physical Task Manager Button For The N900
I just ran some JavaScript benchmark tests of V8 version 5, SunSpider v0.9.1 and Peacekeeper on my laptop. My laptop is HP EliteBook 6930p, which has Intel Core 2 Duo CPU P8600 @ 2.40GHz, 4 GB RAM, running KUbuntu 9.10 with kernel 2.6.31-20-generic. Also, I ran it on my N900 PR1.1 with Qt 4.6.2, and collected some results for iPhone 3GS, Droid and Nexus One, and HTC Desire.
The following scores are from V8, the higher the better.
FireFox for Ubuntu 3.5.8 - 248
Qt 4.6.2 – 910
Chrome 5.0.307.11 Beta – 4155
QtWebKit 2.0 – 2816
N900 - 105
iPhone 3GS - no results
Droid - 39.5
Nexus One - 63.5
HTC Desire - 66.1
Then I found some results of iPhone 3GS for V8 version 3:
N900 - 103
iPhone 3GS - 53
The following scores are from SunSpider, the lower the better.
FireFox for Ubuntu 3.5.8 – 2484.7
Qt 4.6.2 – 1136.0
Chrome 5.0.307.11 Beta – 462.1
QtWebKit 2.0 – 635.6
N900 - 12.5
iPhone 3GS - 16.7
Droid - 34.2
Nexus One - 14.7
HTC Desire - 12.02
The following scores are from Peacekeeper, the higher the better.
FireFox for Ubuntu 3.5.8 – 1510
Qt 4.6.2 – 3261
Chrome 5.0.307.11 Beta – 4324
QtWebKit 2.0 – 4288
N900 - 244
Chrome’s V8 engine is really fast, and WebKit still has a long way to go!
Also, N900 performs much better than iPhone 3GS, Droid and Nexus. Considering HTC Desire, N900 wins easily on V8, but lost a little on SunSpider. However, if you consider MicroB, the default browser on N900, it’s a disaster due to the slow engine of Gecko and N900 even used a pretty old version.
Then the ACID3 test.
FireFox for Ubuntu 3.5.8 – 93
Qt 4.6.2 – 100
Chrome 5.0.307.11 Beta – 100
QtWebKit 2.0 – 100
* The test for QtWebKit 2.0 is done with the revision number of 56441.
The following scores are from V8, the higher the better.
FireFox for Ubuntu 3.5.8 - 248
Qt 4.6.2 – 910
Chrome 5.0.307.11 Beta – 4155
QtWebKit 2.0 – 2816
N900 - 105
iPhone 3GS - no results
Droid - 39.5
Nexus One - 63.5
HTC Desire - 66.1
Then I found some results of iPhone 3GS for V8 version 3:
N900 - 103
iPhone 3GS - 53
The following scores are from SunSpider, the lower the better.
FireFox for Ubuntu 3.5.8 – 2484.7
Qt 4.6.2 – 1136.0
Chrome 5.0.307.11 Beta – 462.1
QtWebKit 2.0 – 635.6
N900 - 12.5
iPhone 3GS - 16.7
Droid - 34.2
Nexus One - 14.7
HTC Desire - 12.02
The following scores are from Peacekeeper, the higher the better.
FireFox for Ubuntu 3.5.8 – 1510
Qt 4.6.2 – 3261
Chrome 5.0.307.11 Beta – 4324
QtWebKit 2.0 – 4288
N900 - 244
Chrome’s V8 engine is really fast, and WebKit still has a long way to go!
Also, N900 performs much better than iPhone 3GS, Droid and Nexus. Considering HTC Desire, N900 wins easily on V8, but lost a little on SunSpider. However, if you consider MicroB, the default browser on N900, it’s a disaster due to the slow engine of Gecko and N900 even used a pretty old version.
Then the ACID3 test.
FireFox for Ubuntu 3.5.8 – 93
Qt 4.6.2 – 100
Chrome 5.0.307.11 Beta – 100
QtWebKit 2.0 – 100
* The test for QtWebKit 2.0 is done with the revision number of 56441.
For a long time there has been a demand for a nice Twitter app for the N900, so far we have Witter and Mauku and web apps such as Hahlo.com and Dabr.co.uk, but there is none that comes close to elegance of something like Gravity for Symbian devices. Enter, TweeGo, formerly Twitter Box, which has all the promise of quickly becoming the best Twitter app for the N900.
As of now it is very alpha with regard to functionality and has not been uploaded to the extras-devel repository yet. There is no dedicated @ reply column, no direct message section and so on but the UI is beautiful. The transitions are slick and the app makes you want to use it. Hopefully it will have much more functionality soon.
If you want to try it, you will have to install it using the terminal (instructions below).
HOW TO INSTALL TWEEGO
- Download the latest version of TweeGo from this page. Download the .deb file.
- Save this under the MyDocs section of the N900.
- Rename this to something like “TweeGo″ so that its easier for your to enter the name in the terminal.
- Install an application called “rootsh” from the Application Manager.
- Next, launch the Terminal application on the N900 and enter “sudo gainroot” and hit enter.
- Now type “cd MyDocs” and hit enter.
- Then type “dpkg -i Tweego.deb” and hit enter.
Enjoy.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:
- Demo Of Enna Media Center On The N900
- Tweakr Helps Add Custom Profiles To Your N900
- First Look: TweetGo.net – Twitter Web App For The N900
- How To Block Unwanted Callers On The N900
- How To Use Mplayer On The N900 To Play Unsupported Video Formats
As I mentioned in my further post about the Nokia Map Loader, I would test the downloaded maps on the N900 on my road trip only with the GPS functionality. The main reason why, is saving roaming costs being abroad, which can be very high in some countries.
Finally I got home and the test succeeded with almost satisfying results. Mostly I described the functions of Ovi Maps in my post Ovi Maps – Navigation on the N900, so please get further information about how to use the map functionality there.
Although ...
The last week has seen some interesting progress for the n900. Firstly it was great to see phototranslator finally being availiable in extras-devel. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about having lost patience waiting and played with OCR myself. However phototranslator has put it together in a slick package and combines with google translate api to provide a pretty cool application.
Obviously it is of most use if you are travelling to a foriegn country, translating signs and menus as you go, but it is still interesting to play with and just show off the capabilities of the device (without having to drop to a terminal).
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-03-15 through 2010-03-21
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-03-15 through 2010-03-21
maemo.org members have been long interested in the open Linux device project Pandora, both seriously and in lovingly jesting fashion.
Now some are asking if MeeGo might look good sitting on a Pandora device, and I have to admit the thought is intriguing. There shouldn’t be any insurmountable technical hurdles, and each open project could reinforce the legitimacy of the other.
But why not take that a step further?
Since MeeGo will be an open source solution freely available to any device or class of device, what would keep the Linux Foundation from broadening the scope of sponsorship? Why not partner very closely with the Pandora project in every aspect? The Foundation could even bring Pandora under its wing as the hardware sibling to MeeGo.
Of course that gets into a sticky area. Hardware-driven sponsors like Nokia, which will be of course producing its own devices to run MeeGo, might balk at providing partial funding to the Linux Foundation if it got too deeply into open source hardware. Then again, think of such a venture more as open source research and development rather than simple competition, and even Nokia may see a benefit. Just as MeeGo drives down its software overhead, so could a sponsored Pandora do the same for hardware.
The value for Nokia and other corporate interests in such a scenario is that the attention on the mundane is diminished and differentiation becomes an even larger, more visible part of revenue contributions– and that is where companies need to focus their bottom line to improve margins anyway.
Naturally, such a scenario relies on all parties seeing a win-win, and Pandora’s leadership may not. In addition, the Linux Foundation could not be faulted for focusing exclusively on the softer side of this equation and avoiding meddling with hardware. Perhaps Pandora could instead evolve into the same sort of organization, ultimately gaining sponsorship from Nokia and others. In that alternative, the Pandora organization and the Linux Foundation could form a partnership of mutual interest without any sort of actual merger.
Personally I find this potentially exciting and believe that sooner or later it’s inevitable… but as always, I’m highly interested in the opinions of readers. Well?
Filed under: Inviting Change, Mentioning Maemo, Mentioning MeeGo, Out There, The Write Stuff Tagged: LinkedIn, Linux Foundation, MeeGo, Nokia, Pandora
The Maemo Community Council election is drawing near, and the nomination process is closed. As you have probably heard by now, the candidate list is quite strong, comprising former and current Council members, community veterans, and relative newcomers with strong community contributions. With the hype surrounding Maemo, the N900, MeeGo, and our uncertain future, this is the hottest political arena that our community has ever seen.
Front Page
Maemo community is again participating in Google's Summer of Code
The Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers salaries to write code for various open source software projects. Sponsored by Google, they: "work with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 successful student participants and 2500 mentors from 98 countries worldwide, all for the love of code." maemo.org was involved in 2009, after organisation efforts by Valério Valério. His efforts this year have also resulted in the Maemo community being named as one of the organisations participating. Project ideas will now be submitted which will get whittled down and students allocated.
Read moreTen candidates for March 2010 Maemo Community Council election
It's election time again and this year's Community Council election is more important than any other in the past, due to one word: MeeGo. Elections start on Wednesday, 24th March and run for a week. Eligible voters will receive voting tokens and instructions from Dave Neary. The voting is counted by "single-transferrable vote", meaning that if your first choice candidate isn't going to win, your vote for your second choice candidate is taken into account. "The Maemo Community Council is a five-person body chosen by the "Maemo community". The Council's primary purpose is to represent the views and opinions of the Maemo Community to Nokia, and vice versa.Maemo Community Council members are unpaid volunteers who are not employed by Nokia Coporation." Ten candidates are standing (Ryan Abel, Randall Arnold, Andrew Black, Attila Csipa, Andrew Flegg, Andrea Grandi, Cosimo Kroll, Javier S. Pedro, Arek Stopczynski and Steven Yeager). The page below lists summaries of their declarations and links to other various comments and Q&A sessions they've been involved in. Sanjeev Visvanatha is pulling together an extended blog-posting having asked a series of questions of all of the candidates.
Read moreIn this edition (Download)...
- Front Page
- Maemo community is again participating in Google's Summer of Code
- Ten candidates for March 2010 Maemo Community Council election
- Applications
- First release of PhotoTranslator application
- Sygic Mobile Maps for Maemo Europe available for purchase
- New Twitter client renamed to TweeGo
- Development
- Qt 4.7's "QtDeclarative" may help N900 run MeeGo and Symbian Qt apps with "little or no extra effort"
- Community
- First MeeGo Technical Steering Group (TSG) meeting: Weds, 24th March
- MeeGo community forums to be powered by vBulletin
- Devices
- After CNET article, Nokia say "door is not closed" to MeeGo on N900
- PR1.1.1 finally released for UK firmware users
- Announcements
- Cosimo Kroll (zehjotkah) running for council
- Andrew Flegg (Jaffa) running for the council
- Attila Csipa (achipa) running for council
One of the reasons I have been using my Google Nexus One more than the N900 over the last month or so is the sheer number and quality of applications for Android. The N900 is a fantastic device, but applications need to get better. I saw a Tweet from Chanse (Nokia employee) that he was testing a new Twitter application called TweeGo. I followed the link to Maemo Central and followed the instructions to download and install the application to my N900. I also discovered an update to Witter and can honestly say that lack of a good Twitter app is no longer a concern for me on the N900.
TweeGo
I was getting some dependency errors and had to enter apt-get -f install to get things straightened out, but now all is good. TweeGo definitely has a slick look and feel to it, but still feels a bit early in development with some limits on Twitter functionality. You can view your Twitter stream, post status updates, and perform some functions after tapping on a Tweet (Retweet, reply, favorite, unfollow). I do not see any way to view mentions or direct messages, update your status with photos, or view conversations/threads. I was all ready to stop using my current application, Witter, and make the switch to TweeGo when I saw there was an update to Witter made today too.
Witter
The updated Witter version improves the UI, which is the area I wanted to see fixed up since it already had a ton of functionality built into it. As you can see in the screenshot, you can now view profile pics in your Twitter feed while also getting a cleaner default theme. The one final function I would like to see is the ability to view the conversation. Other than that, I have to say I am quite happy with Witter and am pleased with the way applications are rolling out on the N900.
After all the hard work required to release Modest and Tinymail I finally found some energy to start a new pet project. I have never really liked the RSS reader that comes with the Nokia N900 Igalia gave me. I looks too “Diablo” and it’s not consistent at all with Fremantle look&feel.
That’s why I decided to write my own and, at the same time, regain contact with Python. The result is ReSiStance 0.1.
ReSiStance 0.1 from Igalia on Vimeo.
These are the main features of this first release
- Support for RSS 0.90, Netscape RSS 0.91, Userland RSS
0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 0.93, RSS 0.94, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3,
Atom 1.0, and CDF (kindly provided by feedparser module) - Feed and Favicon autodiscovery (no need to type the exact URI to the .xml file)
- Add/Remove/Update feed sources
- Landscape/Portrait mode support (I love apps with portrait mode)
- Internationalization support
ReSiStance sources are already available for downloading from gitorious and the package for the N900 was uploaded to extras-devel repository.
Nokia has just released the Maemo 5 SDK 1.2 available here. The release contains many different additions/deletions/updates and features the Qt4.6 library. It also contains package updates required for software designed for the next Maemo product software update coming out soon.
The release notes are available here.
The Nokia N900 is one of my favorite devices and I think GPS navigation is one area where it could excel with the large high resolution display and 3G capability. Unfortunately, the Ovi Maps version on the device stinks and there is no word yet on whether or not Nokia will provide the update to the latest version with free maps for life. There is however some good news for N900 owners in Europe and the US since Sygic announced Mobile Maps for Nokia Maemo. It is a bit pricey at EUR 59.99 (approximately USD$81) and I just received a reviewer code to give it a full test. I am downloading now and drove into the office today so I can start testing it out. Stay tuned for my first impressions later today and a full review to follow that I hope will help you make a more informed decision regarding the software. Please do post questions here for things you want me to test out with the software.
Features and benefits of the Mobile Maps (from the Sygic website):
- All latest maps are with you on your phone.
- Speed cameras, speed limits and railway crossings warnings provide safety for you and others.
- Signposts help you to head in the right direction.
- Lane assistant informs you about the correct lane to be in.
- Automatically adapts to horizontal or vertical view with
- Automatically or manually adjustable color schemes for day and night use.
- User interface and voice guide speak your native language.
- Search for millions of restaurants and other points of interest, with an option to call in, find parking, and navigate to.
- Design your trip with multi-stop route planning before you head out.
- See the summary of your trip before you set off.
- Avoid a roadblock with a single click.
- Save and organize favorites according to your needs.
- Customize what you want to see on the navigation screen.
My submission for this year’s GUADEC:
This is a _lightning talk_ about how the evolution from MAFW (Multimedia Aplication FrameWork used in Fremantle official media player) to Grilo (new multimedia framework for application aiming to provide easy access to many sources of media) and how they can work together to provide a better user experience and access to more media in the Maemo 5 platform (Fremantle)
Those interested in developing widgets and applications for the world's most powerful smartphone, would like to know that Forum Nokia has released the 5th update of the Maemo™ 5 SDK today.
release contains many different additions/deletions/updates and features the Qt4.6 library. It also contains package updates required for software designed for the next Maemo product software update coming out soon.
The Maemo 5 Final SDK has its fifth update, which is an early access to the fourth product software update, being vers... .. .
At the 25th annual CTIA Wireless 2010 show in Las Vegas, Nokia is proud to celebrate a quarter-century of wireless industry advances, highlighting the latest in apps, content, devices, developers, and creative innovation - all of which influences the way you live with technology today.
At CTIA Nokia is demonstrating a wide array of solutions that help consumers connect to what matters most in their world. Making its first public debut is the Nokia 5230 Nuron, available tomorrow with T-Mobile, in addition to Ovi Maps and free navigation, and the innovative creations from the finalists of the "Push N900 Mod in the USA" -contest.
Featuring the creators of some of the hottest apps and content available on Ovi Store, the Nokia booth also inclu... .. .
One of the best known manufacturer of flash memory card, Sandisk has started making the jump to 32GB capacity with the introduction of its new 32GB MicroSD card, which is the industry-leading capacity and will be the world's largest removable storage capacity for mobile phones.
This increased capacity, coupled with the high performance of the SanDisk Mobile Ultra line, allows consumers to further take advantage of the many storage-intensive features offered by today's portable handsets such as music playback, photo and video camera functions, gaming and GPS applications.
A must-have product for consumers who embody the digital lifestyle, the SanDisk Mobile Ultra high-performance card... .. .
Maemo released the latest SDK for developers on Monday and MohammadAG from the forums uploaded some screenshots that gives us an idea of what’s to come in the next major update for the Nokia N900. We’re not sure when the update will be available to everyone, but at least we know some of the things to look forward to.
Different virtual keyboard
Rearrangeable menu without “more”
Browser’s back button actually goes back, instead of showing history
Portrait browsing can be activated in settings instead of the Ctl-Shift-O trick
Increase/Decrease keys can be set to change volume in browser
File manager has built-in share option similar to Petrovich
It was also mentioned that the browser seems much snappier, including scrolling and rendering. He promises to post more changes as he finds them on the SDK. Make sure to follow the thread that was started on the Maemo Forums.
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Now that a preview of the PR1.2 SDK has been released, it's time to push the latest updates into the current Extras repository, so users that won't be upgrading to 1.2 as soon as it's out will get recent packages until they decide to upgrade to the new release. Over the last days, I've updated some of my packages with minor updates and long-requested features:
- Panucci: FM transmitter in menu, HTTP streaming (ideal for podcasts). The "rotate to landscape mode when the keyboard is open" fix has been merged from gPodder.
QA page for Panucci 0.3.9-5 - RæMote: Updated bugtracker URL and fixed the UI glitch where button "highlights" get stuck. It has only been out for two weeks, and therefore it has not entered Extras yet, so your votes are extra important here.
QA page for RæMote 1.2 - headphoned: Support for pausing FM radio has been added - this is useful when you listen to FM radio using a Bluetooth headset. Please read the info comment about FM radio support on the QA page.
QA page for headphoned 1.8
If you can spare some minutes, please help test these applications on your device and vote for them afterwards on the QA pages that are linked above.
More updates to other apps are queued for this week, stay tuned.
Ushering in a new era of high-performance image sensors, InVisage Technologies, Inc. – a venture-backed start-up that is revolutionizing the way light is captured – today announced QuantumFilm.
Harnessing the power of custom-designed semiconductor materials, QuantumFilm image sensors are the world’s first commercial quantum dot-based image sensors, replacing silicon. InVisage delivers 4x higher performance, 2x higher dynamic range and professional camera features not yet found in mobile image sensors.
The first QuantumFilm-enabled product, due out later this year, solves the crucial challenge of capturing stunni... .. .
Maemo Community, tell us how it is!
How is Maemo developer documentation? How should it be improved?
We want to hear it straight from You.
Maemo developer documentation survey consists of 16 questions. Take a few minutes to think about the developer documentation available for Maemo (in Maemo.org, for example) and answer the questions at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2Y8TDXD
The survey will be available until 6 April 2010.
Your feedback is appreciated!
I have seen alot of suggestions for themes I am trying along with some other designers to meet them all but their have been alot the last week and right now I am working on three themes. To make it easier for me and other people to know what themes people want I added a new page on my site that allow users to post a comment on what theme they want then people can vote on the idea if they like it. When I finish working on a theme and get ready to start next I will look here for the theme suggestion with the highest votes and will work on that one first. So get some suggestions in so I know what to work on.
The voting tokens have just been sent out for the Q1 2010 Maemo Community Council elections.
I already have over 100 bounced emails, so if you think that you should have a vote and you have not received an email with a voting token yet, please send me an email or leave a comment, I will look up your Maemo username and send you on the voting token/email combo we have on record so that you can vote.
Voting runs until March 30th – you can find more information about the election and the council in the Maemo wiki.
Sometimes I feel that my lifestyle (and I think that not only mine) makes me forget about some things, everyday activities. One of those activities is switching phone to silent mode at night and switching it back to normal when I get up. I usually use quite loud ringtones not to miss important calls or messages during the day, but I also like to sleep well, without interrupting. So what is the solution for N900?
About a week ago I decided to try System Event Scheduler (available in extras-devel) and it ...
While having breakfast with Iain at our hotel during SXSW (we both won that Nokia video competition), he mentioned that he was working on a Nokia N900 hack that will let him control an RC helicopter. I was hungover from the night before so my mind couldn’t understand him at the time. Nevertheless, Iaian just posted a video with his proof of concept that it will work.
Video is embedded below. Head over to the blog if you cannot see it in your RSS reader.
This video shows that he can send control signals with the Nokia N900′s infrared (IR). He also commented that he has no idea how well it’ll work in practice and what the spread/range of the N900 IR is, but he will work on getting better control when he can spare some time.
This is actually more believable than somebody else’s video of a Nokia N900 controlling a real helicopter.
Iain isn’t new to hacking the Nokia N900. His previous hack that turned the Nokia N900 into a remote trigger flash got plenty of attention too.
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Well, it’s hard to believe that a year has already passed and Ada Lovelace Day has come round again. As with last year, rather than write about one person I’ve decided to dedicate my post to a group of women in technology that have served as an inspiration.
Continuing a rich history of fostering innovation, Nokia s proud to announce the winning team of the PUSH N900 MOD IN THE USA competition - BrettSarahTops - for their work turning the Nokia N900 into a car-like dashboard showcasing odometer, speedometer and more.
The competition, which began in January, pushed the capabilities for the Nokia N900 both from a hardware and software prospective; further showing that the Nokia N900 is one of the most advanced mobile computer currently available.
"Seeing what these teams were able to create using the Nokia N900 in just a few weeks time is a true testa"... .. .
Some weeks ago, a user of MaemoPad+ asked me if it was possible to port MaemoPad+ to the Desktop, so users of Tablet PCs can make use of it. Apart from that, this can also be useful for users of MaePad to copy their "memos.db" file from the N900 to their PC and edit the file (or just view the contents) on the big screen. The file format used by both MaemoPad+ and MaePad is the same, so users of the mobile versions can share their database files with the Desktop version (and vice versa), which by the way looks like this at the moment:
Most of the Maemo 4 libraries are readily available in Debian (hildon, libosso, hildon-icons, etc..), so the initial port has not been too difficult, even though proper Desktop integration obviously needs more work, and there are some ugly crashers still hidden inside the code ;)
I wonder if it's possible to also package Maemo 5 libraries (Hildon 2.2, etc..) for Debian and upload them to the Debian repositories - this should make it easier to port Maemo 5 applications to the Linux Desktop without having to re-write the whole UI layer. Another cool thing would be to have Hildon 2.2 for Diablo, which would allow us to "backport" Maemo 5 apps to Maemo 4 - again, without the work of having to re-write the UI.
Packages for Ubuntu are available from the MaemoPad+ PPA, and the source is available via Git. Please send backtraces of crashes or (even better!) patches against the "desktop" branch in the Git repo.
The FoneArena Nokia N900 Review
The N900 is the first phone from Nokia based on the Maemo Platform. Nokia has expressed their intentions to use Maemo in high-end phones. The Nokia N900 is a Touchscreen, full QWERTY slider phone and one of most talked about members of the N-Series recently.
Does the first phone built on the top of this relatively new phone platform live up to it’s expectations ? Find out in our N900 review.
N900 Specs
The phone boasts of some pretty impressive specs including powerful ARM Cortex-A8 600MHz Processor with 256 MB of RAM and a 3.5 inch 800x480 pixel resistive touchscreen display.
Quad-band GSM EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 Mhz), Tri-band WCDMA / 3G support (900/1700/2100 Mhz)
TI OMAP 3430: ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz CPU , OpenGL ES 2.0 support
Maemo 5 OS with Multiple Homescreens
800x480 pixel touchscreen display supporting upto 16 million colors
32GB inbuilt memory plus microSD slot.
Slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
5 MP Camera with Dual LED Flash ,16:9 video recording
Media player , FM transmitter
Kickstand
Wi-Fi , Bluetooth v2.1 , GPS
3.5 mm jack for Audio /TV-Out
MicroB Browser powered by Mozilla technology with full Flash 9.4 support
Skype , Google Talk IM Integration
Internet calling
Email : Mail for Exchange, IMAP, POP3, SMTP
OVI Maps with geotagging
BL-5J 1320mAh with USB Charging
More specs ...
The original SPARQL regex support of Tracker is using a custom SQLite function. But of course back when we wrote it we didn’t yet think much about optimizing. As a result, we were using g_regex_match_simple which of course recompiles the regular expression each time.
Today Jürg and me found out about sqlite3_get_auxdata and sqlite3_set_auxdata which allows us to cache a compiled value for a specific custom SQLite function for the duration of the query.
This is much better:
static void
function_sparql_regex (sqlite3_context *context,
int argc,
sqlite3_value *argv[])
{
gboolean ret;
const gchar *text, *pattern, *flags;
GRegexCompileFlags regex_flags;
GRegex *regex;
if (argc != 3) {
sqlite3_result_error (context, “Invalid argument count”, -1);
return;
}
regex = sqlite3_get_auxdata (context, 1);
text = sqlite3_value_text (argv[0]);
flags = sqlite3_value_text (argv[2]);
if (regex == NULL) {
gchar *err_str;
GError *error = NULL;
pattern = sqlite3_value_text (argv[1]);
regex_flags = 0;
while (*flags) {
switch (*flags) {
case ’s’: regex_flags |= G_REGEX_DOTALL; break;
case ‘m’: regex_flags |= G_REGEX_MULTILINE; break;
case ‘i’: regex_flags |= G_REGEX_CASELESS; break;
case ‘x’: regex_flags |= G_REGEX_EXTENDED; break;
default:
err_str = g_strdup_printf (”Invalid SPARQL regex flag ‘%c’”, *flags);
sqlite3_result_error (context, err_str, -1);
g_free (err_str);
return;
}
flags++;
}
regex = g_regex_new (pattern, regex_flags, 0, &error);
if (error) {
sqlite3_result_error (context, error->message, error->code);
g_clear_error (&error);
return;
}
sqlite3_set_auxdata (context, 1, regex, (void (*) (void*)) g_regex_unref);
}
ret = g_regex_match (regex, text, 0, NULL);
sqlite3_result_int (context, ret);
return;
}
Before (this was a test on a huge amount of resources):
$ time tracker-sparql -q "select ?u { ?u a rdfs:Resource . FILTER (regex(?u, '^titl', 'i')) }"
real 0m3.337s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.008s
After:
$ time tracker-sparql -q "select ?u { ?u a rdfs:Resource . FILTER (regex(?u, '^titl', 'i')) }"
real 0m1.887s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m0.008s
This will hit Tracker’s master today or tomorrow.
The Maemo Community, that is, the community of people using devices like the Nokia N900 and its predecessors is holding elections for its community council. Instead of looking at this like a beauty contest of geeks, I thought, as an old political organizer and blogger, I would look at it from a political standpoint. For my regular readers who are not interested in geek politics, feel free to skip this. However, if you are interested, read more below.
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There are currently ten candidates running for five positions on the Community Council. They are for six month terms.
By following various blogs and forums, it occured to me there is quite a confusion as to what actually MeeGo is. The basic idea, announced in Barcelona during the MWC, was to have Maemo and Moblin merged into a new OS called MeeGo. So far so good (number of MeeGos: 1). However, recently Nokia re-branded Maemo 6 as MeeGo / Harmattan, which uses a different package format, repositories, so not quite the same MeeGo that was originally announced, despite the general similarity (number of MeeGos: 2). In the same vein, Moblin folks started calling Moblin 2.2 simply MeeGo (number of MeeGos: 3). But wait, the plot thickens! It has recently been confirmed that the N900 will be Nokia's reference platform for ARM-based MeeGo devices. Now, this is closest to the MWC MeeGo, but is just a developer reference platform, not something that end users are expected to install/use (number of MeeGoos: 4). Getting dizzy? Take a look at meego.com, you'll see that MeeGo also intends to provide separate versions (as in different user experience) of MeeGo not just for Pocketables. There will be distinct editions for Netbooks, Media Phones, TVs, In-vehicle devices and, as you probably guessed it by now, they're all called MeeGo (number of MeeGoos: 5, 6, 7, 8). So the next time somebody asks for or talks about MeeGo, make sure it is clear what the object of the talk is, lest the discussion turn into Marklar.
This problem has been usually tackled by subbranding, for example Ubuntu very successfully uses names like KUbuntu, XUbuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, etc. Why is this so important you ask? MeeGo targets a very wide range of devices and users, far more diverse than Ubuntu. By allowing everything to be called MeeGo, despite having different UIs, architectures, application stores, DRMs, APIs, packaging systems and repositories, MeeGo becomes a weak brand. It will no longer be important whether something is MeeGo as it provides no guarantee of anything except for a generic Qt based compatibility (which means little to end-users). It's crucial this branding mess gets cleared up by the powers that be before the first releases are made and the first devices hit the streets, otherwise MeeGo (all 8 of them if I counted correctly) risks going from a strong distribution brand for the embedded industry to being just a generic synonym for 'Linux with Qt'.
This problem has been usually tackled by subbranding, for example Ubuntu very successfully uses names like KUbuntu, XUbuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, etc. Why is this so important you ask? MeeGo targets a very wide range of devices and users, far more diverse than Ubuntu. By allowing everything to be called MeeGo, despite having different UIs, architectures, application stores, DRMs, APIs, packaging systems and repositories, MeeGo becomes a weak brand. It will no longer be important whether something is MeeGo as it provides no guarantee of anything except for a generic Qt based compatibility (which means little to end-users). It's crucial this branding mess gets cleared up by the powers that be before the first releases are made and the first devices hit the streets, otherwise MeeGo (all 8 of them if I counted correctly) risks going from a strong distribution brand for the embedded industry to being just a generic synonym for 'Linux with Qt'.
Congratulations to Brett and Sarah for winning the Push N900 Mod in the USA competition, earning them the cash prize of $10,000! In just a few weeks time, they were able to turn the Nokia N900 into a bike dashboard that displays speedometer, odometer, route mapping, and even provided a car horn to make it a killer app for cyclists.
Click on the image below to watch the video of their presentation to the judges.
The team utilized several different features of the Nokia N900 from the GPS to the camera, to create Bike Dashboard.
“We’re extremely excited to have won this competition! To think that just a few weeks ago we were brainstorming an idea to submit and now we’re here in Las Vegas with that idea a reality is truly amazing,” said Brett Peterson, a member of BrettSarahTops. “It’s really cool that Nokia put together a competition that encouraged us to develop something we thought would be an awesome spin on their existing innovations.”
Niko, a robot that utilizes the Nokia N900 as its ‘brain,’ placed second and will receive a prize of $5,000 while Pit Crew, a mod that sets up the Nokia N900 to be the brains behind a slot car will receive $3,000 for placing third.
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I know I am very, very, very behind on this, but I decided to add this amazing Lifenexus ‘s tweak to our hacking section, mainly for the benefit of those who don't read our forum section frequently.
Anyway, I guess most fo you will agree with me that Nokia N900 is probably the most ingenuous and powerful combination of software and hardware that Nokia has ever created.
Of course, Nokia N900 is not first Linux based device out there but what makes N900 different is how Nokia uses Linux and fact that Maemo is not yet another Linux BASED platform, Maemo IS Linux with a touch opti... .. .
Few weeks ago I was writing about PR1.1.1 update and honestly I was expecting next big update to come in really short time, just like two previous updates PR1.0.1 and PR1.1 but apparently I was wrong. Nevertheless we can already have some look at the features that will come with expected PR1.2 update. If you are familiar with development for N900 you may be already aware of SDK PR1.2 existance. And today you can see which changes from SDK will be included in actual update.
So what’s the difference exactly? SDK ...
We’re nearing our first release since very long, so I’ll do another technical blog post about Tracker ;)
When the RDF store is replaying its journal at startup and when the RDF store is restoring a backup it can be in busy state. This means that we can’t handle your DBus requests during that time; your DBus method will be returned late.
Because that’s not very nice from a UI perspective (the uh, what is going on?? -syndrome kicks in) we’re adding a signal emission that emits the progression and status. You can also ask it using DBus methods GetProgress and GetStatus.
The miners already had something like this, so I kept the API more or less the same.
signal sender=:1.99 -> dest=(null destination) serial=1454 path=/org/freedesktop/Tracker1/Status; interface=org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Status; member=Progress string "Journal replaying" double 0.197824 signal sender=:1.99 -> dest=(null destination) serial=1455 path=/org/freedesktop/Tracker1/Status; interface=org.freedesktop.Tracker1.Status; member=Progress string "Journal replaying" double 0.698153
Jürg just reviewed the SPARQL regex performance improvement of yesterday, so that’s now in master. If you want this busy status notifying today already you can test with the busy-notifications branch.
Premium Themes
In the past I have always done open source themes because I feel it is my way of giving back to the community but with people starting to charge for Maemo software and theme I find it hard to just give away all my work. Its kind of funny I have had several site in the last few years and not once received one donation for any of my work. It seems people don’t like to donate, if something is free then they don’t want to pay for it. If a theme or program cost then they don’t mind paying for it. So in the next few weeks I will release my first Closed Source theme. I have not decided how it will be released but it will most likly sold through my site and not the Ovi Store. I know that once someone gets the deb they will be able to just pass it on to other people but I hope they wont. I will either sell my themes one at a time for $1-$2, Subscription based where I will put out 1 new theme a month for $10 a year, or I will sell a one time fee download all the themes you want for around $15 I might do a mix of 1 theme for $1 or download all you want for $15 I’m not sure yet. I will keep you updated as I decide.
I will still do lots of free themes so don’t worry
Theme Package Service
Second I have have some people either ask me to package themes for them and just some themes people asking anyone to package it for them. I have and still help people all the time learn how to use MADDE to package their own themes but some people just don’t want to learn to do it them self. So to help those people who don’t want to learn to do it I am going to offer a Theme Package Service. I will take your source either in template form or already sliced images in a archive and package the theme for you in deb and or source package format. The fee for this service will be $10 per package. If theme needs to be repackagedbecause I did something wrong then I will do that free of charge. The fee may be paid by the theme maker or anyone who wants to use the theme. To donate to having a theme packaged just use Donate button on right. Make sure to let me know which theme you are donating to. If a theme gets more then $10 donated to it I will keep track and apply left over money to future repackaging of same theme.
Any money not reported for being for a certain theme is considered a regular donation. Thank you.
After a couple of (mostly minor) bugs were discovered in Touchsearch 2.1, I decided I would upload a new version to iron out some of these issues people were having. Today TouchSearch 2.2 passed the required Quality Assurance tests, and should be available to install from your local App. Manager within the next day or so. Although this is mostly a bug-fix release, there is one nifty feature that I would like to talk to you about. It is called the “TouchSearch Quick Bar” and adds keyword based searches to TouchSearch.
One of my users gave me the idea (thanks, evad!) and here is how it works: it allows you to search any of your other search engines by adding a certain prefix to your query. For example, let’s say you find it a bit too time consuming to change search engines every time you want to search a different site. This gives you the ability to use a single search engine, and “change” them by adding a letter at the beginning of your search query. Here are a couple screen shots to demonstrate;
I have selected the QuickBar as my current search engine:
Let’s say I want to search Ebay for, I don’t know, shoes. What I would do is enter “e shoes” as my query.
The “e” tells TouchSearch I want search ebay.com and will automatically by stripped from my query. Shoes, obviously, is what I actually want to search for. When you hit return, TouchSearch magically directs you to ebay’s results page for “shoes”.
And this works for all your search engines. “a” for Amazon, “w” for Wikipedia, “gm” for Google Maps, and so on and so forth. If you enter no prefix or “g”, Google is queried. Additionally, you can change which prefixes are used and add your own to your custom search engines.
How do you get this feature? First, install TouchSearch 2.2. Like I mentioned, it should be available in the next 24 hours or so. Secondly, if this is the first time you’ve installed TouchSearch, you should see the QuickBar available right after installation. If you are upgrading from an older version of TouchSearch, you may need import this search engine into your current database. Do this by:
- Going into Desktop Edit mode (tap the desktop, then tap the little gear)
- Tap on the wrench next to TouchSearch > Configure > Merge > Yes.
That should import all new search engines (including the QuickBar) into your current database.
Have fun (and leave feedback)!
It has been over a month now that MeeGo, Nokia's and Intel's joint mobile linux effort has been announced. The original formula was for Maemo 6 (also known as Harmattan) and Moblin 2.2 to merge, and form a Maemo 1.0 in the next iteration. This was cool and was generally well accepted (except for a few not too well communicated points like switching from Maemo's DEB to Moblin's RPM). Let's delve into the branding/community aspect of Harmattan, the upcoming protoMeego!
This week I spent a lot of time updating witter, so yesterday I redressed the balance and spent some quality time in the workshop.
The following week is shaping up to be a very busy one for Nokia. Starting today, there is a (largish) scheduled maintenance in the Ovi Store, nearly two days for publishers and most of Monday for end-users. There were hints of some major spring Ovi improvements in the past months, let's hope this maintenance introduces at least some of the new & improved functions.
The second (even bigger) event will be the first MeeGo code drop (a technical preview release for developers), also known as "Day One", which is scheduled for Wednesday (search for March 31), and also a TSG meeting later that day.
Last, but not least, while not really announced, the Nokia N900 PR1.2 firmware release, probably the most important one so far (as it brings all-important official Qt4.6 compatibility) could easily happen this week. The early access PR1.2 SDK has been released a week ago, and the autobuilders on maemo.org have already been transitioned to PR1.2, so the firmware itself can't be far.
The MeeGo release is certainly the most important of all these events, so prep your hacking skills, you're going to be able to put them to good use in just a few days !
EDIT: As pointed out below, this week will also see the election of the Maemo Community Council, which while not strictly a Nokia activity, still plays an important role in the Maemo world. If you are a Maemo community member and have received a voting token, take a gander at the candidate list and their programs and make sure the candidates who you think are best take the seats!
The second (even bigger) event will be the first MeeGo code drop (a technical preview release for developers), also known as "Day One", which is scheduled for Wednesday (search for March 31), and also a TSG meeting later that day.
Last, but not least, while not really announced, the Nokia N900 PR1.2 firmware release, probably the most important one so far (as it brings all-important official Qt4.6 compatibility) could easily happen this week. The early access PR1.2 SDK has been released a week ago, and the autobuilders on maemo.org have already been transitioned to PR1.2, so the firmware itself can't be far.
The MeeGo release is certainly the most important of all these events, so prep your hacking skills, you're going to be able to put them to good use in just a few days !
EDIT: As pointed out below, this week will also see the election of the Maemo Community Council, which while not strictly a Nokia activity, still plays an important role in the Maemo world. If you are a Maemo community member and have received a voting token, take a gander at the candidate list and their programs and make sure the candidates who you think are best take the seats!
The Maemo community is looking for talented students to join us in Google Summer of Code 2010.
We already have a good pool of ideas, but new ideas are more than welcome, especially in the following areas:
* Location based apps;
* Context aware apps;
* Social apps clients;
* Mobile/embedded apps in general that can benefit a wide range of platforms (Maemo, MeeGo, etc…).
Following the merger of Moblin and Maemo, we’ll also accept ideas for new MeeGo project.
This year the students will received $5000 + gifts for each successful project, the application period will start tomorrow(March 29) and will end on April 9.
More informations about Maemo @ GSoC can be found here.
Follow the discussion here.
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-03-22 through 2010-03-28
A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-03-22 through 2010-03-28
There has been a lot of talk about Twitter apps for the N900, some good and some not so good. Recently we have seen Tweego, which has a lot of promise, but till the time that it matures what other options do we have? On device clients include – Mauku and Witter (which recently got a UI update), while web apps include my favourite Dabr.co.uk and Hahlo.com.
Another new web app really worth checking out is TweetGo.net. Its first page claims that it is currently the best way to Twitter from the N900 and in my opinion that may not be far from the truth.
- The web app beautiful to look at.
- It packs functionality such as character counter, @ reply’s, DM’s, Search and the ability to favorite and retweet tweets.
- In its current iteration, you cannot follow or unfollow a person from within the app. Update: This functionality has now been added.
- There is no option to edit and then Retweet, something which Dabr allows. This is almost a deal breaker for me.
Here are a few screenshots to give you an idea of what to expect.
- The homescreen. Plain, simple and elegant.
- Tapping on a tweet brings up options to reply, star or retweet.
- Tapping on the star favorites the tweet.
- Tapping on reply opens up the above text box with a character counter.
- A look at the ‘mentions’ section.
- The ‘retweet’ functionality, similar to what Twitter.com offers. No chance of adding your two cents it.
All in all its a great way to use Twitter on the N900. While not being as fully featured as Dabr, it is a lot more finger friendly. If the developers can add editable retweets and the ability to twitpic, it might just become perfect. Check it out here.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:
- TweeGo Is A Great Looking N900 Twitter App
- Grr Is A Fast & Light Google Reader Application For The N900
- BootScreen Lets You Change The N900 Boot Video With One Click
- TV Out Makes The N900 The True MultitasKING
- Details: Skype On The N900
Front Page
Maemo 5 SDK corresponding to PR1.2 now available
The next major update of Maemo 5 is getting closer: the software development kit allowing developers to write and test their software for Maemo 5 PR1e2 has been released. In the announcement, danielwilms said this "release contains many different additions/deletions/updates and features the Qt 4.6 library. It also contains package updates required for software designed for the next Maemo product software update coming out soon." MohammadAG has posted a set of screenshots highlighting some of the new features which users will be able to look forward to in the release.
Read moreCouncil candidates get set a tough set of questions
EIPI sent a set of ten of his own and three additional community-sourced questions to candidates in the Maemo Community Council election. Voters in the election will want to take a look at the answers for insights about the positions of their favourite candidates, or perhaps even help picking their favourites. Sanjeev introduces the piece, "The Maemo Community Council election is drawing near, and the nomination process is closed. As you have probably heard by now, the candidate list is quite strong, comprising former and current Council members, community veterans, and relative newcomers with strong community contributions. With the hype surrounding Maemo, the N900, MeeGo, and our uncertain future, this is the hottest political arena that our community has ever seen. It is therefore with great honour that Mobile Tablets! is presenting this unofficial Q&A with the candidates as part of the lead up to the election." The election ends at 23:59 UTC on March 30th, so be sure to get your votes in by Tuesday. As the voting uses a single transferable vote, you can vote for multiple candidates but your second choice will only be considered after your first choice is knocked out.
Read moreIn this edition (Download)...
- Front Page
- Maemo 5 SDK corresponding to PR1.2 now available
- Council candidates get set a tough set of questions
- Applications
- New RSS reader, ReSiStance, in development by Modest developer
- Official Wordpress client application in Extras-devel
- Hide pictures and videos from Media Player using tracker-cfg
- Development
- New game, mGraph, needs artistic help
- maemo.org auto-builder now running PR1.2 SDK with Qt 4.6
- Integrating Qt Creator and MADDE in Linux
- ...and 2 more
- Community
- Maemo/MeeGo User Experience Framework
- First MeeGo Technical Steering Group meeting minutes
- Proposal for a MeeGo Community Council
- ...and 2 more
- Devices
- MeeGo release for N900 will be a code dump release: interesting to platform hackers only
- PR1.1.1 finally released for UK firmware users
- Configuring borderless/4:3 TV out on N900
- Maemo in the Wild
- PUSH N900 USA winner announced: cycle dashboard
- Will the real MeeGo please stand-up? The dangers of weak branding
- Announcements
- Updated versions of Panucci, Raemote and headphoned
- SquareIt: FourSquare application under development
- Premium themes and theme packaging service
- ...and 2 more
After a long hiatus there was a new GeoClue release 0.12 last week. GeoClue is a D-Bus service that Linux applications can use to obtain user's current position and convert between human-readable addresses and coordinates. As location-aware services are becoming more important and computers more mobile the free desktops should also be aware of where they are.
Geoclue has a really nice feature, the master provider. It means geoclue can handle multiple sources of geoinformations. For example, you can get your position with your gps device, or with OpenCellId, or with webservices that will associate your IP address with a location (such as hostip). Geoclue master provider is able to choose the source with the best accuracy.
Geoclue is used at least in Empathy to publish your location to your contacts, and in WebkitGtk to support html5 geolocation.
It's been the first release in nearly two years, and it's great to see that nice project moving forward again. In this release, Nominatim has been added as a provider for geocoding and reverse/geocoding. It means it's possible to use nominatim service to get the position for a given address, or the opposite. There have been also many bugfixes and code cleaning, including a bug I've helped to resolve that prevented master provider from being usable in some configurations.
I'm also really happy to see GeoClue again moving on. It is important for the free desktop infrastructure to have such critical tools available as vendor-neutral D-Bus services instead of platform-specific libraries.
Update: ran into python-geoclue, a very handy Python convenience library for dealing with GeoClue that is a result from last summer's GSoC. Seems to work pretty well.
“Show me the money” is a common refrain when looking at a business, and mobile is no different. Google already reckon the money is in advertising on mobile, hence their move to acquire AdMob (which is currently being scrutinised by competition agencies in the US), and Apple are expected to launch their own product for the iPhone and iPad early in May (see MediaPost for one of many pieces of speculation). So why is mobile advertising so important to the mobile eco-system? Read on for my analysis.
For those who didn’t notice, last week SeriesFinale finally got promoted to Extras which are very good news and now SeriesFinale 0.5 has been just released!
Why is this edition so special? Because it will from now on retrieve images for the shows and its seasons.
This morning I finally took the time to check how to retrieve those and I really like the way SeriesFinale looks like now. Of course, this means that the next shows update you do will start retrieving all the images for your shows and seasons which might take, let’s say, a while. Still, don’t worry because once it gets the images, next time you update, only the general information will be retrieved.
I’ve also fixed the slowness when panning the different content views. Panning should now be much more fluid.
Another good thing in this edition is that the tiny episodes’ checkbox still looks tiny but it’s in fact larger and this means you can much more easily tap on it to mark episodes.
Juan, the maintainer of the Diablo version and a colleague of mine at Igalia, sent patches for including the season number together with the episode number, so it shows like “2×05″ which is more useful than just the episode’s number.
He also pointed a bug when adding a show manually, which got fixed for this release as well.
Here are a couple of screenshots showing what you’ll see soon (I just finished sending the packages to the server) in your favorite mobile phone:
SeriesFinale with shows' art
SeriesFinale with seasons' art
(I didn’t have time to update or integrate any translations in this version but I’m planning to have it done for the next one so I apologize for any inconvenience.)
If great looking UI is your thing, you might want to look at an application called Enna which is a media center for the Nokia N900. It is a fairly popular application if you are familiar with Linux, but like me, if you had not heard about it before, here’s the page to look up.
The version that has been ported over to the N900 is capable of playing music and video, displaying photos and has a bookstore. The app is still under development and is very alpha. Also, installing it needs a bit of work (detailed instructions below). While the UI is beautiful, the speed at which it currently runs is not. In the current state, sometimes a tap doesn’t register and the Bookstore is virtually useable.
Here are a few screenshots and a quick video of the media center.
If you like video:
If you would like to try the app yourself, here is a how to, but do keep in mind the fact that installing Enna could potentially damage the other installed apps and cause serious trouble to the point where you may need to reflash your device.
- The first thing you need is root access. So go ahead and download rootsh from the application manager or use this link.
- Next add a new repository to the ‘Application Manager’ with the following data:
- Name: GeeXboX
- URL: http://packages.geexbox.org
- Distribution: fremantle
- Component: main
- Now enter launch the Terminal and type:
- root and hit enter.
- Next type apt-get install enna and hit enter.
- You should see a screen such as the one below. Enter Y and hit enter.
- Enter Y and hit enter once more.
- The installation will take time as the app manager will download and install the application and its dependencies. Once you see the command prompt, the app would have been installed.
[via: Maemo Italia]If you enjoyed this, you might also like:
- How To Block Unwanted Callers On The N900
- Give Your Matrix Inspired N900 Application Manager – The Red Pill
- TweeGo Is A Great Looking N900 Twitter App
- Tweakr Helps Add Custom Profiles To Your N900
- BootScreen Lets You Change The N900 Boot Video With One Click
HTC and T-mobile are bombarding the television shows I watch with their “ridiculously big screen” HTC HD2 ads. Wonder how the Nokia N900‘s Maemo OS look on that beautiful screen? Well, Jykazu manages to get Maemo on the HD2 and shows it on Youtube for us to see. Take a look.
I wish there was an actual Nokia N900 next to the HD2 for comparison so we can see the big difference in size of the screen. Check this comparison done by Engadget between a 3.5, 3.7, and 4.3 inches displays.
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This week, it's once again time to update two of the more prominent apps in my collection: gPodder 2.4 "The Pants Alternative" for both Diablo and Fremantle and MaePad 1.5 "Productive" for Fremantle.
With the installation of PR1.2 on the autobuilder, MaePad can once again be built on it, so I've resumed uploading of MaePad releases to Maemo.org.
So, what's in it for you? Let's start with gPodder:
- Progress bar for loading episodes (and optimized episode list loading)
- "All episodes" view is not grouped per-podcast anymore (all episodes are now sorted descending by date)
- Faster download resuming on application start (with progress dialog)
- Automatic clean-up of finished downloads
- Simplified layout of progress indicator dialogs (e.g. deleting episodes, unsubscribing from podcasts)
And now for your favourite productivity tool, the MaePad:
- "w" in the checklist/sketch view now saves the database
- Fullscreen mode of checklists uses portrait mode (for shopping use, etc..)
- Node type displayed in overview (there's a themeing issue here with the highlights and the secondary text color.. suggestions welcome)
Now it's your turn: Please test the new packages and then vote for the packages here: MaePad QA page and gPodder QA page. Any bugs that you will find should be reported here: new bug against gPodder and MæPad t.m.o thread.
The PR1.2 SDK on the autobuilder adds a dependency on a newer Hildon version that cannot be fulfilled in earlier firmware versions, so I'll build a package compatible with pre-PR1.2 firmware soon and publish the package on the MaePad homepage for manual installation during this transition period until PR1.2 becomes available for end users.
Qt was mentioned in my posts few times already. Most of the times I refered to this framework as good base for building applications on many platforms, including Maemo. This time I have another example of Qt application.
CuteExplorer is currently available in extras-devel and for now it seems to be really under development, at least I think it is not perfect yet . Nevertheless it gives power beyond built-in file manager.
Browsing with keyboard is rather easy and intuitive, arrows to move around, backspace to go up in directory tree ...
Do you ever imagine running Maemo platform on other Mobile devices? Well, if you don’t like Nokia hardware [ how could anyone not like HQ Nokia devices made of plastic that looks and feels cheap ;o) ] but you do like this cute and easy to use open source operating system read on.
You see, Jykazu has managed to ‘run’ latest version of Maemo OS on an Windows Mobile powered HTC HD2 and upload video on his YouTube channel to show off how Maemo looks like on an amazing HD2's 4.3in WVGA (480x800) screen.
The only problem is that video is actually fake and it is apparently not possible, not yet at least, but who knows, Maemo is truly open source OS and in op... .. .
Releasing a Maemo application to the Extras-devel repository is a rather simple operation, yet it can be a bit time consuming and one can always make small mistakes which, although always easily recoverable, again lead to a waste of time.
The release process typically consists of:
The release process typically consists of:
- cleaning the source tree from all unwanted files (built binary objects, editor backup copies, core-dumps and what not)
- building the debian package, which involves remembering the command to be used, typically something like
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -sa -us -uc -i -I.git - uploading the resulting files to the Maemo build robot, according to one of the methods described here
- you can easily forget to delete core dumps and other temporary files from the source tree, which might even contain sensitive information
- remembering (or looking up in the shell history) the command for building the package
- if you use the Extras Assistant you'll be dealing with a comfortable tool, but not as fast as the command line
- if you have already made several releases and didn't delete the old files, you'll have to browse through them to find the latest version
#! /bin/sh set -e BASEDIR="$(mktemp -d)" cd "$BASEDIR" git clone --depth 1 -l "$HOME/git/maemo-mapper" cd maemo-mapper git checkout origin/fremantle dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -sa -us -uc -i -I.git cd .. scp *.tar.gz *.diff.gz *.changes *.dsc mardy@drop.maemo.org:/var/www/extras-devel/incoming-builder/fremantle/
It's certainly not a script that you would find in a shell programming manual, but it does its job: first, it creates a temporary directory, then it clones the local git repository (which ensures that there won't be any unwanted files in the tree), then it selects the desired branch (if it's not the master branch), builds the package and uploads it to the builder. If any of these steps fail, the script terminates. Feel free to adapt it to your needs and use for your own releasing pleasure. :-)
As a side note, I've used it just now to release maemo-mapper 3.0+beta4, which doesn't include any remarkable features but comes with a redesign of the menus which are now drawn in the maemo5 style.
I really enjoy using my Nokia N900, but think the Ovi Maps client loaded on it is quite lame. I want the Ovi Maps 2.0 software that all my S60 devices have, but we still have no idea when (or even if) Nokia will ever release a good version of Ovi Maps for the N900. In the meantime, Sygic just recently launched their Mobile Maps 9 product for Nokia Maemo 5 devices. I was sent an evaluation code to install and test the software on my device and gave it a first spin last night. I shot the video below of the interface and some initial navigation testing to give you all a feel for the software.
As you can see the software has fairly typical functionality for navigating to your destination. My first impressions are that it has a finger friendly interface for the menus and has all the necessary navigation options, but the map UI could be improved with larger zoom in and out buttons and the ability to automatically switch into a full screen mode and hide the upper task bar. I may have this full screen mode, but I have yet to find it. I put in a route and then tried going another way and the program had some issues staying with me while it fought to reroute me and kept jumping my location to roads that were nearby. I then put in my real destination and it did a fairly good job of navigating me to my destination.
I need to spend more time with their Points of Interest (POI), navigation accuracy, and other settings while using it on more routes. I’ll try to get more testing done over the next week or two and post my full review so you can make an informed decision since there does not appear to be any trial version. It is currently priced at EUR49.99 ($67) so it is not a cheap software solution.
Openismus is looking for experienced C++ and Qt developers to join our team creating quality and fighting entropy. It’s a chance to work on serious projects with (sometimes uncompromising) colleagues at Openismus who care about getting things done properly.
Please email me if you are looking for work and can show me some public involvement. I like having URIs for blogs, ohloh, git/svn, mailing lists, etc, to see your personal sense of code quality and your ability to communicate. We ideally need people who can work in Germany, probably moving to Berlin.
(We do GTK+, gtkmm, and Qt development, and we like really knowing them all. These days Maemo/Meego developers need a wide range of experience.)
The first builds of the MeeGo for Nokia N900 have landed and are available for download only for developers.
For More details Head over to MaemoArena
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, you've heard that Intel and Nokia have announced strategic relationship to shape next era of mobile computing innovation.
To realize this shared vision, both companies are expanding their longstanding relationship to define a new mobile platform beyond today's smartphones, notebooks and netbooks, enabling the development of a variety of innovative software, mobile Internet services for mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, media phones, connected TVs, and in-vehicle infotainment systems.
The first release of MeeGo is scheduled for the second quarter, with compatible devices launching later in the ye... .. .
The merging of Maemo and Moblin was announced at MWC with the name of Meego. We just heard the news that Meego development is opening up to the public today with image downloads for netbooks, the N900, and Intel-based handsets. At this time, unless you are a developer I am pretty sure there is nothing for us N900 owners to download and try, but at least things are moving forward and we hear that the first version of Meego to install may be released in May. I am interested in seeing how Meego will differ from what we see today in Maemo, aren’t you?
News of the Meego OS now being available for the Nokia N900 are spreading, but end users should stay clear. As explained in the announcement, it is currently targeted for developers and the MeeGo User Experiences for the OS isn’t included yet. Unsuspecting and adventurous users who try installing it on their device will just see text on black and white screen.
The image above is what you’ll see after the installation according to the Maemo forums.
I’m sure developers are excited over this announcement, but those like me who just care about using mobile devices should move along. Nothing to see here… yet. What I want on my Nokia N900 yesterday right now is the next major software update also known as PR1.2.