MeeGo project is making progress. We opened the MeeGo distribution infrastructure and the operating system base. It is not on official or tested release, but the opening of the public development of the MeeGo OS layer. So, it is an invitation for hackers who want to participate in MeeGo development, not for end users ;-)

If you consider yourself a developer, go and check it out. You can run it on an Nokia N900, and on an Intel Atom based laptop or handset.

If you study the code closer you can also see how we are merging Moblin and Maemo projects. Moblin contributed things such as the entire OpenSuse based build infrastructure, geoCLue location framework, PcakageKit, Connman etc. Maemo contributed things such as Telepathy for Internet communication, Tracker for user and metadata management, Maemo multimedia application framework, Qt toolkit etc. And, as we know, a big part of Moblin and Maemo were already the same.

And, by the way, our team within Nokia was called Maemo Devices. We are now MeeGo Devices. Same guys. Bigger ambitions!

P.S.

As explained, N900 is used as one of the platforms for MeeGo development. I do not have any news about the actual Nokia products running MeeGo. We will tell about the products separately.

To debug problems related to D-Bus, I like to use dbus-monitor and graphical tools D-Feet and Bustle. But until now, I couldn’t use D-Feet on my computer and connect to the bus on my N900 because dbus-daemon only listen on UNIX socket and listening on TCP does not work. Bustle works around the problem by using two different tools: one on the N900 to save the D-Bus traffic in a file and another one on your computer to read the file and display diagrams.

I implemented dbus-daemon-proxy which redirects all the traffic through TCP. There is no authentication, so use this tool only on network you trust! dbus-daemon-proxy is meant to run on your N900 and connects to the local bus (either session or system) and listen on a TCP port. Then you can run D-Feet or dbus-monitor on your computer and let them connect to dbus-daemon-proxy using TCP.

Step by step:

• Get the sources:

git clone git://git.collabora.co.uk/git/user/alban/dbus-daemon-proxy

• Compile it in scratchbox and copy the binary to your N900
• Run it on your N900:

./dbus-daemon-proxy --system

• Start D-Feet on your computer, use the menu File->Connect to other bus and type something like “tcp:host=myphone,port=8080,family=ipv4″:

• Enjoy D-Feet!

If you recently typed apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade in your Scratchbox based Maemo 5 SDK, you might have noticed a large amount of packages flooding in - yes, PR 1.2 is near. Maemo.org is already full of PR 1.2 blogs, including a visual overview of the new features and the PR 1.2 Changelog.

This means that the time of the libqt4-maemo5-* packages has come to an end, please use and test the libqt4-* packages (4.6.2~git20100310-0maemo1+0m5), which now contain Qt 4.6.2+x in /usr/lib. To uninstall the old preview packages, just run apt-get remove libqt4-maemo5-\*.

Wait - Qt 4.6.2+x? Well, as with every Linux distribution, some smaller fixlets and features were backported. I’d like to highlight a few of them.

Up until now, kinetic scrolling was limited to 20 fps. This is a good default, since 20 fps look smooth, don’t drain too much battery and leave some CPU for background processes/threads (isn’t it nice to have multi-tasking?). However, for demo purposes, you might want to have 60 fps for that really, really smooth look, so we introduced the QAbstractKineticScroller::scrollsPerSecond property. Unfortunately, our camera cannot grab 60 fps, so no youtube video today

The second interesting feature is QAbstractKineticScroller::axisLockThreshold. Imagine that a user scrolls downwards in a QScrollArea. Now, unless he’s an android, he won’t manage to scroll down in a perfect line, usually it’s something like 100 pixels downwards and 5 pixels to the left. The axisLockThreshold property allows to lock the scrolling to the nearest X or Y axis. In our example, the 5 pixels to the left are ignored, and the view just moves 100 pixels down.

Finally, QAbstractKineticScroller::OvershootPolicy allows to set the overshooting behavior when scrolling. The default is to just do overshooting when a view is able to scroll in a particular direction. In addition to the default behavior, overshooting can now be completely disabled, or always forced on.

A note for everyone building Qt from sources - after you upgrade your SDK to PR 1.2, you should use the *-pr1.2 branches (e.g. 4.6-fremantle-pr1.2) to get the latest input method fixes.

Happy Easter Hacking

If you follow software updates frequently you may have noticed some new updates in extras-devel and extras-testing catalogues which cannot be installed because of unresolved dependencies. I’m fully aware of the date today, but I cannot take everything as a joke and this time I think it’s not a joke. If you follow Maemo 5 development and this blog, you should already know that new system update is almost ready to be released, application developers already have SDK PR1.2 to adapt their applications to this new firmware. Let’s have a look ...

I have released ReSiStance 0.3 (in case if you wonder what about v0.2, it is just that I didn’t blog about it, but it was released on Monday). I don’t know how it could happen, but I totally overlooked the presence of WebKitGtk python bindings in the Maemo repos by the time I started to code ReSiStance. I decided to move to WebKit as soon as I noticed my mistake, specially knowing all the cool features of WebKit Gtk port from the Igalia mates hacking on it.

These are the more remarkable changes since v0.2.1:

• HTML rendering is now WebKitGtk’s business. It performs blazingly fast, much more than GTKHtml, you’ll easily notice that.
• Feeds list can be sorted
• Added application settings
  • Auto load images
  • Default font size
  • Portrait/Landscape modes

You can see all of them in action in this screecast:

ReSiStance 0.3 from Igalia on Vimeo.

UPDATE: I had to push v0.3.1 to the repositories because v0.3 had missing package dependencies

It’s no secret I am a huge fan of Nokia phones. Every mobile I’ve ever owned has been a Nokia, for over a decade no other manufacturer has come close when I’ve looked for my next phone.

Recently, the first development version of MeeGo became available and I figured it was time to turn my Nokia N900 into a Chameleon. This blog post will recount some of my experiences. Non-geeks might want to skip the rest of this post.
<!--break-->
First, let me point to a couple of the other blog posts about MeeGo. Digital Trends compliments the MeeGo team because “it’s transparency that’s very uncommon in mobile device development.”. Ari Jaaksi, who is heading MeeGo Devices and MeeGo operations @ Nokia blogs, “So, it is an invitation for hackers who want to participate in MeeGo development, not for end users ;-)” and a lively discussion opened up there in the comments. This ‘developer’ focus is also echoed in the Nokia Blog which warns ‘end users should stay away’, and provides a screen shot of ‘text on black and white screen’.

I mentioned this cool guy Zachary Goldberg in my blog and in my talk before. While I mentioned his name in regards to his efforts to making sure GUPnP glues nicely with gobject-introspection and is usable from Python, he went much further than I expected and made a cool new UPnP control-point for N900 based on GUPnP in Python. He named it Zhaan (another character from Farscape in the spirit of Rygel).

Some mandatory screenshots:




You can check out more screenshots/specs of the project and follow its status here.

There are many people out there making cool UIs but they end-up using wrong tools and/or re-inventing the wheel so its nice to see someone doing cool stuff but the right way. :)

Sharp Corporation has developed a 3D touchscreen LCD featuring the industry’s highest brightness that can switch between 2D and 3D modes.

Users can view 3D images without the need to wear special glasses, making this LCD ideal for mobile devices such as digital cameras, mobile phones, and smartphones.

The newly developed 3D LCD uses a parallax barrier system to display 3D images. This parallax barrier, which has a series of vertical slits, is incorporated into an ordi... .. .

Brain Party from Hudzilla Games has been released as open source for Linux some days ago. A thread on t.m.o suggested somebody port this over to Maemo. An afternoon of tinkering later (and with the help of Javispedro's SDL-GLES library), I've got the game to run on the N900 (see the patch for details on the changes - as you can see, the original source code is pretty clean, so porting was mostly straightforward after being told about SDL-GLES, fixing a parameter for glTexImage2D and doing some math to scale the game to the N900's screen and scale the input coordinates the same way). The package is currently in Extras-Devel, soon to be promoted to Extras-Testing. In the mean time, you can grab binary and source packages from this page (use apt-get -f install afterwards to satisfy dependencies).

Please test it and vote for it on the Maemo.org package page when it enters Extras-Testing (did you know that you can follow @maemoextras on Twitter to see packages entering Extras-Testing and Extras? Now you do..).

It's good to see developers porting their games to Linux and open sourcing them, which makes learning from their code and porting the games to other platforms very easy. If you like the game, please support the developers by purchasing Brain Party for the iPhone (you probably don't have an iPhone, so show the N900 game off to your freedom-hating friends and tell them that they should purchase the game for their iPhone/iPod touch on the App Store). The game is also available for Windows Mobile and Xbox 360.

Today after I brought Tinne to the airport I drove around Zürichsee. She can’t stay in Switzerland the entire month; she has to go back to school on Monday.

While driving on the Seestrasse I started counting luxury cars. After I reached two for Lamborgini and three for Ferrari I started thinking: Zimmerberg Sihltal and Pfannenstiel must be expensive districts too… And yes, they are.

I was lucky today that it was nice weather. But wow, what a nice view on the mountain tops when you look south over Zürichsee. People from Zürich, you guys are so lucky! Such immense calming feeling the view gives me! For me, it beats sauna. And I’m a real sauna fan.

I’m thinking to check it out south of Zürich. But not the canton. I think the house prices are just exaggerated high in the canton of Zürich. I was thinking Sankt Gallen, Toggenburg. I’ve never been there; I’ll check it out tomorrow.

Hmmr, meteoswiss gives rain for tomorrow. Doesn’t matter.

Actually, when I came back from the airport the first thing I really did was fix coping with property changes in ontologies for Tracker. Yesterday it wasn’t my day, I think. I couldn’t find this damn problem in my code! And in the evening I lost three chess games in a row against Tinne. That’s really a bad score for me. Maybe after two weeks of playing chess almost every evening, she got better than me? Hmmrr, that’s a troubling idea.

Anyway, so when I got back from the airport I couldn’t resist beating the code problem that I didn’t find on Friday. I found it! It works!

I guess I’m both a dreamer and a realist programmer. But don’t tell my customers that I’m such a dreamer.

The N900, labeled as a hacker’s phone, comes with a Cortex A8 clocked at 600 MHz. So how long was it going to be before users pushed the limits?  We now have N900’s running at an impressive 1GHz or 900 MHz or 800 MHz, you can basically pick the speed you want.

(Click to enlarge)

Before you entertain thoughts of doing this to your N900, do keep in mind that overclocking is generally known to reduce the life of your processor and cause stability issues, not to mention the battery drain. Manufacturers generally clock the processors to a slightly lower level than what can be safely reached, but 1 GHz sure seems to be pushing it.

That being said, reports suggest that the N900 is even more snappy at 800 MHz, up from the 600 MHz that it originally comes with. Such a hack would be useful in high duty tasks like video playback or capture.

(Click to enlarge)

If this something that interests you, this is the thread to follow. The actual scripts are not available for download directly, but you can request them via a PM. If you feel adventurous, here is how to overclock the N900.

If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• Unboxing The Nokia N900
• The N900 PR 1.2 Firmware Gets Leaked (Release Candidate) – Changes With Screenshots Inside
• How To Boost The Performance Of The FM Transmitter on Your N900
• How To Overclock The Nokia N900
• How To Block Unwanted Callers On The N900

If there's a problem with Nokia's first Maemo based Samrtphone it's the battery life which is just too short and just in case you want to make it even shorter read on.

You see, although Nokia N900 is one of the fastest Nokia devices in the market in terms of clock speed, Maemo hackers have managed to push the limit further and overclock N900 to 1GHz, which is nearly 100% faster than the original clock speed .

Anyway, if you are a professional who doesn't care about battery life and you plan to overclock your phone then you mus... .. .

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-03-29 through 2010-04-04

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-03-29 through 2010-04-04

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-03-29 through 2010-04-04

Front Page

Introducing the fourth Maemo Community Council

The election is over, and the new Maemo Community Council has been announced: Ryan Abel, Randall Arnold, Javier S. Pedro, Attila Csipa and Andrew Flegg as chair. About 400 votes were cast, and the new council's hit the ground running with a minor revamp of the council homepage and integration between the council blog and talk.maemo.org: "We're your council, so please get in touch via email (council@maemo.org); IRC; mailing lists or Talk. Please remember, though, that the council doesn't (and shouldn't!) do everything. If you want to step up to organise something and want our support, we'll be happy to give it!"

Read more

MeeGo: "Day One"

MeeGo has reached "day one": the source code has been released, the bug tracker open and the first of many weekly snapshots released. "Today is the culmination of a huge effort by the worldwide Nokia and Intel teams to share the MeeGo operating system code with the open source community. This is the latest step in the full merger of Maemo and Moblin, and we are happy to open the repositories and move the ongoing development work into the open - as we set out to do from the beginning." Also released are complete OS images for Atom-based netbooks and the N900, allowing your device to boot into an xterm and explore the lowest levels of the OS.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Introducing the fourth Maemo Community Council
   • MeeGo: "Day One"
2. Applications
   • CuteExplorer: fast, full filesystem file manager
   • Enna Media Center on the Nokia N900
3. Development
   • Extras-devel & -testing are "trunk"; building with PR1.2
   • MeeGo source code now available
4. Devices
   • MeeGo hardware adaptation for N8x0 "skunkworks project"
   • Overclocking the N900's OMAP3430
5. Maemo in the Wild
   • N900 makes TechRadar's "15 best mobile phones in the world today"
6. Announcements
   • Updates for MaePad & GPodder - now both PR1.2 ready
   • PrayerTime app under development
   • Simple Search Tool for files and content
   • Track Extras-testing and Extras releases through Twitter
   • Brain Party ported to Maemo 5

Yesterday we told you that the N900 had been overclocked to run at speeds upto 1GHz. Since then a lot of people have tried overclocking their N900’s for that speed bump and have reported that the N900 stays stable and performs faster even after being overclocked.

Last weeks I’ve been playing with Clutter and Mx libraries, with the idea of knowing them deeper while also trying to help a bit. Honestly, I believe that the best way to learn about such things is just creating something using them.

So, knowing the fantastic effort done by Grilo team at Igalia, to create a framework for accessing different multimedia sources across the internet, I came to the idea of creating a very simple media player that uses MX widgets, Gstreamer, and Grilo framework.

And here it is, the first release of Clutter Grilo Player. It’s still dirty, but the general idea of the interface is there. It supports browsing and searching some Grilo providers, including Youtube and others.

Some links:

• Source code is in gitorious: http://gitorious.org/clutter-grilo-player
• I created a ubuntu PPA with Lucid packages (including MX 0.99.2, clutter-gst 1.0.0 and clutter-gestures), so anyone can play with it a bit. The ppa is ppa:jdapena/clutter-grilo-player

I feel as if I have been somewhat of a leader in the community the past few years.  I have helped get some things done, like Theme and Design section of forums, and minimalist theme.  I have helped lots of people with theme issues.  I have helped with Mer and have gone to several Events to spread the word about Maemo.  I have release well over a dozen themes.  I have done all this for the community I have spent hundreds of hours working late into the night to produce quality work.  I have almost always felt like I my work was appreciated until now.  I feel that due to posts like these and more, Post 1, Post 2. 

If I’ve seemed rather busy recently, it’s because I’ve been working on a book for Packt. It will be a “cookbook” of ways to solve problems on MeeGo using Python and Qt. It started out as an N900-specific book, but it’s grown in the telling.

How to place a phone call

(Of course, until a version of MeeGo with a GUI goes public, I’m testing everything on the N900.)

I’m enjoying writing it immensely. It should be out sometime around the autumn.

After 24 hours to think about my blog post yesterday and talking with several members of the community I have decided to write a follow up that many of you asked for.  I’m not changing much from what I said yesterday just clarifying some.

Just a quick post to share a fairly important piece of information I found out today with the rest of the internets - hopefully this will help if someone is searching to find out why the list in their Qt application is so slow.

Firefox for Mobile Firefox Mobile 1.1 – What’s Coming - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... April 6 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Yesterday, both DigitalMediaWire and Digiday:Daily ran stories about NearVerse securing $1 million in seed funding. I had written about NearVerse a few weeks ago so I thought I’d find out what is new.

Really, there wasn’t much news. The company sent out a press release about funding they had received last year. Their iPhone app, which was supposed to be the hot item of SxSW just didn’t get all that much buzz, and most of the people that tested it for me where unimpressed. Yet I still think they may be on to something.

This thought was reinforced as I read through various blog posts about the Nokia N900. Zach Goldberg has been writing some very interesting things about UPnP and the Nokia N900 on his blog, BlueSata. In one post, he wrote about the Sonos multi-room sound system. It is worth noting that the Sonos page talks about being able to control the sound system from an iPhone. By the sounds of Zach’s blog post, you can probably do the same from a Nokia N900 and his UPnP software.

Yet it is the idea of mobile media sharing that gets me. Could some of Zach’s work on UPnP on the N900 be used to facilitate sharing music and other media between N900’s, and perhaps even iPhones and people’s home music systems? Could Zach’s code be used to take the idea of NearVerse’s LoKast to a whole new level?

I don’t know enough about UPnP and it’s hard to tell how Zach’s code might work with my idea. I haven’t managed to get Zach’s code to run on my machine yet, and even if I do, I haven’t found any N900 owners around where I live so I wouldn’t have a great chance to test out some of the ideas.

So, anyone else out there experimenting with UPnP on their cellphones? With LoKast? With other ways of sharing media from mobile devices?

Since the dawn of civilization, defining the center of the world has been a Very Important Activity.  Great wars were fought to stick a flag in this spot, where ever that turned out to be at any given time.  Ghengis Khan, Alexander the Great and former US president George Bush all had different opinions on the L10N.  Various indigenous peoples have paid for its ever-changing identification by loss of land and gain of child-labored textile mills.

So given the constant confusion around this nebulous spot it’s no wonder many technically-oriented blog sites get lost… especially those in the United States suffering from a gross misconception of world view.

It's true that the accessory title rather gives the game away and isn't inspiring, but this is an accessory that's much needed in the smartphone (and general camera phone) world. Steve Litchfield muses on a predecessor and and reviews the latest product that claims to be able to hold your phone while it snaps or videos away.

Continental and Nokia are collaborating on a new concept that will enable drivers and passengers to seamlessly connect, display and control mobile phone applications via an in-vehicle dashboard display.

The companies are working together to integrate a new technology, called Terminal Mode, into the automotive and consumer electronics industries.

The collaboration between Continental and Nokia is designed to significantly improve the usability of services such as telephony, navigation, social networking and music in an autom... .. .

I lost the Apple Remote that came with my Macbook, but it’s not a problem thanks to a Nokia N900 widget called Raemote developed by Thomas Perl. RaeMote is a desktop widget for the Nokia N900 that allows you to use the device’s infrared port as an Apple Remote. I created a quick video to show you how well it works.

Video

Noticed how responsive it was? 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.

Download

Raemote is currently available for download in the application manager of the Nokia N900 under the Extras-testing repository. If you have no idea what that means, check out my guide to Maemo Extras.

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

• Video How to: Install .deb Files on Nokia N900
• Video: Google Maps Mobile on Nokia N900 Web Browser
• Video How to: Use Bookmarklets on the Nokia N900′s Browser

Zemanta

It has been a long time coming but finally I’ve gotten Zhaan to work on the Nokia N900, a Maemo 5 device!  Today Anderson and Willer at PyMaemo handed me a whole bunch of armel package dependencies for Zhaan.  I combined them with some secret sauce (i.e. some extra projects, including updated GUPnP and GUPnPAV and their GIR/Typelib files), deployed it all to my development N900 and voila, we have a working Zhaan :).

If you wish to get this running yourself the only way right now is to do this manually.  There are still a whole bunch of packaging road blocks before this can make it to extras-devel.  Instructions to do it by hand:

WARNING: FOR ADVANCED USERS ONLY FOR NOW!  Following these instructions could potentially break some features of your device as it does override your built in gupnp, gupnp-av and pygobject libraries.  This will be made safe by the time it makes it to extras-devel.

Download http://www.zachgoldberg.com/data/ZhaanN900.tgz to your device and extract it.

Install all of the non-doc, non-dbg and non-dev “.deb files”.  e.g. “dpkg -i *.deb”.  (Note that the python-gobject-pygi may have a conflict and you may have to do dpkg -i –force-conflicts python-gobject-pygi…..).  Once all the debs are installed (I believe its 14 .deb files) copy the .gir files to /opt/pygi/share/gir-1.0/ and the .typelb files to /opt/pygi/lib/girepository-1.0/.

Finally download Zhaan from git (git://github.com/ZachGoldberg/Zhaan.git) and then use the following command to run zhaan:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/pygi:/opt/pygi/lib PYTHONPATH=/opt/pygi/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gtk-2.0/ python2.5 zhaan.py

And finally, the obligatory screen shots.  (You can tell this is a real device because its charging and the battery guage is moving in the various screenshots, as well as the sim card icon).

Awesomeness.

Some time ago I wrote how you can build and run QML applications on N900, but since that I haven’t done anything related to QML,…

Firefox 1.1 is slated for a May release and will brings a ton of features that the team did not have time to implement in the initial release. The good news is that a beta will be out as soon as tomorrow, while a release candidate is expected on the 26th of April. The focus for 1.1 is UI experience and here is a list of the new functionality coming:

• Form assistant improvements, including autocomplete

• Start page redesign

• Auto update add-ons

• Portrait support on N900
• Context Menu with Open in New Tab and Save Image

• Web content theme update
• Manage site preferences (clearing passwords and others)
• Clean up site menu
• Use volume keys to zoom on N900
• Save page to PDF

I personally found Firefox to be a little slow and sluggish on my N900 and hope that the 1.1 release fixes that issue as well.

[via: Mark Finkle, MozillaLinks & @bvlad]

If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• Firefox 1.1 Beta Now Available For The N900
• Video: Mozilla Firefox for Maemo (Beta 4) Demo’ed On A Nokia N900
• Portrait Browsing Coming To The N900 – Nokia Announces Official Qt Port To Maemo 5
• Screenshots Of The Portrait Mode On The N900
• Demo & How To Enable Portrait Mode Browsing On The N900

After reading an article on Boxee recently which described it's social network integration it occurred to me how wonderful this would be to have for KDE. Having tags and ratings on the desktop is a really nice thing, but having tags and ratings coming through for arbitrary pieces of information from your "friends" makes things quite interesting.

Our very own Rafe is the author of a thought provoking editorial today over on Nokia Conversations, musing over the future of the (mobile) operating system and covering intelligence, location awareness and social nature. Comments welcome if you think he is, or isn't, on the right track!

After releasing Maemo SDK PR1.2 package dependencies in new builds automatically changed to new ones. I’ve already mentioned it in one of previous posts. So now imagine situation when you want to install a piece of software but newly built package is broken. First solution is turning off extras-devel catalogue. If you look at the maemo.org packages you can see that extras-devel contains newer versions (with unmet dependencies) than extras-testing (that contains  installable packages). There is also a way to cope with that problem without disabling extras-devel if you’re not scared ...

With each major variant in the Maemo Device line, Nokia enjoyed incrementally increasing success.  Its conservative “test the waters cautiously with a toe tip” approach cultivated a small but determined community eager to demonstrate that mobility and open source were a match made in electronic heaven.

GSSDP 0.7.2 released!

Changes since 0.7.1:

- Provide gobject-introspection GIR and typelib.
- Use silent build rules.
- Fix issues with version-independence magic in SSDP code.
- Fix build issues in jhbuild environment.

Bugs fixed in this release:

2025 - autogen.sh fails to find autoconf macros when they're installed in a
           non-standard location
1927 - gssdp fails to answer M-SEARCH sometimes
1921 - GObject Introspection Makefile for GSSDP

All Contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Zach Goldberg 
Jens Georg 
Neil Roberts 
Ross Burton 

Download source tarball from here

GUPnP 0.13.3 released!

Changes since 0.13.2:

- Include the Content-Type header in the HTTP messages. This satisfies DLNA
 CTT test cases 7.2.5.9 and 7.2.29.1.
- Use g_message instead of g_warning if we can't connect to DBus.
- Make the HTTP server listen on the context's interface only.
- Fix some potential crashes in GUPnPServiceProxy and GUPnPContextManager code.
- Fix build issues in jhbuild environment.
- Fix some gcc warnings.
- Add new API to host path for specific user-agent(s).
- Add gobject-introspection support:
 - Provide gobject-introspection GIR and typelib.
 - Add needed annotations to doc comments.
 - Add GList variants of action-related functions to satisfy PyGI.
- A few non-functional improvments.

Dependency related changes:

- gssdp >= 0.7.1

Bugs fixed in this release:

2054 - Xbox hacks
1965 - gcc warning fixes
2039 - GUPnP is hard to use with jhbuild
1948 - Signal handler are not disconnected when ContextManager is disposed
2030 - gupnp context listens on 0.0.0.0 instead of the context's ip
1924 - Content-Type header must contain charset="utf-8" in all HTTP transactions
2006 - Implement 3 new functions for language bindings (begin_action_list,
           end_action_list, gupnp_service_action_get_value_type)
1919 - Add GObject Introspection Annotations and Makefile
1979 - g_warning make gupnp-igd test fails
1906 - Tests failed with gupnp 0.13

All contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Zach Goldberg 
Ross Burton 
Olivier Crête 
Neil Roberts 
Sven Neumann 
Jens Georg 
Yakup Akbay 

Download source tarball from here
-----------

GUPnP AV 0.5.5 released!

Changes since 0.5.4:

- Provide gobject-introspection GIR and typelib.
- Provide microseconds in 'duration' to satisfy XBox.
- Fix data type of GUPnPDIDLLiteContainer:child-count
- Fix build issues in jhbuild environment.
- Enable silent build rules if they are available.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Zach Goldberg 
Neil Roberts 
Ross Burton 

Download source tarball from here
-----------

GUPnP Vala 0.6.5 released!

Changes since 0.6.4:

- Require & adapt to:
 - gssdp 0.7.2
 - gupnp 0.13.3
 - gupnp-av 0.5.5
 - vala 0.8.0
- Don't hide gupnp_root_device_get_relative_location

All contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 

Download source tarball from here

It used to be in Tracker that you couldn’t just change the ontology. When you did, you had to reboot the database. This means loosing all the non-embedded data. For example your tags or other such information that’s uniquely stored in Tracker’s RDF store.

How does Frederick P. Brooks new book, The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist compare to his classic, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)? How much time do I want to spend trying to find out?

Been a while since my last post (and a server crash, hence the empty blog).

I’ve recently uploaded fMMS 0.6.2 to extras-devel which has a ‘new’ configuration option: “Connection mode”.

What it does is enable different ways fMMS treats connections and what it tries to do when a new MMS arrives.
The options:

1. Polite (Default behavior

From time to time here and there I find questions regarding USSD codes. Most of people asking that question want to use some specific phone numbers or numeral codes to check account balance in prepaid, activate or deactivate services and so on. For this purpose you can use ussd-widget, which allows you to use this codes and receive reply from operator. Widget is easily configurable with very verbous help, so you shouldn’t have any problem using it. Some people also ask about sharing various files via bluetooth. I know at least ...

The N900's MfE client can sync with a number of MfE servers, but is not Google-friendly, since Google's implementation of Mail for Exchange (MfE) is not standard. I for one would like to use Google Calendar and Google Contacts as my main PIM database. I had my N900 calendar syncing for a while with Google, and then I found it to be unreliable, so I turned it off. Another annoyance I found was that MfE would download my Google contacts, but would not sync them afterwards (I reported Bug 5835 for this).

There have been several threads on Talk about this, including the long winded one started by Vitaly Repin. The short of it all: MfE on the N900 does not officially support Google. A business decision by Nokia, and unfortunate for many of us Maemo enthusiasts who happen to use Google's services for basic PIM.

Enter NuevaSync.

The service offered by NuevaSync is free (for basic usage), and provides a nice bridge between the N900's MfE client and Google. I am a NuevaSync user for about 2 days now. I have not used it to sync e-mail, but Calendar and Contacts sync like a charm. The free account allows you to sync calendar entries up to 2 weeks in the past. If you are like myself, and have years of calendar entries that you want to sync once to the N900 (to retain your calendar history), you will have to 'try' a premium account for 5 days to get past the 2 week sync restriction that NuevaSync has in place on the basic account. The premium account has other niceties, but for me, the basic account is just enough.

It's another service to add to your already large list of accounts you manage. But if you use Google like I do for almost everything, then NuevaSync is a must for your N900. As I posted on Texrat's blog, I hope that major 3rd party services (such as Google) work out of the box with the first MeeGo product from Nokia. I want to be able to open the Harmattan device's box, fire it up, and connect to my entire online life in a few minutes - 100% reliably, and using the default clients. Hopefully, my dream will be a reality shortly!


Note: I am in no way affiliated with Nuevasync.

It is contest time on our sister site, The Symbian Blog and we are giving away not one, not two but 3 Nokia N900’s! Since this is Maemo Central and I am sure all of you would want another N900 for hacking the bits out of it, or really want one if you already do not have it – I’ve decided to open up the contest to you dear readers of Maemo Central as well.

Although the iPhone OS 4 itself is not on the market yet (its release is predicted to the second half of 2010), its upcoming features can be already compared to the N900. Steve Jobs introduced numerous improvements for the new version of the iPhone in the Apple headquarters in Cupertino on the 8th of April. But hold on: Most of them sounds very familiar to us N900 users. The first of these new characteristics is quess what: Yes, Multitasking! Doesn´t we have this already on our N900s? And hasn´t Nokia always been ...

The N900 has been available in the market for a couple of months now. From a geek point of view, it's an attractive device, but what if you are not a geek, and want to use it as a portable multimedia system? With a Mac?

After recent release of the first stabile version of the Mozilla’s mobile web browser, Nokia N900 users just got another 3rd party solution to enhances their web browsing experiences on the go and are able now to choose between three high-quality web browsers with full flash support

A programmer by the name of Jacekowski managed to port and release the unofficial version of the Google Chrome browser . Browser also comes with the full Flash Support and is fully com... .. .

In this lovely sunny Sunday I decided to pick up my bike for the first time after the winter hibernation and go for a trip around the Seurasaari bay, just next to Helsinki centre. Of course I took my N900 with Mapper with me, to make it record the GPS track into a GPX file which I will then use to geotag the photos I took with my film camera (which is a rather advanced model capable of storing the time of the pictures in its internal memory), and to visualize my track in some sports tracking website. While it will take quite some time before I'll be able to show you the pictures I took (I've just started this film roll, and I don't use this camera often), I can show you how the Mapper-generated GPX track looks like in runsaturday.com, a sports tracking website where one can upload his own GPS tracks and get them analyzed and put into different charts:

• My biking trip in runsaturday.com track player
• Pace, speed, altitude charts 

As a geek, watching these data is enough to stimulate me to do some sports. :-)

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-04-05 through 2010-04-11

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-04-05 through 2010-04-11

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-04-05 through 2010-04-11

Front Page

PR1.2 SDK and the Extras autobuilder

Niels Breet has, in this month's maemo.org sprint, picked up a task to sort out the issues caused by the deployment of the PR1.2 SDK to the Extras autobuilder. This has resulted in new uploads from developers often getting dependencies more severe than they actually require, and users who are testing in Extras-devel and Extras-testing getting confused. Andrew Flegg, the Maemo Community Council chair, introduced a discussion on maemo-developers, saying, "After the PR1.2 SDK was released, Niels deployed it to the autobuilder; enacting a plan which was discussed on this list. This has caused problems with libhildon dependencies, but the problems aren't just limited to that library. Both Niels and the Council believe we should do something to assist." Although "real" end-users (who use Extras) are unaffected, anyone with an idea on how to meet the requirements now - and the next time this situation could occur - is welcome to contribute. The current leading option is one based on a deploying a newer debhelper and dpkg-shlibdeps to the autobuilder. This would mean that every package would have its minimal dependencies necessary for it to work.

Not been long since my last post, but one of the two things stopping me from promoting to -testing is now implemented. Thanks to all the great minds on IRC (#maemo on freenode, come visit!) and lizardo for translating my C-code to working python ctypes code (example).

The native addressbook widgets are all part of 0.7.0, as well as what should be perfect number contact matching and no more mistakes where it shows the wrong contact if the name was a subset of another name. Joy all around!

In the next release I’ve added some caching of name/avatar lookup which should lead to some load time improvements if you, like me, get most of your MMS from the same few persons. :)
Another fix in the next release is that ‘Havoc’ mode will work correctly with APN’s requiring username and password on connect. :)

Btw, 0.7.0 is available in -devel now!

Images of address book widgets after the break!

Some screenshots:

This week I’ve been working a bit more in the Clutter Grilo Player. And finally did release 0.1.1:

• Fullscreen button.
• Keyboard shortcuts.
• Volume control.
• Now we sort search results.
• Translation support.
• Style fixes (no more ugly red buttons in media library).
• Speedup in YouTube access.

Thanks to Chris Lord for his patches in clutter code, and Iago Toral for his help improving YouTube speed.

As usual, I uploaded the packages to CGP Launchpad PPA. The code, in CGP  gitorious.

Home is an spectacular wake-up call for all of us living on this planet, if we’d only care to listen. Accompanied by a series of stunning aerial images of Earth, the history of our relationship with the environment is quickly reconstructed, and the unsustainability of our current practices made very explicit.

Its authors want the move to have the biggest exposure, and it can be freely distributed with their permission. I personally got it in HD from this torrent, but you can find alternative sources from a quick google search. Go and watch it when you have some time, I think it’s an hour and a half well spent.

Another great example of how open source is all about 'scratch your own itch'. I started writing code for a Facebook client on Maemo (although once MeeGo is in a more usable state with regards to UI and application development, I'll be porting it to work there as well) a week or two ago now. I finally got tired of using the Nokia Facebook widget which is totally and utterly useless (if I wanted a link to facebook on my desktop, I'd make one. Ok, it's nice being able to see status updates - but come *on*. Let me click them at least.)

So, I started writing code after having found libqfacebookconnect, using Qt. Within a day or two I had something that could read newsfeeds, and post status updates. I found a Qt on Maemo bug along the way, and spent some time digging into that, but it's progressing nicely, and seems to have been quite popular with the folks in the Maemo community.
(facebrick, pre-v0.1)



A few weeks later, and it's growing really well. I'm happy with the progress (although I have a really long list of stuff I still want to do, including replacing that useless desktop widget).

It's going to keep me busy for a fair while to get it up to scratch, but I'm having fun, and the feedback and mini-community I'm forming around this are awesome.
(facebrick, first release)


I'd also like to take a moment to thank m165 (from talk.maemo.org) amongst others for their many ideas and feedback, lcuk (for his interesting discussion), and MohammadAG (from #maemo and TMO) for his help with packaging (though I still have *a lot* to learn in that department)
(facebrick, latest release)










As (I hope) is visible, it's evolving fairly rapidly, mostly through suggestions from the die-hard early adopters I've found, but it's got a long way to go yet.

Thankfully, most of the fun of software development comes from the ride. ;)

Every (good) developer knows that copying of memory and boxing, especially when dealing with a large amount of pieces like members of collections and the cells in a table, are a bad thing for your performance.

More experienced developers also know that novice developers tend to focus on just their algorithms to improve performance, while often the single biggest bottleneck is needless boxing and allocating. Experienced developers come up with algorithms that avoid boxing and copying; they master clever pragmatical engineering and know how to improve algorithms. A lot of newcomers use virtual machines and script languages that are terrible at giving you the tools to control this and then they start endless religious debates about how great their programming language is (as if it matters). (Anti-.NET people don’t get on your horses too soon: if you know what you are doing, C# is actually quite good here).

We were of course doing some silly copying ourselves. Apparently it had a significant impact on performance.

Once Jürg and Carlos have finished the work on parallelizing SELECT queries we plan to let the code that walks the SQLite statement fill in the DBusMessage directly without any memory copying or boxing (for marshalling to DBus). We found the get_reply and send_reply functions; they sound useful for this purpose.

I still don’t really like DBus as IPC for data transfer of Tracker’s RDF store’s query results. Personally I think I would go for a custom Unix socket here. But Jürg so far isn’t convinced. Admittedly he’s probably right; he’s always right. Still, DBus to me doesn’t feel like a good IPC for this data transfer..

We know about the requests to have direct access to the SQLite database from your own process. I explained in the bug that SQLite3 isn’t MVCC and that this means that your process will often get blocked for a long time on our transaction. A longer time than any IPC overhead takes.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that companies from a broad range of sectors have committed to and are participating in the MeeGo project.

Participants today include leading device manufacturers, operating system vendors (OSVs), chipset manufacturers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and development communities. Supporting statements are attached from Acer, Amino, Asianux, Asus, BMW Group, Collabora, Ltd., CS2C, DeviceVM, EA Mobile, Gameloft, Hancom, Linpus, Maemo Community Council, Mandriva, Metasys, Miracle, MontaVista Software, Novell, PixArt, Red Flag, ST-Ericsson, Tencent, TurboLinux, VietSoftware, Wind River, WTEC, and Xandros.

This participation translates into millions of developer hours dedicated to cross-device compatibility, application portability and the user experience for MeeGo-bas... .. .

I was looking over maemo.org today and noticed that my maemo-org theme has been downloaded 51,272 times as of me writting this.  With just over 7,000,000 downloads total for maemo5 that means the maemo-org theme makes up about 0.74% of total downloads from the repo.  That number might look small but if you consider that I’m talking about 1 application out of hundreds 0.74% is a big number.  Numbers like this is what makes a theme designer want to keep working.  To know that thousands of people have downloaded my work means alot to me.

While I’m here just me just put a heads up out to everyone on whats going on with me.  I’ve been working very hard on themes and looking into the Ovi Store.  Right now I am working on 3 themes that should be released within the next few weeks I am holding off until Pr1.2 for them since they will be going to the Ovi Store. 

First is my Star Trek theme.  I’m not going to call this a real Lcars theme since it ended up being very hard to make the lcars interface for the n900.  Instead I have used lcars colors and design for the buttons and many tool bars on the device.  I have also included some other star trek elements in the theme.  The theme will also come with a lcars wallpaper along with several other wallpaper packs that will be on my site for free downlaod.

Second I am alomst done with my Classic Batman Colors theme.  The theme is covered with the classic batman blue and grey.  Due to copywrites the wallpapers will be someone generic but some nice free batman wallpapers will be on my site.

Third is the first in my College Colors theme Series, I decided to do Alabama Crimson Tide as my first theme.  It will be covered in Crimson and Grey.  Once again due to copywrites I will not include the wallpapers with Alabamas logo on them but will release some free ones on my site. 

After these three themes are released I will start doing Variants of them for Differant school, and comic book stars.  Please feel free to suggest anything you would like.  I have also decided on a $1 price point for all my ovi themes.  I had been cosidering $2 but I feel that $1 is more then a fair price for my work and that way we are both getting a good deal.

Thanks for reading my blog and thanks for the support.

Nokia N900 is finally launching in India really soon. We have learnt that the price of this linux monster is going to be around Rs.25000 or upwards We have the confirmation of the launch from Nokia India's product pages which lists the N900 as coming soon as you can see below. The N900 is powered my the Maemo Linux operating system and we are big fans of the device and after playing with the device , Maemo Arena was born. Rs.25,000 is the Dealer Price and actual price might be as much as Rs.28,000 And don't be surprised if the stocks run out really soon. Watch out this space for more. How much will you pay for the Nokia N900 in India ? Check out the FoneArena Nokia N900 Review

Intel is holding its developer centric conference, IDF in China and that has brought up some interesting information about MeeGo on handheld devices. We have a handset feature list and a few screenshots of the OS. What is not clear is whether this is what Intel is proposing or something which has been agreed on by Nokia.

If you look at the chart above, under the user experience tab, Display Orientation is mentioned and this is clear indication that portrait mode is being worked upon in MeeGo. All the other core functionality that you would expect in Nokia devices is also present.

These screenshots clearly showcase portrait mode functionality, but what should be kept in mind is that they are in no way depec tive of what the final UI might look like when Nokia launches its devices. It will probably help shape MeeGo 1.0 but what Nokia does to the UI on top of that is anyone’s guess.

As you can see, MeeGo will look very different from what Maemo 5 looks like today. Interesting times.

[via: CarryPad]If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• Screenshots Of The Portrait Mode On The N900
• What Does MeeGo Mean For Maemo?
• Huge: Nokia’s Maemo & Intel’s Moblin Combine To Become Meego
• Demo & How To Enable Portrait Mode Browsing On The N900
• Its Official: Nokia Is Dropping The Maemo 6 Brand

If you have been wondering how the UI on Meego devices would look like than here is a preview of Meego on Handsets and NetbooksThese screenshots and the Meego release roadmap have been discussed at the Intel Developer Conference in Beijing Head over to MaemoArena for more

With over two thirds of users choosing to be billed through their mobile phone account (where available), and 90% of users able to use their own language, it's getting harder and harder for everyone to ignore the Ovi Store. It's on an upward curve of adoption by users, developers and networks, and now welcomes China into the Top Ten list of active countries.

At its developer-focused conference (IDF2010) surrounded by hundreds of people who make technology magic happen and those who support them, Intel Corporation demonstrated how the company is providing a foundation on which to build common hardware, software and ecosystem solutions to make computing experiences and devices work together seamlessly and easier to use.

The MeeGo Community at IDF is formed around innovative solutions that scale and are interoperable across multiple usage models and types of mobile and embedded devices (such as In-vehicle Infotainment, media phones) powered by the Intel® Atom™ processor. MeeGo came up during Ren... .. .

At the N900 blog we clearly care a lot for the phone. It is a very expensive smartphone, and it’s not easy to get the money to buy it, never mind replace one! So, breaking it is clearly not an option. Even with warranty and insurance, you’ll still to pay a lot to get it fixed, so we found and tested a quick, cheap and easy way to protect your most-loved device: put a transparent sticker. Well, not any sticker. These are transparent resistant stickers made to avoid breaking screens! The one that ...

I hadn’t blogged about it yet, but the last weekend I crossed 10 time zones, one ocean and some insane border inspections to attend the first ever WebKit Contributors Meeting. I just returned to my hotel in San Francisco from two hectic days at the Apple campus in Cupertino, putting faces to the names I see daily in my WebKit work and attending some really interesting working sessions and hackatons. Of course a lot of productive discussions and coding happened, but I also value some incorporeal sense of unity and direction that you can get when you put a bunch of people that work together in a project physically in the same place for a couple of days; I’m already looking forward to next year’s meeting, and I thank Apple for organizing the event.

4 of us from Igalia have come to the US (Álex, Philippe, Juanjo and myself), and we’ll stay until Saturday to attend the Linux Collaboration Summit and do some fast-paced sight-seeing around the city (although we already enjoyed a great day off on Sunday with Martin around the city, including the awesome shoe-garden in Alamo Square).

To finish it off, I have to mention that I used the ever productive airplane time and some dead hours these days to advance quite a bit in the GObject DOM Bindings for WebKitGTK+, and that I can already correctly generate large enough portions of it to do actual applications and meaningful unit testing (basically, I cover Document and most of its dependencies!). More about this soon!

Rygel 0.5.2 (Crackers Don't Matter) is out!

Another release in the unstable 0.5.x series. Changes since 0.5.0:

- Add support for Xbox 360 and Window Media Player 11.
- Add support for subtitles. Currently only useful for certain Samsung DLNA TVs.
- Add Windows Media Video (WMV) transcoder.
- Add unit tests for a few modules.
- Fix some (potential) crashes.
- Make database operations cancellable.
- Throw error on database creation failure.
- Simpler (hopefully) build rules.
- Fix race-condition in streaming code so we don't terminate the connection
  before all the bytes are sent to the client.
- Fix leaking of HTTP messages of live streams on termination.
- Fix 'Content-Length' header values for partial requests.
- Fix parsing of search expression containing characters not within the original
  latin1 range.
- Use bigger (64Ki) buffers when streaming media to reduce cpu usage and
  therefore improve battery life.
- Include spec version in description document.
- Remove now unneeded work-around for vala bug#568972.
- Advertize photos with their specific class, i-e 'photo' rather than 'image'.
- MediaExport:
  - Implement search by URIs.
  - Implement search by album.
  - Error-out on invalid search expression.
  - Add support for virtual containers. This allows creation of metadata-based
    hierarchies in the user-config.
  - Fix deletion of containers.
  - URI-escape meta-data fields.
  - Catch previously uncaught exceptions.
  - Fix upgrade of database from older schemas.
- Lots of code clean-ups and documentation fixes. 
    
Dependency-related changes:

- Require gupnp >= 0.13.3.
- Require gupnp-av >= 0.5.5. 
- Require gupnp-vala >= 0.6.5.
- Require valac >= 0.8.0.

Bugs fixed in this release:

608886 - media export plugin corrupts its database when you change directories
609944 - Files not harvested on update
606305 - Samsung subtitles

All contributors to this release:

Jens Georg 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Cyrille Chepelov 

Download source tarball from here

Firefox for Mobile Fennec 1.1 - the Site Menu - http://madhava.com/egotism... April 14 from Planet Mozilla: Madhava Enros - Comment - Like

I’m looking for 10 to 20 people who would like to beta test my Ovi Themes.  I would like people from beginner to Maemo experts.  You will be given early access to the themes and receive them for free once they are finished.  All I ask is that you install and test at least 50% of all the themes I release a month.  If you fail to test 50% a month you will be removed as a tester.  I will also request that you submit a small review of the app any bugs, color issues, or viewing issues.

If your interested please let me know by email or site contact form.  PS First theme is almost ready for testing.

One of the latest board we’ve been playing with is the new STE U8500.

The official Nokia twitter account has just directed us to this video of a netbook running MeeGo 1.0 at Intel’s Developer Forum 2010. As you can see from the video, the OS looks very pleasing to the eye and the transitions look smooth. Judging by the looks of things we could see Nokia dumping Windows 7 from its netbooks and the Booklet 3G successor could very well be running MeeGo.

Nokia is also rumored to be building a tablet and MeeGo could again be the perfect OS for it. That way we could have applications that would not only run on Nokia’s N9XX mobile phones, but also its netbooks and tablets. Much like what Apple has going with the iPad and the iPhone.

At IDF, MeeGo was also demonstrated on a variety of Internet connected devices from a netbook to Internet TV to smartphone and digital coupon machine with RFID.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• What Does MeeGo Mean For Maemo?
• Welcome to MaemoCentral.com
• This Time Its The Turn Of Ubuntu Mobile To Run On The N900
• Huge: Nokia’s Maemo & Intel’s Moblin Combine To Become Meego
• Video: Flash 10.1 On The N900

Intel and Nokia announced their creation of the Meego platform a couple of months ago and now there’s a video from Intel showing version 1.0 on several devices including a phone. It looks like a Nokia N97 without a slide-out keyboard and with 4 touch-sensitive buttons similar to Android.

How big is that screen?

Closer look at Meego 1.0

These buttons remind me of Android

We’re not sure when or if this Meego device will be announced, but it’s cool that we get a sneak peek now. The cameraman messed up with the exposure settings so the screen on the device looks washed out. Take a look at the video below.

The devices shown on the video seem to work together really well. I’m not blown away yet, but I do look forward to seeing more sneak peeks from Meego. How do you feel so far?

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

• Intel and Nokia Merge Moblin and Maemo to Create Meego
• Meego Now Available For Nokia N900 But End Users Should Stay Away
• Nokia N900 PR 1.3 Update Coming Soon With Dual Boot to Meego

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Remember the Nexus One with its shiny ‘live’ wallpapers or remember that really old SE handset that had animated/live/moving wallpapers? Well guess what, that functionality has now come to the N900 thanks to Vasvlad’s Live Wallpaper application.

As you can see from the video, the eye candy is nowhere as nice as the Nexus One and the animation is not smooth. It can only be applied to one homescreen so far as it has been implemented as a widget. But a good start nevertheless. May be someday we will be able too see performance equal to that of the Nexus One, specially with overclocked CPU’s.

In order to install, you will need to download the latest .deb file from this page, transfer it to your N900, locate it via the File Manager and tap on it to begin the install.

[via: Maemo Arena]If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• Lfocus Hack Gives You Manual Focus During Video Capture – Makes N900 An Incredible Video Capture Tool
• How To Disable The Red Camera Light On The N900 & Turn On The LEDs For Video
• Maemo Select: Applications, Themes & Wallpapers For The N900
• How To Block Unwanted Callers On The N900
• TweeGo Is A Great Looking N900 Twitter App

GCC 4.5 just was has been released yesterday. It's a really awesome release according to its summary of changes. My favorites:

• The -Wc++-compat option is significantly improved.
• Compilation time for code that uses templates should now scale linearly with the number of instantiations rather than quadratically, as template instantiations are now looked up using hash tables.
• Improved experimental support for the upcoming C++0x ISO C++ standard, including support for raw strings, lambda expressions and explicit type conversion operators.
• And last not least: A plugin system has been added! I predict we'll see really nice static code analyzers soon!

Awesome release! Really awesome release!

Another of my single-button widgets for the Nokia N900 got into Maemo Extras this week: Bluezwitch, a simple widget to turn Bluetooth on/off (saving you 3 clicks compared to the original way). Apparently, this widget is a great thing for many users, as it already got 12’000 downloads in just six days!

For me, the main work in this was to find out on how to programmatically enable/disable Bluetooth with Bluez 4.x using D-Bus – all the examples I found online only talked about the older Bluez 3.x versions. After digging through the Bluez Docs and some experimenting, here is how it works in Python:

1. Find the default Bluetooth adapter.
2. Modify the “Powered” property of the adapter.

The following snippet of code toggles the adapter on/off on each run:
import dbus
self.bus = dbus.SystemBus();
self.root = self.bus.get_object('org.bluez', '/')
self.manager = dbus.Interface(self.root, 'org.bluez.Manager')
self.defaultAdapter = self.manager.DefaultAdapter()
print "Default adapter is at", self.defaultAdapter
self.obj = self.bus.get_object('org.bluez', self.defaultAdapter)
self.adapter = dbus.Interface(self.obj, 'org.bluez.Adapter')
props = self.adapter.GetProperties()
powered = props['Powered']
if powered:
  self.adapter.SetProperty('Powered',False)
else:
  self.adapter.SetProperty('Powered',True)

Accidentally, “Bluezwitch” (Bluez-Switch :-) was rather a byproduct on my quest to another widget I’m currently working on: “Carmode” is a widget that toggles a number of things when entering the car. But more about that in another post of my “series”.

And BTW: From now on, I’m changing the button icon size on all my widgets from “Finger” (48px) to the “Thumb” (64px) size, as apparently the smaller icons were just too small for many people (dragging these icons became a mini-game in itself ;-). Bluezwitch has been updated today to version 1.0.0 to accommodate this change – it will show up in your favourite repository soon.

New technologies and platforms on mobile market is something normal nowdays, and some of this inventions use Linux as a base. Maemo 5 and the newest Android 2.1 are both based on Linux in a slightly different way. In case of Maemo users get almost the same system as on desktop, with typical kernel and most of tools and utilities or at least their substitutes. This allows writing applications in similar way as for desktop, using C, C++, python etc. Android was in fact modified in almost every single detail, beginning ...

I have spent three days here in San Francisco at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2010 and I will spend even more days because the Iceland’s volcano eruption caused such a huge ash cloud which closed the almost the whole air space of the Europe.

One thing which has increasingly become apparent to me - from wandering around some of the threads on talk.maemo.org - is that there is a very big difference between typical commercial software development, and open development.

Firefox for Mobile Read Later: a Mobile Firefox extension - http://limpet.net/mbrubec... April 18 from Matt Brubeck - Comment - Like

I was in Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2010, but as you probably know, everyone’s is stucked here now. As many of my friends have said,…

So, since my last blog the two things standing between fMMS and extras have worked themselves out (almost, still waiting for PR1.2 to go live). I hereby like to present: fMMS 0.9.0 aka “Getting really close now…”.

Quick overview of the features:

• Auto configuration of MMS APN.
  So, this will work for everyone in PR1.2 (assuming it’s like PR1.2 SDK), but you can get it to work now on a fresh fMMS install by copying /etc/operator_settings from PR1.2 SDK, but what it does is try to configure all MMS related options automatically. If you are coming from an earlier version of fMMS it *should* automatically copy over your settings from the current one, hopefully.
  When introducing this I also made fMMS add it’s own APN automatically, which means you no longer need fAPN.
• Forward option in Viewer.
  It basically takes the text and the attachment (only one, which got some funky logic attached to it) and opens a new Sender for you. It does not save the subject from the previous message.
• Connection modes.
  They’ve been around a while now, but I’d like to explain them again as it’s not really obvious how they are intended to work.

• Polite: This mode does only connect to the MMS APN if no other connection is active.
• Rude: Automatically takes down your current connection, connects to the MMS APN and when it’s done reconnects to the previous connection if possible.
• Havoc: This is what other phone does (albeit much more reliably), it opens a second connection to the MMS APN in parallel with the one currently open. As an added bonus, the MMS APN is hidden from the “Connections” UI in this mode as it does not need to be visible.
  Due to the nature of the kernel in Maemo 5 there are some ugly hacks involved in this, so if your current connection and the MMS APN configuration share the same network namespace, things might get ugly. Also, if the application fails in some way when opening/closing a connection in this mode it MIGHT lead to the modem not being able to open a new GPRS connection until a device reboot. You have been warned. Note: I’ve been using this mode for more than 2 months and not yet had it happen to me ;).

As always, comments, suggestions etc appreciated at http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=616398#post616398

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-04-12 through 2010-04-18

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-04-12 through 2010-04-18

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-04-12 through 2010-04-18

Front Page

Debian's "Squeeze" devkit installed to autobuilder to bring accurate, cross-SDK dependencies

On 24th March, Niels Breet implemented the plan which had been discussed with the Maemo development community: deploy the PR1.2 SDK to the autobuilder so that applications in Extras can take advantage of new features when PR1.2 is released. Unfortunately, there were two unforeseen circumstances: pretty much every package started declaring a dependency on a later libhildon than is available on public devices and PR1.2 wasn't released as quickly as the community expected. The Maemo Community Council, and the maemo.org team, discussed solutions with the community and Javier S. Pedro outlined the plan: "to upgrade the Debian devkit in the Fremantle autobuilder to the Squeeze version (from the current etch one), and start using "improved shlibdeps" (a.k.a. .symbols files) to version dependencies on a much more granular basis (minimal required version of libraries will be calculated per symbol instead of per library). We plan to ship .symbols files for most of the SDK libraries."

This means that packages built in the PR1.2 SDK using no PR1.2-introduced functions will work on a PR1.1 device and even on a 1.0 device. This was done on 14th April and the repository re-indexed with rebuilt packages. After a brief problem with Akamai caching network, packages from Extras-devel are again installable. This allows developers to sanity check their applications before promoting them to Extras-testing for beta testing.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Debian's "Squeeze" devkit installed to autobuilder to bring accurate, cross-SDK dependencies
2. Applications
   • Nokia N900 Live Wallpaper
   • First user experience week concentrating on preferences dialogues
   • UX week #2 focusing on icons
3. Development
   • Maemo 5 "Info Center" provides centralised reference documentation for Nokia-supported frameworks
4. Devices
   • Example screenshots of MeeGo GUIs for netbooks and smartphones
   • MeeGo screenshots and Nokia: things to understand
   • Video: Intel & Nokia presenting MeeGo running on different kinds of devices
   • Mer 0.17 on Joggler with 3D acceleration
5. Announcements
   • Help Maemo make N900 and future MeeGo products better
   • Keep track of your N900's location with "I am here"
   • Ring Clock is a colourful clock applet for the desktop

As some of you may remember I wrote once that customization and personalization of my N900 is a kind of neverending story and I admit I still work on it to achieve perfection some day. On my quest I’ve found some things you may try and maybe some of them will become part of your favourite set. This time let’s have a look on homescreen, or to be more accurate on wallpaper. If you have a feeling your wallpaper is static and boring you can try Live Wallpaper. After you install ...

Hey all, It was a great time in San Francisco last week when I attended the Linux Collaboration Summit. Presentations from key people of big companies (there were also summit sponsors) fulfill the first day agenda. I highlight Intel and Nokia presentations, both showing what they want with Meego and both emphasizing the collaborative and [...]

While you can follow the progress of Rygel through the release announcements on my blog, mailing-lists and even git log, I feel that I am not providing enough information about the future plans. Also there are some things that are not (or so far have not been) in a shape to be part of a release so here is some of what is coming:

Firefox for Mobile Fennec 1.1 - Start Page - http://madhava.com/egotism... April 20 from Planet Mozilla: Madhava Enros - Comment - Like

Offscreen Technologies, who have released a wide portfolio of games, applications and eBooks on Ovi Store, have announced that their content has been downloaded more than 25 million times. Offscreen has focussed on providing content for Nokia's touchscreen devices, including the Nokia 5800, N97, X6 and N900. They currently have around 100 titles in the Ovi Store; some of the applications, including Level Touch, Bright Light Touch and Labyrinth Lite Touch have been downloaded more than a million times each. More below.

I was using many different mobile devices during last years. Some were GSM phones, some were PDA, now I use Nokia N900 which tries to join both functions.

When I saw calendar on N900 I thought: Is it some cruel joke? But then I got to simple conclusion: designers and developers never used anything newer then Nokia 5110 and never saw (or heard) about PDA devices. I do not see other reason for creating such brain damaged application.

What it supports? Simple events in few local calendars with simple repeat, simple only predefined alarm times, todos (without priority). User gets unusable month view + nearly not usable week view + agenda view. And desktop widget which does not allow any configuration. Probably even PalmOS 1.0 DateBook was more advanced (I would have to check on PalmPilot 5000 which I have in basement).

What it lacks? List would be quite long but I will list few most important things:

• custom alarm times (I like 1:15 alarm times) — now it does not even display such properly
• edition of repeatable events without breaking repeat cycles
• extended repeat possibilities (like: 1st Tuesday in month, every 3rd Saturday)
• remote calendars
• portrait view
• configurable work hours in week view
• day names in date picker (PalmOS like chooser instead of iPhone like rolling lists maybe)
• search function
• attendees support

What makes situation even worse is amount of reported bugs against Calendar. Many of them got resolution ‘MOVED’ which is other word for WONTFIX as it looks like everything which lands in so called ‘brainstorm’ area of maemo.org website is on a list of things to forget.

So far there is only GPE calendar which can be used instead of Maemo one but this one does not have working alarms (without running it in background or using ugly GPE summary widget). Platform is so niche that there will be no commercial application to fill that hole and that’s sad. And I do not require port of PalmOS Agendus (the most advanced PIM I ever used on mobile devices) but something usable.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Maemo5 Calendar — is it cruel joke? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. Choosing next cellphone
2. Nokia N900 discount
3. Played a bit with Maemo 5 SDK

It took me longer than expected, but at last I’ve been able to release the version 0.4 of siggy. As usual, you can find the source code at gitorious, and together with the armel package at Maemo garage, and I’ve also uploaded the package to extras-devel.

For those who haven’t realized, due to the upcoming PR1.2, the Maemo 5 sdk has been updated, so developers can perform the appropriate changes to their apps in order to have them ready for it. To the Qt developers this means that the brand new Qt 4.6 has replaced the old 4.5 version, so we don’t need to keep using the previous testing packages anymore. I’ve modified the application to use the new libs and everything seems to be fine… despite I haven’t been able to promote it to extras-testing yet… it seems that there is a dependency problem somewhere that I need to check. I also need to ask for a bugzilla component at the Maemo bugzilla. But don’t panic ;), I’ll work on it

So based on comments received on the Rygel logo in the last blog entry, Klaus did some adjustments and came-up with even more improved version:

256x256:

32x32:

The news are a bit slow these days, because the summer term really took off after the easter holidays, and the free time for coding has decreased accordingly. Nevertheless: Some updates have hit Maemo Extras-Testing yesterday.

gPodder 2.5 "Knock knock knock Penny" was released and with it another Maemo 5 package rolls into the Extras repository (the Diablo package for Maemo 4 has also been uploaded and promoted to Extras already). Apart from some string changes ("Settings" instead of "Preferences", for example) that we found during the first UX-Week, this version fixes YouTube video downloads - the downloaded files now get a suitable extension (a bug that was introduced by YouTube changing their website a few weeks ago). Another nice feature for those of you with a fast Internet connection: YouTube video streaming. You can now chose to stream subscribed YouTube videos instead of downloading them if you prefer that. Review it and vote for gPodder 2.5-1 here

In gaming news, Paul Hudson (aka Hudzilla) has fixed some bugs in the code of his Brain Party game, and I've now uploaded a new version of the Maemo port for this game. The development repository of Brain Party has now also been opened over at Launchpad: Brain Party on Launchpad, and Paul promised to merge the Maemo patches upstream as soon as I send them to him, which I'll do today :) Review it and vote for Brain Party 0.5.91-1 here

One and a half week ago, we started the "UX Week" sprints in the Forums, focusing on one aspect of third-party applications for Maemo per week. This week, we're focusing on icons, so if you are an artist of want to help out as user or if you are a developer in need for some well-balanced icons, please get in touch in the forums and on the Wiki. And if you don't want to be productive at all, just stop by and look at the great artwork the artists have come up with so far already.

Starting this Saturday I’m going to spend a few days (at least 7) in Lisbon. Not really on holidays, but since my company is awesome and I just have to do my hours from anywhere I want I figured I might as well see a bit more of the world I live in.

So here’s the deal: if you live in the city, or near, and want to talk about free software, WebKit, GNOME, politics or metaphysics and get a free lunch, you can get that and in exchange you only have to show me around a bit. Or, better yet, do you belong to a LUG or any other social group with some interest in free software?  If you want we can arrange some kind of GNOME/WebKit/Epiphany talk, or we can improvise some kind of hackfest (“Your first GNOME patch”?, “Become a WebKitGTK+ hacker in 4 hours”?). Or maybe you have better ideas? Just leave a comment in my blog, or drop me a few lines at ‘xan at gnome dot org’. See you around!

Firefox for Mobile Headless Web Workers: Does the web need background apps? - http://limpet.net/mbrubec... April 22 from Matt Brubeck - Comment - Like

Recently I found this comment in the source code I am working with:

// what if both processes read in the same time and write at the same time, no increment

Please! Don't do such things! Don't just leave such comments in hope someone else will come around and will fix later. Please take the time to apply a locking mechanism.

Obvious choice when dealing with files would be to create a lock file. Unfortunately creating a file based lock isn't trivial, especially when you deal with portable software. Questions arise like: Is that system call really atomic in this context? Is the feature even available? Which characters can be used in the file name? Can it start with a dot? How much time does it take? Will it reduced lifetime of my flash media?

Uh, my head is spinning! Stop!!!

Somewhat understandable that my colleague just left a comment.

Well, fortunatly there is a more trivial solution for that problem. If you have DBus available. More experienced DBus hackers already know and will feel bored now, but to everyone else:

DBus service names can be used as locking mechanism!

Implementation would look similar to this:

bus.request_name('de.taschenorakel.locker.example')
bus.wait_for_name('de.taschenorakel.locker.example')

now some work...

bus.release_name('de.taschenorakel.locker.example')

Easy, not? Doesn't hit the file system. Fully implemented. Ready to use. Daily tested at your desktop.

One implementation of that concept can be found in qtcontacts-tracker.

I know you all like (cough) my long winded and analytical articles, but we'll take a short break from that to allow for a service announcement concerning our busy Qt developers, Maemo 5 and your evergreen favourite update, PR1.2. 

If you're an end user, the short version is - the doors are open for more (and prettier) apps, plus we have a bridge that will make it easy to backport MeeGo apps to Maemo 5. If you're a developer and/or are interested in the gritty details, read on:


[Maemo community council hat]

One of the big changes PR1.2 brought us is official Qt support in the form of Q4.6 in the Nokia SDK and repositories. This change affects all applications depending on Qt currently in extras-devel. We had some talks with Qt/Nokia folks about Qt-related repository changes in Maemo 5 (triggered by aforementioned PR1.2 and potentially again later on by updates to Qt or related components). Here is the short summary:

1. remove qt4-maemo5 (4.6) after PR1.2
2. upload Qt 4.7 snapshots as qt4-experimental to extras-devel afterwards
3. as soon as 4.6 QtMobility is released, get those packages to the nokia-apps repository
4. remove 4.6 QtMobility from extras-devel
5. maybe upload new QtMobility packages to extras-devel, but only for qt4-experimental (4.7) and with 'experimental' in the package name
6. maintainers of bindings and extensions to Qt are encouraged to follow the same nomenclature in their package names (i.e. using experimental in the name if depending on qt4-experimental)
7. use a Provides/Replaces/etc libqt4-maemo5 clause in the qt4-experimental packages (Qt4.7 packages should be binary compatible with the current 4.6 ones) so the packages can be deprecated peacefully
8. QML/declarative will be released as part of Qt4.7 (so qt4-experimental only, no 4.6.2/PR1.2 support)

[/Maemo community council hat]

What does this mean in plain English ? The libqt4-maemo5-* package names are deprecated in extras-devel. Use libqt4-experimental-* if you need Qt4.7 features, or libqt4-* if you want Qt4.6. Qt4.5 will no longer be supported after the release of PR1.2


Have a nice day !  

I finally got back home from the Linux Foundation summit where I gave a keynote. We are now building both the platform and devices, and we need to keep the following things clear on our mind:

Here comes a new version of Mussorgsky, the metadata editor and album art downloader for maemo.

What is new?

• Fixed bug #8912, crash editing some songs (thanks to the reporter and patient users)
• Added support for internationalization (thanks to this tutorial and few bits of code from ReSiStance)
• Translations to Spanish, French (Eric Le Roux), German (Marius Vollmer), Finnish (Kimmo Hämälainen), Galician (Xabier Calvar) and more to come…
• Fixed the album art path calculation, now albums with special characters in the name are set correctly and appear in the media player
• Support for WMA, OGG and FLAC (the merits go to mutagen).
• A brand new cool icon, more maemo style, thanks to Urho Konttori:

Enjoy and as usual, feedback is welcome. We have a bugzilla component (under Extras/Mussorgsky) to report issues.

By the way, If you have a project in python and wonder how to add i18n, give a change to this wiki page: how to internationalize python apps in maemo; i tried to write there as clearly and simple as possible how to do it.

If you are on the lookout for a C++, GTK+2, Qt, Linux developer with a PhD and experience in persistent storage and indexing then I'm looking for you!

For those who don't know me, I am "the libferris guy". Which means I have played with virtual filesystems for many many years and implemented a good handful of ways to index and search diverse filesystems. Some of the articles I did for Linux Journal and linux.com will give an impression of the sorts of things libferris can do, and in the next months the Linux Format includes information on Web services as a filesystem, eg, mounting flickr, youtube, and facebook.

After hacking RDF support into KOffice earlier this year, I would very much like to work more with Soprano and RDF technologies. But anything involving indexing and storage is also of huge interest. In fact one of the things I like about RDF at the low level is that it overlaps these desires too, for example, my custom model partial implementation for Soprano which is targeted at great performance on embedded devices.

I have implemented some GIST trees for PostgreSQL and worked with C++ and development on a Linux platform for over 10 years. If you are interested in these things or just want a Qt hacker for a while then please drop me a line using the nick for this blog at gmail or sourceforge as email address.

One of the key differences between mobile and desktop development (apart from the obvious GUI stuff) is that applications cover different use cases from their desktop counterparts. How does this difference in application focus and required tool complexity reflect on open, modern, Linux based mobile platforms, and how does Nokia's newly announced Qt SDK address this ?

Yesterday I returned to the UK after my trip to San Francisco was extended by a week due to this Icelandic volcano business. It still feels a bit science fiction to be talking of global disruption due to a volcano, and all this talk of repatriation feels similarly odd. One minute I’m on a business trip, and the next there is a government emergency committee, Whitehall meetings, the Navy on standby and plans afoot for Dunkirk-style relief missions.

It’s reassuring to know that the British Government considers it their duty to ensure that in the event of an international emergency subjects are provided with safe passage home. This is something that we – certainly in the West, at least – take for granted and give little thought to. As we complain about the levels of taxation, and idly consider the merits of emigrating to somewhere where this is lower and the climate perhaps warmer, we should consider this little used but invaluable benefit, alongside things such as the much-maligned but wonderful-and-amazing-it-works-at-all National Health Service.

As it happens my repatriation was neither government-assisted nor particularly exciting. All credit must go to my boss’s assistant, who must have spent an awful lot of time on hold to AMEX travel. Since I was traveling on business my extended stay was not physically uncomfortable either. I wish I could say it were not mentally so, and that I were able to heed the suggestions from friends, family and colleagues that I should relax and make the most of it. However, it meant that I missed an event that I’d spent some months organising and a rather important and impossible to reschedule meeting for an out of work project. Add to this that it looked as though I could have been delayed for a number of weeks and missed the inaugural Open Source Hardware User Group meeting and a short family trip, and that I find it very difficult to relax when I find myself restricted by a situation over which I have no control and limited insight.

Volcano-related inconvenience aside, my trip to San Francisco was both productive and, overall, enjoyable. More in forthcoming posts.

A couple of weeks ago Kat and I went to Cyprus for a week. The main reason for going was the wedding of some friends, and so there were actually a fairly large group of friends, many of whom also IBMers, also going for the same period. This was the first time I’ve really done a non-UK holiday with friends. I had a really good time, it was extra fun to have a bunch of friends around, and the wedding was really very nice – it was a great location.
Obviously I took my N900 with me, but was trying to avoid paying the crazy data prices so it spent most of off-line. However I took my TV out cable and loaded it up with some encoded DVDs and lots of music. During the time there, I got lots of great use out of the FM transmitter and the ability to just plug into the TV in the villa and provide music and movies. These are features of the n900 that I don’t really use at home, but really came into their own in this holiday situation.

Before

For returning the results of a SPARQL SELECT query we used to have a callback like this. I removed error handling, you can find the original here.

We need to marshal a database result_set to a GPtrArray because dbus-glib fancies that. This is a lot of boxing the strings into GValue and GStrv. It does allocations, so not good.

static void
query_callback(TrackerDBResultSet *result_set,GError *error,gpointer user_data)
{
  TrackerDBusMethodInfo *info = user_data;
  GPtrArray *values = tracker_dbus_query_result_to_ptr_array (result_set);
  dbus_g_method_return (info->context, values);
  tracker_dbus_results_ptr_array_free (&values);
}

void
tracker_resources_sparql_query (TrackerResources *self, const gchar *query,
                                DBusGMethodInvocation *context, GError **error)
{
  TrackerDBusMethodInfo *info = ...; guint request_id;
  TrackerResourcesPrivate *priv= ...; gchar *sender;
  info->context = context;
  tracker_store_sparql_query (query, TRACKER_STORE_PRIORITY_HIGH,
                              query_callback, ...,
                              info, destroy_method_info);
}

After

Last week I changed the asynchronous callback to return a database cursor. In SQLite that means an sqlite3_step(). SQLite returns const pointers to the data in the cell with its sqlite3_column_* APIs.

This means that now we’re not even copying the strings out of SQLite. Instead, we’re using them as const to fill in a raw DBusMessage:

static void
query_callback(TrackerDBCursor *cursor,GError *error,gpointer user_data)
{
  TrackerDBusMethodInfo *info = user_data;
  DBusMessage *reply; DBusMessageIter iter, rows_iter;
  guint cols; guint length = 0;
  reply = dbus_g_method_get_reply (info->context);
  dbus_message_iter_init_append (reply, &iter);
  cols = tracker_db_cursor_get_n_columns (cursor);
  dbus_message_iter_open_container (&iter, DBUS_TYPE_ARRAY,
                                    "as", &rows_iter);
  while (tracker_db_cursor_iter_next (cursor, NULL)) {
    DBusMessageIter cols_iter; guint i;
    dbus_message_iter_open_container (&rows_iter, DBUS_TYPE_ARRAY,
                                      "s", &cols_iter);
    for (i = 0; i < cols; i++, length++) {
      const gchar *result_str = tracker_db_cursor_get_string (cursor, i);
      dbus_message_iter_append_basic (&cols_iter,
                                      DBUS_TYPE_STRING,
                                      &result_str);
    }
    dbus_message_iter_close_container (&rows_iter, &cols_iter);
  }
  dbus_message_iter_close_container (&iter, &rows_iter);
  dbus_g_method_send_reply (info->context, reply);
}

Results

The test is a query on 13500 resources where we ask for two strings, repeated eleven times. I removed a first repeat from each round, because the first time the sqlite3_stmt still has to be created. This means that our measurement would get a few more milliseconds. I also directed the standard out to /dev/null to avoid the overhead created by the terminal. The results you see below are the value for “real”.

There is of course an overhead created by the “tracker-sparql” program. It does demarshaling using normal dbus-glib. If your application uses DBusMessage directly, then it can avoid the same overhead. But since for both rounds I used the same “tracker-sparql” it doesn’t matter for the measurement.

$ time tracker-sparql -q "SELECT ?u  ?m { ?u a rdfs:Resource ;
          tracker:modified ?m }" > /dev/null

Without the optimization:

0.361s, 0.399s, 0.327s, 0.355s, 0.340s, 0.377s, 0.346s, 0.380s, 0.381s, 0.393s, 0.345s

With the optimization:

0.279s, 0.271s, 0.305s, 0.296s, 0.295s, 0.294s, 0.295s, 0.244s, 0.289s, 0.237s, 0.307s

The improvement ranges between 7% and 40% with average improvement of 22%.

The Bluetooth SIG has announced that the 'much anticipated' v4.0 update to the Bluetooth protocol (incorporating the Bluetooth low energy technology pioneered by Nokia in Wibree) will be finalized and sent to manufacturers by the end of June. Bluetooth 4.0 could theoretically be powered for years by a coin-celled battery, has faster transfer rates, and has an increased range that can extend up to 200 feet and beyond (at higher power, obviously). Bluetooth v4.0-enabled devices should come on sale around the end of 2010.

I've had a fun weekend.

Carsten Munk, of Mer and other fame got me interested in insane schemes (once again): this time playing around with libdui (or libmeegotouch, as it is now apparently known), as we had repeatedly heard from many sources that it relied on GL, which meant that it couldn't be used with devices that require software rendering. Having found the -software flag to widgetsgallery, and poked around the source of DUI in the past, I thought this was a bit of a funny claim to make, until we actually used it and found out how horribly slow it was. Maybe they had a point?

Why was it slow? Well, it happened again. Not completely the same, of course, but this is a very similar issue to one I wrote about recently in Qt on Maemo. Something that a lot of developers, particularly ones working in higher level libraries or languages like C# or Qt forget from time to time is that image (or pixmap) scaling - in particular, smooth scaling - is generally not a fast operation.

DUI did a lot of scaling.

DUI has a class called MScalableImage, the purpose of which is to draw (and scale) a pixmap as needed, which is a good enough reason to have a class. MScalableImage is passed a pixmap, and stores it.

So far, so good.

Now, onto the details of scaling. When being asked to draw, QPainter pointer is passed, as well as an x, y, width and height. The width and height are checked against the stored pixmap's width and height, and if they match, it's drawn instantly, no questions asked.

So far, so good.

What happens, though, in the case where they don't match?

Oops.

DUI currently copies and rescales the stored pixmap to the target width/height, and then proceeds to draw as normal.

This behaviour is obviously wasteful. In the (frequent) case of GL acceleration, this doesn't really matter so much, because scaling on GL hardware - abstracted away by Qt - isn't all that slow, which is why this problem was probably not noticed previously. In the case of software rendering, though, that's a whole different story.

Patching this away to use the application-wide QPixmapCache drastically improves the performance of software rendering. My laptop isn't exactly slow, and I still ended up with a boost from an (unusable) 5-6 FPS to around 170-180 FPS.

Hopefully this post serves as an educational warning to help prevent future such mistakes.

(Oh, and the conclusion? No, DUI doesn't require GL. It helps, obviously, but it's not required.)

Here is a small project I've been working on in my copious spare time.

The Nokia N900 is a great device but I felt kinda frustrated not being able to publish my location to my contacts in a way that Empathy can display it. Good news is the N900 uses Telepathy so that's something that can easily be fixed.

Here comes Azimuth a small daemon publishing your location using the Telepathy Location interface. The interface is only implemented in telepathy-gabble at the moment[1]. That means that your Jabber server has to support Pubsub to be able to publish. Unfortunately, Google Talk servers don't[2]; see the Telepathy FAQ for details.

I just uploaded the first version of Azimuth to Extras-devel (thanks Bigon for the package!) so you should be able to easily install it. This is my first Maemo application so I kept it pretty simple for now. Azimuth doesn't enable the GPS itself so you have to start another application using the GPS (as OVI Maps or Map Buddy for example) to publish.

So, if you want to test it you have to:

• Install Azimuth
• Reboot your N900 (the package doesn't start it automatically; suggestions about how to fix that properly are welcome[3]).
• Set your IM presence to online
• Start an application making use of the GPS

Be aware that once installed Azimuth will always publish your location when an application is using the GPS and your IM accounts are connected!

Plans for future versions include:

• Add UI (probably a settings widget) to easily enable/disable publishing.
• Allow Azimuth to poke the GPS for a position every $N minutes/hours
• Add an option to reduce location accuracy for privacy reasons.
• Allow using the Cell to get a position?
• If you have more artistic skills than I have, an icon would be much appreciated.

If you experience issues or have nice ideas for improvements feel free to mail me. You can also use the Garage page if you feel brave enough. :)

Empathy displaying location using libchamplain

Notes

[1] XEP-0080 if you're into XMPP

[2] Google, I hate you for this

[3] The trick is to start the daemon as user and not root

A serious limitation of the N900 connectivity subsystem IMHO is the inability to create multiple connections. One can only have one connection at a time.

read more

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-04-19 through 2010-04-25

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-04-19 through 2010-04-25

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-04-19 through 2010-04-25

Front Page

MeeGo & Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit write-up

The ever-excellent LWN covers the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which was held in San Francisco just over a week ago. In addition to a MeeGo workshop, the Maemo community was represented by Ryan Abel and Randall Arnold. Jake Edge describes how both Ari Jaaksi (Nokia) and Imad Sousou (Intel) gave keynotes: "Ari Jaaksi, Nokia's VP for Maemo devices and MeeGo operations, spoke first, which he saw as an advantage because Intel's Imad Sousou would be sure to correct anything he said "wrong". The goal of the MeeGo project is to "provide industry with an open platform" for various kinds of devices. Both companies have been working on mobile distributions, which means that they "integrate the same components multiple times", and that is "stupid", Jaaksi said. That is one of the main ideas behind the merger." Numerous times during the keynotes, these senior figures described the development as happening in the open. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. There's an open Bugzilla, an open IRC channel and a code dump which has been "thrown over the wall". Real open development would have architectural discussions about the integration of various components happening on the meego-dev mailing list; it'd have the building of the first release (whether for the N900 or netbooks) happening in the open, with nightly integration builds; it'd have build plans on OBS open and available for others to inspect.

After a long discussion on how to proceed with the packaging policy for Fremantle, you can find the result as packaging guidelines in the maemo.org wiki. The idea is that this is the basis for further discussions, with the goal to smooth the extras-testing procedure and the development in general. The document should clarify the special requirements for the Maemo development, compared to Debian. To ensure some kind of review process, the page is not editable, but please use the discussion page in the wiki and the maemo.org developer mailing list, if you think that changes are needed. Your feedback is welcome and the basis for the further development of the guidelines. So, be active, have a look and join the discussion on the proposed channels.

Packaging guidelines

Today many devices we use in everyday life are called "smart". What does it mean? Electronics (at least now) can't be smart, so we speak about intelligence imitation and following rules can be used for measuring its quality:

• Device should do what user wants
• If device doesn't obey user, it must tell user why it doesn't obey in such a way, that user would agree, that he was wrong. This is user misstakes control.
• Device should guess, what user wants, if possible.

That last rule brings the problem.

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Firefox for Mobile Fennec 1.1 Context Menus - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... April 27 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Firefox Mobile 1.1 Beta 1 and Add-ons - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... April 27 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

I’m not supposed to but I’m proud. It’s not only me who’s doing it.

Adrien is one of the new guys on the block. He’s working on integration with Tracker’s RDF service and various web services like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, picasaweb and RSS. This is the kind of guy several companies should be afraid of. His work is competing with what they are trying to do do: integrating the social web with mobile.

Oh come on Steve, stop pretending that you aren’t. And you better come up with something good, because we are.

Not only that, Adrien is implementing so-called writeback. It means that when you change a local resource’s properties, that this integration will update Flickr, Facebook, picasaweb and Twitter.

You change a piece of info about a photo on your phone, and it’ll be replicated to Flickr. It’ll also be synchronized onto your phone as soon as somebody else made a change.

This is the future of computing and information technology. Integration with social networking and the phone is what people want. Dear Mark, it’s unstoppable. You better keep your eyes open, because we are going fast. Faster than your business.

I’m not somebody trying to guess how technology will look in a few years. I try to be in the middle of the technical challenge of actually doing it. Talking about it is telling history before your lip’s muscles moved.

At the Tracker project we are building a SPARQL endpoint that uses D-Bus as IPC. This is ideal on Nokia’s Meego. It’ll be a centerpiece for information gathering. On Meego you wont ask the filesystem, instead you’ll ask Tracker using SPARQL and RDF.

To be challenged is likely the most beautiful state of mind.

I invite everybody to watch this demo by Adrien. It’s just the beginning. It’s going to get better.

Tracker writeback & web service integration demo / MeegoTouch UI from Adrien Bustany on Vimeo.

I tagged this as ‘extremely controversial’. That’s fine, Adrien told me that “people are used to me anyway”.

Last time was big fun, hence time for another maemo.org Bugday:

Tuesday, May 4th, 17:00-02:00 UTC
in #maemo-bugs on Freenode IRC

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.

No specific topic – take a look here for some ideas.

Step by and say hello to the Bugsquad or become part of it. :-)

Last time was big fun, hence time for another maemo.org Bugday: Tuesday, May 4th, 17:00-02:00 UTC in #maemo-bugs on Freenode IRC 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. No specific topic – take a look here [...]

Myself and the PyMaemo folks have been working these past few days to clear the blockers from making PyGi work on maemo.   There was a last minute bug in the Maemo autobuilder which prevented PyGi from properly being imported into the maemo extras repository.  (Turns out the bug was caused by the fact that the PyGi package’s version number had capital letters in it.  Thanks X-Fade for your help!).  The bug has now been cleared and all of PyGi and Zhaan have been imported successfully.

For any users: Zhaan should be installable in the multimedia category of your application manager.  Please give installing and using it a shot and report any bugs you find (in the maemo.org BugZilla)!  Positive feedback and/or feature ideas is also appreciated!

Firefox for Mobile Fennec 1.1 - Save as PDF - http://madhava.com/egotism... April 27 from Planet Mozilla: Madhava Enros - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Fennec, meet Android - http://blog.pavlov.net/2010... April 27 from blog.pavlov.net » Mozilla - Comment - Like

One of the key differences between mobile and desktop development (apart from the obvious GUI stuff) is that applications cover different use cases from their desktop counterparts. How does this difference in application focus and required tool complexity reflect on open, modern, Linux based mobile platforms, and how does Nokia's newly announced Qt SDK address this ?

Last Monday, Google announced the list of accepted projects for the Summer of Code Program. Like last year, Maemo has got 10 slots. As Valério said in a previous post, we received about 90 submissions this year, which made the task of selecting the best proposals much more difficult. Many thanks to all people involved on the selection process. :)

Enough talk. Here is the list (in no particular order, just copied and pasted the contents of the wiki page):

• Porting Canola to Maemo 5 and beyond
  Student: Andrei Mirestean (andrei1089)
  Mentor: Eduardo Lima (etrunko)


• FaceBrick - a facebook client for Maemo / the N900
  Student: Kamilla Bremeraunet (brik)
  Mentor: Robin Burchell (w00t)


• UPnP Remote Access
  Student: Sunil Kumar Ghai
  Mentor: Zeeshan Ali


• The Tablet of Adventure: a location-based social adventure
  Student: Susanna Huhtanen
  Mentor: Henri Bergius (bergie)


• Extending Shepherd
  Student: Linus Wallgren (ecksun)
  Mentor: Attila Csipa (achipa)


• eBook reader for Maemo 5
  Student: Juhana Jauhiainen
  Mentor: Valerio Valerio (VDVsx)


• Gtk+ Input Method for the Harmattan Input Method UI Framework
  Student: Javier De San Pedro Martin
  Mentor: Mohammad Dhani Anwari


• Transifex mobile
  Student: Lauri Vosandi (v6sa)
  Mentor: Thomas Perl (Thp)


• Optical Page Reader for the N900
  Student: David Jordan
  Mentor: Florian Boor (Florian)


• MeeGo Cloud Storage Integration
  Student: Eli Foley
  Mentor: Yan Li

Congratulations to all accepted students! Some of them already had worked on projects related to Maemo on GSoC last year. In either case would be really cool to post a small introduction about yourself and the project you will work on during the next months. If you have a blog, request it to be syndicated on Planet Maemo.

For those whose projects were not accepted, and still think it is worth to work on it, you are be more than welcome. Although there won't be any assigned mentor, I am sure you can find help on the mailing lists.

My goodness was that cheese good

After finishing some loose ends in a remarkable place I found in Bairro Alto the GObject DOM bindings are in good enough shape to start doing some damage in this world (queue video that probably won’t appear in Planet GNOME, click into my blog to see it):

What you just (hopefully) saw is a GTK+ button that, when clicked, gets all the links from its cousin WebKitWebView and makes them do a small bounce, all with the DOM APIs you know and hate^Wlove exported through GObject.

For instance, to get all links simply call webkit_dom_document_get_links on the WebKitDOMDocument associated with the WebView, which will return a WebKitDOMHTMLCollection. Now we just iterate through the elements, get the WebKitDOMCSSStyleDeclaration associated to each one, and set the CSS properties we want on each one. Simple as that! No “evaluate this string as JavaScript”, and no using the JavaScript bindings through JavaScriptCore. In fact, since we are generating our own bindings instead of using the JavaScript ones, we can get the proper semantics for GObject toolkits instead of having to live with the decisions other people made for other languages and contexts. You can see the code snippet here; I use a two-step animation instead of using the full-blown css transitions because of a small technical issue that I didn’t want to fix before pushing this post, but of course we should be doing it right in the future. In fact, we should create proper APIs for CSS animations in general, not too different from what you have in, say, Clutter.

Most of the code for this is already in Webkit trunk, and now that the initial phase of the work is done I keep improving the code incrementally and pushing the patches to bugzilla, where my compadre Gustavo promptly reviews them. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll go to expose all events as glib signals on the DOM objects, watch this space (or the upstream bug) for more updates. Happy hacking!

I think you wouldn't be pleased if some unimportant call or, what is much worse, SPAM SMS message wakes you up. Solution would be to switch silent profile when you sleep. You can do it by hand ever day, but why not to automate it? You can use silencer, but it has very simple logic, which silences phone when it is late, but not when you sleep. What about something more intelligent?

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Finally, the day of days! Today marks a milestone in fMMS development – I consider it ready for Extras. Baring any serious bugs in this release I’ll bump the version number up to 1.0.0 and promote it to -testing within the next few days. :)

Looking back there are some things worth pointing out:
Original brainstorm posted 2009-09-27 (here).
Over 300 thumbs ups/down on the brainstorm (here).
Original wiki-page containing the research of what was needed for MMS on the N900 (here).
Some early IRC-logs from #maemo on FreeNode: http://wiki.maemo.org/Mms_implemention_conversation

My N900 arrived on the 9th of December 2009.
Was receiving SMS Push messages by the 30th of December (yes, took a while, I had exams the week after I got my device!). Link.
Proof of concept posted on 2010-01-02: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=450237&postcount=101. Code still available at https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=1210.
First package with ugly UI 2010-01-04: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=453107&postcount=117

Since then there has been over 11 000 downloads of the deb-package from garage as well as over 160 000 (!) downloads from -devel.

All of this would not have been possible without the great community AND the great support from Nokia.

Thank you all for testing, giving feedback and taking your time to read this.

/frals

As you probably already know, all gPodder versions (Linux Desktop, Maemo 4 and Maemo 5) use the same codebase, and as Python is an interpreted language, the choice of which UI to run can be made at run time (you could do this for compiled languages, too, but it's easier for interpreted ones). In current versions of gPodder, this happens by using command-line arguments. gpodder alone will start the Desktop version (which does not work on Maemo for obvious reasons - an "auto-detect" feature might be implemented in the future). On Maemo 5, you will usually want to use gpodder --fremantle, which will start the Maemo 5 UI as you know it (that's also the command that gets executed when gPodder is started from its application icon). On Maemo 4, the command is gpodder --maemo.

If you are a gPodder/Maemo old-timer, you might still remember the "good old days" of two-panel, stylus-based podcast goodness with multiple selections, the funky context menu and the thick toolbar on your N8x0. Ever wondered how that would feel on the N900? Try it out! Simply run gpodder --maemo in X Terminal and give your podcasts a little retro interaction (the database and downloads are the same in both versions and are therefore shared).

Try it out - it might come in handy if you are a stylus cowboy or have really small fingers (or a big N900 and normal-sized fingers...). Also, give the multiple-selection feature in the episode list a try. All you need is gPodder version 2.5, as it contains some compatibility fixes to make the Diablo version not be totally unusable on Fremantle.

The title says it all: for the next version I plan to change the name from Mapper to the definitely much better sounding Mapper-o. I might still be convinced to change the plan and use a different name, if someone happens to suggest something I cannot resist to.

Anyway, the main reason behind the change is that a project named Mapper already exists in maemo for the N900, although so far it's only available in extras-devel; and going back to “Maemo Mapper” doesn't look like a great option, considering that Meego is the future (and maybe some other platforms, who knows?). So, I needed a different name which would:

• be recognizable by users already familiar with it
• possibly start with the same letters, so that users would still find it in the application manager when looking for Mapper
• hopefully be found in search engines when someone searches for “mapper”
• sound really, really cool
• make people wonder why the helsinki I chose it

And “Mapper-o” is also easy to pronounce: in fact, there are no rules on how to pronounce it! I myself read it as one would read the word “màppero” in any phonetic language (which English is not), to prove that even the silliest reading sounds just too cool. ;-)

As a slightly different topic, Mapper-o is looking for help from icon/graphics/UI designers: thread post in t.m.o.. If you happen to be interested, don't hesitate to step in! The glory is waiting for you!

Firefox for Mobile Firefox 1.1 Beta 1 for Maemo - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... April 29 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

We told you a while back that the Firefox 1.1 Beta was coming very soon and today is the day its popped up. The 1.1 release has been worked on with a focus on polishing the user interface and improving UI responsiveness and performance.

The update also brings a ton of new features, some of which are listed below:

• Use volume rocker to zoom in and out on the Nokia N900
• Download, First Run and Start page redesign to help you find and use your favorite Firefox features
• Add-ons now auto update and view full add-on gallery from the Add-ons Manager
• Portrait mode support on the Nokia N900
• Form assistant improvements, including autocomplete
• Context Menu with Open in New Tab and Save Image
• Manage site preferences (clearing passwords and others)
• Site Menu improvements and additions including Save to PDF, Forget Password and Add Search Engine
• Web content theme update

In order to download the beta visit Firefox.com/m/beta from your N900.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• FireFox 1.1 For Maemo Coming In May (Beta Tomorrow) – Will Bring A Ton Of New Features
• New N900 Firmware PR 1.1.1 version 3.2010.02-8 Now Available
• Video: Mozilla Firefox for Maemo (Beta 4) Demo’ed On A Nokia N900
• Screenshots Of The Portrait Mode On The N900
• Demo & How To Enable Portrait Mode Browsing On The N900

Earlier this morning, the Mozilla organization made official the release of Firefox 1.1 Beta 1 for Maemo. For this release, the focus was some UI features they didn’t have time to put in the initial release. They are also using your feedback from previous releases and nightly builds to help improve the browsing experience.

Bringing Firefox to mobile devices is the next step toward fulfilling Mozilla’s mission of providing one Web that everyone can access, regardless of device or location. Secure, powerful, and customizable, Firefox is the most modern mobile Web browser available and is optimized for a mobile experience.Key design principles are at the heart of the mobile browsing experience including minimal typing, seamless synchronization with desktop Firefox and the ability to take your Firefox with you, to name a few.

Firefox is the first mobile Web browser to support add-ons. With add-ons, you can customize your Firefox by adding features that help make your brow... .. .

Firefox for Mobile Fennec on Android: user feedback and next steps - http://limpet.net/mbrubec... April 30 from Matt Brubeck - Comment - Like LonelyBob liked this

Last week we had the pleasure of meeting Friedrich Kossebau at our Berlin office and he accepted my offer to work for Openismus, starting at the beginning of May. Friedrich contacted me because we need more Qt expertise. His long KDE involvement fills that requirement perfectly and I think he has the temperament and attention to detail that we value. Unusually, we must send him right off to Helsinki, so we can’t immediately enjoy his company in Berlin. But I think he likes the adventure.

This means we are still looking for an extra Qt developer to work in our Berlin office, so please do email me.

We have chosen two new Openismus trainees who will start at the beginning of June: Patricia Santana Cruz and Chris Kühl. We are looking forward to the new life in our Berlin office and I bet they are looking forward to life in Berlin. I’m thinking of hiring a third trainee, so email me if you are interested.

After they have settled down, they will be studying hard and probably looking for easy ways to help real-world projects such as gnome-love, with our assistance. It won’t be long before we start thinking of them as junior developers instead. I don’t envy them the hard work but I do wish I’d had the same opportunity.