During their Computex keynote today Intel briefly showcased a MeeGo based tablet. The Quanta Redvale tablet  is powered by an Intel 1.5 Ghz Moorestown processor with a 10 inch touchscreen. This also marked the first public outing for the MeeGo tablet experience, the UI that will be used in MeeGo tablet devices. An SDK for application development is expected to be available later in the summer. Read on for further details.

Today Novell announced it would support for MeeGo, by releasing SUSE MeeGo as a fully supported operating system for netbook computers. It builds on top of MeeGo project releases by adding additional pre-installed applications (e.g. Open Office) and proprietary multimedia codecs (WMA, MP3 etc.), thus making a more consumer ready version of the operating system. Novell say that they expect it to be pre-installed on a variety of netbook devices, from multiple OEMs, in the next 12 months.

The Ovi Store (beta) for the Nokia N900 started selling paid apps again. So far, we notice the addition of Angry Birds level pack for $1.99 USD and QuickPanorama Pro for $2.99 USD. Let’s hope this gives an incentive for more developers come out with more apps.

Payments are handled via credit card connected to your Ovi account. First time buyers need to fill out their card information, but the purchases after that just require you to login.

Paid apps have shown up previously at the Ovi Store for the Nokia N900, but have been pulled out when users found a way to bypass the payment gateway. I assume the security hole has been patched and paid apps are here to stay.

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DeviceVM today announced its plans to deliver Splashtop MeeGo Remix, which it describes as "an enhanced version of the award-winning Splashtop instant-on software platform". The new product, which is built on top of MeeGo 1.0, will give Splashtop greater functionality and enable support for developers to add third party applications. It means that in the future many of the laptops and PCs with an instant on feature could have that functionality enabled by MeeGo.

At Intel’s Computex, the first MeeGo running tablet has just made an appearance and it promises to thrill. The 10-inch Moorestown Quanta Redvale tablet is still running on pre-alpha software and will not be making it to store till 2011, but even in its current iteration it is quite a powerhouse.

It is poered by the 1.5GHz Moorestown chip and as you can see from this video it is pretty snappy and has no problems playing a 720p HD clip. While the tablet version of MeeGo is based on the netbook version, the UI is very diffirent. There are two modes, a simple icon based page and a much more advanced panel based design where your webpages, Facebook feeds, apps etc reside as live panels.

Engadget has a ton of hands on pictures and a video, jump over to check it out.

Forget the MeeGo Nokia phone for a minute, I’d like to see them announce a MeeGo tablet come Nokia World. Apple has created a market for tablets, its upto Nokia to cash on.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

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• TV Out Makes The N900 The True MultitasKING
• Maemo Select: Applications, Themes & Wallpapers For The N900
• What Does MeeGo Mean For Maemo?
• Demo’ing The N900 Browser – Music Video Style

The MeeGo related news from Computex continues to flow. Acer has said that it has MeeGo products on the way and Movial has launched its end-to-end MeeGo services. Meanwhile the eagle-eyed Chippy from Carrypad has spotted MeeGo based tablets from Wistron (W1) and CZC (P10T) on the show floor along with news of a MeeGo based distribution from Linpus. Read on for additional details on each of these items. 

This is a pretty obvious hack and nothing new at all, using plain command line tools that existed for ages. Still, it might come in handy, and maybe you did not even think about it yet:

Prerequisites are a computer with an installed SSH server and mplayer or a similar media player. On your N900 (this obviously works just as well for the N800 and N810), you just need the SSH client for the first variant, and Python for the second variant. No other tools or apps are necessary.

In my case, I downloaded a video onto my N900 using gPodder, but I didn't want to watch it on the small screen, and I don't have a TV to hook it up to. So I decided to just stream the video over the network to my computer (ideally initiating the stream from the N900).

What you need to do is find out the $DISPLAY variable in your X session on the computer (:0 usually works, but strangely I'm on :4.0 with Ubuntu 10.04 here). You can do this with echo $DISPLAY in a X Terminal on the computer. Remember that value. Now, let's go to the X Terminal on the N900, cd into the folder with the videos and note the file name. To stream the video fullscreen to the computer, use a command like this: ssh username@computerip 'DISPLAY=:4.0 mplayer -fs -' < filename.mp4.

If you don't have SSH access, an alternative is to use HTTP for streaming (e.g. with VLC, which is also available on Windows and Mac OS X). The easiest way to do is (if you have Python installed, which you most likely have) to cd into the directory that you want to share (the directory and all its subdirectories will be shared - be sure to have no sensitive data there!) and use the command python -m SimpleHTTPServer for some instant HTTP server goodness on port 8000. Use VLC or a web browser on your computer to access the share. You can use Ctrl+C to stop the server.

So, if you want to browse the downloaded podcasts of gPodder on your computer, use the following command sequence in X Terminal:

cd
cd MyDocs/Podcasts
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Now, use the web browser on your computer (connected to the same network) and access http://n900ipaddress:8000/ to get a directory listing of all downloaded content. Copy the URLs into VLC and start streaming over the air.

Usually the limiting factor here is the wireless bandwidth and the reading speed of the eMMC. Apart from that, no restrictions apply - you can easily stream HD content, as the decoding is done on your computer, and the N900 just reads the data and sends it unmodified over the network without much processing (that's why everything said here also applies to the N800 and N810 and should work just as well).

We've already heard about a number of MeeGo 1.0 based distributions that are in the works, including offerings from Novell (SUSE), Linpus and DeviceVM (Splashtop). A fact sheet issued at Intel's Atom Software Summit reveals that there are more on the way from International Syst, Mandriva, Pixart, Red Flag (2), Turbolinux China and VietSoftware. This means that there are ten MeeGo 1.0 based distributions / products that we know about to date. 

Telefónica has endorsed MeeGo by saying that it is working with Intel and Nokia to explore the ways in which it can use MeeGo to deliver innovative connected services to its customers. The company will be looking at the way content and services can be accessed from smartphones, netbooks, tablets and Internet connected TVs. Telefónica is the world's third biggest operator behind China Mobile and Vodafone. It controls networks in multiple countries primarily in Europe and Latin America under the O2 and Movistar brands.

During a recent visit to Nokia's Espoo (Helsinki) offices, I had the opportunity to look round Nokia's Experience Lounge, which showcases all of Nokia's latest products and services - from Ovi Maps and Nokia Messaging to the latest Nokia handsets. As an additional bonus, tucked away in one corner of the room, is a set of shelves that contain one of almost every Nokia phone model ever produced. So how to share this with loyal readers? Film a walkabout of course! 

• A community Qt repository (why not the 'official' one? read on - this is not a fork)
  
• This repository is updated by an integration script, which pulls pristine Qt, applies designated merge requests over the top of it, and then pushes it to the master-proposed branch, if they all merge cleanly.
  
  These lists of merge requests are currently maintained by ..me.
  
  However, the intention is to give other trusted people, such as those in #qt-labs or who submit frequent merge requests, access to edit these lists and push to this community repository too, so it becomes possible to request integration of a change if you're experienced and trusted.
  
• A BuildBot which pulls Qt from the master-proposed branch of this repository, and then proceeds to try to configure, compile, build, and run Qt's extensive test suite, with the help of a custom tool I have purpose-written for this task, unimaginatively called qtestrunner.
  
  The results of these tests are then published on a website, where they may be viewed by others.
• This last bit of this puzzle isn't quite finished, but, assuming all of the above steps succeed with no regressions from the previous test run, the master-community branch is updated with the latest contents of the master-proposed branch, as a working snapshot of Qt+community patches.

I got tired of waiting for my patches to be merged into mafw-lastfm, so I continued with my project which I decided to name maemo-scrobbler.

maemo-scrobbler is a scrobbler application (last.fm/libre.fm) for the Nokia N900 that listens for events coming from the official media player app through MAFW.

The inspiration (and some code) comes from mafw-lastfm which does basically the same thing, but lacks some features. However, the code-base of maemo-scrobbler is completely different as I wrote it from scratch. First, I wrote a simple libscrobbler library which uses libsoup and a test application that can be easily run on the desktop. This way I was able to test the main use-case throughly.

Compared to mafw-lastfm, maemo-scrobbler has:

1. Support for multi-scrobbling (both last.fm and libre.fm at the same time)

   Includes a song queue per service.

2. Improved song queue handling

   Since internally it uses libscrobble (which is independent of MAFW), the important code can be easily tested on desktop sw, and it has been done so… throughly.

   It doesn’t matter how flaky your network is, or that the servers are down, the songs will be submitted.

3. Permanent storage

   The song queue is not lost, even on crashes, device reboots, or software updates.

4. Video clips are ignored

   Small feature, but important.

In other words: maemo-scrobbler Just Works™

It’s now on extras testing, please give it a try and vote up.

For more info and the source code, check in github.

Received today from the Forum Nokia folks. Please forward to Maemo / Qt / N900 developers:

Nokia’s Calling All Innovators developer contest is coming to a close, and there is still time to submit an app. The contest features four categories where you can demonstrate your creativity and talent developing mobile apps for use on Nokia’s latest devices:

• Eco/Being Green
• Entertainment
• Productivity
• Life Improvement

The top three submissions in each of these application categories will receive cash prizes of up to $30,000 (USD), as well as Spotlight Placement in Nokia’s Ovi Store to promote your winning application to consumers using Nokia devices worldwide.

Additionally, regardless of category, all application submissions are eligible to win special prizes. For instance, the best application for the Nokia N900 and the best cross-platform application using Qt will both receive $50,000 (USD). Check out all the prizes on the contest website.

This year, there are more chances to win than ever before. Don’t miss this amazing opportunity – submit your application right away. The deadline for entries is 10 June 2010.

Don’t delay – submit your winning app now!

PS – Do you have the next big idea? It could be worth a $1 million investment from Nokia. Submit it to Nokia’s Growth Economy Venture Challenge.

Nokia today announced a new charging accessories for its mobile phones - one that uses by pedal power. The Nokia Bicycle Charger kit, which is targeted at emerging markets, generates electricity via a dynamo connected to a bike wheel, which is fed into a charger that can connected to a phone via the standard 2mm charging port. The kit also includes a holder to secure the phone to the bike; it will be available in selected retailers before the end of the year.  

Last year for Christmas, there were two technology toys I was most interested in. One was the Nokia N900 and the other was Roku. The N900 costs much more than Roku, but can do much more as well. In fact, I wondered, would it be possible to recreate something like Roku as an application for the Nokia N900?

One of the common complaints about the Maemo address book is that it’s easy to get a lot of duplicate contacts as the address book is able to pull your contacts from various IM services. From the beginning there has been a way to merge duplicates, but it meant manually going through all of your contacts hunting down the duplicates.
Today I finished writing the first version of a program that tries to automatically detect duplicates based on the IM names, emails, phone numbers and names. Of course this is just based on heuristics; you still have to go through the list and select the contacts that you want to merge. You can find this utility under the name “Merge your duplicate contacts” in the application manager and it’s available in Maemo extras-devel. Remember that extras-devel contains unstable software: enable it only if you really know what you are doing!
After installing Contacts Merger you have to reboot your phone[1] and then you will get a “Find duplicate contacts” button in the menu of the main address book window.

The window suggesting the possible merges

Update: I released 0.1.1 that fixes a crasher in case of malformed contacts.

Update 2: Forgot to say where to get the code.

[1] Sadly the address book doesn’t automatically load newly installed plugins without a restart; see bug #10542.

Frequent fliers will know this, but to everyone else: If you ever should be that stupid to miss a flight, call the airline where you booked that missed flight as soon as possible. Otherwise they will cancel your inbound flight and bet on charging you an incredible amout of money for your previously reserved seat. For me they lost their €700 bet yesterday. Just took another airline.

You may (or not

ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI), today announced the formation of Linaro, a not-for-profit open source software engineering company dedicated to enhancing open source innovation for the next wave of always-connected, always-on computing. Linaro’s work will help developers and manufacturers provide consumers with more choice, more responsive devices and more diverse applications on Linux-based systems.

Linaro aligns the expertise of industry-leading electronics companies to accelerate innovation among Linux developers on the most advanced semiconductor SoCs (System-on-Chip). The current wave of “always-conn... .. .

This is a reminder that the deadline for developers to submit their apps for Calling All Innovators contest is June 10th, 2010. It is a worldwide competition that challenges developers to create apps and services for Nokia devices. There are several cash prizes of up to $50,000 plus other incentives.

Here’s a video overview from last year’s competition.

The contest started last February and the winners will be announced at the Nokia Developer Summit alongside Nokia World on September 15th, 2010. More details are available at the competition’s site, but here’s a summary of the prizes:

• Grand Prize: 30,000 USD in cash.
• 2nd Prize: 15,000 USD in cash.
• 3rd Prize: 5,000 USD in cash.
• Best application for the Nokia N900: $50,000 (USD) in cash.
• Best cross-platform application using Qt: $50,000 (USD) in cash.
• Best mobile computing application: $50,000 (USD) in cash, plus the winner of this special prize will be included in a multi-million dollar global marketing campaign that will be used to help promote the winning app.
• Best locally relevant application with global potential: $15,000 (USD) in cash.

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"Woah, I cannot believe you are EIPI!!! You are famous (well at least in a pool of 30,000 people). Very cool."

Recently Nokia released the much awaited pr 1.2 firmware for the N900, and among the many bug fixes and tweaks, came the ability to easily rotate applications to portrait by hitting ctrl+shift+r, then closing the keyboard and rotating to portrait. This feature had the knock on effect that I started to look seriously at portrait support in Witter, where upon I quickly found a pre-canned python module that I could just include to get persistent portrait support available from the talk.maemo.org forums

.

After Nokia releasing PR1.2 firmware for N900, I’ve updated mafw-gst-eq-renderer so it can be installed with that firmware.

Issues with mafw-gst-eq-renderer

Some people have reported problems with this renderer, mainly related with glitches and even sound that is stopped for a while when more applications than Mediaplayer are opened.

Unfortunately, equalizer elements seems to require quite a lot of CPU. I guess as gstreamer’s equalizer element is not a key element in Maemo, very likely it is not optimized.

Thus, if you become tired of those glitches, I suggest to not install this element. This is one of the reasons why I did not put mafw-gst-eq-renderer on extras-devel.

Weatherbug just showed up at the Ovi Store for the Nokia N900. I recorded a video overview of the app so you can see how it works before downloading the app. There aren’t many apps at the Ovi Store, so it’s kind of a big deal when something new shows up. Take a look.

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.

When you first open the application, it asks you for the location either by zip code or city. You can enter more than one and toggle through them on the main panel.

There are four panels on the right that can display maps, forecasts, video, and even a photo outside your nearest weather station. The Weatherbug application gives more information than I really need, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Weatherbug for the Nokia N900 is available for download at the Ovi Store free of charge.

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If you have been following me on Twitter (@TheMeeGoBlog) you will know that on Friday Nokia India held a launch event for the N900 release in India, giving details about pricing, availability, support and the like.

The N900 has a predominantly landscape design, Nokia has said that full portrait capabilities will not come to the N900. But they have enabled portrait mode for the browser and also the shortcut ‘Ctrl+Shift+R’ (post PR 1.2) that lets you rotate quite a few apps to portrait orientation but it works once and you have to enable it again once you close the app.

Over time need has been felt for a conversations app in portrait, portrait text entry in web browser and so on but around 7 months down the line, we haven’t seen Nokia put a portrait keyboard in. A few developers have made their own version in Opera, VertSMS and the latest being Witter, the twitter client for the N900.

Witter has had portrait mode for a few days now and once in portrait all you need to do is tap the new tweet text box to bring it up. If the N900 tilts to the side even a little bit, the landscape QWERTY comes up so keep the N900 as straight as possible.

Pressing the ‘123′ button brings the following up.

It is really great to see the community bring such things to life. But my question to Nokia is, why not make a decent portrait keyboard for the N900 and let all developers use it, rather than each one having to make his own? This will not only save times but also rid users the need to get used to different layouts all the time.

Yes, we know you don’t really plan on portrait mode for the N900, but please give developers a hand at least. Or is something like this already in your plans, considering ‘Ctrl+Shift+R’ was introduced in PR 1.2?

If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• Demo & How To Enable Portrait Mode Browsing On The N900
• A System Wide Portrait Keyboard Comes To The Nokia N900
• How To Disable The Red Camera Light On The N900 & Turn On The LEDs For Video
• The N900 PR 1.2 Firmware Gets Leaked (Release Candidate) – Changes With Screenshots Inside
• Screenshots Of The Portrait Mode On The N900

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

-- Robert Frost

After Nokia releasing PR1.2 firmware for N900, I’ve updated mafw-gst-eq-renderer so it can be installed with that firmware.

Issues with mafw-gst-eq-renderer

Some people have reported problems with this renderer, mainly related with glitches and even sound that is stopped for a while when more applications than Mediaplayer are opened.

Unfortunately, equalizer elements seems to require quite a lot of CPU. I guess as gstreamer’s equalizer element is not a key element in Maemo, very likely it is not optimized.

Thus, if you become tired of those glitches, I suggest to not install this element. This is one of the reasons why I did not put mafw-gst-eq-renderer on extras-devel.

In my last post, I asked why couldn’t Nokia deliver a system wide portrait keyboard for the N900? In this post I am glad to tell you that the community has once again stood up to the challenge and produced a system wide portrait keyboard that can be used by any app automatically.

The ‘portrait-keyboard’ package by Robin Burchell and Frals is available in extras-devel and once installed, it replaces the inbuilt virtual keyboard and pops up in its place wherever you need to enter text be it Conversations, Notes, Web Browser and so on.

It features a landscape mode (pictured above) as well as a portrait mode (pictured below). After installing the package, reboot the N900 to get this working.

Known caveats:

• No fast input. Multi-tap to enter a letter, it’s slow and *very* painful.
• Changing orientation results in the text you’ve written so far being lost.
• To use it, you’ll need to ‘killall hildon-input-method’ after installing the package (or reboot your n900)
• It’s (a bit) painful to use in landscape mode.

Possible future directions (but this is by no means going to happen overnight, these are all quite difficult – feel free to pitch in and help):

• Separate layout for landscape mode, for easier use
• Fast, predictive input
• Automatic capitalisation

This is a great start and eliminates the need of dedicated apps such as VertSMS (although it has a QWERTY layout as well). If you think you can contribute, talk to frals or w00t / w00t_ on #maemo, and see this. You can also follow this TMO thread for the latest. If you haven’t enabled extras-devel, here’s how to do it, the usual warning about software from extras-devel applies.

I can’t wait for the next update. Awesome work.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• A Portrait Keyboard Comes To Witter – Why Can’t Nokia Put In One That All Apps Can Use?
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• Opera Mobile 10 Comes To Maemo

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-05-31 through 2010-06-06

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-05-31 through 2010-06-06

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-05-31 through 2010-06-06

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-05-31 through 2010-06-06

Time running out on Nokia's $50,000 prize app competition

Nokia is running a competition, "Calling All Innovators", where the best applications submitted for their various platforms - including Maemo - can win up to $50,000 in prize money. In reminding us of the impending deadline (submissions have to be in by 03:59 UTC on Friday, 12 June), Quim Gil quoted Forum Nokia: "Regardless of category, all application submissions are eligible to win special prizes. For instance, the best application for the Nokia N900 and the best cross-platform application using Qt will both receive $50,000 (USD). Check out all the prizes on the contest website." With over 900 entries so far, the chances of a Maemo app winning one of the top four categories is small - however, there will be one good N900 application walking away with $50,000 in the developer's pockets. Your editor hopes its one of the open source applications in maemo.org's Extras; rather than a large commercial software house's Ovi Store offerings - if only due to the difference in significance the prize money would make to the recipient.

A calendar widget is a must have for the N900 and almost everyone has it on their homescreen. Unfortunately it is not customisable and a tap on it opens the day’s agenda and not the month view, something I hate. Fortunately nicolai has produced a replacement for it that is based on the default N900 theme and looks just like the default, but with a few additions and the ability to customise. Get it from extras-devel, search for ‘Calendar Home Widget’.

You can now set the duration for which the calendar checks, the number of rows the widget shows (2-9), the calendars it displays, and what mode it opens when tapped on. Here is what it looks like in the ‘Large’ size, notice the default widget for comparison sake. The extreme right of the replacement widget shows whether an entry is a birthday or has an alarm set, it also shows the month on top.

The only disadvantage is that it does not adapt to the current theme like the inbuilt widget. Hopefully, a future update will fix that as well. Follow this TMO thread for the latest.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

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The Nokia N900 has been formally launched in India; it will be available in select retail outlets, from June 9th, at a cost of Rs. 30,639. As part of the launch festivities Nokia held a mini-event where they show cased the N900's abilities and its open source credentials. In somewhat related distribution news the N900 became available in Tesco Phone Shops (UK) over the weekend (on a Vodafone contract at £30 per month). 

As I explained in another post, some colleagues at Igalia were creating the Grilo framework to gather multimedia content and ease the creation of that kind of applications. The origins of Grilo are in MAFW, which is the multimedia application framework used in Maemo 5 (Fremantle) to power the official media player, and that we had created in collaboration with Nokia and other companies, but we wanted to go beyond its limitations and Grilo is the result.

This release marks the start of the new unstable release-cycle. This is also the
release cycle that will be integrated into GNOME 2.31 (and 3.0 eventually).
Changes since 0.6.0:

- Exit on failure to load any plugins in 5 seconds.
- Add icon to preferences UI's desktop file.
- Correct error on missing 'Elements' node in 'CreateObject' action from client.
- Advertize upload features in 'X_DLNACAP' in device description.
- Remove comments from description files as per DLNA requirement (7.2.30.1).
- Don't allow comments in DIDL-Lite from client either. This is to satisfy the
  DLNA Confirmation Test Tool rather than DLNA itself.
- Don't advertize unimplemented actions.
- autogen.sh should create m4 directory if it doesn't exist already.
- Correct Icon path in preferences UI for uninstalled case.
- Specify on debug log where rygel is currently looking for plugins.
- Localization:
  - Don't translate all strings in media-export plugin.
  - No need to translate Mediathek plugin.
  - Add Hebrew translation.
  - Add Swedish translation.
  - Add Czech translation.
  - More Spanish translations.
  - More Slovenian translations.
  - More German translations.
- MediaExport:
  - Fix search result. Search was returning the the result for the current
    limits, not the overall result count. This lead to strange behaviour on
    e.g. XBox 360.
  - Optimize searches. Noticable speed improvements on XBox music browsing.
  - Fix broken SQL query to get object by path.
  - Remove redundant custom tag for duration.
  - Make harvesting of metadata optional.
  - Re-enable simple mode which means we exporting media on the UPnP network
    even if no meta-data extractor is available.
  - Remove redundant URI table from database.
  - Work around a problem in GStreamer element playbin2.
  - Explain the term 'harvest' for translators.
  - Many non-functional improvements.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg 
Andrej Žnidaršič 
Daniel Nylander 
Fran Diéguez 
Jorge González 
Mario Blättermann 
Petr Kovar 
Yaron Shahrabani 

A small update on the state of my GSoC eBook reader. During last week I worked on a startup view (opening files, shows books in library), settings (font, orientation) and some UI improvements (better TOC navigation, fullscreen mode). Here’s some screenshots of the application:

Currently the books for the library are loaded from “/home/MyDocs/books” but I plan to add changing that to the settings-dialog. The settings-dialog uses QFontDatabase to get a list of font’s and supported font sizes.

Epub-support still needs some work. I’ve been testing mainly with books from feedbooks and epubbooks and they work very well. Books from Project Gutenberg use html anchors in the Table of Contents and those aren’t supported yet.

In the reading UI by default books are shown one section at a time and you can move to next or previous section by swiping left or right. While reading a section you can either scroll the view normally or jump to next or previous paragraph with the volume rocker (this still needs some work though). Fullscreen mode is enabled by doubletapping.

This week I plan to do a lot of refactoring, improve Epub-support, start experimenting with paging and take a look at QtTest for writing tests.

I’ll start uploading snapshots to extras-devel soon, but before that I’ll have to come up with a name for the application. If you have ideas I’d like to hear them

A post on the Qt blog explains that Nokia is planning to move Qt towards a more open governance model. The move would see the community having shared control over decisions about Qt and its future roadmap. It follows on from the move to the LGPL license and opening up of the Qt contribution process last year. The planning for the move is at an early stage, but the Qt team are keen to have an open discussion with the community about the details and implementation of an open governance model.

At this point I am wondering if there is something that the community cannot do with the N900? The latest in the line of hacks to come out for the N900 is USB Host Mode. The same functionality that will out of the box on the Nokia N8, can greet your N900 as well if you are happy to hack around quite a bit.

As you can see from the following pictures, connecting a USB flash drive is a go and it pops up in the File Manager once connected.

If you would like more than one flash drive connected, that is a possibility too.

At this point it is not available for the average consumer to try, but if modding is your thing, here is the garage entry for it. If you would like to follow this development more closely, this is the thread to keep an eye on.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• Turn Your N900 Into A PS3 Controller & More With BlueMaemo
• Video: Flash 10.1 On The N900
• How To Enable Application Repositories On The N900 With One Click
• Demo Of Enna Media Center On The N900
• Gtalk Video Chat Is Possible On The N900

Barriosquare, a dedicated foursquare app for the N900 has been available for quite a while now. But in my usage I have found it to be slow and unreliable. Infact when it is refreshing with the server, your ability to multitask on the N900 is taken away.

In comes Cotchin!, a web based app for Foursquare which can be used to going to cotchin.com/m from your N900. It uses the Geo-Location extension of the N900′s MicroB browser to locate nearby venues for checking-in. Even on a slowish connection, it is fast and also offers the ability to look for your friends, at your history, search, shout and of course check-in.

• A simple tap on the ‘Places’ button brings the following up within seconds.

• You can tap on a name to check-in. Also tap the Facebook and Twitter buttons depending on whether you want the notification sent to the respective service. I love this feature.

• Clicking on ‘Friends List’ brings a list of your foursquare friends, sorted by the time of check-in. You can also use the search function here.

• The ‘Me’ reveals your history, mayorships and badges.

To use Cotchin! on your N900, you will need to install the Maemo Geolocation plugin if you already haven’t. You will find it in the Application Manager’s repositories. Alternatively, download it from here and install.

When you open cotchin.com/m on your N900 for the first time, you will see the above popup, select ‘always allow for this site’. The developers have pledged their support for the N900 and promise features like mini reviews, an enhanced history page and enhanced venue search in subsequent versions.

In my opinion, it is currently the best way to check-in from the N900.

If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• Video: Mozilla Firefox for Maemo (Beta 4) Demo’ed On A Nokia N900
• Step 2 In The Maemo Project Saga – The Mystery Continues
• First Look: TweetGo.net – Twitter Web App For The N900
• Must Have Themes For The Nokia N900
• How To Find The Penguin On MaemoProject.com & Win A N900

Controlling your TV from your mobile phone has been possible for a long time now, I have personally used the Nokia 6600 for this functionality in the past. Then IR ports started to disappear from most devices and recently they have made a comeback of sorts. The N900 has one, so the obvious use is turning it into a remote.

You have already seen Raemote, which turns the N900 into an Apple remote, today is the turn of  the Irreco widget. This compact widget features basic features that include volume and channel control, mute the TV and power it on or off.

It works independently of the Irreco app and can be downloaded from extras-devel in the Application Manager. The range is obviously nowhere near that of a dedicated remote, but is good enough for the odd use. After installation reboot the N900 to see the widget on the homescreen.

• Next, longpress the widget to enter its settings and go on to download your specific remote.

• Once downloaded you should see the following. If you don’t find the specific remote you are looking for, try selecting something close to it.

• Simply exit the settings and start using the widget.

Lets us know your experience with it.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• RaeMote Turns Your N900 Into An Apple Remote
• How To Create A Physical Task Manager Button For The N900
• How To Boost The Performance Of The FM Transmitter on Your N900
• Turn Your N900 Into A PS3 Controller & More With BlueMaemo
• Give Your Matrix Inspired N900 Application Manager – The Red Pill

Forum Nokia, Nokia's developer portal, has unveiled a new look for its website. The structure of the site has changed; it is now divided into three key areas: design, develop and distribute - matching the three key parts of mobile application and service development. The website aims to provide access to a wide range of learning resources, tools and technical documents. However there's also an emphasis on helping developers connect with each other, which is achieved through the community section of the site.

An important theme at Internet Week New York seems to be bar codes and location. As participants arrived for Internet Week, many checked in on Foursquare, and some have received a special InternetWeek Foursquare badge.

Since my previous post about the contacts merger, I fixed a crash, made it handle better broken vcards, improved the partial matching and made the installer quit the address book when the plugin is installed, so no reboot is needed.
The new 0.1.3 merger is now available in Maemo extras-testing, just look for “Merge your duplicate contacts” in the application manager.

What’s next

Suppose I could have some spare time to write some small applications relating to the N900 address book; what would you want me to work on? The application should be small and not require changes to the closed source components. Suggestions are welcome in the comments, but I cannot assure you anything

Update: I meant extras-testing of course, not extras

The N900 is finally in India, is seven months late, but is still a compelling device. I am sure a lot of you in are in the market for an N900 and this post should bring a cheer to you.

We have  teamed up with Nokia India to host the ‘Maemo Masters Invitational‘ in which I will be able to invite 25 of you to purchase a ‘Maemo Masters Edition’ of the N900. The best part is that it will cost the same as the N900 you can buy at your local store, but will come with a bunch of really nice goodies.

• The Nokia N900 of course.
• A pair of BH-214 Bluetooth Headphones.
• A specially crafted ‘Maemo Master’ T-shirt.
• The official Nokia title of a ‘Maemo Master’.

I will be randomly selecting 5 names each week, for the next 5 weeks and the names of the winners will be revealed on the Maemo Masters blog every week (first set of winners announced on June 15th). A few days ago I had received a package of my own from Nokia India and this is what it was.

To enter this week’s challenge to become a ‘Maemo Master’ and get invited to purchase the Maemo Masters Edition of the N900, all you need to do is answers the following questions in the comments section below.

• Question 1. – Right out of the box, what operating system does the N900 run? (Hint: M_e_o 5)
• Question 2. – What was The MeeGo Blog formerly called? (Hint: Look under the title)

Good luck!

Hit MaemoMasters.com for all the rules and finer details.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• Week 3 Of The Maemo Masters Invitational – Get Your Entries In
• First Week’s Winners Of The Maemo Masters Invitational & How To Enter For The Second Week
• Coverage From The Nokia N900 Launch Event In India – Goes On Sale June 9
• Its Finally Coming To India
• Blogger Talk From The N900 India Launch Event

I have just completed another example implementation of an action. This time it was the notification.

This means I have working examples for:

• Trigger – WLAN SSID
• Trigger – Calendar
• Action – Change profile
• Action – Secure device
• Action – Display a notification
• Action – Turn radio on/off and switch between 2G/3G

I have only implemented a way to pull information from the calendar, which is not optimal. I would like to have a Qt slot telling me when changes are made as I have done in the SSID trigger but I have not been able to do so yet.

I am also having some troubles with the dbus commands for turning the radio on/off and switching between 2G/3G, I have found the right dbus command but I can’t translate what I found to c++ code. The DBus commands I intend to use is describe here.

My next task will be to tackle getting the geographical position from GPS or Cell towers, I looked into that when I wrote my submission for GSoC, so hopefully it will work out smoothly.

We reported earlier that Linpus is planning a MeeGo based distribution and that it was being demoed at the Computex event. At the end of the event Linpus published a press release, which gives some additional details on the product. Linpus say they have added a number of enhancements including improved hardware and peripheral support (drivers), advanced power management, Linpus Windows Data applications (allowing easier access to Windows data on dual boot systems), online support and a LiveUpdate function to deliver upgraded drivers and new applications over the air.

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This is a joint statement from Nokia and the Maemo Community Council.

A few weeks ago we received a letter requesting that maemo.org cease distribution of Chromium, due to ongoing litigation involving the software.

The Community Council, the package maintainer of Chromium on maemo.org and Nokia legal were contacted.

As you are aware, it is Nokia's policy to respect the intellectual property rights of third parties. Thus, we suggested that Chromium be removed from maemo.org while the situation was clarified.

Nokia legal will be taking a look on the roles and responsibilities of maemo.org. This work should clarify the roles on maemo.org so the process would be clear if we were to receive any future requirements as the one from Red Bend.

The release of MeeGo 1.0 was accompanied by some resolution to Maemo, not all of it with positive consequences.  The long-awaited PR1.2 update was officially released at around the same time, which was a welcome relief, but excitement over the improvements it brought were tempered by less-than-genius developments.

Hermes for the Nokia N900 is an awesome tool that fills in your contacts’ missing info and photo with data found from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Gravatar. It was a pain doing it manually for unmatched names, but the new version 0.8.2 now contains find-as-you-type contact matching for faster results.

Hermes is a must-have app for the Nokia N900. I’m glad I had the opportunity to speak with the developer, Andrew Flegg, when the app was still in early development. You can watch that video below if you haven’t seen it yet.

Find-as-you-type contact matching makes it much faster to connect the dots between your unmatched friends and their online profiles. After Hermes does its magic, there might be a few people in your contacts list that remain unmatched. All you need to do in the new version is start typing at the screen with the online profiles. The N900 will try to filter the list for right person, and the user selects which profile matches the contact.

In the example below, I have a contact in my phonebook named Norm. Hermes could not automatically match it with an online profile. I start typing “Norman” and now the list shows 2 possible matches from my Facebook friends list. I click on the right person then click Update.

Now Norm from my contacts list gets a photo, birthday info, and even a webpage link instead of just the telephone number that was initially there.

Hermes is available for download within the Application Manager on the Nokia N900. It is also free.

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

• Video Demo with Andrew Flegg – Developer of Hermes for Nokia N900
• TwimGo for Nokia N900 Updated to 2.0.15, Adds Old/New Retweet & In Reply To
• Conversations on Nokia N900 Adds Support for Facebook Chat, AIM, MSN & More With Extra Protocol Plugins

In this feature article guest author Sergejs Cuhrajs shares his list of applications for the Nokia N900 that have earned his attention. There are more than 130 applications on this list, ranging from Abiword (a word processor), through gPodder (podcast client) and Leafpad (notepad style application) to Zoutube (a YouTube browser and viewer). With one or two exceptions they are freely available through the maemo.org repositories. 

Right after the N900 India launch event, I sat down with a group of bloggers that Nokia had invited to talk all things N900. The best part was that it was a diverse mix, which included bloggers from different avenues.

Some of us were very familiar with the in’s and out’s of the N900, while we also had people who were still new to the device. While we were talking, I was filming so here’s a 10 minute video capturing everyone’s thoughts with a few agreements and disagreements thrown in.

In alphabetical order:

• Anirudh Sharma
• Harsh Agarwal
• Prashant
• Thejesh GN
• Vaibhav Sharma (Your’s truly!)
• Varun Krishnan
• Vinu Thomas

If you are new to the N900, what do you think about it?If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• Welcome to MaemoCentral.com
• The N900 Features Auto Focus In The Video Mode
• How To Block Unwanted Callers On The N900
• The N900 Overclocked To 1GHz
• Coverage From The Nokia N900 Launch Event In India – Goes On Sale June 9

I've just uploaded Panucci 0.9-alpha0 to Maemo 5 Extras-Devel. This package is the first one based on the new codebase, which includes support for sending fine-grained playback status messages to gPodder and also receive metadata about episodes from gPodder. This makes listening to podcasts and managing your listening queue even more comfortable. The following screenshots are from development versions of gPodder, but you'll soon be able to enjoy these new features with the upcoming release. Until then: Please test Panucci 0.9-alpha0 in Extras-Devel (I won't be promoting this package to -Testing yet, but report bugs against it if you try it from -Devel), so we can fix any outstanding bugs until the first final release.

So, what's working so far? gPodder gained the display of the current position and total time in the episode actions dialog:

This position information is automatically sent from the newer Panucci version (so it depends on you using Panucci for playing podcasts). Another cool side-effect is that this information will be synchronized with gpodder.net if you are logged in and have enabled synchronization, so you can finally start playing back episodes on your computer, and then pick up where you left on your mobile phone on the go. You can also view a detailed overview of what parts of an episode are played on gpodder.net:

This is really an important feature milestone for gPodder (and Panucci), and it's nice to finally have playback status and episode duration information inside gPodder. Expect a new gPodder release soon, released together with the new version of Panucci (due to the branching history of Panucci, there are some feature regressions, like missing display orientation controls, but these will be re-added in the next few weeks as we move along).

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and its probabilistic counterpart pLSA are two well known techniques in Natural Language Processing that aim to analyze the co-occurrences of terms in a corpus of documents in order to find hidden/latent factors, regarded as topics or concepts. Since the number of topics/concepts is usually greatly inferior to the number of words and since it is not necessary to know the document categories/classes, LSA and pLSA are thus unsupervised dimensionality reduction techniques. Applications include information retrieval, document classification and collaborative filtering.

Note: LSA and pLSA are also known in the Information Retrieval community as LSI and pLSI, where I stands for Indexing.

Nokia Connection is an annual event in Singapore where Nokia showcase their current device and service portfolio and address the SEAP (South East Asia and Pacific) market. This year it is being held on Monday June 14th (tomorrow) at Conrad Centennial Singapore. Asri al-Baker is attending the event on behalf of the Malay language SymbianKu blog, but will also be reporting back for AAS and AAM.

Do you remember this comment? Well, I took the challenge, and it has been hard to accomplish.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-06-07 through 2010-06-13

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-06-07 through 2010-06-13

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-06-07 through 2010-06-13

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-06-07 through 2010-06-13

Major, and avoidable, recent mistakes from Nokia

Randall Arnold, one of our Maemo Community Council representatives, has post a new blog article outlining his view on many of the missteps Nokia has made with Maemo recently. "The release of MeeGo 1.0 was accompanied by some resolution to Maemo, not all of it with positive consequences. The long-awaited PR1.2 update was officially released at around the same time, which was a welcome relief, but excitement over the improvements it brought were tempered by less-than-genius developments.There's an unfortunate legacy of dropped balls in the Maemo closet, usually involving operating system evolutions so rough that they evoked more feelings of abandonment than joy. I'm not going to rehash all of the legacy, but will instead focus on this year." Dealing with issues such as Harmattan branding, lack of communication at a corporate level and the privacy-busting "MyNokia" SMS (amongst others), Randall clearly lays out some of most eye-watering mistakes which could've been avoided.

I am not someone who likes changing themes often. I like themes that look elegant, polished and definitely not brash. Over the last seven or so months of owning the N900, I have tried almost every theme that is available and have come away with the following as my picks.

Most of these themes comes from the Maemo repositories so make sure you have them enabled. Then just type the name to search in the Application Manager and install. So without further adieu, here are my must have themes for the N900, in no particular order.

• Black Plastic – The lists in this theme are shaded differently, nice change.

• an-DROID – One of my favorites. Love the colours on this one.

• Bossa Teal - For times when you want custom icons. Seems to slow down the phone though and takes 6MB in rootfs.

• Carbon – Brilliant. Dark. Polished. Makes the N900 look good.

• D-Theme Red – I like red themes. They go well with the black on the N900. This is part of the D-Theme series, check them out for different colours.

• iStyle Black – Part of the iStyle series. Best of the lot.

• Matrix – Its here because it goes amazingly well with the Matrix live wallpaper. Plus I like the vibrant colours too.

• Red Alert – Another red theme, but sadly not part of  the repositories so you will have to manually download and install if  you liked it. Get the .deb here, locate it in the file manager and tap to install.

• R-Style Green – Part of the beautiful R-Style series that features similar design in new colours. Green is easily my favourite.

So there you have it, those were my picks. Think there is a theme that deserves to be in this list that I have missed out? Please let me know. What themes do you like?If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• Maemo Select: Applications, Themes & Wallpapers For The N900
• Live Wallpapers Come To The N900
• Give Your Matrix Inspired N900 Application Manager – The Red Pill
• Solving The Maemo Project Mystery – Step 1
• A Replacement For The Inbuilt Calendar Widget Is Here & Its Awesome

I’m often asked questions about the handling and parsing of phone numbers, so I’m going to explain how we do it on Maemo 5. I hope this can be useful also for developers of other applications.

I finally bought a netbook and since I am intending to use it with some work stuff (meaning data that requires confidentiality and integrity) I started to tuning my MeeGo to make it more protected before place my data

To make it more protected I think that it is interesting to confine some, let’s say, “untrusted applications”. Which basically means more restrictive control over the processes. Usually I use GRSecurity for that but this time I am using SELinux. Since I am dealing with RPM and Fedora use to be a reference (at least for me) in the support to the SELinux, most of the specs files were copied from Fedora including the policy. The policy should be well refined to fit my needs, but it will be the subject of another post.

Supporting SELinux involves to support not only the kernel part of SELinux (kernel-selinux-netbook), but to support a huge number of packages as you can see bellow:

repo   --name=security --baseurl=http://meego.zimmerle.org/repo/security/packages/

@SELinux
kernel-selinux-notebook

The N900 comes with a pretty basic photo editor that allows you to crop and resize, but if you want to do a bit of quick colour correction or editing, you were pretty much out of luck. Enter Ansel-A by lostinmirkwood.

It is a ‘digital darkroom’ for the N900 that can perform:

• Filtered-Black-&-White-Conversion
• RGB-Color-Correction
• Brightness, Saturation, Contrast and Sharpening
• Pixel-level-Cropping (Portrait is still a little fishy)
• Tonal Shadows/Highlights
• Kinetic Photo Browser
• 360-Degree-Precision-Rotation
• EXIF-Browser-with-maps
• Unlimited-Visual-Undo
• Is Multi-Platform (Qt4.6, PyQt)

By looking at the above list if you are not quite sure as to what the software does, the following video should help.

The app takes a little while to load because it pulls recent images from the camera roll, you can also load more images or manually select the one you want. The controls are intuitive and you always have the safety of undo when you try and experiment. Some actions like rotation, are pretty impressive and not not many apps support editing so extensively.

Ansel-A is available for installation from extras-testing and is virtually a must have if you consider yourself a photographer of any kind. The best part is that the developer is taking feedback, bugs and feature requests, so if you like the app get involved at this TMO thread or leave a comment on his blog.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• Front View Turns The N900 Into A Very Good Document Scanner
• Maemo Select: Applications, Themes & Wallpapers For The N900
• The Optima OP5-E Is The First Maemo Device NOT Made By Nokia
• How To Wirelessly Update the N900
• Give Your Matrix Inspired N900 Application Manager – The Red Pill

Changes since 0.13.3:

- GUPnPService should remove all handlers installed on the shared SoupServer
  instance when it is disposed.
- Fixate subscription timeout to be 300s as per DLNA requirement (7.2.22.1).
- Correct type of action argument of GUPnPService::action-invoked.
- Remove redundant copying of GValue content in a few places.
- Handle multiple variables inside property node in event notifications to be
  compatible with server-side implementations using older GUPnP
- Fix syntax of event notifications with multiple properties.
- Add/fix gobject-introspection annotations for various functions.
- Some non-functional improvements.

Bugs fixed in this release:

2084 - Add scope annotations to various functions
2131 - GUPnPServiceAction is a boxed, not a pointer
2086 - Fix gtk-doc format on all functions in public GUPnP API

All contributors:

Sven Neumann 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Zach Goldberg 

Changes since 0.5.5:

- Optimize namespace handling in DIDL-Lite handling code.
- Hide internal function gupnp_didl_lite_object_new_from_xml().
- Remove new redundant gupnp_didl_lite_container_new_from_xml(). 
- Free the array allocated by xmlGetNsList().

All contributors to this release:
  
Sven Neumann 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 

Last week I told you that we had teamed up with Nokia India to host the ‘Maemo Masters Invitational‘ in which I would be able to invite 5 of you each week for 5 weeks to purchase a ‘Maemo Masters Edition’ of the N900 that comes with special goodies (including a Maemo Masters T-Shirt and a cool BH-214 stereo bluetooth headset) for the readers of The MeeGo Blog.

Today’s its time to reveal the names of first 5 Maemo Masters:

1. Anurag Jindal
2. Nithish Rajan
3. Nithin
   
4. Vinu Jose
5. Ajit

Many congratulations! I will be in touch via email with all the details.

For those of you who missed out, I have some great news. If you entered the first week’s contest, I will also consider the same entry for the contests coming in the following weeks AND you can also take part in the second week’s contest again to double your chances of winning! Sweet?

For those of you who’ve just seen this contest, don’t worry we still have 4 weeks and 20 Maemo Masters to be crowned. So how do you enter this week’s contest? Simple, answer the following questions in the comments section below:

• Can the N900 act as a remote control? (Hint)
• In what resolution does the N900 capture video?

Good luck!

PS: Please note that this contest is geographically limited to those of you in India only.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• Week 3 Of The Maemo Masters Invitational – Get Your Entries In
• Announcing The Maemo Masters Invitational
• Here’s Your Final Chance To Enter The Maemo Masters Invitational
• This Is What I Had To Say About The N900 On National Television
• Gtalk Video Chat Is Possible On The N900

(I’m not the first person to cover this topic, anyway.)

finally I reached a stage where I could upload my small augmented reality app to extras-devel, so all those who asked for it can now play with it. But be aware that it is in extras-devel for a reason. In case you are wondering what I am writing about, here is a video of the demo:

in order to make it work, you will have to print the artoolkitplus markers. Furthermore there are these controls:

• scale the objects using the volume buttons
• select one of the objects for scaling by tapping on it
• tapping on the palette symbol triggers annotating by drawing on the screen
• tapping on the sun symbol fixes the sun to the current device position
• once fixed the shadows can be rotated using the arrow keys

Who knew that educating people in simple sabotage (defined as sabotage not requiring in-depth training or materials) could have so much in common with communicating free software values? I read the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual (pdf) which has been doing the rounds of management and security blogs recently, and one article on “motivating saboteurs” caught my eye enough to share:

This year I attended only one day of LinuxTag: Friday. There were many reasons for that but I am glad that I made at least that.

Some projects on gitorious want all patches via git merge requests. This is very tedious, particularly for small changes. It’s therefore likely that many small improvements will never be submitted. Projects must care about that if they care about quality.

As far as I can tell, you must do it like this:

Create a remote clone

You can do that via the project’s top level web page. For instance. Then you need to “checkout” that clone on the command line.

Or reuse an existing clone, though you’ll have to rebase against the original, probably fixing some awkward conflicts from previous commits to your clone if you haven’t used branches for everything as I suggest below. It looks like people often create new clones for each merge request.

Create a branch in your remote clone

For instance:

• git branch mr_dosomethingtofooforgoo master
• git checkout mr_dosomethingtofooforgoo
• Make your changes, add and commit them.
• git push origin mr_dosomethingtofooforgoo

Request a Merge

Click the “Request Merge” button at the right, when looking at your clone’s top-level. For instance. There is no “Merge Request” button when looking at an individual commit, or even when looking at a branch. This would make it far easier to submit small changes.

Then you must copy/paste the first-line and details from your commit message into the two text fields on the Request Merge form.

You must also choose your branch name from a drop-down list and choose the commit from that branch that you want to use.

Then you can finally click “Create Merge Request”.

A while back I wrote a few GStreamer plugins that expose OpenCV functionality as GStreamer elements (source code), I haven’t had much time to work on these recently myself, but thankfully a number of other folks have started contributing now. Yesterday Daniil Ivanov kindly packaged gst-opencv for the maemo extras-devel repository, and the n900 performs surprisingly well considering how CPU intensive many of the vision operations performed are.

This first video shows edge detection being performed from the n900′s main camera (whilst simultaneously being encoded):

Example gst-launch line: gst-launch v4l2camsrc device=/dev/video0 ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=480,height=272 ! videorate ! video/x-raw-yuv,framerate=12/1 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! edgedetect ! ffmpegcolorspace ! xvimagesink

This second video shows the faceblur element in action, it detects any faces in the current scene and blurs them out, the frame rate and resolution on this one had to be reduced somewhat due to the complexity of the operation, it looks clearer when performed directly to an xvimagesink rather than attempting to encode at the same time.

Example gst-launch line: gst-launch v4l2camsrc device=/dev/video0 ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=240,height=136 ! videorate ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=240,height=136,framerate=6/1 ! videoscale ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=120,height=68 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! faceblur profile=/home/user/haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml ! ffmpegcolorspace ! xvimagesink

For some more examples of the gst-opencv plugins in action on a normal desktop machine take a look at thiagoss’ blog post and a couple of videos by Alexandre Poltorak (edge detection and face blurring).

I’ve had another stab at getting Jokosher running on the Nokia n900 and I’m getting much closer to something actually usable now, as this screenshot attests:

There’s still a number of issues that need resolving before it’s really ready for use (most notably some playback/recording problems and some dialog boxes that are too large for the screen), but it’s getting there. When it’s working fully it could make the n900 a very useful device for portable podcasting, allowing users to record, edit, mix, encode and upload their roaming shows with nothing more than their phone.

I’ve been watching some videos from Dan Pink, an American writer that concentrates on the science of motivation and I think they’re actually very interesting for most people, but specially reassuring for FOSS people…

If you ask an artist why they became an artist, a lot of them will say: I can’t do anything else; I have to do this… It’s the same thing. — John Yodsnukis

Dan Pink argues that for most of the tasks of the 21st century (which are more right-brain thinking), carrot and sticks (extrinsic motivators) don’t work, instead, intrinsic motivators should be used.

RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

What Drives Motivation in the Modern Workplace?

And now that we are on the subject of creativity in work, Charles Leadbeater makes a very good argument about why radical innovation mostly comes from amateur professionals rather than traditional corporations.

Charles Leadbeater: The rise of the amateur professional

As part of Nokia's 'Open for Ideas' event, I had the opportunity to attend the Tampere Innovation Experience @ Demola day, which included a showcase more than 40 research projects that had been guided by open innovation principles. I teamed up with The Really Mobile Project's Ben Smith to shoot three videos of NRC (Nokia Research Centre) demos. The first video covers the Nokia Image Space research, with a demo of the Image Space mobile client on a Nokia N900.

Just a quick post to inform the N900 users that didn’t enable the extras-devel or extras-testing repositories that the contacts merger has been promoted to Maemo extras. Just look for “Merge your duplicate contacts” in the application manager and enjoy

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-06-14 through 2010-06-20

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-06-14 through 2010-06-20

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-06-14 through 2010-06-20

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-06-14 through 2010-06-20

MeeGo Handset UX style guide unveiled early (and now hidden)

"Bananas and pears", that was the oddly chosen name for a wiki document on meego.com describing the "Handset UX" user interface guidelines. These groundrules for the MeeGo system, and third party applications, were uncovered by Reggie Suplido before the wiki page was deleted. However, things of interest on the Internet never stay hidden for long, so it's still available. From the introduction, "MeeGo is a direct touch UI, meaning that users manipulate objects, such as a thumbnail of an image, directly through touch interactions. Content is surfaced and navigation hierarchies should be shallow and accessed through simple navigation systems. In addition to direct touch, MeeGo is optimized for multi-tasking usage and provides a rich platform integrated Applications. The MeeGo interface is scalable for different screen sizes, resolutions, and aspect ratios and it supports both portrait and landscape orientations." In your editor’s opinion, the document seems to describe a nice mix of existing Maemo 5 features (top-left button, menus from the title) with new enrichments to improve the general flow. The principles about interaction speed and flow will be just that - principles, however hopefully redeveloping the stack from the ground up, and having complete control over Qt, will mean a much more fluid UI than has been achieved on the N900 to date.

The link below goes to the original Talk discussion thread, which now links to various mirrors, including Google Cache and Engadget.

Road to MeeGo 1.1

Quim Gil has pointed to the roadmap and timeline for release planning purposes of MeeGo 1.1, due in October. According to the document, marketing will receive the release the week commencing 14th October; with general availability (GA) the following week: 21st October.

Of course the realities of software development mean that plans are always subject to change, but it seems a weekly agile approach is being followed which fixes time and quality, but instead varies features.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • MeeGo Handset UX style guide unveiled early (and now hidden)
   • Road to MeeGo 1.1
2. Applications
   • Augmented reality on N900
3. Development
   • Nokia opening Ovi Store up to individuals rather than just VAT-registered companies?
   • MeeGo open requirements process
   • Hosting Maemo and MeeGo build systems together
   • MeeGo developer "buddy" system proposed
   • PyMaemo's guide to packaging Python applications without Scratchbox
4. Devices
   • Ultimate MeeGo Dictionary
   • PR1.2 hildon-desktop has random CPU eating bug when using menu sub-sections
   • N8x0 3D accelerator running OpenGL ES tests
5. Announcements
   • Ansel-A digital darkroom for N900
   • FastSMS: portrait, T9 SMS writing
   • rotatedaemon gives 360 degree rotation
   • ...and 4 more

Last couple of weeks have been really busy. I have been dividing my time with work for my application and work for University. The last exams and essays are over and done with. Now I can concentrate fully to my coding.

My coding has been a deep plunge to Python and mathematics. Understanding the principles with the xkcd geohashing algorithms and researching for geographical tools and methods. Google has been a dear source for me lately. It’s knowledge I need and search engines give it to me rather easily. I have also raided a couple of my friends offices out of their books on Python and Qt. During this time I’ve been working with my assigned project mentor quite a lot, getting help with some obstacles that had gotten me stuck.

I established an Github repository for my project. I’ll be sharing and managing my code there from now on, so you all can go and take a look of what I’m coming up with. At this point there isn’t that much, but I have a lot of things brewing in my mind.

What works:

Geohash algorithm, Midgard, location(partly), distance between points, checking for internet connection.

What doesn’t wok:

Social features, bearing, map, and GUI

And this week, ill be concentrating on bearing and the map component

suski, your mission, if you choose to accept it, is:

Today’s Geohash is in Lahti (60.8959922841, 25.9775894322), some 88 km away from you

New on YouTube is a video demo showcasing the upcoming MeeGo for Tablet User Experience (UI). This was first seen at the recent Computex trade show running on a Quanta Redvale tablet and a number of other devices. The video includes an explanation of the multi-column homescreen, a quick look at the Photo and Music applications, a demo of HD video playback and a quick demo of Intel's AppUp app store. In addition to embedding the video in the full story we have also broken this video down in detail to offer you some insight into the MeeGo 1.1 tablet user interface. Read on for further details. 

Expectation-Maximization

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a popular algorithm in statistics and machine learning to estimate the parameters of a model that depends on latent variables. (A latent variable is a variable that is not expressed in the dataset and thus that you can’t directly count. For example, in pLSA, the document topics z are latent variables.) EM is very intuitive. It works by pretending that we know what we’re looking for: the model parameters. First, we make an initial guess, which can be either random or “our best bet”. Then, in the E-step, we use our current model parameters to estimate some “measures”, the ones we would have used to compute the parameters, had they been available to us. In the M-step, we use these measures to compute the model parameters. The beauty of EM is that by iteratively repeating these two steps, the algorithm will provably converge to a local maximum for the likelihood that the model generated the data.

We brought you news of a MeeGo tablet a little while back, but a detailed demo of its early MeeGo UI has just popped up in HD. The video clearly shows the paneled homescreen which holds your photos, videos, web feeds and other content in vertical columns that can be scrolled sideways. It automatically updates itself and also packs a deep level of social integration removing the need of dedicated apps.

It also has a simpler app launching screen which works just as well. MeeGo supports full blown multitasking, HD video playback, and five finger multitouch. The current demo comes with Intel’s App Up client fro downloading more apps, while the Nokia variant will probably come with the Ovi Store.

Apart from that the UI looks intuitive, fast and has all the eye candy that you could wish for. I have wanted Nokia to make a large screen internet tablet for a while now and it looks as if Nokia World will hold the key. The MeeGo tablet will give me an amazing web browser with flash and multiple video codecs, so I can virtually throw anything at it and it will play it. This is something the iPad cannot do and that’s why its not for me.

What do you think?

[via: My Nokia Blog]If you enjoyed this, you might also like:

• The First MeeGo Tablet Has Just Made A Pretty Impressive Appearance
• MeeGo 1.0 Running On A Netbook & Other Devices At IDF 2010
• Maemo Select: Applications, Themes & Wallpapers For The N900
• Great Video Overview Of The N900
• Web Based Version Of The Ovi Store Now Available On The N900

Over the last few years, I've had a burning conviction that's been growing and growing as I watch the current craze for 'Apps' blossom. Now, I've nothing against genuine applications or games, but it has to be said that a large number of so-called 'Apps' are simply scraping or managing exactly the same data as you get right now, on any phone, for free. And my way there are no installations, no complications and no hassle. Apps? Pah - I've a new slogan to rival Apple's. "There's a Bookmark for that!"

The modern marketeer has their work cut out for them with smartphones - the traditional methods don't always work, so it's a good thing that Nokia's ecosystem is helping them find a new way to get their message out and reinforced with their customers. The Ovi Store and the App Wizard are two new elements in the quest to try and find a way to make advertising on smartphones effective... through applications. Read on for some thoughts.

I am attending GUADEC

So the input context skeleton is finally in place, and gedit can start receiving commit signals from the MeegoTouch keyboard:


I can even create new documents and switch tabs while typing on it, and it correctly follows focus. Not much else to try yet!

Many thanks to murrayc for Multipress Input Method, from which I took many build system related bits and of course to Mohammad Anwari for the original Hildon Input Method.

I’ve been busy with some “internal work” that was not that fun and due to that, it was not worth it talking about it . However during this time I wrote some KDE stuff and right now I’m busy with some awesome work and this one I’ll share with everybody

On the Maemo users mailing list, there has been a discussion about the Go Programming Language. Various people have tried various things to get Go to work, so I thought I would take a crack at it and see what I could do with it.
<!--break-->
Before I try installing something on my N900, I like to try and install it on my Ubuntu box. So, I followed the installation steps for Go to run natively under Ubuntu. I already had most of the C tools installed and I’ve been using Mercurial for some other projects, so getting set up was fairly easy. At the end of the install process, I received a message 2 known bugs; 0 unexpected bugs. Everything looked good to go.

Joikuspot, an app that lets you turn your device into a wifi hotspot is now available at the Ovi Store for the Nokia N900. The Maemo version came out of beta last March and has been ready for purchase and download at Joiku’s own site. Its presence in the Ovi Store now makes it even easier for users to download this great app.

Joikuspot for the Nokia N900 costs $9.99 and is definitely worth it. The only question I have is, “why did it take 3 months to show up at the Ovi Store?”

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

• JoikuSpot Beta for Nokia N900 Now Available – Turns your N900 To WiFi Hotspot
• Joikuspot for Nokia N900 Now Out of Beta. Coming to Ovi Store Soon
• Screenshots Preview of Joikuspot for Nokia N900

My GSoC project is progressing step-by-step and now I got to this point where I had to add some installation scripts to make it easier to install the application. For Python applications there used to be Distutils which has been gradually replaced by Setuptools. Setting up Setuptools is rather confusing in the beginning.

For example if you’re shipping random data files with your application and accessing those files by reading them as regular files, you have to mark the package as not zip-safe. There are some options to read those files from the zip file altough I am not sure if this is possible with Qt4, more specifically QIcon. There is more discussion about packaging your Python application and reading packaged files here.

Getting icons, modules and other files properly included took some time. For arbitrary files I used “data_files” parameter. For Python modules inside a directory “packages”. For modules in single file form “py_modules”. To automagically generate /usr/bin/transifex-mobile I used “console_script” inside “entry_point”. The resulting setup.py is accessible here, hopefully this saves some time who’s doing exactly the same thing.

So the application pretty much handles PO files, you can open them, edit strings, filter, search them and save the file. On N900 I am having some issues with QFileDialog, it seems to be extremely slow and sluggish. You can try out the application on your PC by:

git clone git://gitorious.org/transifex-mobile/transifex-mobile.git
cd transifex-mobile
python main.py


Setuptools should handle installation from source like this:

sudo python setup.py install

Afterwards you should be able to start application easily, since init script is added to /usr/bin:

transifex-mobile


I added some custom commands to setup.py, for example cleaning script to remove temporary files from the source tree:

python setup.py clean


I also made an attempt to add support for Debian package generation. Unfortunately the file/directory paths are messed up in the resulting Debian package:

python setup.py dch # Rotate changelog
python setup.py dpkg_buildpackage # Generate *.deb


I would be thankful to anyone who could help out with testing. Any comments about the path mess in Debian package are also welcome.

Git tip: I had some commits in my Git repository with incorrect e-mail address. I found cure for this here:

git filter-branch -f --env-filter "export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME='Lauri Võsandi'; export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL='lauri.vosandi@gmail.com'" HEAD

Announcing another maemo.org Bugday:

Wednesday, June 30th, 16:00-00:00 UTC
in #maemo-bugs on Freenode IRC

No specific topic set – take a look at our wiki for some ideas.

Bugdays are about hanging out together on IRC, triaging/discussing some reports in maemo.org Bugzilla, and introducing new people into triaging. No technical knowledge needed, no obligations. Step by and say hello to the Bugsquad or become part of it.

The lights start to fade, the audience goes quiet, the curtains start to rise, spotlight on, drum-roll…

I have the great pleasure to finally announce the 1.0 version of the Nokia Qt SDK. It is available for download on the usual location at Forum Nokia as of now. In addition to the final Windows and Linux versions we also added a beta version for MacOSX 10.6 as well.
In case you have been using the Release Candidate, the integrated updater will allow you to get your installation up-to-date, there is no need to reinstall.

In related news, there is now a public beta of Nokia signing Symbian apps for free and the Ovi Store will accept Qt apps starting in the next month. Read more about this.

This final release contains the following components:
• Qt Creator 2.0 final
• Qt Simulator 1.0 final
• Qt Mobility libraries
• a current version of MADDE
• Symbian packages
• Smartinstaller packages for Symbian
• the experimental Remotecompiler
• Documentation for all components

Please use our Bugtracker to report bugs and provide feedback (select the “Nokia Qt SDK installer” project).

Changelog for the 1.0 release:
• Installer:
  • [QTSDK-10] The Nokia SDK installer attempts to install by default an unsigned “USB network driver” for MS Windows (needed by Maemo?)
  • [QTSDK-57] Can’t install or upgrade the SDK on Linux/amd64
  • [QTSDK-63] Qt Creator is not killed before uninstall
  • [QTSDK-70] Mac: “internet enable” the disk images
  • [QTSDK-72] mac install missing QtMobility headers for maemo target
  • [QTSDK-74] installation completes with progress bar at 97%
  • [QTSDK-87] problems when installing with sudo
  • [QTSDK-90] Application hangs on windows when trying to use ContactManager
  • [QTSDK-92] Cannot build for Symbian with out-of-the-box Nokia Qt SDK
  • [QTSDK-96] SDKMaintenanceTool timeout for checking repository
• Simulator:
  • [QTSIM-8] make the close button in the Maemo theme functional
  • [QTSIM-40] Mobility Multimedia Examples cannot be compiled for Simulator

There is a lot of effort being put into QtWebKit in order to make it attractive on the mobile front.

Nokia has made a number of developer announcements today, which significantly strengthen their developer services and offerings. Perhaps most interesting is news of a public beta service that allows developers to get their content Symbian Signed at no cost (compared to a previous first time signing cost of up to $215). Also important is the news that individuals can now register as Ovi Publishers (previously restricted to companies) and that the Ovi Store is now accepting Qt-based applications. Finally, and the most significant in the long term, is the first full release of the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 and the accompanying Nokia Smart Installer (previously in beta). Read on for additional details. 

The first MeeGo Conference is scheduled to take place in Dublin (Ireland) between November 15th - 17th. It aims to bring together a technical audience (developers, OEMs, OSVs, and MeeGo project contributors) to learn about the current status of MeeGo and discuss future directions. The event, which will take place at the Dublin's newly redeveloped Aviva Stadium, follows in the footsteps of the Maemo Summit and similar Moblin events. We'll be in Dublin in November to bring you live coverage of the event.

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Last week we announced five winners who’d won the title of ‘Maemo Masters’ which enabled them to purchase a ‘Maemo Masters Edition’ of the N900 that comes with special goodies (including a Maemo Masters T-Shirt and a cool BH-214 stereo bluetooth headset) for the readers of The MeeGo Blog.

For those of you who missed out, I have some great news. If you entered the first or second week’s contest, I will also consider the same entry for the contests coming in the following weeks AND you can also take part in the third week’s contest again to triple your chances of winning! Sweet?

For those of you who’ve just seen this contest, don’t worry we still have 3 weeks and 15 Maemo Masters to be crowned. So how do you enter this week’s contest? Simple, just enter your name in the comments section to enter. No questions to answer. Good luck!

Winners of week 2:

• Aruj Ali
• Mahender
• Samir Kshirsagar
• unitechy
• Salil

Many congratulations! I’ll be in touch via email with the details.

PS: Please note that this contest is geographically limited to those of you in India only.

Similar Posts:

• First Week's Winners Of The Maemo Masters Invitational & How To Enter For The Second Week
• Announcing The Maemo Masters Invitational
• Here's Your Final Chance To Enter The Maemo Masters Invitational
• Hunt Your Way To A Nokia E73 ‘Mode’ Or A Nokia E72
• Here’s Your Chance To Win Nokia Music Store Vouchers & Get Questions Answered

A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.31.4
release.

- Implement DLNA's 'AnyContainer' upload extenstion. This allows clients to
  upload items without having to specify target container. Currently it only
  works for the Tracker backend.
- Report types of items that could be created/uploaded in a container and allow
  clients to search containers by this property.
- Port last bits of C code to Vala. Now Rygel is completely written in Vala.
- Make Rygel build/work against both current stable and unstable Vala releases.
- Offer SD transcoding in EU profile. Seems certain Sony Bravia TVs only
  support EU profiles. With this change, they should at least be able to use the
  SD transcoding.
- Two more unit tests.
- Provide default configuration for WMV transcoding.
- Correctly handle boolean commandline option for disabling WMV transcoder.
- External:
  - Port the external plugin to use the new D-Bus MediaServer specification:
    http://live.gnome.org/Rygel/MediaServer2Spec. The new specification is meant
    to be very generic and scale well to large media hierarchies.
  - Make use of search API when implemented by the external application.
  - Various other performance improvements.
- Preferences UI:
  - Improve resize behavior.
  - Add missing bevel to URI tree view.
  - Replace GtkVBox by GtkVButtonBox where appropriate.
- Localization:
  - Added Punjabi Translation.
  - Updated Norwegian bokmål translation.
  - Updated Galician translations.
  - Updated Spanish translation.
  - Updated Hebrew translation.
- Various non-functional improvements.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require gtk+-3.0 >= 2.90.3.
- Require gupnp-av >= 0.5.7.
- Require gupnp-vala >= 0.6.7.

Bugs fixed in this release:

593628 - mp2ts transcoder not working with certain Bravia TV models.
596214 - URI table is missing bevel.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Eric Anderson 
A S Alam 
Fran Diéguez 
Jorge González 
Kjartan Maraas 
Yaron Shahrabani 

Nokia's quoted comments regarding the future of its Nseries devices have been causing much comment in the media in last few days. This editorial puts some perspective into the story - Nseries devices only represent around 12% of Nokia's Symbian portfolio and the evolution of the brand towards Maemo/MeeGo had been signposted since Autumn 2009. Moreover it is vital to understand that MeeGo and Symbian are complimentary parts of Nokia's overall software strategy. Read on for further analysis of the evolution of Nseries and a number of salient facts.

There has been a lot of people writing in the press that the N8 is the end of Symbian and other such nonsense. Last Fall Nokia made it clear that future high end devices were going to be powered by Maemo (now MeeGo) so the fact that the Nseries lines is going this way is clearly no surprise to anyone. I think people may be a bit disappointed that the upcoming N8, that hasn’t even been released yet, has a visible end of life. As someone who bought and enjoys using the Nokia N900, I am a bit hesitant to get the N8 since if looks to be following the same pattern. Then again, I switch phones so often that this shouldn’t really matter. Others though do not switch this much and thanks to webOS, Android, and the iPhone people have come to expect their smartphones to be upgradeable for at least the 2 year contract cycle. We have not seen any news that the N8 will be upgradeable to MeeGo so this concerns people who were considering paying for this new flagship device.

We also have not seen much in the way of what MeeGo really means and I am not completely sold that Nokia is all in with this either. Nokia has changed their mind and it seems tough to sell to developers what the path forward is with changes and inconsistencies in your strategy. Rafe assembled an excellent article over on All About Maemo that lays it all out.

Lately many people have been writing to me by e-mail, IM or to my maemo.org account, mostly asking for help on how to use Mappero or request new features. While I'm glad to see that there's some interest about the project, I feel a need to tell everybody that writing personal messages to the developer is not the best way to get help. I'm sorry to say that I couldn't answer most of these requests: it would have simply killed off my time, which instead was spent working on Mappero (see below in the post for some news on what i did).
On the other hand, I understand that the Maemo community is growing a lot, and many new members might not know how to find their way through all the amount of information in maemo.org and related projects. Unfortunately I'm not going to deliver any solutions to this, but I can at least write here a few pieces of advice that I think are generally productive.

I recently watched a really interesting you tube video about drive. Eg that which motivates us.
It’s really interesting in two ways. Firstly the content is interesting to me, as it pertains to things that motivate people and what generally makes people happy in work.
The second, is that the style of the video is fantastic, it’s basically a lecture which has been put to an animation of drawing on a whiteboard, drawing pictures and words that go with what is being said. I really love this idea and it makes for a great video. So if you got this far without clicking on the link, go spent the next 10 minutes watching. It’s ok. I’ll wait.

The Maemo Community Council raised with Nokia the issue that upgrading to Maemo 5 PR1.2 forces the user to subscribe, via SMS, to the "MyNokia" service. The user has no ability to opt-out: it's either subscribe or don't use the device.

One evening and the map works. Two whole days and I still cant get bearing calculation working. Mathematics is definitely not my strongest area. I think I’m calling in the medics with the mess of calculating bearings.

I originally thought I would use PyQt but as it turns out, there is no map widget available for that on Maemo. So PyGtk and osm-gps-map it is, the map widget is already being used in other Maemo applications. My mentor contacted the osm-gps-map team and they were nice enough to verify that their widget can support custom CloudMade maps. This means I will be able to design a map style that fits the spirit of my application.

If you want to see the map part working, try running map.py from my GitHub repository. Here is how it looks like on an Ubuntu Netbook:

Next week I’ll be concentrating on minor details and organizing an event for nearly 600 persons. After that it’s an intensive week wrapping this up for midterm evaluation.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-06-21 through 2010-06-27

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-06-21 through 2010-06-27

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-06-21 through 2010-06-27

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-06-21 through 2010-06-27

Dear Nokia,

Nokia response to forced MyNokia subscription in PR1.2

The Maemo Community Council, an elected body of five representatives for the Maemo community, approached Nokia formally about a response to bug #10366 and the forced subscription of users to their "MyNokia" service - without the possibility of opting out - when upgrading to PR1.2. Nokia have engaged on the bug report, and Quim Gil is raising the issue of the missing opt-out within the Fremantle maintenance programme. However, the official reply is standard sterile Big Corp condescension and hubris: "The first use of the latest software for Nokia mobile computers include functionality preparing the device for the service use on behalf of the consumer. In this connection Nokia also provides the consumer with the possibility to receive support messages to assist the consumer get the most out of the purchased Nokia mobile computer. These messages include tips on the capabilities and features of the Nokia devices and available services and features. We believe that these support messages are for the benefit of the consumer and help those consumers who are not yet fully aware of the possibilities their devices offer to make the most out of their purchase." Graham Cobb, a former council member, has been involved in the community discussions around this and has produced a tool, "notmynokia", which can be installed prior to the upgrade to REALLY give the user the "possibility" to receive support messages. The package tricks the system into thinking the user has already accepted the terms, and so does not present a dialogue box of which the choices are, effectively, "yes; I'd love to subscribe to this useful service" and "yes; please subscribe me to this valuable service".

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We tried to get the combined GUADEC and aKademy conferences to Tampere in 2009, but a warmer place unfortunately won. However, we will be hosting this year's aKademy so at least KDE and Qt fans will get to enjoy this beautiful northern industrial city.

The main conference will be held at the Tampere University over the weekend, and then the remaining hackweek will be in the nice Demola facility in the Finlayson district. Expect great connectivity and close proximity to all Tampere nightlife.

I'm involved with two aKademy activities:

• GeoClue presentation on the location service that can be used on any Linux desktop and is used in MeeGo. I'll also talk about what desktops can do when location is available
• Midgard Gathering during Mon-Wed of the hackweek. Midgard provides a content repository for applications that should be available also for Qt apps through GObject Introspection. With some proven performance benefits and replication support, Midgard should be interesting for any desktop or mobile app that deals with structured data

In addition there will be a Maemo / MeeGo meetup in the Plevna brewery on Friday evening. See you there!

Next week I’ll be concentrating on minor details

Like getting the application working on N900 and both on GeoClue and Maemo’s liblocation

The whole universe seems to be buzzing about Tomi Ahonen’s post about iPhone economics, which is unfortunate cause it’s completely incorrect. First of all let me say I like Tomi. He’s helped out with the Mobile 2.0 events in the past, I’ve had a few chances to have conversations with him, he’s a good guy. Even smart people can be wrong however, and in this case there are definite issues with the analysis laid out.

Recently I presented a small Qt 4.6 based demo on the LinuxTag in Berlin, as an example of something you could do with the Nokia Qt SDK. It combined existing projects like the Tiled map editor and the Box2D physics library with Qt Mobility’s sensors API for reading out the accelerometer. It looks like this on the N900:

Andreas has demonstrated before that integrating Box2D and QGraphicsView is easy. In this demo I have used the generic object layer support in the Tiled map editor to conveniently define the starting points and properties of some boxes, including the definition of the colliding parts of the rather minimal tile based background.

The big red boxes around the sides are a quick hack to prevent any of the dynamic boxes from leaving the scene. Since indeed, turning your device will change the gravity applied to the boxes as appropriate. This was the first time I’ve used an accelerometer and I expected it to be somewhat more complicated, but combining the sensors API in Qt Mobility with Box2D was as easy as:

    QAccelerometerReading *reading = mAccelerometer->reading();
    b2Vec2 gravity(-reading->x(), -reading->y());
    mWorld->SetGravity(gravity);

As documented, the accelerometer gives us the force applied to the device relative to freefall. When the device is in rest, this is the exact opposite of the applied gravitational force. Hence we have to reverse the x and y readings when turning them into the gravitational force applied to the Box2D world. One little caveat: as of Qt Mobility 1.0 the application will need to run as root on the N900 to be able to get any values out of the accelerometer. This is bug QTMOBILITY-326.

Here is the demo in action:

The complete sources of this demo are available on gitorious.org, on the ‘qtarcade’ branch. The repository includes the necessary classes from Tiled and Box2D so that it’s easy to try it out.

With Qt Creator 2.0 and the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 released last week, it could not be easier to start hacking and implement your own crazy ideas. Who will be the first to get his cool Qt app signed for free and distributed on the Ovi store?

A great opportunity has arisen to come and work with us on the Service Experience team @ INdT

I need someone to work on my team creating, maintaining and supporting a community of open source developers and implementers around the world. The full job spec is pasted below but the most important skills are experience working with open source development, fluency in English and some experience working with social projects in the areas of Education, Health or the Environment.

Please, if you would like to be considered either send me your CV or get in contact directly with our human resources department at INdT.

Please pass this opportunity on to anyone you think might be ideal for this role and I am looking forward to meeting some really cool people at the interviews :).

Mandatory

Education Level: Degree - but exceptional candidates without will be considered
Desirable Experience: 0-1 year
English: Fluent
Must Have: Demonstrable open source community involvement preferably as a committer to an open source project.
Would Like But Not Essential: Java, Debian, MySQL, ECMA script, Previous voluntary work in the fields of Education, Health or the Environment

Job Role

You will evangelize the adoption of our developer products and support implementations of our solutions worldwide. You will bring strong and well-rounded coding skills in a wide range of open source technologies along with excellent writing, presentation and support skills. You will be measured on growth in adoption of our developer products and customer satisfaction in our implementer communities. You need to be able to work equally well answering simple questions with NGO's, highly technical ones with developers at our partner companies as well as reporting accurately to senior managers.

Key Responsibilities

• Actively tweet, blog and write sample code, developer articles and tutorials for our products as well as provide support online through our forums.
• Provide on-line support and advice.
  
• Advocate for and evangelize our developer products and APIs in multiple mediums.
• Participate in architectural,design and support discussions with strategic partners to speed adoption and ensure best practices during implementation.
• Influence our developer product strategy by working with product management, engineering, marketing, business development and operations.

We are building an outstanding team around our social investment projects here at INdT - if you want to be a part of this write and tell us why.

Good Luck!

I’ve been using the Nokia E73 Mode as my primary T-Mobile device for the last couple of weeks and as awesome as the N900 is I am finding the utility and ease-of-use of the E73 Mode to be more compelling at the moment. If you are bored with your N900, then you should check out this Android Central post that shows Google Android Froyo 2.2 running on the N900. There are definitely limitations with the build at the moment, but it is pretty slick it runs as well as it does.

I wonder if the issues with the SD card mounting have to do with the fact that there is an integrated flash drive on the N900 since I have seen issue with apps on the HTC Incredible (one of the only Android phones with an integrated flash drive). I am pleased enough with the N900 and Maemo while also having my own Sprint HTC EVO 4G that I do not plan to attempt this port. Any readers try this out? Keep in mind, I am NOT recommending it and just thought it was pretty cool that it is possible.

• Feature parity with the GTK version
• 5 Windows (Two ways of unit conversion, quick jump, and recent)
  
• 1985 LOCs
• From May 26 to June 15th
  

• 1 Window
• 1658 LOCs (766 of that is hildonize.py which Gonvert doesn't use all of it)
• From October 29th to January 9th
  

Notice: this is a rant posted only to my “life” blog category, if you happen to not like personal stories but got this due some syndication using my global RSS instead of specific, please forgive me and just ignore this post.

All About Maemo is changing its name to All About MeeGo to reflect the creation of MeeGo, following the merger of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin. Our aim is to continue to inform, educate and entertain, through the provision of independent, comprehensive and high quality coverage of the MeeGo platform and ecosystem. Reggie Suplido joins All About MeeGo, who will run and administer the forums, which are soft launching today. Read on for more details. 

We store our data in a decomposed way. For single value properties we create a table per class and have a column per property. Multi value properties go in a separate table. For now I’ll focus on those single value properties.

Imagine you have a MusicPiece. In Nepomuk that’s a subclass of InformationElement. InformationElement adds properties like title and subject. MusicPiece has performer, which is a Contact, and duration, an integer. A Contact has a fullname.

Alright, that looks like this in our internal storage.

Querying that in SPARQL goes like this. I’ll add the Nepomuk prefixes.

SELECT ?musicpiece ?title ?subject ?performer {
   ?musicpiece a nmm:MusicPiece ;
               nmm:performer ?p ;
               nie:title ?title ;
               nie:subject ?subject .
   ?p nco:fullname ?performer .
} ORDER BY ?title

A problem if you ORDER BY the title field is that Tracker needs to make a join and a full table scan with that InformationElement table.

So we’re working on what we’ll call domain specific indexes. It means that we’ll for certain properties have a redundant mirror column, on which we’ll place the index. The native SQL query will be generated to use that mirror column instead. A good example is nie:title for nmm:MusicPiece.

ps. A normal triple store has instead a huge table with just three columns: subject, predicate and object. That wouldn’t help you much with optimizing of course.

Today is Day 1 for the MeeGo Handset User Experience; this means the software for the handset category of MeeGo devices is being made public through meego.com. The release includes the Qt based MeeGo Touch UI framework, a number of reference UX elements and the core application suite. Those interested in trying it on a device can do so on the Nokia N900 or Aava Mobile, which are being used as reference development hardware. Read on for further details.

Day 1 for the MeeGo UI is here and with that comes a ‘developer preview’ of how the OS is shaping up. There are a bunch of screenshots available on the official MeeGo website but if you are feeling adventurous, there is a N900 version you can play with. The current release comes with a dialer, sms, photo viewer, browser, and personal connection management applications. These apps are a works in progress, and the MeeGo UI is no where near ready for mainstream adoption yet.

The idea behind MeeGo 1.0 for handsets is to give everyone an idea of how the MeeGo 1.1 release (due in October) is shaping up. The release is not bug free and here is a list of some workarounds to those issues. The MeeGo team has also published a video showing off the UI, take a look for yourself and let us know what you think? A nice mashup of the best from the popular platforms with some bonus features?

I will reserve judgment till I play with it on my N900, it is also worthy to note that Nokia’s next Nseries will probably not look very similar to the UI we’re seeing above. Although they do have a tendency to keep most most of its as they are usually the ones who’ve worked the most on it. (Symbian for example, the other manufactures have their UI layers)

So what do you think of the MeeGo 1.1 developer release?

Similar Posts:

• MeeGo 1.0 Is Here, Even For The N900 – Although Nokia Will Not Be Officially Supporting It
• Possible Nokia MeeGo UI Captured On Video – Is Super Slick
• What Is MeeGo?
• Huge: Nokia's Maemo & Intel's Moblin Combine To Become Meego
• Intel & Nokia Merge Maemo With Moblin – Call It MeeGo

Following on from today's MeeGo Handset UX Day 1 release we have collated some screenshots and a video to show you the look and feel of the user interface. However bear in mind that this is an early release (pre-alpha), is incomplete and is the base from which productised versions (those appearing in commercial devices) will be created. This means any end-user products are likely to look substantially different. Read on to see the video and screenshots.