First, let me apologize for not pushing a lot of updates lately, I recently moved to Finland so have been quite busy the last few weeks. :)

I recently pushed 1.2.2 to extras-testing which has the option to “Save attachments” from the application menu when viewing an MMS, which should help everyone do whatever they want with the media they receive. :) Please help test and vote for it at http://maemo.org/packages/package_instance/view/fremantle_extras-testing_free_armel/fmms/1.2.2/

In closing I’d like to thank everyone for downloading and using this application! Just another 500 000 downloads to the first million! ;-)

PS. Is this the first application from maemo.org to reach 500 000? :)

David Gilson has a theory. It concerns correlating the aspect ratio of a smartphone's virtual or physical qwerty keyboard with text entry speed, on the grounds that one's thumbs have more (or less) work to do, depending on form factor. Read on for his data and the theory in detail - and see if you can help produce more data points with your own device(s).

Just one day after releasing mappero 3.0+beta11, another version is out. Today's hot dish is the Google Maps address disambiguation dialog:

It sometimes happens (especially to people living in Italy) that the address you need exists in different cities. “Via Roma”, for instance, is one very common street name in Italy, so if you are searching for it in Google Maps web interface you won't get a route, but instead you'll get a list of possible matches. And so far, in such a situation Mappero would have spit out the infamous “Invalid source or destination.” error message.
In today's release the situation is improved, because when we get a disambiguation request from Google Maps, Mappero shows the screen above and lets you pick your destination. This should hopefully save you some time when typing addresses.

I still have a few unclear points about Google Maps behaviour, because sometimes the reply is different from what we get via web, and it seems that it doesn't always honour our request for local results only. So, if someone is familiar with Google Maps parameters and knows how to get the destination address resolved using a local search, please let me know and as a reward I'll append your name to all street names returned by Mappero. ;-)

By the way, the main reason for releasing this today was that this version also fixes the problem when libmappero doesn't get automatically upgraded along with Mappero. Also, the fact of having received a huge donation stimulated me to do something in return. :-)

Oh! I hope that now you won't be expecting a new release every day! But in case you do, here is how you can make it happen.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-07-26 through 2010-08-01

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-07-26 through 2010-08-01

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-07-26 through 2010-08-01

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-07-26 through 2010-08-01

Front Page

Where are those mobile Qt apps? How to move forward

Attila Csipa, a member of the current Maemo Community Council, concludes his series of blog posts looking at Qt by musing on the future, and what steps should be taken now to leverage Nokia's worldwide platform and get a critical mass of developers (and so applications, and so users, and so developers) on to their strategic platform: "As seen from the infamous PR1.2 delay, a coupled-with-the-firmware release cycle is detrimental to the platform. If multiple devices are on the market, it would mean instant-fragmentation as developers would have to code for the Qt released with the last firmware. This is eating Android alive, too, as various handsets have different upgrade cycles. A separate distribution mechanism HAS to be employed." An interesting article and one which many may dismiss, and others - more worryingly - will think they're already following.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Where are those mobile Qt apps? How to move forward
2. Applications
   • Tour of App Search Widget for quick app launching
   • Using Monorail and Maemo's open nature to share via IM networks
   • Update for Advanced Geocaching Tool brings bug fixes
   • ...and 3 more
3. Development
   • Mailing list for following maemo.org Package interface comments
4. Community
   • Voting closes as Maemo coding competition wraps up
5. Devices
   • N900s still losing their USB ports
6. Maemo in the Wild
   • Angry Birds voted "Best Game in Ovi Store"
7. Announcements
   • Star Trek-inspired "Okuda" theme now in Extras Testing
   • Documents To Go Premium now available for Maemo 5

That’s it. I claim my GSoC10 project finished.

And what did I actually do? I coded like a mad person at times, slept much too little, found myself in odd places, took some time off and did nothing related to my project, swam in the sea of despair, learned a lot and had fun.

The application is not in all parts what I planned it to be and in some parts it’s more than I expected. Now the version 1.0 is in extras-testing. It would be nice to hear some testing reports, the bug tracker can be found in GitHub . Hopefully soon enough I’ll have the opportunity to just lay back and watch people going on their adventures. A short introduction to the application can be found in the tab the Tablet of Adventure.

Although the GsoC10 project is finished, the work with the Tablet of Adventure is not. I have couple of ideas of how I could make my software more versatile. And then there will be the versions. First an Ubuntu desktop version, so you can watch where your friends are going. And if I get to an agreement with my University I’ll make my software run on Android too. And so on. This was only the beginning.

artwork by Nina Mutik (nina.mutik (a) gmail.com)

The smartphone is making an audible difference to the world (writes Clive Thompson at Wired). He’s spotted that his mobile phone bills are dropping, and there’s one obvious cause. he’s not phoning people as much as he used to, and what calls he is making are not lasting as long. It’s all to do with the rise of social networks and smartphone connectivity, "This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways."

A painful fact is that Flash 10.1 is not currently available for the Nokia N900 (well, at least painful for N900 owners). If we look at the bigger picture, applications (like my version-forging TweakFlashVer) uncover a few non-N900 specific problems with the way things are done in Flash land.

Some might have already noticed the "launch" of the Qt Web Runtime. What is Qt Web Runtime? Simply put Qt Web Runtime provides a runtime environment for web applications, applications written using HTML/CSS/Javascript.

A question which I get often is - what are web applications and how do they differ from just pointing browser at web pages or saving web links as application shortcuts and launching them in a browser (very much like native installed applications) ? Web Application working group is a good place to start.

Web Browser consist basically of 2 parts (simplified).

1. Browser application/framework (UI /chrome, process model, extensions, settings etc) and
   
2. Web Rendering engine. This is the part which does much of the work, like fetching web pages, rendering them, running javascript etc. This is the part which implements the various W3C specifications and standards

Web Runtime shares much of the characteristics of a web browser (in this case webkit/Qt), while focusing towards the needs of an application developer.

• Widely deployed, understood and mature web technologies html/css/javascript. (enables rich client side applications to be written by web developers)
  
• Emerging W3C specifications e.g Widget Specifications which provide the foundations for (hopefully) a standardized environment for web application developers in crucial areas missing from the web browser paradigm like widget API, packaging & configuration, digital signing, view modes among many others.
  
• Provides an execution and deployment mechanism (e.g how web applications are installed, executed, transition between various view modes, integration to platform UX/chrome etc)
• Rich API's comparable to native application developers enabling the use of e.g sensors, runtime info, calender, file system (among many others) etc while developing rich web applications.
  

Working on standardizing the various API's and specs through W3C would help unify web application development, which at the moment is quite fragmented (while predominantly using the same web technologies) e.g opera widgets, apple dashboard widgets, yahoo widgets among many others. This would also mean better return of investments for developers (while at the same time enriching choice for end user).

If you are a web developer and own a N900 , you can take the QtWeb Runtime for a ride. It is now available from maemo extras repositories . Writing a W3C complaint widget should be relatively straight forward (Just follow the above w3c specs). You can also find some simple examples in the source code.Code is available here. Developers can discuss and provide feedback at Qt Web Runtime Forum. Remember, this is work in progress !

We just spotted a video demo of what looks like MeeGo OS running inside a Nokia Phone Emulator. The screens don't look like the UI where MeeGo screenshots pointed us about a month ago. But we heard that Nokia is going to have it's own UI on top of the native MeeGo UI and this might be atleast a portion of that. But the UI looks pretty impressive !httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDp1MGlfGQ8&feature=youtu.be Thx to chilko for spotting this vid who also feels that video might be about Symbian^4 rather than MeeGo. But we saw the extras icon in the video so its MeeGo we say ! But it might be confidential information and we shall find out soon when the video is yanked !

A video showing off an iteration of the MeeGo OS has popped up on the internet and from all indications, it looks like Nokia’s MeeGo UI. What lends credence to this fact is the Ovi Store demo that forms a part of the video.

The UI looks incredibly slick and I can’t wait till Nokia World when Nokia will reveal its first MeeGo device and if this UI is anything to go by, we have a fight on our hands!

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

• Pre-Alpha Meego Tablet UI Gets Demo’ed In HD: Impresses
• The First MeeGo Tablet Has Just Made A Pretty Impressive Appearance
• Video Demo Of MeeGo For Handsets – An Installable Version For The N900 Is Available
• MeeGo 1.0 Running On A Netbook & Other Devices At IDF 2010
• The N900 Is Now Shipping To Europe, Middle-East & North America.

What’s the most used internet application on your Symbian phone? It’s likely that the web browser is going to feature quite highly if we were to have a survey, and the huge number of eyes that mobile websites can gather is only going to grow in the future. That makes it one of the growth areas for online advertisers, and the capabilities of Symbian-powered smartphones should help drive innovation and help grow the market for everyone involved. My thoughts below....

As I mentioned last week one of the pieces of software that I have been waiting to see released for the N900 is an Office editor and creator. I actually am a bit surprised that DataViz launched this software for such a small Maemo 5 community when the larger Palm webOS community has been clamoring for something from DataViz or Quickoffice for quite some time. The Nokia N900 is a good fit for such software due to the QWERTY keyboard, large display, Bluetooth keyboard support, and TV out capability, but I am not sure how many copies they will sell at $29.99. If you purchaed their Viewer Edition, version 1.0, then the upgrade to Premium is free so that is worth the $10 you paid for the Viewer. You do get 30 days to test it out and if Office editing and creation is essential to your work then the $29.99 price may not be much of a concern and it certainly wasn’t back in the days before the iPhone forced software prices to drop like a rock.

The summer is slowly coming to an end and so is Google Summer of Code. I have been patching up Transifex-Mobile for final release and it seems to be quite usable at the moment. Now I need your help with promotion to Maemo Extras repository.

Since I couldn’t get screencast applet working properly, here goes a bunch of screenshots and some notes. The main screen mimics Transfex‘s dashboard view. The user can see her locks there, browse projects etc. Left-top button shows user’s first and last name plus e-mail address. Verify that those are correct before pushing any files back to server. PO-file metadata is updated based on this information. In current release editing local PO-files is also enabled, just tap on “Open local file” in the menu.

Browsing projects is rather straightforward, to search tap on “Search” in the menu.

Each component in a project contains files, or translations to be more abstract. File list view shows progress for each file.

Each file contains a set of strings. In the left-bottom corner there are some buttons for filtering. A string can have three statuses – green means translated string, red means not translated and blue is used mark fuzzy strings, this means that the string is basically translated but might need to be checked one more time.

String editor view provides all the things you need to translate one string. With the buttons on the bottom user can navigate through strings in the current stringset, revert back to the original one, copy source string, use Google Translate to automatically translate the string and finally set the string status either to translated, fuzzy or untranslated.

That’s it folks!

One we all missed last week, but Nokia have released an updated version of their application suite for Ramadan. Following on from the acclaim of the 2009 release, this year Nokia have gathered everything under a single application. When we talk about Nokia reaching out to customers, this is a wonderful example. See below for details.

As you may know from my previous post, in latest 100 Boxes version I added localization support with English and Italian versions.

But a strange fact occurred: when building the .deb packages with my machine (Ubuntu 10.04 + latest Maemo SDK), the language files were included, but when using the maemo.org to Autobuilder the build process went OK but the language files were missing.

Unfortunately, I noticed the problem only after 100 Boxes 0.8.0 had reached Maemo Extras repository, so everybody is still downloading an English-only 100 Boxes. My own quality assurance checks when the package was in Extras-devel were not accurate enough to pinpoint the problem: this is a lesson I will remember.

Likewise, QA tests performed by maemo.org community members when the package was staging in Extras-testing did not highlight the issue. It is fair to say, however, that the issue was almost impossible to notice for people not using Italian as system language on their devices.

After analysis of Autobuilder output, some guesswork and trial-and-error, I managed to spot the cause of the problem. A script was not executed by the Autobuilder, because it was called with an absolute path instead of a relative one.

Finally, I just uploaded version 0.8.0-4 to Extras-testing repository. The only change with respect to 0.8.0 is working language support. Please help test it and vote on the appropriate page, so that it can be promoted to Extras and fulfill the promise of localization support, at last.

Oh, just one more thing. If you want 100 Boxes in your language, why don’t you help translate? 100 Boxes uses *.po files for localization, which is the recommended method for Maemo apps. If you know how it works, just grab the latest revision of template.po in 100 Boxes Subversion, edit it, save it as <your translated language code>.po and send it to me (my email address is in the 100 Boxes Guide, accessible from within the game). If you need assistance, just send an email and I will happily help you help me

Changes since 0.5.7:

- Fix crashes in DIDLLiteContributor API.
- Remove incomplete and broken DLNA guessing code. Applications should use
  gupnp-dlna now for all their DLNA needs.
- Do set the 'dlna:profileID' property of 'albumArtURI' node and treat it as
  mandatory as per DLNA guidelines (7.3.61.3).
- Prefer non-transcoded resources over transcoded ones when choosing compatible
  resources for a particular MediaRenderer.
- Minor correction to DIDL filtering code.
- Some other minor improvements/fixes.

Bug fixed in this release:

2187 - GUPnPDIDLLiteContributor class doesn't work

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 

Download source tarball from here

Rygel 0.7.3 (Out of Their Minds) is out!

A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.31.6
release.

- Add Album-art support.
- Add support for sorted Browse/Search.
- Don't push data after HTTP response is cancelled.
- Advertise support for search by "createClass".
- Revive accidently removed XBox hacks.
- Fix icon export for uninstalled case.
- Simplify plugin APIs to further abstract plugin developers from UPnP details.
- Add convenient MediaRenderer APIs for plugins. This involved moving most of
  the GstRenderer code to core.
- Fix seeking once again.
- Improve error handling in HTTP request handling code.
- Port to new DIDL-Lite contributor APIs.
- Port to Vala 0.9.3 and 0.9.4.
- Clean-up README and specify build and run-time dependencies.
- More debug output.
- MediaExport:
  - Make use of gupnp-dlna for faster, more complete and reliable metadata
    extraction.
  - Print a debug message if extraction fails for a file.
  - Add windows formats to positive list of file extensions to include in the
    metadata extraction.
  - Don't share anyt folder by default.
  - Fix url-escaped folder names on PS3.
  - Fix issue of empty title of top-level virtual folders on PS3.
  - Process 256 children at a time. This improves performance of harvesting of
    large folders.
- GstRenderer:
  - Rename to Playbin.
  - Advertize support for 'video/mp4'
  - Advertize support for RTSP
  - Handle error from playbin.
  - Don't claim support for unsupported UPnP actions and state variables.
- External:
  - Fix a crasher bug.
- Localization:
  - Add French translation.
  - Update Simplified Chinese translations.
  - Update German translation.
  - Update Galician translation.
  - Update Swedish translation.
  - Update Slovenian translation.
- Lots of other non-functional and/or minor improvements and fixes.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require Vala >= 0.9.3
- Require gupnp >= 0.13.4
- Require gupnp-av >= 0.5.8
- Require gupnp-dlna >= 0.2.1 (new dependency)
- Require libgee >= 0.5.2
- Use gtk+-2.0 (>= 2.21.5) if available rather than gtk+-3.0

Bugs fixed in this release:

607411 - Need to mention non-compile time deps.
624445 - Samsung can't FF/REW/PAUSE when playing video/avi from Rygel.
625556 - New configure flag to switch GTK+ version.

All contributors to this release:

Aron Xu 
Arun Raghavan 
Claude Paroz 
Eleanor Chen 
Frédéric Péters 
Javier Jardón 
Jens Georg 
Mario Blättermann 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 

Download source tarball here

For over three years now I have been running a website called The Symbian Blog, a website that you have helped grow from strength to strength. What started as a hobby under the vaibhavsharma.wordpress.com domain, moved to thesymbianblog.com when things got a little serious. Then I decided I needed my own hosting and off it went from the wordpress.com servers and things merely went on.

Nokia India has very kindly invited me to an exclusive preview of the Nokia N8, a device I have been wanting to get my hands on for a very long time. To say that I am excited is an understatement, for the the simple reason that the N8 brings functionality that I have wanted to ages. USB on-the-go and support for a bluetooth mouse in addition to all the other awesome functionality such as HD video capture, 12 MP stills, capacitive multitouch OLED display and I could go on.

So I will be going to New Delhi, come Friday to put the N8 through its paces and go over it with a fine tooth comb. If you have anything questions, or things I must check out, do let me know and I will be sure to get you answers.

Fortunately, by this time the N8 firmware should have also reached a certain level of maturity and we will get a good idea of what thinks will be like when it launches in late September.

I cannot wait.

Similar Posts:

• Hunt Your Way To A Nokia E73 ‘Mode’ Or A Nokia E72
• Axel Meyer Is Coming To India For The N97 Blogger’s Meetup – Line Up Your Questions Here
• Coverage From The Nokia N900 Launch Event In India – Goes On Sale June 9
• First Screenshots Of MeeGo Emerge
• Here’s Your Chance To Win Nokia Music Store Vouchers & Get Questions Answered

Now that I am back to using my Nokia N900 much more I was excited to read the news on Engadget this morning that the Game Gripper is now available for pre-ordering for the Nokia N900. I just ordered one with an extra set of buttons for my N900 since I have my N900 loaded with SNES and ColecoVision games.

I grew up with the ColecoVision as one of my first gaming system and still vividly remember when my brother and I stayed up most all of that Christmas night playing games. I now have Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Zaxxon, Frogger, Galaxian, Pitfall, and Star Wars loaded on my N900. I also was a big fan of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and have Donkey Kong Country, Pitfall, and more loaded with this emulator. Emulator games play very well on the Nokia N900 and as an old-timer I am really loving it as a gaming system. With the Game Gripper I should be able to enjoy the games even more.

Do you enjoy playing emulated games on your Nokia N900 too? If so, what are your favorite games?

The main points of this new release are:

- Massive bugfixing;
- API 2.0 support;
- Mac OS X supported;

At the moment the PySide team is working to get Bindings for QtMobility packaged and released ASAP.

The packages are available on extra devel.
The source code can be fount at: http://www.pyside.org/downloads/

After receiving feedback from the community, including developers who are trying to get their software into Ovi Store, it is the opinion of the Council that the unexplained restriction on dependencies between Ovi and Extras - and in particular the availability of Python as a platform for Ovi Store applications - represents a serious threat to the success of Maemo, MeeGo and Ovi Store.

 

It will come as a surprise for many community members and users that Python is still not an officially supported language/runtime on the Maemo nor MeeGo platforms, despite the huge number of  Python applications currently in Extras, and even though they base on the work of Nokia's own PyMaemo team, plus two Qt bindings and a GTK+/Hildon one. To put things in perspective, about a third of ALL stable Maemo applications are written in Python, both overall and those using Qt.

The community level support means Python itself is located in community repositories, and, as a consequence, Python software is not admissible to Ovi (regardless of being free or not). Highlighting this is part of a broader agenda - ensuring cooperation between libraries and runtimes used by Ovi-distributed software and software in community repositories, but the first step towards that is addressing the single biggest such case - Python.

If there are technical issues which need to be addressed, let's discuss them in the open and try and solve them; if there are purely political issues, we strongly urge Nokia to reconsider.


Maemo Community Council

Firefox for Mobile Firefox 1.1 Quiz Challenge Winners! - http://mozmobileintern.wordpress.com/2010... August 4 from My Summer at Mozilla »... - Comment - Like

The MeeGo Conference 2010 website is now live. The website is now accepting session proposals (speaking slots) and registration for the conference is expected to be available shortly. The first MeeGo Conference is scheduled to take place in Dublin (Ireland) at the Aviva Stadium between November 15th and 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. 

To whom didn’t know I’ living in São Paulo city now. When I was looking to apartment here I was using the Nokia maps at my N900 to guide me trough the streets that I didn’t know.

The first version of MeeGo for IVI (in vehicle information) systems has been released. Based on MeeGo 1.0, the Day 1 release of the MeeGo IVI UX includes a homescreen and taskbar for launching and managing applications, a sample navigation application, a version of the Fennec browser and various packages from open source automotive projects.

For the very first time the Linux Foundation is organizing the Linuxcon Brazil. It will happen on August 31th and Seeptember 01 in São Paulo city at WTC.

I’m already confirmed to do a presentation in Portuguese-br: A Maturidade do Linux no Mercado dos Celulares e de Serviços: Rumo ao Domínio!

I was also invited by Klaus Kiwi to participate of a mini-sumit to discuss about Linux development as a professional activity, which I’m not sure if it is already confirmed.

Helio Castro will  be there as well doing a presentation about Meego!

Ok ok, maybe you don’t want to hear what we have to tell there, but what about listen to Linus Torvalds at this keynote

I’m pretty sure that there will be other good presentations and talks over there.

See you there?

Green Dublin Letterbox - Stephens Green Dublin (CC by-sa)

A subdomain is born: conference2010.meego.com

The first MeeGo Conference will be held in Dublin’s Aviva Stadium on November 15-17. The venue has a main room with a capacity of 600 people and we will do our best to fill it up.

Currently “we” are the Linux Foundation, Intel and Nokia, who are providing the basic hands and funds needed to assure the success of the event. Now you can get involved!

• The call for session proposals is open until August 23rd. We welcome proposals about hardware support, platform development, application development, MeeGo project process and progress, and any other MeeGo related topics.
• Sponsors wanted! We expect a very interesting audience and we are putting a strong effort making the event accessible through free registration, sponsored participants, sponsored meals & parties…
• Volunteers are welcome. The meego-community mailing list is the place to be. For instance, testing and feedback about the conference website is very useful at this point.

The event registration will open soon. Early birds are great contributors to the success of the event, allowing better planning and providing louder buzz. Make your plans, see you there!

Tagged: conference, Dublin, MeeGo

Nokia's social media outreach initiatives continue apace. Today, from 6 pm (UK time), Niklas Savander, who recently became Nokia's head of sales and marketing, will be answering questions  submitted to his Twitter account @NiklasatNokia. The Nokia Conversations Blog has invited everyone to ask any Nokia related questions they may have. Answers will come back via Twitter or via video.

Open Source and commercial interest can be odd bedfellows.  The former depends of course on transparency and high access to thrive, while the latter tends to fall back on secrecy just to survive.  Detractors of Open Source will even claim that there’s no such thing as a successful open source project, especially a profitable venture.

In a seriously awesome piece of technological prowess, the N900 can make the call you were thing about without you have to touch a thing. Manipulating the N900 from the mind has been made possible by a Qt based application called ThinkContacts, paired with the NeuroSky MindSet.

The interaction between the user and software is done via brainwaves and for this to happen the user needs the NeuroSky Mindset which reads the user’s brainwaves, uses an analog-to-digital converter and sends the digitalized information via Bluetooth to the phone. The byte sequence, called packet, sent by the headset is then translated into the user’s level of meditation and attention by using an algorithm provided by the headset’s company. Once all of this is done, the signal is passed on to the ThinkContacts app via bluetooth and it places the call.

To get an idea of how it works, I recommend that you check out the following video.

[via: MaemoArena & MobileLivingRoom]

Similar Posts:

• Pre Sales Review Of The BH-703
• Nokia Initiatives: Headset Design & The Unloader
• The BH-503 Review
• Update v1.02: Flip Silent – Shut Up Functionality Today!
• One Year Of The Symbian Blog & Bluetooth Headsets Giveaway!

I previously wrote up my first impressions of Sygic Mobile Maps 9 for the N900 and covered most of my thoughts in the 13 minute video. I found the application to be decent, but could not recommend it for EUR49.99 based on the fact that it kept jumping around the map, required too many button presses to navigate around, and did not seem to be quite ready for primetime. I was going to follow-up with a full review, but did not find the software useful enough to do so. Thus, I was pleased to receive an email this morning that Sygic just released Mobile Maps 10 for the Nokia N900 and I will be taking a closer look at it over the next few days with a full review coming here so you can decide if it is now worth the

According to the email I received Mobile Maps 10 for the N900 includes the following:

• The app has new look and feel.
• While all maps and content are stored on the phone, we added online sharing of speed traps or road incident locations and within few weeks also real-time traffic.
• Navigation to addresses stored in phone’s Contacts is available.
• Scrolling through menus, lists and map zooming supports touchscreen gestures so that no buttons are needed when using Mobile Maps.
• Recent state or country is stored automatically, new destination entry is easier and non-relevant cities from various states will not pop up. If you want to pick a destination from a country other than the one you used the last time, just tap Back button on the keyboard to display the list of all available countries.
• Maps have also received an upgrade. Now with more detail, safer and easier navigation.

There is a detailed upgrade process for those with Mobile Maps 9 that includes a few manual tasks that are just fine with us geeks who like to tinker, but may be a bit of an issue for newbies.  The download for US maps and the application was 1.28GB so it took quite some time to download the update. Make sure to follow the directions specifically to complete the upgrade process.

I will post some quick first thoughts here with an update after I get the huge download to finish up and get the update installed. Nokia did upgrade the Ovi Maps client for the N900 in the last firmware update, but you still cannot get offline maps with Ovi Maps so this is one area where Sygic Mobile Maps 10 is better for sure.

Today I’m pleased to announce the release of TouchSearch version 3.1. This is the first major release of TouchSearch in the past six months and brings with it all the shiny new features I’ve been working on.

During the last few weeks I have been making some final changes to the desktop widget and it should be ready to be merged in with the rest of FaceBrick now.

Done:
* Changed the buttons to use default maemo icons (as per Dominik's comment to my last post)




The buttons are slightly different, but not a huge change.
* Switched to using the Qt Homescreen adapter. 
When I was setting the widget to be a homescreen widget manually I noticed that in order to click a listview item or a button, you would have to first click the widget once to get it in focus, then once more for the item you're clicking to actually notice something is going on. This is fixed in a later version of Qt, but using the adapter takes care of fixing this for now - which was my main reason for trying it.

It also sorted out some other issues I would have had otherwise, such as making making FaceBrick show up in the "add widget" menu (and re-appear there if removed) and restarting the widget if the desktop were to crash.

(Ignore the gibberish at the top - my phone is set to Norwegian ;p)
Using the homescreen adapter is quite easy, you only need an extra 2-3 lines of code and that's it. The only minus with it is that in order to test your homescreen widget, you need to package the application, install it and add it to your desktop via the menu - which probably wouldn't be too bad if you have done packaging before.

I ended up having a fun time last week trying to sort out packaging, but I eventually managed to package an example widget with help from this tutorial and the forum. Packaging FaceBrick itself turned out to be more hassle though.

FaceBrick uses a third party library called libqfacebook, and MADDE isn't all that happy with third party libraries. In the end I ended up trying scratchbox instead and it worked like a charm (at least for the most part)!

What's next?
* Possible fixes to desktop widget after mentor review
* Continue work on the inbox (fetching messages)

The FoneArena Smartphone Championship is getting interesting and tough after every round. The last match was between the Droid X and Samsung GalaxyS, where Galaxy S takes the lead. Galaxy S won by 274 votes, and Droid X only got 134 votes, total votes are 408. Now lets head to the next match, which is between the Nokia N900, and the HTC HD2. Both are very good smartphones and known as the best sellers of both manufactures. So folks are you ready for voting, because you have only one day to choose your favorite, so on your marks, get set, VOTE! [polldaddy poll="3584694"]

So the deadline is approaching, and slowly all features start appearing:

The the MeeGo preview for the N900 first came out, in order to install it you need to make your own image and then flash it onto the N900. Things have moved along since then and a ready to flash MeeGo image is now available from Nokia’s own servers. So if you have been wanting to install MeeGo on the N900 but have been waiting for it to become just a little easier, the necessary guides are here.

But before you embark on the MeeGo journey with your N900, please keep in mind that this is still very much a developmental release and that it holds no value for an everyday users and if you think you fall under that category, its better to hold off. There also some issues with backlighting, which are being discussed here.

[via: @mwkn]

Similar Posts:

• How To Install MeeGo On The Nokia N900
• Video Demo Of MeeGo For Handsets – An Installable Version For The N900 Is Available
• MeeGo 1.1 For The N900 Is Here
• MeeGo 1.0 Is Here, Even For The N900 – Although Nokia Will Not Be Officially Supporting It
• Pre-Alpha Meego Tablet UI Gets Demo'ed In HD: Impresses

I have written a lot of articles previously about project openness, and I've had this one cooking in drafts for a while without time to write much around the actual issues I'm presenting.

With some more thought, I realised that the best way to proceed is just to publish, and not point fingers and draw conclusions (though I certainly did write this with some projects in mind), so here goes.

• Do you reject contributions for non-technical reasons?
• Do you have development documentation (e.g. build instructions, architecture information) available for external contributors?
• Do you answer questions on design, architecture, etc. from external contributors?
• Do you work with contributors to polish their contributions and educate them as to best practices and your project?
• Do you let external contributors take part in design decisions?
• Do you hold external contributions to the same standards of review as internal contributions?
• Do you grant rights (such as commit access, ability to close bugs) to external contributors?
• Do you have a public means for (preferably real time) communication that you use?
• Do you have a public issue tracker?
• Do you use your public infrastructure wherever possible unless an issue is explicitly private?

Run your project against the list -- perhaps you'll find some things you can improve on.

If you've any suggestions to add to the list, why not write a comment? :)

One thing which comes up quite often when I'm talking to developers new to Qt is the topic of strings, more specifically, character encoding: how to do it right, what options are available, and best practices.

Having written this a few times now, I thought that perhaps it was about time I write it up in a more permanent location (here) in the hopes that people will stumble across it and magically become enlightened, and end world hunger. ;)

Qt (and C++) have a number of different string types.

QString

Qt has a string type in QtCore called QString. QString, internally, stores data in utf16, and *does* have knowledge of character encoding.

Services across a network (like web services) often want data in utf8. QString, however, stores data in utf16. To get to utf8, you want QString::toUtf8(). To convert from utf8 back to utf16 QString (e.g. parsing input from a web service) see, QString::fromUtf8().

std::string

C++ also has std::string (although you won't find a lot of this in Qt applications). Simply put, it's a wrapper around a C string providing convenience operations and nicer syntax. It still doesn't have such (fairly essential) things like character encoding.

You probably want to avoid using this in an internationalized application or one requiring interaction with network services unless you find your own solution for encoding issues.

QString has ::toStdString() and ::fromStdString() methods if you must use them for whatever reason.

C strings (char*)

Finally, you have C strings (char*) which don't have any idea what encoding is, they are just a bunch of bytes.

Generally speaking, they're latin1 encoded (ASCII), to put them into a QString.. QString::fromLatin1(). If they aren't latin1, see QTextCodec::setCodecForCStrings().

QLatin1String class is also helpful - in particular, this will allow you to compile when using QT_NO_CAST_FROM_ASCII (which itself is helpful to make sure you explicitly give encodings for all of your strings).

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-08-02 through 2010-08-08

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-08-02 through 2010-08-08

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-08-02 through 2010-08-08

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-08-02 through 2010-08-08

Front Page

Maemo Community Council ask for Python apps in Ovi

The Maemo Community Council, of which your editors - Andrew Flegg and Ryan Abel - are two, has posted an open letter asking for Nokia's stance towards open source libraries and runtimes, and Python in particular, to be reconsidered in their Ovi Store. Ovi only accepts binary applications, while a very large number of apps for Maemo are written in Python: "It will come as a surprise for many community members and users that Python is still not an officially supported language/runtime on the Maemo nor MeeGo platforms, despite the huge number of Python applications currently in Extras, and even though they base on the work of Nokia's own PyMaemo team, plus two Qt bindings and a GTK+/Hildon one. To put things in perspective, about a third of ALL stable Maemo applications are written in Python, both overall and those using Qt." Nokia cannot afford, when trying to garner developer mindshare, to be shutting the door on anything but the One True Way of C++/Qt. Nokia may be the leading supplier of smartphones in the world (a claim which, many argue, depends on your definition of "smartphone"), but they - quite simply - are not the first choice for developers. Nor, these days, even on the radar of the tech enthusiast or hobbyist developers. Doors need to be opened to these users, not shut in their faces.

Read more

MeeGo Conference: propose your sessions now

The first (of hopefully many) MeeGo conference is being held in Dublin, 15th-17th November; and the ability to propose full-blown sessions is now open: "Do you want to speak at the first MeeGo Conference? Now is your chance! The call for session proposals has started, and anyone who wants to speak at the conference must submit a proposal. Proposals from community members, Intel, Nokia, the Linux Foundation and others will all be given equal consideration." Proposals must be submitted by 23rd August, however a further round for birds-of-a-feather (BoF) and lightning sessions will open after.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Maemo Community Council ask for Python apps in Ovi
   • MeeGo Conference: propose your sessions now
2. Applications
   • Display a Conboy note in a widget
3. Development
   • Introduction to Qt Web Runtime on Maemo 5
   • Qt Messaging Framework (QMF) is going into MeeGo
   • Ginge is a GP2X compatibility layer for ARM Linux devices
   • KISStester lists apps you have installed which still need voting
4. Community
   • MeeGo Greeters launched for fora
   • Apps languishing in Testing despite being promotable
   • Sponsoring MeeGo conference attendance
   • Conclusion on MeeGo Community OBS being able to target existing Nokia devices: not clear cut
5. Devices
   • Game Gripper fits to N900 keyboard to give console controls
   • Update on USB host mode progress
   • Nokia's UI for MeeGo possibly revealed
   • ...and 3 more
6. Announcements
   • New Qt-based file manager in development
   • Gnumeric port for spreadsheets on the move

Lots of activity on the maemo.org wiki as always (except for GUADEC when I was not editing, although many other people were). I have been mostly doing tidying of the Documentation articles, which involves making the code examples human-readable (not an autogenerated mess of HTML formatting), adding markup and fixing broken links. There is still a lot to do, but progress is good.

Elsewhere in the wiki there have been many changes to pages regarding the N900 hardware subsystems, so look out for more in this area from Joerg rw and Speedevil.

There are more than 1000 people following my Twitter updates. Thank you all! I keep doing my best posting and retwitting what I find really remarkable, plus one or two lines just for fun from time to time.

This is how you look like:

Apart from the obvious big fonts, I find interesting the thick “enthusiast” & “everything”, since this somehow reflects this permanent curiosity that substitutes coffee in my life. What to think though about the combinations “anxious ceo” and “dead profesional” (sic)? Good to see “beer” in its fair measure. And “hauler” was the Wiktionary word of the day.

Anyway, thank you again! And now back to work.

Tagged: twitter, twittersheep

Firefox for Mobile Firefox for Android Alpha Ramblings… - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2010... August 9 from Missmobile's Blog » Firefox... - Comment - Like

A couple of days ago I mentioned that Sygic sent out an email letting us all know Mobile Maps 10 was available as a free upgrade to N900 owners. I went on a short camping trip and wasn’t able to test out the latest version until last night, but shot the video embedded below and took the screenshots you see below in the image gallery. I am going to do some more extensive testing over the next couple of weeks and will post a review here when I finish checking it out. Here are some initial thoughts on my experiences, along with the video of the program in action.

I’ve uploaded a new version to extras-devel with some improvements. In scrolling mode the books are now loaded one section at a time unlike previously when the whole book was loaded (this caused some problems with large books). The toolbar has buttons for navigating between sections.

There’s now a slider at the bottom of the screen which shows current position as percentage. By moving the slider you can jump to different position.

I’ve also made improvements to how progress, bookmarks and annotations are saved. If you had the previous version installed I recommend removing the database (/home/user/MyDocs/books/bookdb.db)

GSoC is coming to an end and for the rest of the time I’ll be focused on bug fixing, refactoring and documenting.

This morning, I set up my Nokia N900 to be an #ipv6 enabled web server. In this article, I will discuss what some background information about setting this up and then the details of what I did.
<!--break-->
Let me start off by describing the Nokia N900 for those who are not acquainted with it. It is, in my opinion, the best geeks’ phone out there. While non-geeks might enjoy some of the power off the phone, I generally steer my non-geek friends to an iPhone or an Android. However, for someone that wants a phone that they can configure, customize and program for, to their hearts content, there is nothing I have found like the N900.

We had an awesome discussion about App Stores at Mobile Monday SV last night:

Now it’s possible for power testers to install and run MeeGo 1.1 unstable in the Nokia N900. MeeGo Handset is not yet in shape for users of any kind. If you find the instructions complicated and unfriendly it’s simply because MeeGo is being sincere with you: stay away from it and come back later. 

Chronology of a success story (please contribute dates missing):

• Jan 2010 – kojacker joins maemo.org.
• Feb 16th – First Talk post (no firmware update for Vodafone UK).
• May 4th – First Talk thread started: Any interest in a friendly Maemo app development ‘competition’?

• May 19th – He goes for it: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!

• May 20th – Cosimo Kroll (aka zehjotkah) proposes that Nokia could fund prices for the winners (and contacts me).
• May 21st – Prizes agreed: “the winner of each category will be invited to the MeeGo Conference with travel and accommodation covered. If someone can’t make it then we can offer an N900 in exchange.”
• zehjotkah opens a PayPal account to pool donations.
• July 1st – A new category for beginners is created on the fly based on popular demand. 17 projects apply.
• July 22nd – 65 projects registered and ready to be voted in 6 + 1 categories.
• August 8th – The community has raised a bounty collection of €781 ($1019) to reward the 2nd, 3rd and 4th participants in each category.
• August 9th – Winners announced! (see screenshots & more)

1. Queen Beecon Widget by Alessandro Peralma (No!No!No!Yes!) (Desktop category)
2. CloudGPS by Damian Waradzyn (dwaradzyn) (Location & Navigation category)
3. Faster Application Manager by Heikki Holstila (hqh) (System & Utilities category)
4. PSX4M by Tomasz Sterna (smoku) (Games category)
5. PenPen Sketchbook by Ben Lau (benlau) (Graphics & Multimedia category)
6. TweeGo by Mikhail Ramalho (mikhail_ramalho) and Rodrigo Avelino (rodavelino) (‘Other’ category)
7. DropN900 by Jonne Nauha ( jonnenau) (Beginners category)

Congratulations for the winners and everybody involved. *You* are making a difference with initiatives like this. See you in Dublin!

More: http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Coding_Competition_1

Last month International Syst announced the formal release of Metasys MeeGo, an operating system based on the MeeGo netbook experience software platform. It is designed to support the 'didactic requirements of the educational process' and to be 'used in the new generation of Intel powered convertible classmate PC'.

Registration for the MeeGo Conference 2010 is now open. Registration for the conference, which takes place between November 15th and 17th, is free and is available via the MeeGo conference website. A discounted hotel rate (from €105 per night) has been organised at the nearby D4 hotels, at which a number of additional networking opportunities will take place. 

I made some documentation about our SPARQL-IN feature that we recently added. I added some interesting use-cases like doing an insert and a delete based on in values.

For the new class signal API that we’re developing this and next week, we’ll probably emit the IDs that tracker:id() would give you if you’d use that on a resource. This means that IN is very useful for the purpose of giving you metadata of resources that are in the list of IDs that you just received from the class signal.

We never documented tracker:id() very much, as it’s not an RDF standard; rather it’s something Tracker specific. But neither are the class signals a RDF standard; they are Tracker specific too. I guess here that makes it usable in combo and turns the status of ‘internal API’, irrelevant.

We’re right now prototyping the new class signals API. It’ll probably be a “sa(iii)a(iii)”:

That’s class-name and two arrays of subject-id, predicate-id, object-id. The class-name is to allow D-Bus filtering. The first array are the deletes and the second are the inserts. We’ll only give you object-ids of non-literal objects (literal objects have no internal object-id). This means that we don’t throw literals to you in the signal (you need to make a query to get them, we’ll throw 0 to you in the signal).

We give you the object-ids because of a use-case that we didn’t cover yet:

Given triple <a> nie:isLogicalPartOf <b>. When <a> is deleted, how do you know <b> during the signal? So the feature request was to do a select ?b { <a> nie:isLogicalPartOf ?b } when <a> is deleted (so the client couldn’t do that query anymore).

With the new signal we’ll give you the ID of <b> when <a> is deleted. We’ll also implement a tracker:uri(integer id) allowing you to get <b> out of that ID. It’ll do something like this, but then much faster: select ?subject { ?subject a rdfs:Resource . FILTER (tracker:id(?subject) IN (%d)) }

I know there will be people screaming for all objects, also literals, in the signals, but we don’t want to flood your D-Bus daemon with all that data. Scream all you want. Really, we don’t. Just do a roundtrip query.

On Monday MeeGo made available the second update for the MeeGo 1.0 Core Software Platform and Netbook User Experience project release (the version of MeeGo designed to be run on netbooks). The updated version, 1.02, resolves several email and media player issues, updates syncevolution and connection manager and has more than 70 bug fixes. Read on for further details.

If you have any application that adds buttons to the address book (like the contacts merger), you could have noticed that the buttons recently disappeared. This happened because of a bug in Monorail, the IM file transfer application.
Alban already fixed this bug and uploaded a new version to extras-devel. This new version also fixes other bugs, including a crash caused by the sharing plugin in Conboy.

Update: Note that you need to reboot or kill osso-addressbook after updating monorail to see the plugins again.

Today I was thinking...that it'd be nice to share a video of the recently "released" unstable version of the MeeGo 1.1 Handset UX running on the N900.So, with no further ado, here is the video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAtS5EUVAZ4

It’s been a bit since my last post about siggy. But don’t worry. That only means that I’ve been working hard on it

Firefox for Mobile Mobile Add-on Developers: Update Your Mobile Add-on to 2.0a1 - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2010... August 11 from Missmobile's Blog » Mobile... - Comment - Like

I wake up quarter past 6 in the morning. Some time later went to my desktop to check does something happened during night. Usually it means IRC highlights or new emails but today it was something other: network outage.

OK, I told — there are other things to do like buying train tickets, making few calls, breakfast etc. But I returned home 2 hours later and situation did not changed. Cable modem still blinks with “DS” led… After call to isp (UPC) I got information that there are some modernization works in progress and will be ended at the end of hour. But hour later it was still “at the end of current hour”…

As I had to be at work I took my Nokia N900 from pocket and launched X-Chat to give network outage information to my coworkers. And started to think how to fix situation…

Lack of sleeping seats in train forced me to change train so I will take my laptop with me to be in contact during trip. So I had to learn how to use N900 as modem anyway.

So how to do it? Thanks to blog post by Marius Gedminas I had easy way. As I prefer to not have cables hanging and like to have more battery power I had to limit myself to BlueTooth.

Nokia N900 side: installed “bluetooth-dun” package which starts “dund” so “Dial-Up Networking” appears in list of offered services.

Desktop side: BlueDevil detected phone but handles only OBEX and Audio profile ;( Thanks to one of comments on Marius’s blog post I installed “blueman” and used it to connect to N900/DUN service. This allowed me to use NetworkManager to connect to internet.

Laptop side: Also BlueDevil and “blueman” are installed but I did not used them. Instead I altered default routing and got crazy setup: laptop -wifi-> router -ethernet-> desktop -bluetooth-> n900 -gprs-> internet.

Setup works properly. Modem still blinks with “DS” led…

Related content:

1. Nokia N900 discount
2. Things to check with Nokia N900

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Today is GPRS day was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Firefox for Mobile Fennec 2 update: The road to alpha - http://limpet.net/mbrubec... August 12 from Matt Brubeck - Comment - Like

Quim Gil has a blog post up Running MeeGo 1.1 unstable in your N900. I’ve kicked around installing Meego and this is my report of how things have gone.
<!--break-->

Recently announced Qt Web Runtime (QtWRT) is a perfect opportunity to energize masses of people out there in the wild with at least bare html/css/javascript awareness to become application developers for their Maemo and probably future MeeGo devices. However, since QtWRT is still pretty much in pre-alpha stage, it has been thrown at us with [...]

I got my hands on an iPhone 3gS so out of curiosity, I have been using it for the past week just to see what the fuss has been all these years. When I received the phone, I couldn’t use it because it was iOS 4.0 and not jailbroken. Since I am with T-mobile, I [...]

Recently announced Qt Web Runtime (QtWRT) is a perfect opportunity to energize masses of people out there in the wild with at least bare html/css/javascript awareness to become application developers for their Maemo and probably future MeeGo devices. However, since QtWRT is still pretty much in pre-alpha stage, it has been thrown at us with no proper documentation (not counting few external W3C references), so early adopters might scratch their head upon simple "Hello World" tutorial that would kick-start the general idea behind Web Runtime.
Read more »

One of the things which I like about Maemo is the way they arrange an application repository structure go with a development cycle of an app.

Several people complained that my custom ringtones application is too slow when receiving calls, so I started analysing what ringtoned does when a new call is received. The three main operations in this case are creating the object that represents a call after retrieving all the needed information (caller ID, etc.) from Telepathy, looking up the contact that matches the caller and playing the ringtone.
The Telepathy bit just needed to be slightly smarter, but was already quite fast. The contact look up was already very fast, unless you have so many contacts to make your address book unusable.
The code that needed more optimisation was the one that plays ringtones. It turned out that using GStreamer with playbin2 (the element able to detect and play all the supported file types) is not fast enough for this use case. I tried different approaches and in the end I decided to always use uncompressed wave files and stream them directly to PulseAudio.[1]
Note that GStreamer is not the best solution just in this very specific case, for all the other use cases GStreamer is still the best solution.

Meego seems to be progressing well and all indications point to MeeGo having a strong future ahead. With the backing of the Linux Foundation, the list of industry supporters is long and growing; and so is developer interest of which the forums and mailing-lists are a good indicator. Intel’s MeeGo Zone is a good complement to the [...]

Last spring I started to write QuickFlickr application i.e. a Flickr client for N900. Back then I wrote this article of it. For me this…

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-08-09 through 2010-08-15

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-08-09 through 2010-08-15

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-08-09 through 2010-08-15

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-08-09 through 2010-08-15

Front Page

Registration now open for the first MeeGo Conference

Registration for the MeeGo Conference taking place this November in Dublin has opened. Those interested in registering will need to have a meego.com account and fill in the information in the conference registration form. If you would like to request sponsorship of travel and accomodation, check the "Travel assistance" box when registering.

Read more

talk.maemo.org gets formal rules/code of conduct

After being overrun with on-topic, but spamming, newbies; trolls and personal attacks; the sub-community of maemo.org frequenting talk.maemo.org has enacted a set of rules, which all members are expected to abide by, lest they suffer "infraction points". "The establishment of these rules has been given much consideration by the talk.maemo.org staff, the Maemo Community Council, and feedback from long-time members, and is designed to foster and promote a healthy, helpful, and professional atmosphere in all of our forums. Anyone posting in the forums should be treated with respect and in a manner which will create an enjoyable experience for all." At certain infraction point thresholds, temporary and - ultimately - permanent account suspension occurs.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Registration now open for the first MeeGo Conference
   • talk.maemo.org gets formal rules/code of conduct
2. Applications
   • Game Gripper review for better experience playing classic games
   • KISStester lists on device installed applications which are in extras testing queue
   • Disappearing Contacts plugins
   • ...and 4 more
3. Development
   • Building Qt debs "the easy way"
   • What's the status of the Maemo licensing change request queue?
4. Community
   • Qt Ambassador Program launches
   • Usefulness of Maemo Community Council questioned, and definitively answered
5. Devices
   • MeeGo on non-SSSE3 x86 Hardware
   • Small update on status of MeeGo-Harmattan (and its N900 "Hacker Edition")
6. Announcements
   • QPlaylist - music playlist editor
   • Wifi Assistant helps getting online with connections which require browser interactions
   • Mobile Firefox roadmap, including next version

So let's see how the two versions of ejpi compare:

Qt Version

• Feature parity with the GTK version
• Improved pie menu performance but two pie menu display bugs
• Simplified layout with the potential for rotation
  
• 3382 LOCs
• From June 8th to July 16th
  

GTK Version

• 4473 LOCs
• From January 30th to February 25th
  

LOCs are measured by "wc -l" rather than getting fancy.  I wrote both apps and they were written in a similar style with similar amounts of whitespace and documentation.


The LOC counts look nice, more drastic than my Gonvert port for what it is worth.  I had a lot more distractions going on during my port of ejpi so a comparison of implementation times between Gtk/Qt or Gonvert/ejpi is as meaningless as the title of this post suggests.

My main Qt disappointment in this port is what seems like high coupling both in Qt itself and in code written by others (the example pie menus).

Now for some of the upsides.  Though I implemented them differently, the similarity in the drawing code between Qt and Cairo helped.  Also finding out about QStandardItemModel made my life easier.

I'm split on which direction I want to go in my learning of Qt.  Originally I had planned on porting Dialcentral for gaining experience with threading.  I have too many ideas though and not enough time.  Possible directions include: porting other apps of mine, a new app using QGraphicsView, or some QtMobility contacts (and eventually calendar) plugins (though then I'd also have to learn the quirks of Qt in C++ and deploying compiled apps to Maemo).

I will promote Cybercom’s FREE QtQuick & KDE Plasma event because I’m partially responsible of it. As you may have noticed, I like Qt so…

fast post to announce that siggy 0.4.2 has finished its testing quarantine and it’s now available on the extras repository

• End of Life for Maemo5 hildon-desktop & friends.
  Being honest and communicating that something is dead: New, and good.
  On the wishlist for next time: Announce it on the developer mailing list (though that implies interaction with people outside of Nokia, scary!) in case somebody wants to pick up maintainership.
  Unlikely, but still.
• If you want to file bug reports about user interface and platform component issues in Maemo5: It’s welcome in case of major issues. Otherwise save your time and efforts as unstable development happens in MeeGo Handset which has its own bugtracker awaiting your bug reports. MeeGo Handset can be run on an N900 if you love to live on the edge.
• Quim Gil on Maemo5 Licensing Change Requests.

End of Life for Maemo5 hildon-desktop & friends. Being honest and communicating that something is dead: New, and good. On the wishlist for next time: Announce it on the developer mailing list (though that implies interaction with people outside of Nokia, scary!) in case somebody wants to pick up maintainership. Unlikely, but still. If you [...]

On 3rd of August I promoted Transifex-Mobile from extras-devel to extras-testing. The package has to stay in testing repository for 10 days and has to get at least 10 thumbs up from fellow testers before it may enter the “stable” extras repository. Few days ago it happened and now Transifex-Mobile is marked as “stable”. It happened just in time for Google Summer of Code final evaluations and it seems to be currently the only one of the first GSoC projects that was marked “stable” before the end of GSoC.

Thank you very much guys who helped out with testing and reporting bugs! Who wants to be marked in About box just ping me via e-mail, even the smallest efforts are worth mentioning

The deadline for Summer of Code projects is coming in a few hours, so it's time for an update on my project.
During the last weeks I have been working on switching Canola from etk to elementary. Etk is the old toolkit used in the Enlightenment world, it is now deprecated being replaced by elementary. Etk in Canola was used mainly to create the settings dialogs and panels. Part of this switch I have replaced the etk buttons, lists, entries, labels, etc.. with their elementary corespondent. The more difficult part was to adapt the theme/style of the new elementary widgets to match Canola's design. Finally it looks pretty good, although I have some problems with the alignment of some buttons. I am not sure if there is a problem with my code or a bug in the efl libraries. I have asked for some help on e-develop mailing list and I'm still waiting for their response.

Some of the old Canola plugins will probably have to be updated ( if they use custom panel/dialog that were created using  etk) . I have already updated the Picasa plugin I have developed last year so it's ready to be used with the new version of Canola.

As soon as the efl packages are updated (Eduardo Lima is taking care of this)  the new version of Canola will be available in extras-devel/testing.

A summary of the things that I've done as part of the project (more details are available on wiki page):

• fixed the annoying segmentation faults 
• fix system properties for Maemo 5 (battery, wireless and signal level)
• fix the keyboard input bug
• use ethumb to generate thumbnails
• integrate Canola with the Connection Manager
• integrate Canola with Tracker
• use elementary instead of the etk widgets

The Fremantle daemon that decodes ringtones seems to have a bug that, in some cases, makes it produce wave files with an invalid size in them. These files cannot be played by libcanberra, so it meant that some ringtones couldn’t be played when you receive a phone call. I just released ringtoned 0.2.1 with a work around for the bug, please let me know if this version works better for you.

Anyway, I got a new component in the Meamo Bugzilla for ringtoned, so please report bugs there.

Update 2: I released ringtoned 0.2.2 that just adds some more debugging info to make my life easier.

Let's use this stuff :P Anyway, it's a good tool and I need to put some ideas anywhere.

So, today's tip is how to compile your CUnit tests on Embedded platforms - in this case, on a N900 (ARM) with MeeGo installed on it.

You should download the CUnit source code from http://sourceforge.net/projects/cunit/ (I only tested versions 2.0.X and 2.1.X). The process is very simple: download the code, copy to your development environment, and build it (./bootstrap && make). However, things are not soooo easy as it seems :P

Probably, you'll face problems at initial steps.

If you have any problems on , execute the following command to change modification time/time:

find /path/to/files -exec touch {} \;

It seems to work.

Hello everybody.

After pretty long pause I’m happy to announce that our team is alive and still rocking hard for your amusement. And today I want to tell you about some really hot stuff for your Nokia n900.

Initially started as a project for FRUCT application competition by Tanya Makova, new name in the maemo.org community and Vlad Vasiliev, who is well known as an OMWeather project leader, this application has evolved into one of the most shiny pearls on the scene. Thanks to these two people you’re now able to amaze the audience with your n900 like never before. Instead of showing static wallpapers on your desktops, now you can set almost anything from video files to XScreenSavers. Let me introduce you – Live Wallpaper. Project details with screenshots and video are after the break.

Here’s a quick look on what is already done now and what’s planned for the nearest future. First of all Live Wallpaper is already available in extras-devel repository so you can go and get it right now. This application adds one more option to your settings menu. Also, statusbar applet is planned for quick on/off toggling (to conserve battery life, for example).

By clicking “settings” you’ll see main layout window that shows you all your 4 desktops with your settings. Tap any of them to view its details. Also you’ll be able to donate to the project via PayPal, which is highly recommended, considering all this awesomeness that you can do with Live Wallpaper.

Settings window is pretty straightforward. Here you can disable Live Wallpaper for specified desktop or chose one of your favourite from available. All wallpapers are divided into categories: Video, Live Wallpapers or XScreenSavers. Each of them has its own settings. For example for Video you can chose the file to play and enable looped playback.

Here are some examples of what you can expect with Live Wallpaper installed. Screenshots doesn’t show all beauty, so you can scroll down for the video.

You can also find a lot of “n900 ready” videos in this thread on talk.maemo.org. And feel free to add your favourites too.

To see all XScreenSavers available you can visit its homepage.

Well, that’s all for now, don’t forget to report any bugs or wishes in Live Wallpaper discussion thread. Some more cool news will come soon, so stay tuned and thanks for reading.

Three days ago, Maemo bug 11130 was filed: It complains about gPodder stealing focus when it has finished checking for new episodes in the background. This is true, and I've been bitten by this annoyance several times already, so I decided to finally have a look into the SMS/IM/Phone-style notifications (the "yellow" bubble that merges into your task switcher after some time). Thankfully, Daniel Would (of Witter fame) has published his research results some months ago already, so getting up and running was easy from that point. Here are the results so far:

One problem that I still have not figured out how to fix (even after digging in the hildon-home source tree) is how to attach such a notification to the a given window (or application) instead of having it appear as separate "window" in the task switcher (see the second screenshot). Can somebody in the know give me a hint? On the other hand, the callback for clicking on the notification works fine already and opens the new episodes dialog.

A related change that also prevents gPodder from stealing focus was to replace the progress indicator dialog with a HildonBanner - it might not look so good without a progress bar, but it makes gPodder less intrusive when the user interacts with other applications.

With the merger of Moblin (Intel) and Maemo (Nokia) to form MeeGo, a single MeeGo conference is being held in Dublin, November 15th-17th (Monday-Wednesday, inclusive). This replaces the Maemo Summit which was held so successfully in 2008 (Berlin) and 2009 (Amsterdam).

"I want to speak!"

There is just one week left to submit your session proposal. Apart from these main sessions & keynotes, there will also be lightning talk slots opened up shortly. However, if you want to give a full-blown talk or run a bird-of-a-feather (BoF) session you must submit your proposal before August 23rd (even if you work for Intel, Nokia, the Linux Foundation, maemo.org, meego.com, ...). [EDIT: BoFs should be submitted now too!]

"I want to go..."

Members of the Maemo community who want to learn more about MeeGo, see it on N900s and netbooks, or even promote their latest Maemo hacks are encouraged to register.

"...but I can't afford it"

As with the Maemo Summits, a number of sponsorship places are available. When registering tick the checkbox for Travel Assistance. If selected (by a panel from the Linux Foundation, and the MeeGo, Moblin and Maemo communities), travel (air fare) and accomodation (at the D4) will be paid for.

If you have requested sponsorship, you should not book any plane tickets, but you should book yourself into the hotel.

"Where should I stay?"

The conference organisers have booked 530 rooms at the D4 hotel, which has a couple of properties within easy walking distance of the venue; and still close to the Dublin city centre. It is requested that people stay there, until all the rooms are booked.

The prices (including breakfast), are at a special rate for the conference:

• €105 per room, per night for a single
• €115 per room, per night for a double
• €115 per room, per night for a twin

"I have other questions!"

Questions should be directed to the MeeGo Community Forum, where you can log in with your maemo.org OpenID and password.

GUPnP DLNA 0.3.0 released!

Changes since 0.2.1:

- New API and tool (gupnp-dlna-ls-profiles) to list all supported profiles
- Move API to get a profile to the DLNADiscoverer namespace
- Make GUPnPDLNAProfile opaque, add to API documentation
- Add support for several AVC_MP4_MP profiles
- Print stream topology instead of a simple list in gupnp-dlna-info
- Add debug output controlled by an environment variable for eaesier
  debugging
- Beginnings of an automated testing infrastructure
- Add relaxed/extended mode properties (more details in the next release)
- Use 'bitrate' instead of 'maximum-bitrate' while matching streams
- Various bug fixes

All contributors to this release:

Arun Raghavan 
Parthasarathi Susarla 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 

GUPnP Vala 0.6.11 released!

Changes since 0.6.10:

- Require and adapt to gupnp-av 0.3.0.

All contributors:

Arun Raghavan 
Parthasarathi Susarla 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 

Download source tarballs from here

Rygel 0.7.4 (Look at the Princess) released!

Yesterday I uploaded spatialite into Fremantle's extra-devel.

Spatialite itself isn't directly useful to the average Maemo user, but it ca be lot of fun if you're a developer and are interested in GIS.

Spatialite is a sqlite3 extension for geo-spatial data and compatible with OpenGIS, which means you can store any map's nodes (using a OSM nomenclature) into sqlite and use them in your application, with SQL methods that will make easier the management of the node in the map space.

For more info http://www.gaia-gis.it/spatialite/ and http://www.opengeospatial.org/

If you need something more powerful you might give a look at http://postgis.refractions.net/, but this is a bit heavy for Maemo :-p

Soon a new version of Map Buddy will be available, supporting point of interest from OpenStreetMap (theoretically any source) and using spatialite (the reason for which I uploaded it), but I'll write specifically about it in another post.

So, I think it's about time for me to really weigh in why it is I'm pushing MeeGo on N900 and why this is the right direction. This is probably going to be a bit long. Some people asked me to repost it on my blog as to not have it lost in the maelstrom of talk.maemo.org.

In January of this year we began discussing the idea of releasing Nokia Data Gathering under an open source license - 8 months later, a couple of days early and here we are. All the legal and IPR issues have been resolved, the corporate site has been updated and we have a new project home on Forum Nokia with training guides, documentation, and a tutorial on setting up a development environment.

To celebrate this achievement we decided to scratch an old itch and package the NDG server for Debian. It was fun learning about the state of Java packaging in Debian and the awesome work of the Debian JBoss team. Jon and I managed to get some of the work done at Debconf in NYC (thanks Nokia) and the rest, well most of it in fact was done by Rodrigo, a new member of the NDG Open Source team.

To try it out add

http://people.debian.org/~jbernard/debian unstable/

to your

/etc/apt/sources.list

and run

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ndg

The packaging work is taking place on the mailing list so please join us if you are interested in this work.

Reaction to the source code release has been great with a nice review up on Mobile Active and a lot of new users on our playground

The positive feedback has inspired us to be creative and we have some great ideas for the future of data collection on mobile devices including porting the mobile client to Series 40, scoping out the design of a 'legacy connector' to talk with existing data sources and integrating Bluetooth sensor support into the server and mobile client.

In the second half of 2010 we will also further develop our university collaborations, particularly in Africa. Here the University of Lagos is already working to select 15 - 20 of its more promising students to work on a data gathering project to assess the extent and nature of patronage enjoyed by alternative medicine practitioners in Nigeria.

Indeed the university collaborations have already been a great success. Rodrigo was one of my students at the INdT/FUCAPI Mobile Linux Development Center and his application Tweego recently won the Maemo Coding Competition.

His prize is a trip up to Ireland to the Meego conference. Well done Rodrigo, for sure you deserve it and watch out for great things from him (and NDG Open Source of course) in the future

Rygel 0.7.6 (A Kiss is But a Kiss) is out!

Another micro release to fix the critical regression in 'Year' hierarchy of
Tracker plugin.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 

Download source tarball from here

When I’ve got myself a Nokia N810 couple of years ago, I was nicely surprised by very good quality car holder that came inside the retail box as standard. When I’ve got myself a Nokia N900 last December, there was no car holder inside the box. Even worse – Nokia didn’t seem to care providing [...]

I saw a Bell Canada iPhone 4 commercial on TV today. It was focused on the FaceTime application. At the end of the commercial, in small print, was the limitation that it works on Wi-Fi only.

Well, Maemo 5 and the N900 allow SIP video calling, GoogleTalk with Video, and Skype Video over Wi-Fi and 3G. I have had several Google Talk with Video calls over Windmobile's 3G network. And, just for the record, Maemo had this feature before Apple, and without the silly limitation.

Advantage: Maemo.

Almost one month ago, we announced Qt Web Runtime, and released some snapshot for N900. Basically, QtWRT is a framework, using which you can write "native" application with standard web technology, e.g. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As a good starting point, you should take a look at this article.

When I've got myself a Nokia N810 couple of years ago, I was nicely surprised by very good quality car holder that came inside the retail box as standard. When I've got myself a Nokia N900 last December, there was no car holder inside the box. Even worse - Nokia didn't seem to care providing one as an optional accessory to buy later. They still don't seem to care, anyway.
Read more »

Are you a Python developer, feeling envious of your C++-coding buddies cranking out N900 Qt applications with all those nice Qt Mobility APIs? No reason for envy any longer: The PyMaemo/PySide team is proud to present PySide Mobility: Python bindings for the Qt Mobility APIs! Combining the power of Python and the Nokia-sponsored PySide Qt bindings with the capabilities of Qt Mobility, you’ll be spewing out impressive apps for N900 like never before!

Original announcement

The FM transmitter on the Nokia N900 is one of my favourite features. The N900 was not the first Nokia to have it but the first to actually have a usable one. This was because you could boost the FM transmitter output and thus get clear sound even in slightly congested airwaves.

I have been tethering via USB a lot lately. I don’t connect to the internet using my laptop directly but instead, I access the N900′s data connection via SSH tunnelling (port-forwarding). I had to resort to this because I didn’t want to interfere with the network that my laptop was already connected to. So the [...]

Here's a common scenario. You've acquired a spare battery for your smartphone, either by buying one on purpose or by inheriting one from another device. Yet, in order to charge each, you've got to power the device down and swap cells, effectively using the phone itself as the charger. If, like me, you juggle more than one phone and more than one battery for each, this can get very tiresome. Enter this latest mains battery charger from Mobile Fun, compatible with nearly every Nokia smartphone battery from the last few years and reviewed right here. Summary? It's a slam dunk.

Three days ago, a new MeeGo Handset UX image has been released for the N900. I wanted to try out gPodder on it to see how far I could come without any coding...

It was quite easy to get things going: Download the image, dd it to a MicroSD card, boot the kernel (detailed instructions) and set up USB networking. After that, I could ssh into the environment (the root password is meego) and have a look around.

Instead of using apt-cache and apt-get to search for and install packages, I utilized yum to search for and install PyGTK. Then, I used rsync to copy my Git checkout of gPodder to the device. There are two additional dependencies for gPodder that aren't yet available in the MeeGo repositories, namely feedparser and mygpoclient, so I just copied the Python modules from my Laptop into the src/ folder of the gPodder checkout. Then, just switch to the MeeGo user (su - meego), make sure that the DISPLAY variable is set (export DISPLAY=:0) and start gPodder from the source folder (with bin/gpodder - it automatically loads the modules from the right path) - gPodder says hello MeeGo.

The basic functions work, it's just that the Desktop UI isn't suited for mobile devices (the MeeGo compositor/decorator also has several problems, but that seems to be a more general problem). Python bindings for Hildon aren't (yet ?) available, so I could not test the Maemo 4 or Maemo 5 UIs, but I would like to do a proper Qt/MeeGo Touch-based UI for gPodder, anyway. Let's hope the PyMaemo or PySide teams are quick to release bindings and make them available in the MeeGo repositories, so Python developers can create usable UIs for MeeGo handsets :) Oh, and two MeeGo-Python facts: It comes pre-installed in the N900 image, and the version shipped is 2.6.

In short: Apart from the UI framework, everything is already in place (and working) for Python on MeeGo. With the recent release of Qt Mobility for PySide, let's hope that MeeGo Touch bindings are not that far away.

Display a Conboy note on your desktop

MOptinagi - found unoptified packages

Installing packages and applications on n900 from extras-devel or extras-testing result most of the time on a nice error : ‘Not enougth space on device’. This happen most of the time because you have installed package which aren’t yet optified.

Found this packages isn’t easy. This is why i ve made this little script which is not optimal. It takes a long time to process all packages and files.

moptinagi.py

import commands
import os
import hildon
import gtk
 
details = ''
less = ''
 
r = commands.getoutput("/usr/bin/dpkg --get-selections")
packages = r.rsplit('\n')
for index,package in enumerate(packages):
  print 'Processing packages ',index,' on ',len(packages)
  #print package.split('\t')
  s = package.split('\t')
  if s[(len(s)-1)] == 'install':
    pkg_files = commands.getoutput("/usr/bin/dpkg -L "+s[0]).split('\n')
    pkg_size = 0
    for pkg_file in pkg_files:  
      #pkg_size = 0
      if ('/opt' not in pkg_file) or ('/home' not in pkg_file):
        try: 
          st = os.stat(pkg_file)
          if st.st_blocks > 0:
            details = details + '\n'+  s[0]+':'+pkg_file+':'+str(st.st_size/1024)+'Kb'
            pkg_size = pkg_size + st.st_size
        except:
          pass
    less = less + '\n' + s[0] + ' : '+str(pkg_size/1024)+'Kb'
 
print less
w = hildon.Window()
p = hildon.PannableArea()
t = hildon.TextView()
 
p.add(t)
w.add(p)
total = less+'\n\n\n'+details
t.get_buffer().set_text(total)
w.show_all()
 
gtk.main()

Just to be clear, i didn’t blame any developpers to not optify their packages. I understand why Nokia keep root fs on a fast nand. But a so small one is a real pain for everyone, users and developpers. I just hope that apps and libs will be optify in a short delay.

Post the PR 1.2 firmware for the Nokia N900, the kinetic scrolling inside the menu became painfully slow and coupled with the fact all apps are now displayed on one page, scrolling to the bottom has started taking multiple swipes. If you have a lot of apps installed, then situation is even worse.

But fortunately, as is with most N900 problems, the community in the form of MohammadAG has found a fix and if you are keen on getting the speed back, follow the instructions below.

• Install ‘wget’ and ‘rootsh’ via the Application Manager.

• Then open the ‘Terminal’ and run the following commands with the N900 connected to the internet:

root
wget http://mohammadag.xceleo.org/public/maemo/debfiles/hildon-desktop_kinetic_2.2.138-1+0m5_armel.deb
dpkg -i hildon-desktop_kinetic_2.2.138-1+0m5_armel.deb
killall hildon-desktop

• That’s it.

If for some reason this method doesn’t work for you or there is a problem with the automatic download, grab this file and copy it to the N900′s root directory (/home/user/MyDocs).

• Then open the ‘Terminal’ and run the following commands:

root
dpkg -i /home/user/MyDocs/hildon-desktop_kinetic_2.2.138-1+0m5_armel.deb
killall hildon-desktop

This method replaces the default ‘hildon-desktop package’ with a modified variant that also has fixes for PR 1.2 bugs like call UI glitches. After installing this, if you were to use an apt-get command to update, the N900 will reinstall the default version. To override this, enter the following commands in the terminal.

echo "Package: hildon-desktop
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 1001" >> /etc/apt/preferences

A huge hat tip to MohammadAG for this very welcome fix, if you want to know more, this is the thread to follow.

Similar Posts:

• A System Wide Portrait Keyboard Comes To The Nokia N900
• TweeGo Is A Great Looking N900 Twitter App
• How To Block Unwanted Callers On The N900
• How To Make Your N900′s FM Transmitter Work In The 76.0Mhz – 107.9Mhz Range
• Multitasking: The N8 Can Handle 15 Apps Without A Lag

PyPackager HowTo

The Osmosoft team as of October 2007

The N900 is the undisputed king when it comes to the options available for tethering its internet-connection. The best part is that it works out-of-box without any software restrictions. Ubuntu 10.04 With the USB connection, the N900 is recognized as a modem that can be used to “dial-in”. The setup is easy. The only thing [...]

Like Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and probabilistic LSA (pLSA) – see my previous post “LSA and pLSA in Python“, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is an algorithm which, given a collection of documents and nothing more (no supervision needed), can uncover the “topics” expressed by documents in that collection. LDA can be seen as a Bayesian extension of pLSA.

As Blei, the author of LDA, points out, the topic proportions in pLSA are tied with the training documents. This is problematic: 1) the number of parameters grows linearly with the number of training documents, which can cause serious overfitting 2) it is difficult to generalize to new documents and requires so-called “folding-in”. LDA fixes those issues by being a fully generative model: where pLSA uses a matrix of P(topic|document) probabilities, LDA uses a distribution over topics.

Researchers at the University of Manchester revealed a real-time face tracker on a mobile phone this week and decided to use the Nokia N900 for demo. The aim for the research is to do both face and voice verification using the camera and microphone built into mobile phones for secure access to apps without passwords.

Video is embedded below. Click here if it’s not visible in your RSS reader.

The face tracker use landmarks on the face using a technique known as the Active Appearance Model. The positions of these landmarks relative to each other define the shape of your face and indicate where you are looking, your expression and who you are. As you can see in the video, the tracker does a pretty good job following the face even when the phone pans or rotates. Let’s hope this technology evolves from the Nokia N900 into other mobile phones as well.

For more information on this video, see this page from Dr. Philip A. Tresadern.

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

• JoikuSpot Beta for Nokia N900 Now Available – Turns your N900 To WiFi Hotspot
• Paid Apps in Danger at Ovi Store for Nokia N900
• Paid Apps For Nokia N900 Showing Up in Ovi Store Again

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WordPress へようこそ。これは最初の投稿です。編集もしくは削除してブログを始めてください !

It's been six months which have flown by, but the current Maemo Community Council's term is coming to an end and it's time for the election of five people to the council who represent the Maemo community's interests to Nokia and vice-versa.

The next election's voting will run from Thursday, 16th September to Wednesday, 22nd September.

What's it for?

The council is a body of volunteers taken from the Maemo community. It acts as a focal point for the Maemo community, representing developers on, and users of, maemo.org to Nokia (and vice versa). Examples of council activity can be found on the Council homepage or in the blog, but also in the tens of little things that happen in the background of which you may be unaware.

For example, in this term, some of the issues the Council dealt with include:

• Cease & desist issues over Chromium distribution
• The release of PR1.2
• The bundling of Nokia's "MyNokia" service with PR1.2
• The pushing of Ovi Store for Maemo, but the limited set of technologies it supports
• The Fremantle Developer Device Queue
• Improvements to the Extras-testing process
• The evolution of MeeGo
• The MeeGo Conference (replacing the annual Maemo Summit)
• The announcement that Nokia will not be supplying a commercial-quality MeeGo variant to N900 end-users
• Implementing a set of rules for talk.maemo.org
• A brainstorm on the future of the Maemo community
• The increasing move of focus of Nokia from Maemo maintenance and support to MeeGo growth.

What's next?

Community members should be considering whether they want to stand. When nominations open, you can nominate someone via an email to maemo-community (which they must reply to to accept) or you can put your own hat into the ring by emailing the same list. A further announcement will be made when nominations open, with more information.

The election timescale (all times UTC) is:

Voting closes:
23:59, Wednesday, 22nd September 2010 Voting opens:
00:00, Thursday, 16th September 2010 Hust ings Nominations close:
23:59, Wednesday, 8th September 2010 Nominations open:
00:00, Thursday, 26th August 2010

How's it work?

The election is a "single transferrable vote". Each member of maemo.org, who has had an account for over 3 months and earned over 10 "karma" points, gets a ballot. They rank their candidates in order of preference; if their top candidate cannot get elected with the votes they receive, the votes are redistributed until all five seats have been allocated.

Anyone who has karma of over 100 is eligible to stand, including employees and sub-contractors of Nokia.

Here is a cool UI for MeeGo tablets called Velvet from the folks at TAT and Wind river . Watch the video below. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrdrBefMAEc Does a re-scaled UI for mobiles or PCs make a good tablet UI? We think tablets are radically different types of devices that require new and unique UIs. Velvet is a playful cloth shader concept UI for MeeGo tablets by TAT and Wind River. With full support for 3D graphics and shaders, TAT Cascades enables astonishing UIs on MeeGo, Android and other tablet OSs. It's hard to tell if we will see such UIs on devices soon but for now it's something cool for a concept ! via TAT Blog

Windows 7 Unexpectedly, tethering on 7 was quite straightforward. Ovi Suite does a pretty good job at it. Here is what needs to be done: 1. Install Nokia Ovi Suite 2. Connect the N900 in PC Suite Mode. A nice confirmation is displayed after a successful connection 3. From the Menu, Select Tools -> ‘Connect [...]

Firefox for Mobile Once a Mozillian, Always a Mozillian - http://mozmobileintern.wordpress.com/2010... August 22 from My Summer at Mozilla » Once a... - Comment - Like

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-08-16 through 2010-08-22

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-08-16 through 2010-08-22

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-08-16 through 2010-08-22

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-08-16 through 2010-08-22

Front Page

Community release of hildon-desktop, and promise of Maemo 5 community SSU

As Nokia winds down its N900 support the community will need to step up to provide its own. Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh has done just that, releasing a number of core Maemo 5 packages with updates developed by Nokia since PR1.2, but not yet introduced in "PR1.3". His particular prompt was a change to the scrolling behaviour of the applications menu: "Many (including me) were particularly annoyed with the introduction of the PR1.2 menu, which had slower (much slower) kinetic scrolling. Here's a modified hildon-desktop package which has this reversed, and includes all fixes post PR1.2 (call UI glitching etc...)." He goes on to say, later in the thread, that he is preparing a proper community updates repo, similar to the Maemo 4 one from Lucas Maneos. This would provide both an interim release before PR1.3 is released (if it is) and an ongoing home for community-driven updates to Maemo 5.

Finally, the past week Alban and I released MapBuddy 0.4

As mentioned in my previous post, now MapBuddy supports Point of Interests from OpenStreetMap.
It stores them in a sqlite3 db using its spatialite extension.

We use OSM XAPI, for which sometimes requests fail and it seems to silently ignore requests for large areas.
We are working on it :-)

"Download POIs" in the main menu will download all the OSM POIs in the shown area, which mean that you need just to centre the area for which you want to download POIs for and it will fetch them for you.
This is the only operation that will need network access and might take quite long time, depending of the size of the area. Remember that OSM dislikes very large area fetching. Please be considerate.

This means that if you're planning to have a trip to a city you don't know, what you need to do is cache its tiles at different zoom level just loading them (some improvements for this step are scheduled) and select "download POIs".

Remember to "Show POIs", which will show some of the most interesting categories (OSM features) and select any of them. Amenity and Tourist are among them. Again, improvements are scheduled.

POIs are hidden at wider zoom levels, to improve map readability on high density areas.

Some more improvements are still needed and will be added soon, in particular about speed issues at startup or when finger-scrolling the map with POIs shown and about UI.

Lot of work is still going on in the offline mode direction, a search for POIs, integration with the evopedia package, better tile caching experience, etc...

Last but not least, I'd like to thank Enrico Zini for his great suggestions!

I just released ringtoned 0.2.4 with a fix to make the N900 able to vibrate again when a call is received.
Ringtoned (displayed in the application manager as “Custom ringtones for your contacts”) is available from extras-devel (that contains a lot of other unstable software!) or from my personal repository:

Install from my personal repository
(follow the link on the N900 browser)

This release fixes the last major reproducible bugs, but I’m sure there are more. If you find any please report them in the bugzilla explaining clearly what you are doing, what you would expect to happen and what happens instead. A log attached to the bugzilla entry is very useful to understand what is going on, and can be easily created by opening a terminal and giving this command:

ringtonedctl -d stop startwait > /home/user/MyDocs/ringtoned.log 2>&1

Then attach the ringtoned.log file that is in your documents directory to the bug report.

Nokia has been proudly touting some impressive statistics of its Ovi store recently, and on the surface they do seem promising.  Given their global cell phone sales numbers, that shouldn’t be surprising.  Even though Nokia has hit a rough spot, the company still manages to crank out more devices per year than any competitor.

Tethering over Bluetooth is slower but being wireless is a great advantage over USB. Ubuntu 10.04 Another simple setup: 1. Install Dial-Up Networking (bluetooth-dun) from Extras on the N900. 2. Install blueman Bluetooth-Manager on Ubuntu. This is not required but a good gui doesn’t hurt. sudo apt-get install blueman 3. Open blueman from the status bar [...]

GSoC has ended but development of MeBook continues. I’ve decided to keep the name MeBook (Maemo eBook) which I originally intended only as a development name. I’ve promoted version 0.1.7 to extras-testing so testers are needed to get the application to extras.

If you have any feature requests or bug reports please either contact me or use the bugtracker at http://code.google.com/p/mebook/issues/. I have some features and improvemts planned and I’m already working on some of them. Contributions are of course welcome! (the source repository is now at http://gitorious.org/mebook)

In the future I will possibly set up a website and blog for development updates and support.

Thanks for reading this blog and thanks for the comments and feedback!

After almost a month without updates, today I've pushed some fixes and improvements to Maevies and butaca-server.

• Query results are freed once they're no longer needed
• The service quits when the user closes the client
• There's a proper About window (taken from Joaquim Rocha's SeriesFinale)
• Maemo packages (Maevies, butaca-server) in extras-devel work fine (previous version for butaca-server lacked the butaca-service file, even if the autobuilder log said it was OK)

The nice news is that Maevies already had users! I haven't promoted this app neither in talk.maemo.org nor in Identica's Maemo group, but several Maemo-related blogs and forums were listing it. It's funny because, as butaca-server's previous version didn't work, those users were happy just with python-webkit pointing to Google Movies . I hope they enjoy the new features they'll find.

About Window

Movie Info - The Expendables

Movie Stingers - The Expendables

Tracker 0.8′s situation

Yesterday Nokia and Intel announced the establishment of a joint research centre, based at the University of Oulu (Finland). The lab, which will have around two dozen researchers, will focus on mobile user experiences, with a particular emphasis on 3D experiences and technology. Likely research areas include 3D virtual worlds, 3D user interfaces and immersive gaming. 

TAT (The Astonishing Tribe), a company specialising in the creation and licensing of mobile user interfaces, believes that "tablets as a radically different type of device" and that this has important implications for user interface design. They have released a video showcasing their Velvet UI, a "playful cloth shader concept UI for MeeGo tablets", which has been developed in conjunction with Wind River. 

These days I’ve been playing with a sharing plugin for the Nokia N900. You can use it to upload pictures to Twitter, using a variety of services. Right now it supports Twitpic, Twitgoo, Mobypicture, img.ly and Posterous, but it can be easily extended to support other services.

Right now it’s in extras-testing, so if you find it useful you can vote to help it reach the Maemo extras repository.

As usual, feedback is appreciated.

Enjoy!

In case you didn’t know, the N900 is capable of creating a hotspot and share its 3G internet connection with other wireless devices. Sharing via a Hotspot is the top-dog of all tethering options. There are currently two ways available to get this set up. Mobile Hotspot (Free) Like all maemo.org downloads, this comes free [...]

Some may have noticed that the Nokia Qt SDK contains a simulator for Qt applications on Nokia devices. It consists of the simulator application, plus Qt libraries built for its platform (Q_WS_SIMULATOR), which basically “wraps” the target application on the simulator window (and allows to simulate various events of the target device).

It has been asked on the Maemo.org Talk whether it would be possible to run PySide applications on the simulator. Technically, it would be as simple as building PySide against the simulator libraries… and indeed it was! Well, at least after a couple of patches, I managed to make it work, as can be seen on the screenshot below (for the curious the application running on it is the “hyperui” demo from pyside-examples repository):

For anyone willing to try, you just need to download the latest PySide code, apply the patches not yet upstream (to the pyside.git tree), and build everything as per official instructions, with these notes:

• When building PySide, add the directory which contains the Qt tools for the Simulator platform (usually “<SDK_installation_dir>/Simulator/Qt/gcc/bin”) to your PATH (taking care to add it before other directories which contain Qt tools).
• When building PySide, add -DQ_WS_SIMULATOR=yes to the cmake command. This is necessary because currently CMake does not detect the Simulator platform, thus requiring us to force it.
• When running applications, remember to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the Simulator libraries, otherwise the application might try to be run with your system Qt libraries, which will probably fail.

To make testing easier, I built PySide binaries (from git snapshots) for the Simulator libraries shipped in Nokia Qt SDK 1.0. You can download them here. They were built on Ubuntu 10.04 (32-bit), but will probably work on other (32-bit) distributions. Also note it was build for Python 2.6. To use these binaries, unpack the tarball and modify the “qt_sdk_dir” in run_with_simulator.sh to point to your Nokia Qt SDK installation directory. Next, run:

./run_with_simulator.sh /path/to/app.py

And your application should run under the simulator (the simulator opens automatically if not already running).

TODO

• Apply required PySide patches upstream (they are currently under review).
• Attempt to build PySide Mobility as well.

Maemo5 (which is running on Nokia N900) has application launcher which by default lists all entries in some kind of order. There is a way to move icons but when you have too many of them it becomes not comfortable enough to use.

There are few ways of dealing with it. First was MyMenu application, then Catorise got born and some time later ApMeFo arrived on scene. Few months ago I installed Catorise, hacked it a bit (and got my changes merged) and it was fine. Automatic sorting of applications worked fine, there was a way to force icons to be placed in other categories then default given. Someone even wrote GUI for moving icons from folder to another.

But there was also thing which I started to miss one day — no way to create own categories. Or at least I did not found such one. So I asked on IRC one day and got suggestion to try ApMeFo.

Installed, started GUI and WTF!?! Interface was (still is) disaster. Uninstalled it but promised to get back to it after vacations. And I did. I even keep it installed and use it. But let’s start from beginning.

How did I moved from Catorise to ApMeFo? First made a backup of setup so I could check which application was in which category. Then used ApMeFo to create basic folders and added one app into each of them. Next step was in ViM where I edited all sub menu files to contain entries from Catorise setup, edited order, moved some into other categories.

Now I am waiting for ApMeFo author to return from his vacations as I would like to improve UI a bit but sources present in ‘Extras’ repository are not complete (files are generated from *.ui files saved by Qt Designer).

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Switched from Catorise to ApMeFo was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

I’ve decided to candidate myself again (yes, I wasn’t elected last time) for the Maemo Council elections. During these months I’ve tried to help more the Maemo Community and I’ve started working to two Qt/C++ projects. Here you can find something more about me.

Name: Andrea Grandi
maemo.org profile: Andy80 – http://maemo.org/profile/view/andy80/
Corporate affiliation: none

Introduction: My name is Andrea Grandi, I live in Italy and I’m a Computer Science student. I’ve worked for some years as a software developer, then I started university. I’m part of the Maemo Community since 2007. Since then I like to help new users, organizing events, developing applications for Maemo. During this year I’ve started developing applications using Qt/C++ for N900, to be ready when MeeGo for handled devices will be out. I really like to collaborate with other community members to build together the best product ever.

My life in the Community:

– May 2008: PyMaemo: Python for Nokia Internet Tablet @ PyCon Italia 2 – http://www.pycon.it/conference/talks/pymaemo-python-i-nokia-internet-tablet

– September 2008: ESBox and Pluthon Eclipse plugins: how to use Eclipse to develop Maemo applications @ Maemo Summit 2008 – http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2008

– Summer 2009: I worked to python-mafw bindings, during a stage in Igalia.

– October 2009: python-mafw: MAFW framework for Python developers @ Maemo Summit 2009 – http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2009

– May 2010: PySide: Python Bindings for the Qt Framework @ PyCon Italia 4 – http://www.pycon.it/conference/talks/qt-mobile-pyside-bindings

Current Activities: I’m currently working to two Maemo/MeeGo projects. The first one is mSoma, a Soma.Fm client that I’m developing with Lorenzo Bettini. The other one is LastGo, a Last.fm client. Both applications are written in Qt/C++ and are using QtMobility as multimedia libraries.

mSoma: http://gitorious.org/msoma – http://maemo.org/packages/view/msoma
LastGo: http://gitorious.org/lastgo – http://maemo.org/packages/view/lastgo

Motivations: I really would like to be able to do more for the community and one of the best way could be to be part of the council, to help both users/developers to explain their requests to Nokia and Nokia to understand the requests from the community. There are a lot of fantastic ideas coming from the community that could improve what we are doing: the key is to organize them and giving them more attention. This is what I’ve always looked for: working together to build something great! This will be probably the last Maemo Council, since now we (Maemo) and them (Moblin) are all part of the same community: MeeGo, and I’d like to help Maemo people to feel the most comfortable possible in our new Community.

I thought it would be great to end the series with a visual summary of the options covered so far, and then some Ubuntu 10.04 Tether GPRS/3G connection via Bluetooth Tether GPRS/3G connection via USB Tether Wifi connection via USB Tether GPRS/3G connection via Hotspot Tether Ubuntu internet-connection via Bluetooth. (Haven’t tried this yet..PAN?) Tether [...]

Dave Neary has continued in his role of handling the election of a new Maemo Community Council, and published the list of eligible candidates. There are over 500 eligibile candidates. To nominate yourself, or someone else, you need to send an email to the maemo-community mailing list:

To nominate yourself or someone else for the council, please email the maemo-community mailing list with a clear email header (something like
"Council nomination: Michael Mouse" for example).

People who are nominated should accept (or refuse) such a nomination, if they are not nominating themselves. Apart from that, nominations don't require a seconder.

Read more

Nominations are open until 23:59 Wednesday, 8th September; so you have just under two weeks to get your preferred candidates on the ballot sheet!

(First, an apology in advance, this is a bit of a braindump, and as such, isn't very well structured.)

Mozilla has finally released the alpha version of its mobile browser Fennec for Nokia N900 and Android (2.x) devices. Fennec is the codename of Mozilla’s mobile project. This browser is built on the new “Electrolysis” and “Layers” technology which concentrates on increasing speed and responsiveness. Fennec is designed and optimized for browsing on a mobile device and it comes with some interesting features such as Firefox Sync, Add-ons and the Awesome Bar. Fennec 2.0 Alpha 1 Highlights: Pinch-to-zoom (Android), double-tap, or use the volume rocker (Nokia N900) to zoom in and out Tabbed browsing in thumbnail view lets you easily see and open the site you want Location-Aware Browsing gives you content and info relevant to your location Save to PDF in the Site Menu lets you capture important content, like driving directions or a boarding pass, to view offline Find in Page in the Site Menu lets you quickly find text on the webpage Share Page in the Site Menu lets you send content to email, Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader Forget Password in the Site Menu tells a website you no longer trust to forget your private data Add Search Engine in the Site Menu lets you quickly add a new search engine to your Awesome Screen Context ...

Firefox for Mobile Fennec Alpha for Android (2.0 and above) and Nokia N900 Now Live! - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2010... August 27 from Missmobile's Blog » Fennec... - Comment - Like

The Community elections are already underway, but in order to fully comply with stating affiliation as per the Community Council election rules and in agreement with the rest of the Community Council, I want to state to the wider community that starting with September 2010, I, Attila Csipa, will be joining Forum Nokia's support arm engaging in developer support with a pinch of technology advocacy. This change will hardly affect maemo.org in any way - your maemo.org resident Nokian contact is still Quim Gil (qgil) and I certainly will keep on working on my OSS/community projects and trying to make the Maemo/MeeGo ecosystem a better place for developers and users.

.

Testing another gem. Funny looking fish, up to nothing! Its great to see Maemo development still pushing boundaries.

During the first semester of this year I’ve been playing with the idea of creating a “Share” dataengine that would support scriptable plugins. This idea came from the fact that there were a lot of hacks on the pastebin dataengine that at the time were the only “fast” solutions to the problems I was facing. I was also motivated by the amount of bugs/wishes on bko regarding new services.

The Mac makes it easy to share its internet connection with any other device it is connected to. If you want the N900 to share a Mac’s Ethernet or Wifi internet connection over USB, this is what you need to do: 1. Connect the N900 to the Mac and select PC Suite Mode. 2. Setup [...]

If you have been following this blog, you already know that the N900 is remarkable in its ability to adapt itself in various environments. This post will describe the steps needed in situations where you would like to connect to the internet using the N900′s wifi connection via USB from a desktop (or less likely, [...]

Does this look familiar?

After my post-mortem on the Nokia N900 microUSB failure fiasco I received an interesting offer from Nokia: collect the Care experiences in a clear, objective format, and the situation(s) would be investigated.

An offer I can’t refuse.

To start this off, I am reintroducing the survey that galvanized the maemo.org community.  That survey has closed but had collected a significant amount of data beforehand.  The challenge here is to bring respondents back to the table.  Even more critical, to obtain a reasonably accurate picture of the problem’s scope we really need response from as many people as possible, especially those not having any problems.  More on that later in the article. 

The survey:

View This Poll
Market Research

For those who either encountered unreasonable difficulty getting proper service, or had no success at all, please provide the following in comments here:

• Mode of failure
• Country of purchase
• Months of use
• Did you file off and/or compress male connector prongs?
• Care center(s) involved
• Details of Care experience (number of service attempts, escalation, if satisfaction survey was sent to you, etc)

Please limit responses to objective descriptions to make reporting and analysis easier.  I will also be collecting what I can from previous postings.

Now, I can’t promise a positive outcome for everyone currently frustrated by service difficulties or outright refusal, but I can guarantee nothing will improve without trying.  Hopefully Nokia is serious about addressing the inconsistent and often poor N900 customer support experience so far.

You can of course help: spread a link to this post far and wide.  Tweet and retweet the message.  The more people respond, the more accurate and useful the data can be.

On a broader note: I wasn’t surprised to learn this issue is affecting other companies such as HTC.  Any manufacturer who elects to use a surface-mount connector for charging and/or data transfer is asking for trouble in my educated opinion.  Interestingly, leaked photos of the Nokia “N9″ indicate through-hole mounting for its microUSB port (far right side of linked picture).  This may well turn out to be an instance of one company learning from its mistake, and setting itself apart from competitors in an unglamorous but highly useful way.  This will be critical as Nokia seeks to retain current customers and gain new ones.  There’s been a lot to forgive.

Additional resources and references:

Nokia discussion thread where issue is formally acknowledged

Filed under: Addressing Retention, Delivering Quality, Mentioning Maemo, Mentioning MeeGo, The Write Stuff, Unusability, Ways of Rocking Tagged: CARE, customer, customers, failure, N900, Nokia, poll, service, survey, usb

There are several ways of being part of the KDE game: you can develop, translate, be an artist, help users, take care of our infrastructure, organize developer sprints. A lot of ways right? But some people just lack the time to join the game in any of the areas that I just listed but still want to contribute in some way to the project.

The “Join the Game” campaign was launched to create another way of contributing to the project: you donate some money to the project in order to help organizing developer sprints, to represent KDE on conference and trade shows, maintaining the current infrastructure and help the e.V. to legally represent the project in different manners.

As soon as the campaign was launched I wanted to be part of it too because I know how hard it is to sponsor all the activities that we have and how important the activities are. Some weeks after joining the game I received this awesome gift from the KDE e.V. It came in a simple box and when I opened I could find a blue box (no, it’s not a T.A.R.D.I.S. :P) and a letter.

It was really a nice emotion to read the letter that was sent to me, signed by the president of the KDE e.V. (really signed, not that image of the signature that organizations usually use). Opening the blue box another surprise: a nice silver card with my name, the KDE e.V. logo and the number of my membership: 0006! It was a surprise and I am very very happy to be an early adopter of this! And the cherry of this awesome cake: a playing piece (the same that you see on the posters), made of wood and with the KDE logo painted on it and also my membership number. Just great! Congratulations to everybody involved on this campaign! Check below some pictures:

The Letter - really signed

You can see the KDE logo in the center of the box

What you see when you open the box

The Membership card

Playing Piece - front

Playing Piece - back

And you? What are you waiting for? Help KDE and be part of it: Join the Game!

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-08-23 through 2010-08-29

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-08-23 through 2010-08-29

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-08-23 through 2010-08-29

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-08-23 through 2010-08-29

It's been some time since the last gPodder release, and I've been busy adding some nifty features to make the best use of the on-board facilities of Maemo 5. As already mentioned in a previous post, this new version comes with built-in notification support. After installation, you might have to re-start hildon-home (or your device) for the changes to become effective. That's what you will get when new episodes are found:

The other and more "invisible" change is that gPodder now listens to MAFW and also talks to it at times. MAFW is the backend of the Media Player application, and you profit in two ways from this integration:

• The last playback position and duration of an episode are displayed in gPodder and synchronized to gpodder.net
• Playback can be resumed even with the Media Player application

This means that users of the normal Media Player application will benefit from all the goodies that were previously only available in combination with Panucci. Combined with the new notifications, this makes for yet another great release with even better integration into the Maemo 5 environment.

gPodder 2.8 is now available from Extras-Testing, so please test, review and vote on the package.

While the MeeGo Touch Python Bindings are still not packaged and released, I though I'd give the C++ library a try and have a look through the class hierarchy. After getting the basic "Hello World" app running, I decided to create an application that can load the list of subscriptions from gPodder's SQLite database:

This view uses MContentItem, which already provides an icon and two lines of text - correctly styled and ready to go. Menu and toolbar items are MAction objects that can either appear everywhere or only at specific places (e.g. only in the toolbar). The great thing is that this all works on your Desktop in a normal window, so testing applications on your computer will be much easier with MeeGo Touch than it is with Hildon (which does not really run without its own hildon-desktop session in Xephyr).

The screenshot above is from the prototype written in C++, and shows how a gPodder MeeGo UI could look like. The MeeGo Touch UI of gPodder will be implemented in Python once the bindings are ready - the framework seems to be fun to work with so far. If you would like to play around with it yourself: MeeGo Touch is available from the MeeGo PPA of Ville M. Vainio if you are on Ubuntu and don't want to build it yourself.

Front Page

Community SSU for Maemo 4 is now stable and available to all

It's been talked about for a while, but Lucas Maneos took the ball and ran with it: there's now a community-owned software update repository for users of N8x0s. Announcing this milestone, Lucas said, "the first "stable" community SSU is now available in the maemo.org repository. Many thanks to all the testers who made this possible :-) [...] Now that this is out it frees up -testing for more experimental work. If anyone wants to contribute in any way, please ping me. Ways to participate include: adopt a package, evaluate and apply existing patches to it; discover patches or other improvements that can be applied; for the extra brave, follow the community-testing repository and report any issues found; maintain and improve the wiki pages." With Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh's equivalent for Maemo 5 gaining traction, the possibility of a roadmap of improvements and bug fixes for non-MeeGo devices seems entirely possible. However, both SSU efforts are primarily packaging and logistical tasks; only bug fixes and improvements developed by the community can be shipped.

Read more

Nominations open for Maemo Community Council election

Having returned from holiday, and not being given much time by your editor, Dave Neary - who acts as maemo.org's returning officer - has officially opened the nominations for the Q3 Maemo Community Council election: "To nominate yourself or someone else for the council, please email the maemo-community mailing list with a clear email header (something like" With over 500 eligible candidates, this could be the most varied and important election. Things are clearer about the relationship of the Maemo and MeeGo communities, but the migration paths for maemo.org users, contributors and developers is not yet completely clear.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Community SSU for Maemo 4 is now stable and available to all
   • Nominations open for Maemo Community Council election
2. Applications
   • Chess clock application supports lots of game styles
   • MeBook development continues post GSoC
   • Maevies updates
3. Development
   • When should an email address be suitable as a bug tracker in an Extras package?
   • Running PySide applications in Qt Simulator
4. Devices
   • Accessing N900 contacts from cars' Bluetooth systems
   • Walkthrough of various N900 tethering options
   • Nokia Care seeking more information on users' experiences of N900 USB "defect"
5. Announcements
   • Font Changer allows user selection of theme fonts
   • ringtoned updated to include vibration options
   • Open source Twitter sharing plugin for pictures
   • ...and 3 more

Got acquainted with Raemote today. A desktop widget that allows remote control of FrontRow. Its works great on my MacBook Pro! but I noticed that the application doesn’t optimize its use of lircd. This hits the battery hard. I let the developer know at t.m.o. Hopefully, a solution will come around soon. Until then I [...]

I’m going to start echoing job listings for projects and companies I am tracking, and that of course includes Ovi, MeeGo and mobile computing in general.  The category, for those wishing to follow via RSS, will be Employing Opportunity.

In that spirit, here’s an attractive one: “Senior Product Manager, MeeGo Operation-PRO00000031“.  The description is as follows:

MeeGo Devices is where Nokia builds mobile computers on Linux. We build leading-edge devices by combining the most powerful hardware and the best open source software technologies. Our ambition is to deliver a superior user experience dedicated for mobile computers with large touch-screens that fit into your pocket. Using agile development methods and engaging with open source communities define our new way of working. Our latest product is the Nokia N900 – a high-performance mobile computer with powerful multitasking capabilities, fantastic web browser, and a rich media experience. Get to know everything about MeeGo at http://www.meego.com

Besides strong personal charisma and ability to influence, success in this role requires excellent leadership skills, strong strategic thinking skills and excellent negotiation and communication skills. With more than 6 years of experience in similar R&D or product management functions already under your belt, you have a proven your ability to execute in a turbulent environment. We also expect you to have experience from Linux-based open source projects. Take your career to a totally new level by applying today!

As a Senior Product Manager in Nokia’s MeeGo.com operation you will be responsible for driving Nokia’s product and software platform agenda in the MeeGo SW platform creation with Nokia, Intel and the community. You will ensure competitiveness of the MeeGo SW platform in a setup where decision-making is essentially based on your ability to sell your ideas and capability to convince others of the benefits for the whole community, rather than on a formal organizational position. You will need to form a consolidated view of MeeGo building blocks and roadmap with the Nokia MeeGo Product Planning team and to agree on that with Intel representatives or other community members. Also, you will execute a set of front-end product processes (e.g. roadmap process) for steering and managing the development of the MeeGo software platform from Nokia’s perspective. You will report to Head of MeeGo Product Planning Operations.

If I were able to relocate and had just a bit more directly-relevant experience this is the sort of position I would target myself.  I’m sure that Nokia will have no trouble finding candidates.

The position is intended for Helsinki, Finland.  For those interested, the listing can be found here: http://nokia.taleo.net/careersection/10120/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=623606

Filed under: Employing Opportunity, Mentioning Maemo, Mentioning MeeGo, The Cat Corral, The Process and Product Frontier Tagged: Finland, Helsinki, manager, MeeGo, Nokia, product

http://www.meetup.com/SFBay-MeeGo-Network/

Here you can track MeeGo related activities in San Francisco Bay Area. Propose genuine MeeGo meetups or casual meetings after interesting events.

First meetup on September 14 @ San Francisco:

MeeGo Developer Day – The After Meetup

I finally released a version of “Custom ringtones for your contacts” that implements every basic feature I wanted to have for a first stable version, so I think it deserves being called 1.0 .
Apart from some bug fixes, this new version is translatable and allow you to set a ringtone for callers with a hidden phone number and for contacts not in your address book. The new settings are available from the address book settings dialog.

The settings dialog with the extra ringtone buttons

For now there is only an Italian translation, but any help to get more is appreciated. Don’t worry, there are just 8 strings to translate!
To propose a new translation just go to the Transifex component page, download the .pot source file, add the translations to it, login to Transifex, and upload the file by pressing “Add a new translation” and setting as target file “po/XX.po” (where “XX” it the language code, for instance “fi” for Finnish, “de” for German, etc.). If you don’t know how to use gettext translation files I suggest using Poedit or gtranslator.

The custom ringtones application is now available both from extras-testing and from my personal repository:

Install from my personal repository
(follow the link on the N900 browser)

Update: I released version 1.0.1 containing some new translations: German (by NightShift79), French (by Alban Crequy), Brazilian Portuguese (by Humberto Sgrott Reis) and Swedish (by Andreas Henriksson). I will add more when I receive more.

Update 2: I released version 1.0.2 containing a crasher fix and some new translations: Albanian (by Ilir Gjika), Dutch (by Daniel Holsboer) and Spanish (by Fernando Borrego Polo).

Update 3: I released version 1.0.3 containing some new translations: Russian (by Misha Ketslah), Norwegian (by Stian Husemoen), Korean (by KwangHee Cho), Czech (by Pavel Fric), Hungrarian (by Balázs Bárány) and Romanian (by Bogdan Vernescu).