OK, since news is a bit slow as we approach Nokia World (you do know I will be there, right?) it is a good time to see what is cooking over at Nokia Beta Labs. We are at the tail end of the summer here in Washington State and I am finding that mobile phone photos are not turning out very well with all of the background light. I just read on the Nokia Beta Labs blog that there two new applications for the Nokia N900 that look to take the camera to the next level. The HDR Capture application is designed for those situations when you are taking a photo with an open window with light behind the subject. The Lowlight Assistant is designed to help in situations when there is light, but not enough to give you a good photo.

Check out the samples and more details on the Nokia Beta Labs site. You can then sign into your Nokia account and download the apps.

A great deal of useful conversation during Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2010 (LFCS2010) earlier this year revolved around what a MeeGo community should look like.  There are of course numerous aspects to this but for now I want to focus on three only: what sort of constituency would best benefit MeeGo, how could the website structure reflect, support and encourage that constituency, and what might this mean for maemo.org.

Jos Poortvliet did an interview with me for dot KDE in this summer's aKademy and it has been online for a while now. In it we discuss things like Midgard as a storage engine for desktop applications, and Maemo's open QA process for Downloads applications. Some excepts:

At maemo.org we have an appstore for FOSS applications on the Maemo platform. This appstore is enabled by default on all Nokia N900s so we wanted to have some quality control. We had to create our own appstore approval process, compatible with the FOSS philosophy. Now any developer can submit an app, and anyone can test and vote. The whole process is completely transparent, auditable and visible. And it also provides a feedback channel from testers and users to the developers!

...

Midgard is a data storage service. Whether you write desktop or web applications, instead of coming up with your own file format, you just use Midgard. You can work more easily and object-based. Users have many different devices these days, so Midgard has strong replication features to synchronize between different systems. Midgard is built on top of GObject; we provide bindings to a bunch of different languages so developers can choose the tools they like - PHP, Python, Javascript. Currently (as in now, while we're talking) Qt bindings are being developed here at Akademy.

Read the whole interview.

Opening public data is a hot topic in Finland at the moment. As a small experiment with the data that is available I wrote buscatcher, a simple N900 app that displays Helsinki trams (and some buses) moving on a map in real time. This makes it easy to determine when your next tram is coming to the stop, or where it is stuck.

Updated 2010-09-28: Buscatcher now has a stable release that is available from Maemo Downloads with already more than 10,000 installations.

For other platforms, you can grab and run the application from the GitHub repo. It should run on regular Linux desktops, and there have been reports of working on also platforms like the OpenMoko Freerunner.

Firefox for Mobile Changes for add-ons in Fennec alpha - http://limpet.net/mbrubec... September 2 from Matt Brubeck - Comment - Like

It took me a while to get started with the blog again… so let’s start with something tiny: OpenEmbedded images for the Sim.One. So far we had quite some documentation about filesystems on external media but what about the internal flash? We have 8MB which is enough for a tiny filesystem we can build with OpenEmbedded.

Sim.One (OpenEmbedded booth at LinuxTag)

OE has support for the Sim.One already and I just added the parameters to build jffs2 filesystems for the internal NOR flash. In order to build jffs2 images for the Sim.One use the current org.openembedded.dev branch.

OpenEmbedded Setup
I just want to introduce the basic ideas and useful settings for these images. More generic information about how to get started with OE can be found here. For my tests I used the minimal distribution definintion in OE and built a very small image. The relevant settings for your build configuration (local.conf) are as follows:

MACHINE = "simone"
DISTRO = "minimal"
LIBC = "eglibc"
IMAGE_FSTYPES = "tar.gz jffs2"

The minimal-image is a good starting point for the internal flash. The image does not include much of functionality but leaves some free space for additional software. OE does not build the filesystem only, it builds the kernel for us as well so that we can start with a consistent set of files. Let’s give it a try and install the built results – I assume you have a U-Boot shell and network+tftp server configured already.

Install Kernel

erase 0x60080000 0x6027ffff
tftp  0x60080000 uImage-simone.bin

Install Filesystem

erase 0x602c0000 0x60800000
tftp 0x602c0000 simone.jffs2

We need to tell the kernel where to find the patitions. The actual layout we are going to use is as follows:

Device    size        name
mtd0:     000c0000 "Firmware"
mtd1: 00200000     "Kernel"
mtd2: 00540000    "Root-FS"

I have set up the configuration of U-Boot in order to minimize te effort booting from some other medium.
setenv bootargs console=ttyAM0 root=/dev/mtdblock2 rootfstype=jffs2 video=ep93xxfb
setenv bootcmd_nor 'setenv bootargs ${bootargs} ${mtdparts} ; bootm 60080000'
setenv bootcmd run bootcmd_nor
setenv mtdparts mtdparts=physmap-flash.0:768k@0(Firmware),
2048k@0xc0000(Kernel),-@0x2c0000(Root-FS)

It works… what can I do now?
Make the filesystem functional: Add useful things to the filesystem – a good candidate might be busybox httpd. Another useful target in OE is meta-toolchain which creates a cross compilation SDK for your device.

Now that you have read the whole text: If you do not want to build yourself you can take a look at my build results.

Enjoy!

T-Mobile USA is currently inviting its subscribers to test their IPv6 beta service if they have an IPv6 enabled device. The N900 does not support IPv6 out-of-the-box but the Maemo platform is easily capable of enabling IPv6 via a custom kernel. So, if you are feeling adventurous with the N900 and want to help the [...]

It’s been a while since I don’t post anything, and the main reason is that I just got a new job and I’ve being pretty busy with it

After working at INdT for more than 2 years, I decided that it was time to move on, get back to Campinas, get closer with friends and family and start looking for a new job.

I had a quite good time at Recife, working with Mamona, Maemo and MeeGo, mostly helping bring up different ARM platforms to be used by the Institute in many different projects. The work was nice, but Recife can be hard to get through over the time. I’ll for sure miss the nice work place we’ve built, and the nice people I worked with.

About the new job, I’m quite happy to announce that I’m now working as a Software Engineer at Canonical. My main objective now is to help bringing Ubuntu into different ARM platforms, like beagleboard and the new pandaboard.

Canonical is awesome, and the people from the Ubuntu Platform Team is even greater. Had the opportunity to meet most of the people at the last Ubuntu Platform Sprint that was held at Prague, and it was awesome to see so many skilled and fun guys working together to improve Ubuntu.

That’s it, now it’s time to get back to work because we have a huge pile of cool and fun things to work on If you’re interested in understading, helping and participating on what we’re currently doing, get at #ubuntu-arm, freenode, and ping me (rsalveti)!

After buying an iPhone 3gS today, I took my 6 year old to Chuck-E-Cheese’s as I had promised last week; even though I find its ambience utterly unbearable. In order to use the 3gS on T-Mobile, I had planned to jailbreak it after getting home. But while hanging out at ChuckE, in the midst of [...]

#leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top: 60%; left: 70px; } #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { height: 30px; width:50%; padding-top:1px; } #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height: 30px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; } The S60 software platform is slowly ageing away with Maemo covering it up. So I have to say, that the S60 users have to now get used to Maemo. You’ll hear me say this a couple of times here at our Nokia N900 blog. Maemo 5 is currently present on the Nokia N900. The Maemo OS which is [...]

Checked out Gas-Balls from the Ovi Store. Its a nice Live-Wallpaper-like application developed by Nokia. The gas balls bounce around on the desktop, respond to tilt, and explode in vibrant colors when touched. It comes in 3 modes: 1) Fullscreen 2) Background This mode will turn the app into a Live-Wallpaper but still respond to […]

Hi,

Introduction

It would be nice to organize a weekend like the Barcelona Long Weekend we (the Maemo Community) organized on October 2009. These two days should be completly organized by the community and for the community. No formal conferences or talks, but interactive activities and hacking sessions where you, the participant, are the main actor.

What about the content of these two days? We could have (for example) programming tutorials, Qt tutorials, hacking sessions on a specific task, round tables where a developer explains his difficoulties implementing a feature and the others help him, ecc…

The first thing to do is spreading this and asking people (users, developers ecc…) what they would like to find during these two days. Once we’ve gathered some nice ideas we can organize them better.

When and Where

The basic idea is to organize these two days on November 13th, 14th. About the location that will host us we still have no idea. Probably it will be possible to use the same hotel used for the MeeGo Conference, but this must be confirmed yet.

Ideas for the program structure

• Active participation in the event – less talk, more code. No powerpoints – just you, the editor and the compiler. Be productive!
• A two-day Hackathon: Start putting your ideas into fresh code, or finish a project that has been on the back burner for some time
• Participants are encouraged to share their progress at the end of each day – what they accomplished, where they need further help, etc.
• A short but intensive indroduction to Qt/C++ (something like 3-4 hours course, offered by some expert developer)
• Round tables to discuss about UI improvements or features implementation: a developer could have found some difficoult implementing the UI for his application or to provide a particular feature. Other expert developers could try to help him with his problem.
• A workshop for x86 developers on getting started with MeeGo development for ARM – end goal: By the end of the session, everyone has a sample application running in an emulator on their laptop
• Developer tools training – a half day on using git, valgrind, oprofile

Discussion resources

The official place where I would like to take this discussion forward is the MeeGo Forum. The official thread is available here: http://forum.meego.com/showthread.php?t=1342
We also have started a discussion on Maemo Forum and you can find it here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=61708

The official page with all informations available is on MeeGo Wiki: http://wiki.meego.com/MeeGo_Conference_2010/Early_Bird_Events

Thanks to Flumotion, you can access and view the awesome talks that happened at GUADEC 2010.

I have got those related with Grilo, and put them here. Besides the original WebM format videos, I provide also Theora version (in lower quality, intended to those who can not play WebM yet), and the slides too.

The first is a complete talk about Grilo: what is Grilo, what provides, and some of its features.

The second one is a 5 minutes lightning talk, about using Grilo to create a daemon that is able to provide content to other clients through DBus.

The third one, is also a 5 minutes lightning talk, that explains the port of Grilo to Maemo 5, and how it was used to add more multimedia sources to N900‘s Mediaplayer.

Enjoy them!

• Iago Toral Quiroga, Grilo: Feeding applications with multimedia content (video, slides)

• Juan A. Suárez Romero, Rygel-Grilo (video, slides)

• Xabier Rodríguez Calvar, MAFWGriloSource (video, slides)

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-08-30 through 2010-09-05

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-08-30 through 2010-09-05

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-08-30 through 2010-09-05

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-08-30 through 2010-09-05

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-08-30 through 2010-09-05

Front Page

Cut-down MWKN issue

Apologies for this cut-down issue of MWKN. There are two reasons:

1) Twitter's authentication changes caught us whilst we weren't prepared. The appropriate scripts for news gathering and publishing need updating to use "OAuth".

2) One of your editors is currently enjoying the delights of LegoLand. Next week's issue will contain everything that should have been published here.

Read more

Less than a week to declare your candidacy for the Maemo Community Council election

Nominations for the next Maemo Community council will be accepted until 23:59 on Wednesday, 8th September. Nominate yourself, or someone else, soon if you'd like to help steer the transition of the Maemo community to MeeGo. Dave Neary says: "So far, only one person has nominated themselves. We typically get a number of nominations on the last day, but I would encourage people to announce early to avoid the rush. As a tiny extra incentive, I plan to list the candidates in order of their nomination on the voting page this year." The next 6 months will, perhaps, be the most important in determining the future of both maemo.org and MeeGo. maemo.org will need to figure out where it fits in the picture that MeeGo, MeeGo-Harmattan, and Maemo's legacy position as a community-supported platform. The next council will be in a unique position to help smooth this transition and influence the direction of both the Maemo Community and MeeGo moving forward.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Cut-down MWKN issue
   • Less than a week to declare your candidacy for the Maemo Community Council election
2. Applications
   • Macuco2 is in Extras-testing: use web pages that are optimised for iPhone
3. Development
   • Developing MeeGo Touch Framework apps in Ubuntu
4. Community
   • Cheaper rooms available at MeeGo conference hotel
5. Devices
   • Jailbreak your PS3 with Maemo

Thanks to Flumotion, you can access and view the awesome talks that happened at GUADEC 2010.

I have got those related with Grilo, and put them here. Besides the original WebM format videos, I provide also Theora version (in lower quality, intended to those who can not play WebM yet), and the slides too.

The first is a complete talk about Grilo: what is Grilo, what provides, and some of its features.

The second one is a 5 minutes lightning talk, about using Grilo to create a daemon that is able to provide content to other clients through DBus.

The thid one, is also a 5 minutes lightning talk, that explains the port of Grilo to Maemo 5, and how it was used to add more multimedia sources to N900‘s Mediaplayer.

Enjoy them!

• Iago Toral Quiroga, Grilo: Feeding applications with multimedia content (video, slides)

• Juan A. Suárez Romero, Rygel-Grilo (video, slides)

• Xabier Rodríguez Calvar, MAFWGriloSource (video, slides)

Here is the latest video about the latest version of QuickFlickr on N900: New features and future plans I have spent little time for making…

Last week, my wife got a Nook eReader as a birthday present. We've talked a bit about eReaders and have put off getting one. I've had a few concerns with eReaders. First, most of them so far seem to be too closed for my liking. You can't go in and make modifications. In many cases you are limited to where you can get your ebooks. Also, as the iPad and other slates or tablets become more popular, eReaders may end up being over taken by tablets before we know it.

This is a post about metadata extraction from files for desktop search. While it applies specifically to libferris, the same considerations apply to anything which trawls an entire filesystem looking to create a rich index of metadata to allow desktop search to run queries in a reasonable timeframe. Ferris runs fine on KDE and the n810 (soon n900?) so its applicable to both syndications in a way.

The last match of FoneArena Smartphone Championship was between the Palm Pre and Nexus One, and I have a bad news for Android fans. Palm Pre beats Nexus One by a very big margin. Palm Pre got 625 votes, and the Nexus One got only 230 votes, and total votes are 882. Thanks everyone for voting, and now lets head to the next match. The next match is between the Nokia N900 and BlackBerry Storm 2, both are leading smartphone of their companies. So lets see who's the winner. Vote for your favorite after the break. [polldaddy poll="3733030"]

"How do you use multitasking in N900?" That's the question asked by Peter Schneider, head of the Marketing in Nokia's MeeGo Devices team.

"Obviously, multitasking in the Nokia N900 is rather decent (my way of saying it's the best out there). BUT, are you making full use of it? Help me to understand how you use the multitasking feature. Your feedback is appreciated and taken into account in the MeeGo Marketing approach now and in the future."

Participating in this poll could really shape Nokia's vision of multitasking on their MeeGo devices, and it's encouraging to see them reaching out to the power-user, enthusiast and developer community on this topic.

The available options, based on the number of "mini-windows" you see in Maemo 5's task switcher, are:

• None. I'm happyily single-tasking
• 1 to 3 apps
• 4 to 6 apps
• 6 to 9 apps
• More than 9 apps
• Plenty, I never close any app but leave them all open

 

» Vote now!

For Maverick Meerkat we’re continuing improving the ARM support for Ubuntu. With Lucid we got the first release optimized for ARMv7 (Thumb2 and SoftFP but not NEON), and for Maverick the plan is to keep the same ARM optimizations as base, but improving board support and user experience.

Currently the main target boards are the ones based on OMAP 3 and OMAP 4, like:
– BeagleBoard (C4 preferred)
– BeagleBoard xM
– PandaBoard (still to be released)

The main decisions to support these boards are basically the upstream support, solid community around them, easy hardware access and CPU power (standard Ubuntu is quite heavy, so we need a good and powerful machine).

At the moment we already got a good support for them, and the Beta release is somehow usable already! There are some development on-going to have a full working 3D interface (unity) for OpenGL ES much the same way we have for normal OpenGL devices. The only bad thing is that currently most of the 3D drivers for ARM (if not all) are closed source, so the development is a little bit harder than the usual.

If you just got your BeagleBoard xM, or want to try Ubuntu on your C4, please give it a try. For Maverick the idea is to give the users a pre-installed image, that you just need to ‘dd’ to your SD card, boot and adjust the environment.

Here are the instructions needed to get Ubuntu up and running at your OMAP device: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/OMAPMaverickInstall

In case you don’t have any of these boards, but want to use Ubuntu with different devices remember you can always try to build a ‘rootfs’ with RootStock. You’ll only need a working and compatible kernel and boot-loader.

And please, in case of you find any bug, want to help testing and getting Ubuntu better on your ARM device, just poke us at #ubuntu-arm (freenode). We’ll for sure be happy to assist you with any problems you may find.

Note for Beagle xM users: in case you find that your Maverick Beta image doesn’t boot with your board, please check bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/628243. This means that you have a Numonyx memory chip, and unfortunately the fix didn’t make Beta. To work around it just mount the first partition of your SD card (after giving ‘dd’) and replace your MLO with http://people.canonical.com/~rsalveti/maverick/boot/xM/MLO. After this just umount the partition, put it at your board and boot it.

We have a feature request to support return types and to give back variable names. We currently return an array (of array) of just strings, with no typing. This doesn’t work very well for knowing whether a cell is (for example) unbound. Empty string isn’t the same as unbound. So what can you do?

With direct-access the implementation is easy, we’ll just read it from the SPARQL engine. We have all this info already anyway. For filedescriptor passing with D-Bus we need to marshal it over the protocol.

Although we might come back to this decision short term, we wont yet do it for our “normal” (non-FD passing) D-Bus query method. SPARQL’s type system is different from D-Bus’s, so we shouldn’t try to match them somehow. Any custom format that we’d come up with, would be arbitrary.

Maybe someday we’ll add another “normal” D-Bus method that gives you a big string with SPARQL Query Results in JSON or SPARQL Query Results in XML back. Right now this has no priority for us, plus it would be a lot slower due to serialization. Post 0.9 everybody should be using libtracker-sparql and that’ll select either FD passing or direct-access.

Anyway, this will likely be the API for Sparql.Cursor. The methods get_value_type and get_variable_name got added.

public enum Tracker.Sparql.ValueType {
	UNBOUND, URI, STRING, INTEGER,
	DOUBLE, DATETIME, BLANK_NODE
}

public abstract class Tracker.Sparql.Cursor : Object {
	public Connection connection { get; }
	public abstract int n_columns { get; }
+	public abstract ValueType get_value_type (int column);
+	public abstract unowned string? get_variable_name (int column);
	public abstract unowned string? get_string (int column, out long length = null);
	public abstract bool next (Cancellable? cancellable = null) throws GLib.Error;
	public async abstract bool next_async (Cancellable? cancellable = null) throws GLib.Error;
	public abstract void rewind ();
}

I usually post about work in progress, not about something that is done. Same this time, of course. You can find the branch where we’re working on this here.

Tampere people: the MeeGo project knocks your door.

San Francisco and Dallas are also growing a Local MeeGo Network, followed by Buenos Aires, Cambridge and Delhi.

Helsinki & Oulu, now what are you waiting for? Same for Bangalore, Manaos, Oslo, Berlin, Beijing, London, Portland, New York, San Diego and whoever else is reading this invitation with a genuine interest in MeeGo stuff.

All what you need is 5 ameegos happy to meet once a month. Let it grow if it wants to grow. See http://wiki.meego.com/Community_Office/Marketing/Local_MeeGo_Networks

If you want to start a Local MeeGo Network I’m happy to help you. Let’s reach that critical mass.

Own a Nokia N900?  Peter Schneider of Nokia Maemo marketing has a challenge for you: he wants to know how important multitasking is for N900 owners, and exactly how they take advantage of it.

 A new poll at talk.maemo.org breaks it down by number of concurrent windowed applications on the desktop.  The poll has a slight design quirk (it has categories for 0, 1 to 3, 4 to 6,  6 to 9 and > 9 apps, whereas 7 to 9 might be better for the 6 to 9) but it’s not enough to undermine the purpose.

So if you have not already, take a moment to respond to the poll and then post your typical use cases that either require multitasking or explain why it is unnecessary for you.  Your input could be valuable for future product considerations!

This effort has the endorsement of the maemo.org community council.

UPDATE: It was brought to my attention the poll has already closed.  I am very sorry that I didn’t notice.  I’m quite frankly surprised it was not allowed to run longer.  However, posting comments may still be helpful.

Filed under: Econometrics and Analytics, Mentioning Maemo, Mentioning MeeGo, The Write Stuff, Ways of Rocking Tagged: feedback, input, Maemo, multitasking, N900, Nokia, Peter Schneider, poll, survey

An official Nokia press release has just hit the internet and it marks the change of guard at Nokia HQ, Stephen Elop will be the new President and CEO of Nokia as of September 21, one week after Nokia World ends. There have been rumours of a change in the top leadership for quite sometime now, but the timing of this announcement is what’s surprising.

It hasn’t been that long since many pundits, self included, read the technology tea leaves and predicted the pressure on Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo would end in a change at the top.  Sure enough, I was just pointed to a MarketWatch article stating that OPK had resigned and was being replaced by Stephen Elop, a business executive coming from Microsoft.

Nokia's Board of Directors has appointed Stephen Elop, currently head of Microsoft's Business division, to replace Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo as CEO of Nokia as of September 21st. As a Canadian, he becomes the first non-Finn to lead the company, reflecting Nokia's increasingly global management and work force. The market is responding positively to the news, with Nokia shares up 5% in early trading.

So, the first MeeGo conference will be upon us in two months and it's time for me to wrap up what's been going on with me and the transition from Maemo to MeeGo.First of all, I hoped to have more spare time to dedicate to the completion of the Maemo version of Xournal. The latest version in extras-devel still need some fixing and at least a bunch of features before pushing it to Extras.I still

If there is no API, Qt WRT is merely nothing but a naive web browser. Then what APIs are supported other than standard HTML and JavaScript now? You can first get a list of features already supported, or to be supported in the near future here.

So I'm standing for Council! Who'd have thunk it just a year ago when I turned up at t.m.o. and posted a thread roughly titled "N900 - convince me"?

So I'm standing for Council! Who'd have thunk it just a year ago when I turned up at t.m.o. and posted a thread roughly titled "N900 - convince me"?

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-09-06 through 2010-09-12

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-09-06 through 2010-09-12

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-09-06 through 2010-09-12

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-09-06 through 2010-09-12

Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President in charge of Mobile Solutions (Symbian and MeeGo devices) and a member of the Nokia Group Executive Board, has resigned. He will work out his six month notice period, will continue in his current tasks for the time being and will be attending Nokia World. Coming just days after the appointment of Stephen Elop as the new CEO of Nokia, it seems very likely that Vanjoki was one of the internal candidates passed over for the job, consequently he has decided to move on.

At the time of writing this I am 35,000 ft in the air, flying over Asia and headed to London for the biggest Nokia event of the year, Nokia World. To say that, I am excited is putting it very mildly. There has been so much happening around Nokia in the past few months. They’ve just got a new CEO, there have been last minute reshuffles in the keynotes and there is a general air of ‘ I wonder what will happen’. Update: Anssi Vanjoki has just resigned!

What is happening inside Nokia? First OPK has to make way for a new CEO two days before Nokia World, despite being listed to give the keynote (subsequently taken-off) at the event and now news that Anssi Vanjoki has resigned from Nokia is making the airwaves. To say that I am shocked is a huge understatement. Anssi was also keynoting at Nokia World and was the head of Nokia’s Mobile Solutions unit.

Mobile 2.0 2010 Silicon Valley is next week. We have the event divided up into two days again this year, with the developer day on Sept 20th at Microsoft in Mountain View and the business day on Sept 21st in San Francisco. You can use the code “friends” when you sign up for 20% off the normal registration price.

Nokia World 2010 starts today and the team is on the ground to bring you live coverage from Nokia's premier event. Over the next two days we'll be bringing you the key news, views and information. This news story contains our live coverage, where you can see the latest images and text updates; you can also interact with the team, asking questions and adding your own thoughts. Alternatively you can keep up to date by following our @aas account on Twitter, where we will be posting text updates and images.

Its not long before Nokia World 2010 kicks off in the morning, we’re pretty much bang next to the venue and raring to go. The live blog’s all set up waiting for 9AM London time when the keynote kicks off. Go here for all the latest #NokiaWorld posts.

If you think you’ll forget, bookmark this page and set a reminder below. I will also be live tweeting the highlights @TheHandheldBlog. For other things around Nokia World, you can follow my personal account at @v4ibhav.

Nokia World Live Coverage

Similar Posts:

• Pictures: Nokia N8 v Nokia E7 – The Clash Of The Titans
• Welcome To TheHandheldBlog.com
• Live From Nokia India’s Conversations Event: Demystifying 3G
• Setting Up A Hotmail Account On Your Nokia Could Win You A Xbox 360
• Live From The MeeGo Conference

So, I’ve been working on gst-av, a GStreamer plug-in to use FFmpeg codecs (only audio for now), in order to get it in good shape for ogg support. First, I had to fix oggdemux and flacparse to be compatible with tagreadbin, it seems I managed to do it (with the help of a patch from Sreerenj Balachandran), so now the custom tracker extractors are not needed any more.

Khweeteur 0.0.28

Khweeteur is a small Python Qt4 twitter and identi.ca client for #Maemo and #Meego. The main goal of Khweeteur is to stay simple and easy to use.

The version available in extras-testing provide the following features :

• Support oauth
• Unify replies, retweet, timeline and mentions in the same view
• Reply, Retweet, Search (with save), Follow/Unfollow and destroy a status
• Theme : 4 themes are currently available
• Automatic crash report to the bu tracker
• Bit.ly for short url
• Tweet serializatiom
• unicode (support all charseta)
• Auto refresh
• Hildon Notification (Notification like the email client)
• Portrait and landscape @ode (Auto rotation)
• Open url contai in tweet with browser

Of course suggestions are welcome, on the bug tracker : Khweeteur Bug Tracker
And do not forget to vote for it on : Khweeteur 0.0.28 on Maemo.org Packages Interface

Frequently the two issues get tossed into the same basket when talking about mobile applications in particular. The most obvious reason for grouping the two together is that the main driver of both for most businesses is the app store. Getting top placement in the charts on the app store is seen as the holy grail of distribution, driving much larger numbers for most folks than any other technique. Plus the main source of income for most developers is directly selling their app to users through iTunes.

I'm using Twitter plugin for Contacts and Conversations to twitter on my N900.

Twitter recently moved to OAuth. Problem is the Maemo package is outdated and seems to be unmaintained.

I did some research and came across a blog entry about exploring OAuth-protected APIs and some code. Nice idea but not usable for me.

I ended up sitting down and writing a small python script that will re-route your HTTP requests to api.twitter.com after adding all the OAuth bills and whistles, read the reply from twitter and send it back. Neat ? :-)

There's also supertweet.net which I've discovered after I finished writing my script but seems they don't support all of the twitter API call while my script does that.

The script is simple without much error checking but it's been working for me for a few days already.

Last thing, I'm not interested in running a service like supertweet. I'll not be implementing the full OAuth protocol. Need to use it ? Register your own application.

Get the code while hot!

git clone git@gitorious.org:twitter-proxy/twitter-proxy.git

Next step: Thinking of maintaining the twitter plugin for Maemo. I already compiled the latest code and it sort of works fine :-)

read more

Last week I got a wonderful surprise in the mail, a tasty new n900! The package "from" lists Quim Gil as the sender, so its come directly from half way around the world. Thanks Quim! And now for my initial thoughts and investigations; some of this will be of no surprise to existing owners, some of it was of some surprise to me. Oh, before I begin and loose folks to the down arrow key, anyone know of plasma packages for the n900? I'd like to port my abomination australian weather plasmoids over for mobile use.

Firefox for Mobile Fennec 2.0 – New and Notable - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... September 14 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Is it bad that I was so apathetic about early Nokia World talk this year?  After all, I blog a great deal about the company… mostly around business practices, community and technology.  I should cover an event this important.  But I’m not a device reviewer per se, which probably explains why I never get invitations to these shindigs.  Which probably explains the apathy.

In the last few weeks at Collabora, I worked on having D-Bus directly in the Linux kernel to improve its performances. I based my work on what Ian Molton did. For now it’s just a prototype, but some benchmarks I did show a good performance improvement.

Just wondered right now why Qt doesn't provide a greater-than operator for QSize.

Well, indeed: How would you define this operator? Maybe like this?

inline bool 
operator >(const QSize &a, const QSize &b)
{
    return a.width() * a.height() > b.width() * b.height();
}

Or is this the proper definition?

inline bool 
operator >(const QSize &a, const QSize &b)
{
    return (a.width() > b.width() || a.height() > b.height());
}

Mathematician might intuitively choose the first alternative, aka. covered area. I claim for UI problems usually the second interpretation is useful.

Funnily the Qt author(s) of QSize implicitly agree with my claim, as they provide:

inline bool QSize::isValid() const
{
    return wd>=0 && ht>=0; 
}

Which gives "(b - a).isValid()" computing the same result as my preferred interpretion of the greater-than operator.

Well, my currently preferred interpretion, within the scope of my current problem. Oh, and sans integer overflows and such "minor problems" - of course. Someone really cares about such "minor details"? :-)

So what tells this? API design is fun. Even more if you add operator overloading to the soup.

*Disclaimer: There is nothing Qt specific in this post. It only provides the example. *

As part of the lead-up to the Q3-2010 Maemo Community Council election, I am holding a Q&A with the 10 candidates.  There is a wide range of candidates again this time, making the vote difficult, at least for me.  I am hoping that the Q&A will help the community decide which candidates are best to represent our community.

For those who missed it, we settled on a time & date for a maemo.org team & community meeting, to set the short term agenda & evaluate progress. The meeting will be held today, Thursday 16th September, in #maemo-meeting, at midday UTC.

The agenda is:

1. Overview of current paid resources for maemo.org, and current thoughts on roadmap/future (Tero Kojo)
2. Overview of Brainstorm roadmap progress & current status:
   • Introduction (Community Council rep)
   • SSO (Tero/Niels)
   • Garage (Ferenc)
   • Packages & Downloads (Niels)
   • Bugzilla (Andre)
   • Wiki (Dave)
   • Planet & News (Henri)
   • Talk (Reggie)
3. Discussion around community handover of maemo.org
4. Next steps (Community Council rep)
5. AOB

Voting has now opened for the next Maemo Community Council and, once again, I'm standing.

Last year I won, and the council chose me as their chair (hence the quietness of this blog compared with the Council blog, or even MWKN).

Please vote, the Council this next term will be very important in setting the tone of maemo.org, and the way the Maemo community can work with (and, where desired, transition to) the MeeGo community.

You can read my declaration, my response to EIPI's set of questions covering numerous topics. Then, don't forget to vote. Contact Dave Neary if you have not received your voting token.

Voting has now opened for the next Maemo Community Council and, once again, I'm standing.

Last year I won, and the council chose me as their chair (hence the quietness of this blog compared with the Council blog, or even MWKN).

Please vote, the Council this next term will be very important in setting the tone of maemo.org, and the way the Maemo community can work with (and, where desired, transition to) the MeeGo community.

You can read my declaration, my response to EIPI's set of questions covering numerous topics. Then, don't forget to vote. Contact Dave Neary if you have not received your voting token.

With AppNation wrapping up earlier this week and Mobile 2.0 happening next week I’ve been thinking a lot more about industry level shifts in mobile. Normally I’m heads down in some bit of server code lately, so it is relatively infrequently that I pop up and genuinely take a look around. One thing I was surprised to see is that whenever I talk about mobile apps it’s assumed that that discussion applies only to natively coded platform-specific applications. Definitely not the case.

The surprising selection of Canadian and former Microsoftie Stephen Elop for new Nokia CEO has triggered mass speculation that the company has finally decided to walk the walk on this continent.  The invitation to numerous bloggers from North America to attend Nokia World 2010 in London pretty much seals the deal.

One of the panels at Digiday Social was "Is The App The Future of Social? . Perhaps it would have been better named, "What is the future of apps?"

I use Qt on my devices since my first LinuxPDA: Sharp Zaurus SL5000 on which I used OpenZaurus with OPIE as primary environment. It was based on Qt/Embedded 2.3.x and was looking ok. UI of most applications work properly in both portrait and landscape modes, adapted to size of fonts (I used smaller then default ones).

A few days ago Bryan Rieger posted some fantastic slides about rethinking the layout of site resources for content meant to go to mobile devices from Yiibu. There’s some great stuff in there related to applying progressive enhancement principles to the layout as a whole, and the follow-on has spilled over into the mobile web discussion group about how to deal with desktop browsers that don’t do well with media queries. Great technical discussion and happy to see it happening.

In a bit of very good news, Nokia has released maemo.org governance over to the Maemo community. There already is a maemo community council so they will be the governance body (vote ongoing now).

While Maemo is sadly an officially “dead” OS, it may be given new life if the community can take over and run it. There are still lots of excellent and quite dedicated hackers and members in the community so I see no reason why this shouldn’t be a vibrant project. It can also share source code with other projects like MeeGo and Linaro and can potentially help Maemo keep pace with MeeGo. I do have some concerns with the OBS but there are other ways to build packages.

This is good news and I look forward to being more active again in a more open community.

Well, I finally did it. Last night, I bricked my Nokia N900. Bricking a mobile device is making some change or update that causes the device to no longer start up properly. Normally mobile device users don't have to worry about bricking their devices. Most phone manufacturers and mobile carriers don't want people to brick the phone, so they lock it down and keep tight control over what can be installed for apps.

Support Vector Machines (SVM) are the state-of-the-art classifier in many applications and have become ubiquitous thanks to the wealth of open-source libraries implementing them. However, you learn a lot more by actually doing than by just reading, so let’s play a little bit with SVM in Python! To make it easier to read, we will use the same notation as in Christopher Bishop’s book “Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning”.

As far as number of handsets out in the market go Android has been wonderfully successful. Most folks agree that all things being equal, the number of Android handsets is going to surpass the number of iPhones pretty soon. Generally that’s been taken as a sign that developers should start thinking about Android cause it’s going to be the next gold mine. I’ve started to question that a bit however.

After two and a half years building rich UIs on top of QGraphicsView and trying every kind of exotic flags or approaches to get better performance results on symbian, I’ve decided to publish some of them which can be useful to game programmers.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-09-13 through 2010-09-19

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-09-13 through 2010-09-19

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-09-13 through 2010-09-19

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-09-13 through 2010-09-19

Front Page

Community Council Election (Q3-2010): candidates' Q&A

Sanjeev Visvanatha asked each of the ten candidates standing in the current election a set of questions, touching on motivation; MeeGo; priorities and community support efforts for Maemo: "The format of the Q&A is 5 questions, selected by me. A few of the questions intentionally attempt to illicit discussion surrounding our future - one in which Nokia's involvement could conceivably diminish. I am not sure if that will happen, but I thought I would push those boundaries to see what the candidates thought. As you will see after reading the Q&A, there are mixed feelings on this topic." With the election closing on Wednesday night (at 23:59 UTC), there isn't much time to decide if you haven't already voted. As each of the respondents notes, this is going to be a term which is at least as important as the current one.

Read more

Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia exec ultimately responsible for MeeGo, resigns

The day before Nokia World, Anssi Vanjoki resigned. He'll be working his six month notice period, and still gave an empassioned keynote at the London event. AllAboutMeeGo continues with the thought we've all had: "Coming just days after the appointment of Stephen Elop as the new CEO of Nokia, it seems very likely that Vanjoki was one of the internal candidates passed over for the job, consequently he has decided to move on."

Read more

Peter Skillman hired by Nokia as MeeGo user experience chief

Following the departure of two executives, Nokia have found someone to lead their UX & Services teams; focussing on MeeGo. Engadget said, "Nokia has managed to scoop up Peter Skillman from the wreckage of the HP/Palm merger. One of the many senior VPs to leave Palm upon its assimilation into the HP empire, Peter spent 11 years with his previous employer and was in charge of the design team that produced the deliciously curvaceous Palm Pre. Now at Nokia, he'll be heading up the user experience and services division for MeeGo, which means that if you weren't excited for the platform already, you've now got a very good reason to be."

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Community Council Election (Q3-2010): candidates' Q&A
   • Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia exec ultimately responsible for MeeGo, resigns
   • Peter Skillman hired by Nokia as MeeGo user experience chief
2. Development
   • Reacting to MeeGo Touch list selections
   • RFC - MeeGo connection handling
   • What's it Like to develop commercial apps for Nokia devices?
   • Invitation to Qt Developer days
   • New release of PySide (Qt bindings for Python) now in Extras-devel
3. Community
   • Local MeeGo group collaboration
   • Minutes for maemo.org coordination meeting
   • Robin Burchell election ballot confusion: mini-constitutional crisis ensues
4. Devices
   • Nexus One's MeeGo port is booting and usable
5. Announcements
   • TPlayer is "small, quick & easy-to-use" music player
   • Wallpaeper manages desktop wallpaper groups on N900
   • Flashlight-extra gives control over camera lens behaviour
   • ...and 3 more

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's keynote speech started day two of Nokia World 2010 and I was there for All About Symbian to try and bring you his key points, summarised below. Sir Tim talked about the underlying principles that effect every member of the information society, not just Nokia users. As ever, he championed and promoted an open Internet and stands by the need for Net Neutrality. He currently holds a position at MIT, where the World Wide Web Consotium (WC3), of which Nokia are a member, is currently hosted.

Openismus is looking for experienced and mature C++ coders again in Berlin and Munich. gtkmm or Qt experience is persuasive. I hope you can find my email address.

It's time for another release round of some of my lesser-known apps. First up is something that will make all the proud N8x0 owners happy: Maemopad+ has seen its first new release in 7 months, fixing a crasher bug that happens when creating a new database. The new version, 0.37, is now available from the Extras repository. I also noticed that I forgot to promote the version from February to Extras (it was sitting in Extras-Devel all this time), so if you are running on Extras-only, you should now see the first Maemopad+ update since early October 2008 ;) In this case, you also get a new feature that you didn't have before: Full-text searching in the toolbar.

Next up is MaePad, Maemopad+'s Fremantle-ified descendant. Still fighting for its place in the Extras repository, MaePad has not entered Extras due to some unfortunate typo in the bugtracker link. Now that this one has been fixed, you will also get the aforementioned bugfix (from Maemopad+), an update to the Russian translation (by Serge Broslavsky) and two new translations: Simplified Chinese (by hyao) and Czech (by fri). If you are on Transifex, submit your translation for MaePad to be included in the next release! If you are into testing stuff, test MaePad 1.7 now!

Last but not least is Trophae (known in the app manager and app menu as "PS3 Trophy Viewer"), an app that simply shows your trophy progress for your PS3 games. There has been a change on the PS3 website recently, which broke the app, so this provided a nice opportunity to not only fix the bug, but also properly package it up for Extras-Testing - with a new icon, bugtracker link and all these things that lazy developers tend to forget in a hasty first release ;) Please also test Trophae in Extras-Testing if you have about 4 minutes to spare and a PSN ID to test.

Some goodies for the n900 are now in my repository. Yes, I know it's evil to have my own, but if that's all it takes to be George Thorogood then so be it. In the at the aforementioned link you will find unison, gphoto, stldb4, libferris, ocaml, a compiled install of coreutils to avoid battling busybox, xercesc, xalanc, xqilla, and a (more) working soprano.

Okay folks, the FoneArena Smartphone Championship is going on very well, and now we are finally in Semi-Finals. The qualifiers for Semi-finals are the SE Xperia X10/ Samsung Galaxy S and Palm Pre/ Nokia N900. All of them are great phones, but we are going to have only one winner. So lets head to the first round of semi-finals. The first match is between the Palm Pre and Nokia N900. So folks you have the power to choose your favorite, so if you want to see Nokia N900 or Palm Pre in the final, then start voting. On your marks, get set, VOTE! [polldaddy poll="3793996"]

After many months of designing, coding, reviewing, testing and documenting, Qt 4.7.0 is finally ready for the big time!

Although it’s a little more than nine months since Qt’s last feature release (4.6.0 on December 1st, 2009), the seeds of some of the new stuff in 4.7 were sown much earlier. Indeed, many of the ideas behind the biggest new feature in Qt 4.7.0, QtQuick, were born more than two years ago, not long after Qt 4.4 was released. We hope you’ll benefit from the effort and care that went into bringing the implementation of those ideas to maturity.

You can download source and binary packages for Qt 4.7.0 (and binaries for the corresponding Qt SDK 2010.05) from the Qt Download Page. Alternatively, you can grab the source directly from the public repository, where the “v4.7.0″ tag matches the released packages. You can also check out the Qt 4.7 documentation.

A lot of the changes made between 4.7.0-rc1 and 4.7.0 were the result of feedback we received from the community, and this feedback is already shaping future releases, such as 4.7.1. If you would like to provide some feedback, you can do so using the Qt Bug Tracker. If you want to contribute code, documentation or autotests to Qt, all the information you need to get started can be found at qt.gitorious.org.

Finally, it’s a long-held tradition that for each feature release of Qt, we show you the people who have worked so hard to make it all happen. Therefore, I’d like to present the Qt teams from Berlin, Brisbane, Munich and Oslo. You’ll be able to meet quite a few of these folks at this year’s Qt Developer Days in Munich (Oct 11–13) and San Francisco (Nov 1–3) — a great opportunity to further your Qt skills and influence our roadmaps for Qt 4.8 and beyond.

In the meantime, we look forward to seeing the kick-ass applications we know our users will build with Qt 4.7.

Berlin Team

Brisbane Team

Munich Team

Oslo Team

Firefox for Mobile Congrats to Our Firefox Home iPhone Skin Design Challenge Winner! - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2010... September 21 from Missmobile's Blog » Congrats... - Comment - Like

Pop quiz, hot shot; an n900 sits before you and something wonderful is happening in the distance. You've love to take advantage of the rear camera and share images of the wonderful event on any flickr API website or some sort of facial book site. What do you do? The camera has all sorts of custom APIs to access it, and the web sites all need some authentication and use REST.

Well, for those who know me, or of me, the answer is quite simple... just "cp" the data from your camera to the Web. And I've now got this working on the n900. I tried the front camera too, but unfortunately it comes out quite underexposed on in house shots.

To read the camera, libferris uses gstreamer. Because there are a whole bunch of ways you might like to read information, frame rates, transcodings etc, you use a file in your ~/.ferris directory to tell libferris how to create virtual files for your input hardware like so:

cat ~/.ferris/gstreamer.xml 
<gstreamer>
  <capture>
    <file name="live.jpg">
      <source>
        v4l2src  num-buffers=1 
        ! videorate !  video/x-raw-yuv,framerate=\(fraction\)3/1 
        !  ffmpegcolorspace ! jpegenc
 ! appsink name=sink
      </source>
    </file>
  </capture>
</gstreamer>

Those with a keen eye will notice that the live.jpg is generated with the same thing you can use in gst-launch to create a jpeg image. The final element is an appsink which is where libferris gets the bytes from. I made that last element explicit because you can tee the data in gstreamer and do other things to have multiple end points.

Then to take a photo and put it up on the net:

$ fcat     gstreamer://capture/live.jpg >| /Card/tmp/out.jpg
$ ferriscp gstreamer://capture/live.jpg 23hq://monkeyiq/upload 

Of course, the fcat line above hints that you can use ssh to grab an image from the n900 to your laptop or server and upload it from there. See the ferris-capplet-auth for how to authenticate with the web sites and also how to have libferris scale before upload (optional) and what privacy settings to add during upload.

Next up is using the vimeo and youtube mounting in libferris to stream video to the net.

I got around installing the NITDroid 0.0.8 on my N900 unit a few days ago. The installation was quite easy, even though I had to manually partition my MicroSD card. The rest of the installation was a breeze because of the awesome automatic tool by MohammadAG. After a power cycle the dual boot menu offered easy access to both operating systems.

While trying to handle a bug that had a description like “if I do this, tracker-store’s memory grows to 80MB and my device starts swapping”, we where surprised to learn that a sqlite3_stmt consumes about 5 kb heap. Auwch.

Before we didn’t think that those prepared statements where very large, so we threw all of them in a hashtable for in case the query was ran again later. However, if you collect thousands of such statements, memory consumption obviously grows.

We decided to implement a LRU cache for these prepared statements. For clients that access the database using direct-access the cache will be smaller, so that max consumption is only a few megabytes. Because our INSERT and DELETE queries are more reusable than SELECT queries, we split it into two different caches per thread.

The implementation is done with a simple intrinsic linked ring list. We’re still testing it a little bit to get good cache-size numbers. I guess it’ll go in master soon. For your testing pleasure you can find the branch here.

Yesterday Nokia announced the official release of Qt 4.7, the latest version of the cross-platform application and UI framework. A key addition is the inclusion of the first stages of Qt Quick (QML and Qt Declarative), a technology that allows for the rapid development of user interfaces and closer co-operation between designers and developers. The Nokia specific (Symbian and MeeGo) version of the Qt SDK, Nokia Qt SDK, will add support for Qt 4.7 shortly.

FriendlyARM is shipping the new Mini6410 for a little while now.  It is based on a 533MHz clocked Samsung S3C6410. I do not want  to repeat all the technical details here, an English description can be found here. Lets summarize the features in a simple sentence: It is fast enough for Qt and offers lots of ports for connectivity.

With another Mobile 2.0 conference just wrapped up I wanted to just highlight some of the topics and conversations:

I posted this to the maemo community mailing-list before, but I guess it’s worth blogging, too. The long awaited Bugzilla 3.4 for bugs.maemo.org landed in trunk, including maemo.org specific customizations (avoiding it where possible) and a maemo.org skin for a (somewhat) consistent branding.

I deliberately designed the maemo.org look-alike skin for easy maintenance of later (security) updates to Bugzilla, avoiding changes to the templates and the abuse of images for the sake of design — and instead create a consistent feeling using pure CSS. Likewise, fortunately, I was able to port most of the maemo.org customizations previously requiring code changes, by using Bugzilla features introduced way after our current, aging Bugzilla version. This again helps the community to easily and cleanly apply any updates later, without the need to dive into that custom code yet again.

Besides that, the shiny new Bugzilla will offer a bunch of features requested by the community, as well as fixes to bugs reported against the current version — out of the box. Some essential work-streams are finally fully supported, e.g. Brainstorm handling, which required quite a hack before. In particular the bugsquad will be happy about the additional headers in bug-mail for filtering. Just to name a few of the benefits the migration will bring.

Since I am no longer officially working for maemo.org, David King has been taking care of some remaining lose ends the last days. After some further testing, the final result should be “coming soon to a Bugzilla near you”.

Firefox for Mobile Mozilla Labs Concept Series Showcases an Outstanding Community-Driven “Open Web Phone” Concept - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2010... September 23 from Missmobile's Blog » Mozilla... - Comment - Like

Khweeteur 0.0.36

A new version of Khweeteur is now available in extras-testing. Since the last Khweeteur version 0.0.29 (The previous one available in extras-testing) there are some changes :

• 0.0.36-1 : Fix retweet of me, fix notifications, add ctrl-r (update), ctrl-a (reply), ctrl-up (scroll to top) and crtl-bottom (scroll to bottom) shortcuts, Add auto focus on text field when key pressed
• 0.0.35-1 : Optimize timeline refresh.
• 0.0.34-1 Fix error when you double click on a tweet.
• 0.0.33-1 : Fix for notifications (But callback still broken), Add replyto display option, fix a few minor bugs, refactor the refresh of status, improve the ReTweet support.
• 0.0.32-2 : Fix for notifications (But callback still broken), Add replyto display option, fix a few minor bugs, refactor the refresh of status, improve the ReTweet support. Benoît HERVIER 2010-09-16 18:31 UTC
• 0.0.31-2 : Fix for notifications (But callback still broken), fix for ReTweet support, Add an option for auto rotate.
• 0.0.30-1 : Fix segfault
• 0.0.29-1 : Fix segfault, add timeout exception, closing main window close also search, implement coolgray and coolwhite theme, some cleaning

I hope you will enjoy this new version, do no hesitate to report bugs or suggestion to the Khweeteur Bugs Tracker.

This new version is now waiting your vote to reach the Extras repository on Khweeteur on Maemo Packages Interface

Khweeteur 0.0.36

A new version of Khweeteur is now available in extras-testing. Since the last Khweeteur version 0.0.29 (The previous one available in extras-testing) there are some changes :

• 0.0.36-1 : Fix retweet of me, fix notifications, add ctrl-r (update), ctrl-a (reply), ctrl-up (scroll to top) and crtl-bottom (scroll to bottom) shortcuts, Add auto focus on text field when key pressed
• 0.0.35-1 : Optimize timeline refresh.
• 0.0.34-1 Fix error when you double click on a tweet.
• 0.0.33-1 : Fix for notifications (But callback still broken), Add replyto display option, fix a few minor bugs, refactor the refresh of status, improve the ReTweet support.
• 0.0.32-2 : Fix for notifications (But callback still broken), Add replyto display option, fix a few minor bugs, refactor the refresh of status, improve the ReTweet support. Benoît HERVIER 2010-09-16 18:31 UTC
• 0.0.31-2 : Fix for notifications (But callback still broken), fix for ReTweet support, Add an option for auto rotate.
• 0.0.30-1 : Fix segfault
• 0.0.29-1 : Fix segfault, add timeout exception, closing main window close also search, implement coolgray and coolwhite theme, some cleaning

I hope you will enjoy this new version, do no hesitate to report bugs or suggestion to the Khweeteur Bugs Tracker.

This new version is now waiting your vote to reach the Extras repository on Khweeteur on Maemo Packages Interface

This tutorial takes you through the steps necessary to build a simple application which is capable of displaying data from OpenStreetMap and find driving routes between two locations without the need for any network services.

Clawmotia is a MythTV remote control written using Qt and EFL technology. My repository contains a tarball ready to install clawmotia onto an n900. Desktop shortcut optional :)



Simply extract the tarball into /opt on the device. From there, you currently have to install the desktop file yourself to get it onto the menus. Finally, you'll need to edit start-clawmotia.sh to tell the application where your mythtv server is at and which client you want to control through that server. I plan to add dynamic client selection and a user configuration window in the app itself, but I seem to have more plans than the clock allows.

It’s here folks, it’s finally here. I was waiting for the final match from a long time, and now we are heading to our final match. But lets talk about the previous match first. First ...

Smartphone Championship Grand Finale: Nokia N900 vs Samsung Galaxy S is a post from: Fone Arena

One of the future technology demonstrations at Nokia World 2010 was an innovative system for providing indoor location services. Indoor positioning has always been a missing link in navigation software because GPS signals cannot penetrate into buildings. This new system from Nokia Research Centre has the potential to revolutionise navigation, providing a seamless transition between outdoor and indoor navigation. For example, allowing people to navigate to a public place, and then find their way around once inside, and much more. Read on.

Twitter on the Nokia N900 has always been a mixed bag. There are a lot of options, the web app Dabr, Witter, TweeGo and so on, but there was always a compromise here and there. The best way to tweet and consume tweets from the N900 in my book has been the web app TweetGo.net.

Enter an all new Qt Web Runtime based Twitter client for the N900 in the form of TwimGo by Tommi Laukkanen. It is adept at all the basic Twitter functionality such as auto-refresh, replies, retweets, favourites, DM’s and does all of this in a pretty eye catching UI. Here are a few screenshots.

It even packs a portrait mode for on the go app use.

But since screenshots sometimes don’t tell the complete picture, the developer has kindly put together a short video showing the app off.

Please note that the app is still under developement and has only hit the 3rd Alpha yet. There are a few features such as uploading TwitPics missing, on this Tommi Laukkanen says that he will add the TwitPic, etc. service uploads when Qt Web Runtime documentation gets better. But you can already preview TwitPics and Yfrog uploads from within the app.

All in all its the best combination of a great looking UI and functionality among all the Twitter apps available for the N900. To use TwimGo, you need to have Qt Web Runtime on your N900. Download TwimGo here and visit the TwimGo homepage for more.

Similar Posts:

• Twitter Client TwimGo Sheds Its WRT Wings & Moves To Qt Quick – Gets A Shiny UI
• Screenshot Based Walkthrough Of The N97′s Facebook Application
• Details About Maemo 6 – Multitouch, Capacitive Screens, Portrait Mode Support
• Share Online 4 Is Here: Some Welcome Additions & Some Gripes
• TweeGo Is A Great Looking N900 Twitter App

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2010-09-20 through 2010-09-26

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2010-09-20 through 2010-09-26

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-09-20 through 2010-09-26

A Quick Look at Documentation in Bugzilla
2010-09-20 through 2010-09-26

Front Page

Maemo Community Council election results

Dave Neary announced the official results from the Community Council elections on Thursday: "The Maemo Community Council elections closed last night, and the results are in! Congratulations to the incoming council members." The winners are:

* Attila Csipa (achipa)

* Andrew Flegg (Jaffa)

* Andrea Grandi (andy80)

* Tim Samoff (timsamoff)

* Kathy Smith (revdkathy)

At the time of writing the new Council has yet to select a chair. However, the Council homepage has been updated.

The full results, including how the votes were transferred using the "Single Transferrable Vote" system, is available from the link within Dave's email.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Maemo Community Council election results
2. Applications
   • Maemopad+, MaePad and Trophae updated
   • Review of TwimGo, a new Twitter client
3. Development
   • Calling All Innovators N900 prize winner(s!) announced
   • Prevent battery drain with suspendprocess
   • Recent security email reports lost, please re-submit
4. Community
   • Voting for the MeeGo Conference t-shirt design open
   • Mailing lists for local MeeGo networks
   • New MeeGo mailing lists for kernel, security and porting
   • Details forming for MeeGo Conference's day 3 "unconference"
   • UK MeeGo meetup: Birmingham, 9th October
5. Devices
   • Respinning MeeGo: only if you ship MeeGo (or don't use the name)
   • Hands-on with MeeGo-running WeTab
6. Maemo in the Wild
   • FoneArena's "Smartphone Championship" final: N900 vs. Samsung Galaxy S
   • Orange testimonial video on MeeGo
7. Announcements
   • Openismus hiring C++ developers
   • theme-customizer allows tweaking your current theme

Proporta's range of mobile charger/battery packs has been perennially popular, every single winner on my Phones Show accessory giveaways has so far chosen the Proporta accessory. And with good reason. This, the latest in the line, is bigger and better in every way, with a whopping 5000mAh of charge ready to be transferred into any smartphones of your choice while out and about. Here's my illustrated review of the USB TurboCharger 5000.

As Karsten mentioned in his post on the subject, Bugzilla 3.4 is coming to bugs.maemo.org! It has taken some time, but regressions from the current 2.22 code have been fixed (hopefully) and it is now time for public testing. There is a test instance of the new code, with a dump of the bugs.maemo.org database from mid-August and mail sending disabled. All interested users should test for regressions and report them as bugs. Screenshots showing layout issues are welcome, as in bug 11330, for example.

The source code for maemo.org Bugzilla is availabe on Garage in a Subversion repository, so patches are very welcome.

I was at the SVC Wireless conference this weekend, and caught the Internet of Things panel. A decent amount of the conversation revolved around revamping the power grid. Despite hearing about “concerns about the new SmartMeters here in California” on the news a number of times, it wasn’t till this weekend that I learned that the SmartMeters are a mesh sensor network. Last time I heard about these bits of technology it was very much research, and at the time folks were calling it smartdust. Nice to see it has worked its way out into practical applications, unfortunate to see the crackpots causing so many issues with the application.

It made me think a lot about the shifting mindshare (or maybe share of attention?) going on in mobile. Back in 2003 and 2004 stuff like ubiquitous computing, RFID, and sensor networks were part of common conversation for just about everyone “working in mobile”. In 2010 when you mention mobility iPhone and Android pop to mind immediately, and the discussion only infrequently makes it outside of handset technologies. The attention goes where the money flows, not abnormal. But I was somewhat surprised to realize how long its been since I’ve thought about some of these things. And in some cases surprised to see how far some of the technologies have come even though they’re progressing effectively under the radar.

Navteq were present at Nokia World 2010, with one of their GeoData collection cars taking centre stage. They were also showing a promotional video of their LIDAR based 3D data collection system. Also on display was the first showing of a mobile client to actually make use of Navteq's 3D street maps, running on the Maemo-powered Nokia N900. Read on for more details and a demonstration video.

There’s a decent amount of chatter about microcredit/microlending being used in developing regions, and plenty of respect paid to the need to get “the unbanked” represented in mobile payment systems. But what about filling out the rest of the desktop base services with mobile equivalents? Just the normal base productivity apps. What happens once these folks get up and running? Is there a need for a Quickbooks equivalent that’s entirely mobile? How about backups that don’t involve syncing back to a desktop you probably don’t have? If you needed to run everything you did on a daily basis from mobile devices only are all the necessary parts in place?

I’m a developer, so the answer to that question has always been no. Although us developers are pretty much “pure” online interaction – we don’t have a lot of the need for offline interaction that lots of other professions do – everyone just assumes that if you’re going to be a developer you’re going to have a computer system of some kind. What if that wasn’t the case however? What if the knowledge of local conditions or business models trumped the other concerns? What are the tools you could use to get the job done if you had a business opportunity and a mobile phone, and that’s it? These are the kinds of questions that have been dragging me out of bed lately.

...displayed inside gPodder. Not only the total time of a podcast episode, but (thanks to the MAFW integration that has been added in 2.8) also the position that you stopped listening to, so you know how much time is remaining. There are several possibilities how to display the progress: A circle sector image, a "position/total" text display and a "remaining" text display. Right now, I opted for the "position/total" display (with "total" in cases where you haven't started listening to an episode). Here's how it looks in the current development version of gPodder:

If I remember correctly, the idea for this came up during the Barcelona Long Weekend and was suggested by Tuomas while we were discussing gPodder's UX. Back then gPodder did not store any kind of time-based length information in its database - only the file size in bytes, which isn't that helpful for listening purposes. But since then the work on gpodder.net and the desire to synchronize episode status information between different devices has put everything in place that's needed to detect the duration of episodes (it's even provided as <itunes:duration> (spec) in some RSS feeds) and with the MAFW integration to detect the current playback position when playback is stopped.

If you are using gPodder 2.8 and the built-in Media Player, gPodder already collects this information, so when the next release comes out, you will immediately have some useful data there. This should also help you in deciding which episode to pick on your commute.

What do you think of this feature? Is the current representation the best one, or would something else be more useful to you?

I have talked before about using JoikuSpot on both my S60 and Maemo devices and it is one of the first apps I recommend you install on your devices. JoikuSpot turns your Nokia device into a WiFi hotspot and while there is a free Lite version, the full Premium version has no closed ports or other limitations. I received an email this morning that you can buy the Premium version for only EUR5 ($6.80) today and tomorrow.

Android 2.2 has this capability integrated into the device and I sure wish Nokia would also do this with the Symbian and MeeGo platforms moving forward. Unlike carrier locked devices though, at least you can easily add this with an inexpensive and effective application.

Today it was finally released the new PandaBoard website, showing everything you wanted to know about the new community oriented OMAP 4 board.

If you are already used with BeagleBoard, Panda should be similar in some way, but now deploying the latest OMAP 4 SoC and tons of new stuff.

What you can find at the PandaBoard:
– Dual Core ARM Cortex™ A9 powered by OMAP4430
– 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM
– PowerVR SGX 2D/3D Graphic Accelerator
– WLAN, BT and FM by WL1271
– DVI-D and HDMI support
– 2x USB Host + Ethernet by LAN 9514
– Mini USB with OTG support
– SD/MMC
– JTAG
– RS-232 UART
– LCD and Generic Expansion and more

Software Support:

Another good thing is that much of the software support is already available at omapzoom, like Kernel, X-Loader and U-Boot. Upstream kernel is still missing some patches, but there’s a lot of work going on linux-omap, so expect at least basic support from upstream soon. For bootloader you can already use U-Boot from upstream, as Sakoman did an awesome work doing the Pandaboard and OMAP 4 support.

Early Adopter Program:

While PandaBoard is still not out for general public you can already participate at the Early Adopter Program and luckly get a board for free (and first than everyone else)! All you need to do is go to http://www.omappedia.org/wiki/PandaBoard_Early_Adopter_Program and propose a cool open source project that could take use of it. The board is really small and powerful, think about running Ubuntu, MeeGo or any other distro and getting 3D support, 1080p video decode and more! Lots of ideas, for sure.

If you’re interested don’t waste your time and join the still small PandaBoard community, joining the mailing list and IRC channel #pandaboard at FreeNode.

Happy hacking!