In just two weeks, Mobile World Congress 2011 will be kicking off in Barcelona. Nokia will be there and has just announced details of its talks, exhibitions and press briefings. On each day of MWC someone from Nokia will be speaking, including new CEO Stephen Elop and Mary McDowell. Nokia will have three exhibition stands, for NavTeq, Qt and Nokia Siemens Networks. Nokia will also be hosting a developer day at the AppPlanet event. Finally, Nokia will be showing off its deveice portfolio and Ovi services at the Pepcom Mobile Focus event.

The Linux Foundation has announced today that it will be offering MeeGo and Android development training courses. At the time of writing, training.linuxfoundation.org, shows three courses for Android development, four for MeeGo, and many more for general embedded Linux development, and other topics. The courses are not free and are intended for business and engineering managers who want to know more about the respective platforms. The classes are available online and in local classroom events (at local U.S. based sessions), and cost between $1000 and $1200 (USD) per course.

The Nokia Bicycle Charger accessory is now available in select markets. It can be bought from Nokia's online shops and other select retailers; the Nokia UK online shop is selling it for £25. The accessory uses pedal power to recharge the battery in your phone. It works by attaching a dynamo to the wheel that generates power as you move. Those using the accessory will need to maintain a speed of at least 4 mph and no more than 31 mph to provide sufficient energy for effective charging. 

Today we finally converted kdeplasma-addons to git The rules itself were written some time ago and we waited for the conversion of kdelibs and kdebase. Thanks to eean I found a last minute problem on the rules and today we fixed that!

Picture by The Rocketeer

You can find kdeplasma-addons on https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdeplasma-addons and you can easily clone the repo using:

git clone kde:kdeplasma-addons

Assuming that you did the trick below in your ~/.gitconfig file:

[url "git://anongit.kde.org/"]
insteadOf = kde:
[url "ssh://git@git.kde.org/"]
pushInsteadOf = kde:

I have been working with git for almost four years now and I used a lot of tools to create projects and help with visualizing repositories. With ReviewBoard and RedMine all integrated, the commit mails, integration with BKO and other features (a lot of them were already present with svn) I can say that KDE’s git infrastructure is one of the most complete and professional that I’ve ever seen. It’s really very “PRO” and I would love to have any of our sysadmins working on my IT department. Guys, you really rock! (besides doing an amazing work).

I think that it’s fair also to thank KO that sponsored Ian to work and do the conversions of kdelibs and kdebase. This was not an easy job and it’s really a pain to do the conversion *right*. Of course we may find some rough edges right now as we still need to get used to new workflows and new tools but IMHO we will overcome that and soon we will feel the benefits of git

Firefox for Mobile Latest Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo Now Live! - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2011... February 1 from Missmobile's Blog » Latest... - Comment - Like

The latest Firefox 4 beta for the Nokia N900 was released today, version Beta 4. To get it, go to Firefox.com/m/beta on your default browser. The Mozilla team says this update features faster start-up, page load times and responsiveness to panning and zooming. If you still have your Maemo device, don’t hesitate to try it out.

Firefox 4 Beta for mobile is built on the same technology platform as Firefox 4 for the desktop, optimized for browsing on a mobile device. Here’s a summary of what’s new in this update:

• There are now over 100 add-ons, and counting.
• Startup speed has improved visibly.
• JavaScript is much faster – almost 15% performance improvement in Beta 4 compared to Beta 3.
• Memory and CPU usage is reduced, making the browser more responsive and stable.
• Added an option to resize text to fit the screen when you double-tap to zoom in, to optimize the reading experience.

You can read the complete release notes for Firefox 4 Beta 4 here.

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

• Firefox for Maemo Beta 5 Released But Slower and Less Accurate than Default Browser
• Firefox Release Candidate 1 Now Available for Maemo – Nokia N900 & N810
• Pixelpipe Google Apps Browser Now Available to Beta Testers

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The world’s first national MeeGo Summit is taking place in the beautiful city of Tampere on April 15-16 and if this interests you, you will be pleased to know that registrations are now open. The MeeGo Summit FI will be a developer oriented 2-day summit packed with MeeGo and Qt sessions and showcases, along with a coding competition aptly titled Meegathon with hardware prizes from Intel and Nokia. There is also the obligatory after party.

Valtteri Halla, Director MeeGo, Carsten Munk and Thiago Macieira will be keynoting, you can find the rest of the detailed program here. Other activities include:

• Core & Future – Apps and possibilities with latest tools
• Hacks & Tricks – HW inventions, unconventional experiments
• Biz Buzz – MeeGo ecosystem and open source
• BoFs & workshops
• Meegathon competition with awesome prizes. Pre-registration required!
• Qt certification test center
• Quadricopter fun
• Technology demos
• Finhack 2011
• Party

You can follow updates on Twitter or Facebook. If you would like to know more about MeeGo Community activities, look this calendar up. Via @mwkn.

Similar Posts:

• Live From The MeeGo Conference
• What Is MeeGo?
• The Maemo Summit Is Now Underway
• Intel Disappointed With Nokia’s Move, But Puts Its Weight Behind MeeGo
• The ‘New Symbian’ Gets A New Home At Symbian.Nokia.Com

Mozilla has just rolled out Beta 4 of its Firefox browser for Maemo and Android devices. Beta 4 promises to be noticeably faster, improve start-up and page load times and responsiveness to panning and zooming.

Also advertised is compatibility with 100 add-ons to customize the features, functionality and look of your Web experience. According to Mozilla, tests on JavaScript benchmarks show Firefox 4 Beta is faster than the stock Android browser; roughly three times faster on Kraken, about twice as fast on SunSpider and slightly faster on V8.

Other advancements in this release include increasing stability, reducing installation memory usage, improving readability with zooming, and fixing some keyboard issues. The latest beta is available to download from the Android Market and if you use a Nokia N900, visit this link to get downloading.

Despite Mozilla’s claims, the browser doesn’t feel as fast in the real world and I found myself going back to the N900′s stock MicroB and the stock Android browser on my Galaxy S.

Similar Posts:

• Video: Mozilla Firefox for Maemo (Beta 4) Demo'ed On A Nokia N900
• Firefox 1.1 Beta Now Available For The N900
• Nokia Ovi Suite 3.0 Beta Now Out, Mac Support As Mythical As Ever
• Walkthrough: Ozone – A New Web Browser For S60
• Here Is Why The PR 1.2 Firmware For The Nokia N900 Is Late

Users of the third party Mail for Exchange service, NuevaSync, may be interested to know that they have added a new feature allowing for read-only synchronisation to mobile phones. Currently, the feature is only available via the NuevaSync Labs page, as it is still in development. This feature will be useful to anyone using NuevaSync and finding that their device is duplicating or modifying data in other undesirable ways. Users have fine control over read-only access, being able to set it on a per-data-type basis, for each device they are synchronising with NuevaSync.

It’s got like single-color rectangles and stuff, like in your standard theme setup, but with nothing in particular standing out. Check the screenshots below and find the Incredibly Uninspired Blocky And Dull Theme #154 package in Extras-devel.

2+ months @ HP. I’m enjoying the ride tremendously. And in my personal life, I'm loving the weather and living on Craigslist.

We are working hard to develop webOS and services further. We will show some new stuff next week, so stay tuned.

As a teaser, take a look at this.

And this, we are in the finals ;-)

And this, we are hiring!

Ohai February. The winter term is over; time for some gPodder QML hacking. This means that gPodder gets a new UI, and the structure of the application and the usual workflows also change a bit, based on the experiences with gPodder on Maemo 5. One of the most important changes will be that content will be played inside gPodder, as this provides even more control over playback and resuming than what the MAFW integration with the Maemo Media Player can provide.

Most of this has been done in the last two days. Thanks to Python, PySide and QML, I'm able to reuse the gPodder codebase (feed parsing, downloading, etc..) and just slap a lightweight QML UI on top of it.

Andrew Zhilin (aka wazd) has helped a lot with the design and the artwork, but see for yourself (this is a screenshot, not a mock-up):

And here is a video of the current performance on a N900:

Feedback, as always, welcome :)

Firefox for Mobile Necko team - http://dougt.org/wordpre... February 4 from dougt's blog » mozilla - Comment - Like

I hear this question every now and then - how do you avoid going to the command line and/or scratchbox to generate your uploads for Extras ? There are plenty of ways of doing it (simple and not-so-simple), with some guidance even, but here's the 'how I do it' post:

First of all, you'll need a fairly recent QtCreator. Today, that means the QtSDK 1.1 Beta. When you have that installed, all you need to do to get your .source package is add a custom build step in Projects -> Maemo -> Build:


The stanza you need is a bit of MADDE/debian magic, but fairly simple:



Windows folks - don't panic, you can do this, too, just use \QtSDK\Maemo\4.6.2\wbin\mad.cmd as the command. For the lazy typists, here's a plaintext for copy-paste:


dpkg-buildpackage -sa -S -uc -us
That's all there is to it ! Whenever you want to publish something to maemo.org, you just tick the 'Enable custom process step' and voila, after the build you'll have your .tar.gz, .changes and .source files good to go, no console or scratchbox tinkering required.

A few caveats, though:

• This will work only after you have successfully built a binary package (deb) at least once (as that generates some of the necessary files - like changelog)

• The Maemo/4.6.2 directory name is a known bug. In reality it contains Qt4.7, don't let that confuse you

• If you want to sign your packages, remove the "-uc -us" from the command arguments (make sure you have previously set up your RSA keys correctly, of course).

Have Qt fun(k) and see you in Extras !

Firefox for Mobile NSCP Team Building Tug of War - http://dougt.org/wordpre... February 5 from dougt's blog » mozilla - Comment - Like

There have been a lot of speculation and rumours since Nokia's new CEO, Stephen Elop has chipped in his famous line "[Nokia] must build, catalyse or join a competitive ecosystem". One of the latest and apparently "credible" rumour is that Nokia and Microsoft are going to join forces, leading Nokia to start offering Windows Phone 7 powered devices under their brand, possibly ditching their own platform(s) instead.

Let's say that is actually going to happen and Nokia will really "join a competitive ecosystem". Regardless if it will be WP7 or perhaps Android, it would definitely mean that Nokia will simply become a mainstream follower rather than loosing-but-striking-back innovator. This would be extremely disappointing and effectively would be understood as "sorry people, we surrender and adopt whatever is already on the market just to survive".

C'mon Nokia, you have far too much potential and power at hand to become yet another "MeToo" mass maker of WP7/Android devices just like HTC, Samsung, Huawei, ZTE and zillion others. You can do better than that. You have created a smartphone back a decade ago in the first place, for God's sake! Don't become the victim of own success but win that success back by brilliant and genuine smarthphones that would leave people breathless. That's surely nothing easy nowadays, yet everyone knows that you really are capable of doing that, Nokia.

As I'm not an industry expert, nor the financial analyst and that's all only my wishful thinking really, so I am not going to elaborate on that more than necessary, yet the closer we're getting to the magical date of 11th of February when all would suddenly become clear, the more worrying rumours appear all around the net and suggest the recent Nokia's promising push towards brand new mobile OS (MeeGo) and development (Qt) platforms is doomed anyway.

Let's hope all these crazy gossips are simply not true and Mr Elop would not disappoint his old and faithful Nokia fans.

Propagating a novel operating system (OS) can often be a frustrating chicken-vs-egg scenario, as many abandoned platforms and even current ones like Linux can demonstrate.  An OS won’t gain many converts without a reasonable stream of ready-made applications as well as the necessary ecosystem support (especially device drivers).  In open source contexts, this is compounded by Digital Rights Management (DRM) and similar sticky, usually legal, bogeys.

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-01-31 through 2011-02-06

Front Page

Minutes from MeeGo Community Office on taking "Extras" forward

Following discussions on the MeeGo mailing lists, David Greaves presented his thoughts on the issues needed to be addressed to take the concept of community repositories forward on MeeGo. The meeting ended with David Greaves, Niels Breet and Andrew Flegg picking up an action to write up a proposal for the TSG to sign off a project team to come up with the first draft of proposals for review.

Read more

Come on in...

David Greaves's introduction to the challenges addressed above: "Borrowing Andrew Flegg's mission statement for MeeGo Community Apps: we need to ensure a vibrant and quality area for community open source software. So MeeGo Apps is the community app store and follows on from the succesful Maemo Extras. It allows app developers to build MeeGo compliant (and other) apps and distribute them to users." In particular can (and should) attempts be made to move the Diablo auto-builder to OBS?

Read more

This MWKN brought to you by...

The letters P and Q; the number 42 and Ryan Abel.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Minutes from MeeGo Community Office on taking "Extras" forward
   • Come on in...
   • This MWKN brought to you by...
2. Development
   • Using the N900 GPU for image processing rather than rendering
3. Community
   • MeeGo Community Calendar
   • Registration open for MeeGo Summit Finland
   • Request to create new MeeGo Cellular mailing list
4. Announcements
   • TwimGo 2.6 released

Sometimes even a Tech Preview or Beta of the QtSDK or QtCreator seems too far behind, especially when you see that something that bugs you has already been resolved in the mystical master branch. My favourite is for example that I can start my Maemo apps without going through the packaging step. If you are in similar shoes, and you (and your projects) are not afraid to be mentally traumatized, cut and maimed by the bleeding edge (you have been warned !), you can always grab the stuff from gitorious. Except, building QtCreator can be a drag, especially if you're not on per tu with gitorious. This brings us to the crux of the matter:

The QtCreator nightlies

Yes, I pretty much made a blog post and a long intro just to give you this link - lame, I know :) You have Windows, Mac, Linux32 and Linux64 binaries there. Note that sometimes a particular platform might be missing due to build failures - in that case just go ../ from the latest directory and check previous day or two. The general advice is to install the nightly in a different directory (i.e. not within the QtSDK). A special note is that QtCreator keeps some of it's settings as global, which is a double-edged sword - on one hand it makes easier to use the same Qt versions and rootstraps in both the stable and nightly QtCreators, but also can lead to config pollution if going back-and-forth between various versions which might require an SDK reinstall (you have been warned - again !).

Keep the Qt applications flowing and have Qt fun(k) !

I’ve had the Google/Samsung Nexus S phone for a few days and I will now vomit my thoughts out here.

One of the most important documents a project can have is some kind of elaboration of what the maintainers want to see happen in the future. This is the concrete expression of the project vision – it allows people to adhere to the vision, and gives them the opportunity to contribute to its realisation. This is the document I’ll be calling a roadmap.

A very promising press release hit my inbox today morning, the Myriad Group has announced Alien Dalvik, a solution that will let users take advantage of applications made for Android devices on their MeeGo smartphones. According to the press release, Alien Dalvik ‘enables the majority of Android applications to run unmodified, allowing application store owners to quickly kick start Android application store services by simply repackaging Android Package (APK) files’.

The best part about the solution is that Alien Dalvik applications will appear as native and can be seamlessly installed on devices, as you can see from the demo video below, they appear just as any other native Maemo app would.  Myriad Alien Dalvik is slated to become commercially available later this year on the MeeGo platform with support for other platforms to be announced in the coming months.

The press release only mentions MeeGo, however the demo video has been shot on the N900, running Maemo 5 and other documentation also mentions it, so chances are N900 owners might get some love as well. Alien Dalvik will also be demonstrated publicly for the first time on the Nokia N900 at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 14th-17th at the Myriad hospitality suite located at The Avenue, Stand AV91.

Myriad claims that the Alien Dalvik solution will let Android apps run on non Android smartphones with the same speed and performance as they would on a native Android device. ‘A very tight integration to both the Android SDK and the MeeGo SDK (QTCreator) makes it very easy to modify, package and test applications. Most Android applications can run unmodified as the vast majority of Android APIs are supported and tight integration with the QT framework leads to a seamless user experience.’

The bottomline is, if the solution can do what it claims and Nokia can churn out a great looking UI for MeeGo, people will stop their demands for a Android or WP7 device from Nokia.

Similar Posts:

• How To Install MeeGo On The Nokia N900
• Register & Log Into Meego.com With Your Maemo.org Account
• Huge: Nokia's Maemo & Intel's Moblin Combine To Become Meego
• MeeGo 1.2 Release Now Out – N900 Developer Edition Release Set For MeeGo Conference
• What Does MeeGo Mean For Maemo?

Software company Myriad, has announced a Qt port of the Android VM, Dalvik. The demo video (below) accompanying the release shows Alien Dalvik running Android applications on an N900, which received the Qt framework in the PR 1.3 release of Maemo 5. Myriad says that it will make Alien Dalvik commercially available for MeeGo. Myriad claims that the user experience should be seamless with Android application icons appearing along side native applications. Read on for more anaysis.

During Linaro/Ubuntu platform rally in Dallas I went to Best Buy and bought Nexus S as a phone which has to replace Nokia N900 which I used for over year. It was first time when I paid full price for such device — previously I took phones from operators or had some kind of discount (like DDP one for N900 year ago).

Recently, I’ve contributed a bunch of improvements (sparse matrix support, classification, generalized cross-validation) to the ridge module in scikits.learn. Since I’m receiving good feedback regarding my posts on Machine Learning, I’m taking this as an opportunity to summarize some important points about Regularized Least Squares, and more precisely Ridge regression.

Widely reported in the media today is the leak of an internal Nokia 'memo', penned by Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop. It lays out the problems facing Nokia, most notably around its software strategy, and argues that Nokia is "standing on a burning platform" with a choice to be made about the future. And what is that choice? That's what we'll be finding out on Friday, when Nokia holds its Analyst and Financial event (Capital Markets Day).

Since my new son had started sleeping in a different room in his crib a few weeks ago, Babyphone has been an indispensible tool to keep an ear on the baby during the night when he wakes up. After tweaking the Babyphone settings to the desired sensitivity the first time, putting the N900 next to […]

There has been lots of tidying on the maemo.org wiki recently. I have removed lots of unused images and started to categorize and add more links to the remaining images. I have had to do quite a bit of spam policing, with the help of Dave Neary and Jack Tanner, but this has largely been kept under control. Annoymous page creation has been disabled, to see if this prevents the huge spam increase in the last couple of months. This should also get easier with the addition of reCAPTCHA to the wiki.

As for new content, there has not been a significant amount, just lots of refinement of existing articles, such as Orrery and a consolidation of the firmware update troubleshooting information.

At a Strategy and Financial Briefing, which takes place at 10 am GMT on February 11th Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop, is expected to outline his vision for the future strategy of the company. Rafe will be reporting live from Intercontinental Park Lane Hotel, London, where the event is taking place. You can follow our live coverage using this story or via our Twitter accounts (@aas and @allaboutmeego).

At its Strategy and Financial Briefing event today in London, Nokia has outlined its "new strategic direction, including changes in leadership and operational structure to accelerate the company's speed of execution in a dynamic competitive environment". Some more quotes below, but in short this means a reorganisation into "Smart Devices" and "Mobile Phones", and adding a new OS platform to its portfolio, with Windows Phone becoming Nokia's "primary smartphone platform" and Symbian becoming "a franchise platform, leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value". More below, and more through the day, of course. Rafe's on the ground, see the other Coveritlive news item.

Nokia and Microsoft have just announced their partnership, Nokia will be using WP7 as its primary smartphone strategy. What happens to Symbian? Nokia says they plan to ship a 150 million more Symbian devices. What happens to MeeGo? It looks like its on the back burner now, barely hanging in there. ‘MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year‘.

Nokia will be making Windows Phone 7 devices by the truckloads, if you had been harboring dreams of an Android intervention, deal with it. The internet is virtually up in arms against the move, Nokia enthusiasts who had been waiting patiently for Nokia’s Qt, Symbian and MeeGo strategy to pan out have been woken up to an alternate reality. Even Nokia’s stock price is down 9.19% at the time I write this, in stark contrast to what they would have expected.

So it happened. Mr Elop decided to make financial geeks happy (hmm, apparently not) and disappoint all devoted Nokia fans at the same time by announcing "strategic partnership" with Microsoft.

What struck me today in the morning, once such bold announcement has been made, is that no earlier than few months ago Mr Elop has been quite positive about future of Nokia in context of MeeGo in one of the interviews he gave. What had to happen in-between to suddenly make him claim Nokia as "burning platform" and need to "join an ecosystem" remains unclear. Yet I suspect his Microsoft roots had some influence here but we'll never know.

Nonetheless, this is it. We will now have MicroNokia (or better NoSoft) with Windows Phone OS rather than MeeGo.
Read more »

...now we need to let the dust settle.

So, unless you've been living in a cave, you've probably heard about the Nokia news by now. I of course have thoughts and opinions about this, not all of them clear. So I'll just stick with what I think about the future for Qt and MeeGo for now.

A lot of people around the Qt development community (some users, some contributors, and some Nokians) have been worrying. There have also been a few people asking about forking, and to them, I would say: not yet. Let the dust settle. Right now, Qt themselves don't know exactly what the future holds, but I would expect this to be clarified in the near future. Thiago has also clarified that open governance of Qt is still an ongoing project.

I don't personally see too much changing here, because despite news of Symbian's perhaps timely death, MeeGo still needs Qt, and I don't think MeeGo is in any imminent danger. Here's why.

• MeeGo is not just Nokia
  
  Intel is also involved in MeeGo, and in addition to that, there are other partners and OEMs.
  
  This will not change.
  
• MeeGo is open
  
  This means that anyone who wants to continue the work and contribute, can. There's no barriers, no licensing fees, and no patent worries. This is attractive to hardware manufacturers. Thanks to (trying) to reuse upstream components, it's also a less expensive alternative than Android.
  
  This will not change.
  
• Nokia did, right at the outset of the announcement say, they are continuing work on it
  
  Yes, it is true that they also announced that they are reducing their R&D spending on it, but perhaps this isn't such a bad thing. Perhaps lower spending will enable them to spend on what really matters, and focus on getting something out the door.

That's not that I think today's news is great, or even good - but I'd like to encourage calmness. Let's all have some time to digest the information and think about what exactly it means.
I might write more about this once I've had a chance to collect my own opinions a little more. I'm certainly concerned, and interested, but there is no need to panic.

When I first read Elop internal leaked memo, I thought the "plaftorm" that was burning was the whole Nokia as a company. And the way it was going ahead needed to change.I thought it needed to act faster and be more flexible.Instead he actually was referring to a platform the way we technical people use it: the Symbian Platform.I didn't think about that. Symbian is Nokia as much Nokia is Symbian.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened. 

That quote was the first thing that went through my mind when I heard the announcement about the MS/Nokia partnership.  As a community member I feel betrayed but I feel even worse for the employees.  Nokia has been building up a strategy that attracts a very passionate group.  The main supplier of your mobile platform switching strategies away from your needs is a drop in the bucket to your employer switching strategies to the exact opposite of where your passion lies.  Whether you quit, get layed off, switch to developing a product you dislike, or even move to a project in the forgotten shed that gets no attention are all options that are not fun.

Nokia today put MeeGo devices on the back burner by ushering in the Windows Phone 7 era. A direct fallout of this move is that Nokia’s MeeGo man Alberto Torres ‘has stepped down from the management team, effective February 10 to pursue other interests outside the company’ effectively saying, I go with MeeGo.

Nokia still plans to ship one MeeGo device this year, but with the whole Qt ecosystem gone and virtually zero developer traction guaranteed, things aren’t looking up for Nokia’s MeeGo effort.

Meanwhile, Intel has put out the following statement:

While we are disappointed with Nokia’s decision, Intel is not blinking on MeeGo. We remain committed and welcome Nokia’s continued contribution to MeeGo open source.

Our strategy has always been to provide choice when it comes to operating systems, a strategy that includes Windows, Android, and MeeGo.  This is not changing.

MeeGo is not just a phone OS, it supports multiple devices. And we’re seeing momentum across multiple segments – automotive systems, netbooks, tablets, set-top boxes and our Intel silicon will be in a phone that ships this year.

Although Intel spokeswoman Suzy Ramirez has later clarified that the last line doesn’t mean that there will be a MeeGo smartphone based on Intel’s hardware.

As much as well all wanted MeeGo to be the next big smartphone OS, without Nokia behind it, I don’t see it gaining any traction on smartphones. Like Intel points out, there are still other uses for MeeGo, but none of them as exciting.

[via: LaptopMag, The Register]

Similar Posts:

• What Is MeeGo?
• LG To Show Off Prototype Devices At Next Month’s MeeGo Conference
• Intel & Nokia Merge Maemo With Moblin – Call It MeeGo
• Microsoft & Nokia Tie Up, Nokia Still Plans To Sell 150 Million Symbian Devices, MeeGo Barely Hanging In There
• Nokia Connection Is On June 21, Expect New Devices & A Possible MeeGo Unveil

Several people have asked me to put my thoughts down on Nokia’s new partnership with Microsoft.  Twitter just isn’t the place for it; several 140-characters-or-less postings were met with responses quite distant from where I was going.  I’ll try to say something useful and coherent– but keep in mind this will be an opinion piece.  Very personal.  And lengthy.

So Nokia has dramatically reduced commitment to MeeGo and has cited, amongst other thinks, MeeGo's inability to deliver a focussed baseline with sufficient speed. I happen to agree with this failure (and given Nokia was a significant part of MeeGo's management I don't think there's a blame issue - more a how do we fix it issue)

Assumptions and observations:

• MeeGo is intended to provide a viable but focussed baseline upon which vendors can build compliant products; not to be an expansive and 'complete' linux distribution.
• MeeGo has limited dedicated resourcs and focusing them on a reduced MeeGo core will improve quality.
• MeeGo's main customers are not end-users - they are device vendors : they should be the focus of our core engineering team's design, delivery and QA effort.
• MeeGo core does not appreciate the difficulties a vendor has in tracking MeeGo;
• A visibly secure development model is important to the perceived integrity of MeeGo - so visibly restricting write access to the core is important.

Proposal:

• MeeGo Core is confirmed as not being a linux distribution
• An open MeeGo project (openMeeGo?) is created on the community infrastructure to provide a reference MeeGo distribution
• Packages not *essential* to the delivery of a compliant MeeGo Core are moved into the community OBS (emacs, vi etc - maybe even the reference UXes) where they are available for use by development teams and end users.
• "openMeeGo" acts as a reference vendor and provides a forum for reviewing and improving the processes MeeGo uses to communicate releases
• MeeGo community (which includes core developers) has a significantly lower barrier to entry.

As a Nokia employee working on MeeGo, I feel that my career is going to be deeply affected by the recently announced Nokia strategy. I'm not going to comment on the value of the business decisions; of course I have my opinions about that too, but what I feel more important now is the future of MeeGo, and Linux-based platforms in general, inside Nokia.
The announcement mentions MeeGo only marginally, as a “longer-term market exploration”, and ends the paragraph with “Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year”. This sounds to me like: we won't market any MeeGo devices in parallel with Windows Phone ones, not to hinder the latter's success, but we'll release the MeeGo product we're currently working on before downscaling MeeGo back into the R&D division.

I have been with Maemo since 2007, when I purchased the fabulous N800 Internet Tablet. It stayed with me through Chinook, Diablo and even through the 'Elephanta year'. The N810 started shipping in late 2007 with Chinook. If you recall, a rumoured OS named Elephanta and an associated device were dropped after the N810 came out, eating up about a year in the process. Rationale for this was not officially conveyed, but could be assumed to be due to a shift in strategy for Maemo, focussing on mobile phones rather than Internet Tablets. Fine with me at the time - let us regroup and Maemo will come back stronger and more resiliant at the start of the 'new' smartphone era.

In the new world order, MeeGo is no longer a priority for Nokia. This is a big setback for MeeGo and therefore GNU/Linux. Nokia’s contribution to Linux and open-source started with Maemo and continued with a bigger extent into MeeGo. From what I understand, the amount of source-code opened was significant. Numerous GNU/Linux projects and […]

This is yet another blog post about the announcement of Nokia and Microsoft. I felt, I want to share my thoughts about it, but  first let’s put here a nice picture which tells more than 1000 words. Mr Elop’s Memo Before the official announcement of Nokia and Microsoft collaboration, someone leaked Mr. Elop’s memo and [...]

One of the implications of Friday's announcements was that in Nokia drastically reducing further development of the Symbian OS and ecosystem, the future of Qt, its next-gen development platform, was also put into doubt. After all, it's argued, Windows Phone has its own tool-chain and Qt simply isn't needed. Daniel Kihlberg, one of the top guys at Nokia's Qt division, has responded to the uncertainty with a rallying article, of which some quotes are copied below.

Fellow Maemo and MeeGo developers. Dear Nokia lovers.

Lot’s of things have already been said around the internet, both apocalyptic and joyful, about this agreement between Microsoft and Nokia. But mostly people somehow felt “betrayed” or something like that.

Let me ask you a question: would you like to see your favourite company dead? I really doubt it. But you still want Nokia to devlop only their own products, without realising actual states of them right now.

1. Symbian. This is a long story, this OS has both pros and contras, but it has one only downside that ruins the whole story – right now Symbian is the syninim to “Old”. You can argue with that as much as you want, but it’s true. And it’s suicidal for marketing to have “old” OS onboard. You just won’t be able to sell it to ordinary people, who just watch the ads and listen to their quasi-geeky friends.

2. MeeGo. MeeGo is a great and abitious start, but it needs money and work to make it useable for casual user. Meanwhile Nokia needs to sell something, anything. Maybe you’d suggest just not to develop any high end smartphones untill MeeGo is ready, but that not sounds  like a great plan for #1 phone manufacturer, eh.

So, Nokia needs to sell devices and it needs to sell it right now. I don’t know why the developement of symbian is taking so long, but right now it’s clear that Symbian is being developed much slower than competitors. And that will make a gap between them even wider.

Android is really the worst choice possibe and the reason has already been discussed thousand times.So there was pretty much one option – WP7

As for connection between Mr Elop’s past in Microsoft and current actions – I see pretty clear sense in it. He needs to do something right now, today, with no “dating” period for him and his future possible partners. So he started to work with people that he already knows well enough to do business. If I’m starving to death and have nothing to eat at home – I won’t be riding to some unknown grocery across the city.

And right now Nokia has only 3 things to eat at home: haribo bears, very old donut and half baked wedding cake.

So please, don’t feel betrayed when your favourite company is trying to breathe in to continue their marvelous work. Nokia still does the best hardware on the market, it searches for breakthroughs in every direction, it tries to do something with this difficult situation in software. Nokia does, Nokia will do.

Thank you.

Mobile World Congress, the largest mobile industry event, takes this week. We'll be using this story to provide live coverage from the event. This will encompass a number of activities including Nokia's media briefing on Sunday (5.30 GMT), Nokia's Developer Day (Monday) and a number of keynote speeches from Intel.

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-02-07 through 2011-02-13

Front Page

Nokia make Windows Phone their strategic smartphone OS

The news has been everywhere, including the BBC television bulletins: Nokia are abadonning hopes of owning the entirety of their stack and the board - led by CEO Stephen Elop - has decided to partner with Microsoft. The main reasons cited are Nokia's lack of ability to deliver a next generation mobile OS, and an ecosystem to go with it. Elop's conclusion is to go back to his old employer and use their OS, platform and ecosystem: "Nokia will adopt Windows Phone as its primary smartphone strategy, innovating on top of the platform in areas such as imaging, where Nokia is a market leader. Nokia will help drive and define the future of Windows Phone. Nokia will contribute its expertise on hardware design, language support, and help bring Windows Phone to a larger range of price points, market segments and geographies. Microsoft development tools will be used to create applications to run on Nokia Windows Phones, allowing developers to easily leverage the ecosystem’s global reach." Reaction has not been positive. Some elements of the US technical press are enthusiastic, but Nokia shares were down 15% following the news and the reaction from developers has been swift and visceral. Nokia finally had a good developer story: Symbian at the mid-range, MeeGo at the high-end with Qt and QML as the common development platform; and were delivering some cutting edge and exciting developer tools (such as the new Qt Creator with QML support). It is sad to see that MeeGo hasn't been given a chance, and one wonders how things might have been different were Nokia to push MeeGo forward hard, and release a couple of astounding devices this year. Having said that, it's easy to see what each side gets:

Hello people, as most of open source lovers I’m still trying to digest Nokia’s move to WP7. But although many are worried about the future of Meego or the Linux on mobiles, I’m quite confident.

First, as said before MeeGo is not just about Nokia or phones, it’s also being pushed as In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) and is already adopted by BMW, which you can see daily contributions on projects such as ConnMan. So let’s not assume it is the end of the world given Nokia’s action.

Second, although Android and WebOS are indeed Linux since they use this kernel, we often want more traditional user-space stack, like MeeGo would be. For those,  don’t loose hope! Today (Feb14, 2011) we got a major announcement at MWC by LiMo: LiMo Foundation Unveils LiMo 4. It’s based on X11, WebKit, GNOME and… EFL!

Wait? Where do you see EFL in that announcement? You’ll have to check What is the LiMo 4 Platform? block diagram and see EFL is now a first class component at it, together with GNOME that was there since first release. Yeah, we surely could use better publicity at EFL side

The release is still just text and no code, which should be available by July2011, however you can get code straight from EFL SVN.

ProFUSION team is happy due our contributions to make this possible, after all we help with EFL and WebKit-EFL developments!

Over on Engadget, Chris Ziegler has grabbed a video Q and A session at Mobile World Congress with Stephen Elop. It’s wide ranging in the ground covered, although given the short time-scale it’s mostly sound-bites and short paragraph style answers. And some questions were outright dodged. Nevertheless, it casts some more sunlight on the decisions of Elop and how the next few months are going to pan out for Symbian, Meego and Nokia.

I've been writing some patches for hildon-desktop (the window manager on Maemo 5). For some of the more useful ones, I've reworked them to be configurable via transitions.ini (and disabled by default), so they can be merged into the Community SSU. Most of these patches try to improve the user experience and look and feel of the Maemo 5 UI, but tastes differ, so you can choose which one to enable:

• Blurless desaturation: With this feature enabled, the background of dialogs, menus, the launcher and the switcher won't get all blurry - instead, they keep their sharpness, but are darkened and desaturated. (thread with screenshots)
  
• Bigger task switcher: I think this is one of my earliest patches, now cleaned up to be configurable with different settings. You can choose between the Maemo 5 default layout, the single-column "big" task switcher and the two-column task switcher. I've left the horizontal task switcher out of this, as it wasn't working that well in some situations. (thread with screenshots)
  
• Rotation around the Z axis: This one makes the screen rotation look much more natural, just like on the MeeGo Handset UX. Instead of rotating around the X and Y axis, this makes the transitions from/to portrait mode rotate around the Z axis. (demo video)
  
• Forced auto-rotation for all apps: By default, hildon-desktop obeys the preferences of application windows and whether or not they support portrait mode. With this option enabled, hildon-desktop ignores those preferences and instead assumes every application can be auto-rotated. There's no support for the home screen, launcher or switcher, as these things are more complicated to support in portrait mode. (demo video)
  

Assuming that MohammadAG will merge these patches into the Community SSU version of hildon-desktop (a few of these have already been merged), you will get to enjoy those features in a future update. Please note that all those features are disabled by default, and need to be enabled explicitly in transitions.ini. For some of these options, a restart (of the device or hildon-desktop) is required.

In other news, the Community SSU version of H-A-M (that's the Application Manager in Maemo 5) now supports portrait mode, and this might also be merged at some point (it already works with the "Forced auto-rotation" patch, there are just some graphical glitches in the main screen that are fixed by the patch). Anybody up for some HTML hacking to make Maps portrait-aware? Should be easy to do, but I won't work on that one. Contributions welcome :)

The choice buzzword since the February 11 Nokia-Microsoft deal (satirically tagged on twitter as #NoWin) is ecosystem.  Stephen Elop’s vision apparently stops short of a Linux-powered mobile solution.  Either the newly-minted Nokia CEO can’t see how to monetize it or thinks it hasn’t happened fast enough for him– pick your choice of pundit assessments here.

The post-Elopocalypse angst has been getting me down over the past few days. It’s against my nature to spend a lot of time worrying about things that are decided, done, dusted. It was Democritus, I think, who said that only a fool worries about things over which he has no control, and I definitely identify with that. It seems that a significant number of people on mailing lists I’m subscribed to don’t share this character trait.

I have been working on implementing multicast Unix sockets in the Linux kernel. This allows a process to send a message on a socket to a multicast group with one system call sendmsg() and the message will be received by all sockets member of the multicast group.

On September 30th 2008, I pre-ordered my Pandora ———————————————– from gp2xmobile Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 4:47 PM subject Your order from GP32 Distribution Ltd has been processed successfully Order total: 208.88 GBP Card used: Unknown, United States – MasterCard – XXXX XXXX XXXXXXXX – Attempt:1 You bought: 1 x TV Cable & 1 x [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about this decision to use WP7 from Nokia, as I’m sure many people have, but I’ve wanted to wait for the dust to settle down before blogging, so here’s what I think; it doesn’t make any sense from any point of view.

Ever since last Friday’s monumental announcement (do I have to say which one?) I have wrestled with Nokia’s new direction.  I admit to being skeptical of its success, and I’m very disappointed in what I see as a significant retreat from open source… but I’m going to try really hard to be objective.

I see a lot of very polarized reactions and people forming into two distinct Pro and Con camps.  This is understandable; Nokia’s new clothes signify a very different empire than the one to which many of us have grown accustomed.  Because we’re looking at so many unknowns, I have to lean toward the doubters on this one, and Nokia is going to have to work harder than it ever has to prove itself in my view.  Too many words from the past unmatched by action.  Not that the past need dictate the future, but after repeated bumps and potholes one begins to distrust the road.  The one Nokia has been on requires much more than simple patching, to be sure, but the jury will be out on the shotgun wedding to Microsoft for some time yet.

As an (unpaid and often gonzo) journalist I often walk a fine line here between opinion and strict reporting, but I will always make it clear which is which.  In the same vein, I will work at not letting my personal opinion get in the way of highlighting the positive aspects of Nokia’s new developments.  That won’t be easy though!  But I was recently reminded that being a Forum Nokia Champion means supporting the communities, whatever form they take.

I do think some of my peers have been far too eager to radically embrace Nokia’s abrupt shift, but then, I can understand it– especially from employees concerned about their future.  On that note, I left a post at forum.meego.com about showing understanding toward Nokia employees and I hope it’s heeded.  They certainly don’t need any grief right now.

So expect me to cover this subject some more, maybe at times in an aggravated tone but perhaps with some hopeful accents as well.  I don’t want Nokia to fail… far too much at stake that goes beyond the success of Stephen Elop.

Disclaimer: author is a current stockholder and customer as well as former employee of Nokia, and a longtime developer with Microsoft Visual Studio.

Filed under: Great Governance, Into Outreach, Inviting Change, Mentioning Maemo, Mentioning MeeGo, The Process and Product Frontier Tagged: community, forumnokia, MeeGo, Microsoft, Nokia, Stephen Elop

I will upload the slides soon.
[Update] Slides are up here at slideshare.net

Firefox for Mobile Home Links Add-on Wins People’s Choice Vote! - http://blog.mozilla.com/mobile... February 18 from Mobile Blog - Comment - Like

Following our recent story about Aien Dalvik, there have been sightings of the Android run-time environment running on a Nokia N900 at MWC 2011. Thanks to mobile bloggers Julien Fourgeaud and Steve 'Chippy' Paine, there are now independently produced videos of product demonstrations and interviews with Myriad's John Ronco. The videos show off how Android applications icons appear alongside native applications in the Maemo 5 app-grid. They also show off the Android Photoshop app running on the N900 and a HTC Desire, with apparently equal performance.

Hegel once observed that all events and persons of some importance in history would occur, as it were, twice, to which Karl Marx famously added: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. It’s no wonder than this little snippet became so popular, since we human beings are so fond of repeating history again and again.

A new version of gPodder, a podcast downloader for Maemo 4 and Maemo 5 has been released. The new release is already available in Extras for Maemo 4 (i.e. N800 and N810), and is currently in Extras-Testing for Maemo 5 (please test and vote!). You can read the official announcement on the gPodder blog, or go directly to the detailed ChangeLog. This release fixes some issues reported by our users, improves the episode list on Maemo 5 and adds the often-requested "Download only when on Wi-Fi" feature:

This release does not yet contain the QML UI, as it is not ready and/or feature-complete yet, and the QML development happens on another branch ("tres" in the Git repo) that contains more under-the-hood changes that cleans up the gPodder codebase. The QML UI will be released "when it's done" :)

We are Maemo.

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-02-14 through 2011-02-20

I decided not to blog anything right after Nokia & Microsoft deal was published. And I'm glad about that, because I have now reached the state where I'm actually excited again! Volker Hilsheimer made a very good summary about the situation from Qt perspective.

Instead of going deep into politics and sales speeches, I decided to approach this from a technical perspective. Keeping things simple and concrete, here's one example UI implemented in few hours with Qt Quick & QML Scene Graph:



Please spend a bit time looking at what is really happening in there: wave, colorize, fading, water, text highlight... This is ~300 lines of QML + GLSL, performing smoothly on good ol' N900 hardware. Same can not be done using WP7 Silverlight & XAML, period.

Qt is still the best platform for "mobile phones" and we have also here good ingredients for the "future disruption" like Nokia management has outlined. But technology is nothing without a community (a.k.a. "ecosystem"), so question is that are we going to continue the work and do it? While you think about that, I'll continue hacking with my superior technology! =)

Front Page

State of Maemo, Q1 2011 from the Community Council

The Maemo community's fifth council will soon be stepping down and the sixth (for March - September 2011) will be elected. Tim Samoff, chair of the outgoing Maemo Community Council, has started wrapping up the current term whilst summarising the opportunities and challenges facing the Maemo community: "In conclusion, the Council would like to thank you, the Maemo Community, developers, end-users, and Nokia employees alike, for helping to make this a fun ride. Our hope is that the ride isn’t over yet, but it’s up to us to begin to think about providing the fuel. Many exciting developments are still in store for Maemo, so lets not sit back and wait for a supposed end. There are already many dedicated community members who have made the Maemo Community a success. If you’ve never contributed before, think about how you can help: report bugs, edit the wiki, and take part in the Talk forums… Likewise, we’re quickly approaching the next Community Council elections, so please consider your role in Maemo and how you might contribute in a more (or less) “official” role (yes, many of us still think the Council is an integral component to sustaining the Maemo Community). Our community is not ready to die, so be one of the people who provide life to an organism that thrives on personal involvement." The road ahead is likely to be a tough one for users of open mobile devices, as the alternative offerings available in the market to Maemo and MeeGo are limited (or nonexistent). The Nokia announcement, far from obsoleting maemo.org and the Maemo Community, has, perhaps, greatly increased both its current and future importance. A large number of N900 owners, lacking reasonable alternatives, are likely to rely on their existing device for a much longer period of time and maemo.org will need to be there to support them.

There's an interesting editorial over at The Telegraph, quoted below, in which the author questions, as I have done several times, the prevailing wisdom over whether the current craze for 'apps' (for accessing information and services) is a good thing. The editorial starts and ends in the pub, which is a good start to some decent left-field thinking. Why use 'apps' when we have the Web itself? Surely what we need is a better and more intelligent Web?

Imagine que você desenvolveu uma aplicação que precisa de permissão de root. Agora você quer que o Mandriva chame sua aplicação como usuário administrador(root).

0 – Minha aplicação simples é um Hello world

echo -e '#include \nint main(){printf("hello mandriva world\\n");}' > hello.c
gcc hello.c -o hello

1 – Chamar o console-helper ao invés de chamar sua aplicação:

su - root
cd /usr/bin
ln -s /usb/bin/console-helper hello

2 – Criar arquivo PAM /etc/pam.d/hello

#%PAM-1.0
auth            include         config-util
account         include         config-util
session         include         config-util

3 – Criar arquivo com PATH em /etc/security/console.apps/hello

USER=root
PROGRAM=/home/alecrim/hello
SESSION=true
FALLBACK=true

Many a time, ok, well, quite frequently at least I've needed to see what is bringing a dependency into an application or a library I'm working on. At the moment, I'm working on removing some useless dependencies for performance and misc reasons, so I'm finding information like that very helpful.

So, scripting to the rescue.

Use is simple:

burchr@virgin:~/code/scripts(master+)% genlibtree.rb /usr/lib/libQtCore.so
Dependency tree for /usr/lib/libQtCore.so
 /usr/lib/libQtCore.so
* /usr/lib/libpthread.so.0
* /usr/lib/libz.so.1
* /usr/lib/libdl.so.2
* /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0
** /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
** /usr/lib/librt.so.1
** /usr/lib/libc.so.6
* /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6
** /usr/lib/libm.so.6
** /usr/lib/ld-linux.so.2
** /usr/lib/libgcc_s.so.1

There's a few gotchas in that it won't list repeated dependencies, only searches /usr/lib, etc - but it more or less works. Patches welcome. I hope you find it useful in your quest to remove unneeded dependencies - it is worthwhile running it over your work, at least, to see what bloat you're pulling in.

(Much thanks to many folks, but especially Thiago Macieria of Qt and other fame, for giving me a bit of a crash course in some of how shared libraries work under the hood.)

edit: I should probably note that this may not necessarily provide a full picture. Shared objects may still be loaded at runtime, and in the case of QtGui, are in the form of things like image plugins and other things. It's still useful, though.

edit 2: since I've had a few people point out that it is horrific ruby, I'd just like to note that yes, I am not in fact a perfectionist when it comes to throwaway tools I write in five minutes. Patches welcome. ;)

Since last night, SeriesFinale version 0.6.6 should be available for those who have the extras-devel catalog.

This version’s highlights are:

* Live search of shows. Finally it includes a way to quickly filter shows, this is especially useful for those who have a large number of shows in the list.

* Quick access to the next/previous episodes. This was another request from a user, when viewing an episode, add a way to quickly go to the previous or next episode. I have added this by panning/dragging horizontally in the episode view, dragging left or right will bring the next or the previous episode, respectively.

* Switched episodes’ “watched” check-boxes to the right. After adding the portrait mode, it was clear that having the episodes’ check-boxes on the right made more sense for right-handed people. This is now the default position, nevertheless, a new option was included in the settings dialog so users can choose to either have on the right or left.

* Last but not least, Juan has made SF more reliable and fast by saving the database and settings only if they have been changed.

We will keep the list of bugs and feature requests in mind for the SF development (for both Maemo and GNOME) so, you are welcome to submit more.

If you use the extras-testing catalog, be sure to try this new version of SF and vote for it when it appears here.

To me, and a lot of people, it’s obvious why MeeGo scales to a wide variety of devices, but apparently that’s not clear to other people, so I’ll try to explain why that’s the case.

Time sort of swept right by us during this term of the Maemo Community Council. The Maemo Community has seen a lot happen within the past six months: MeeGo gained its wings (and then had them proverbially clipped); we watched and attended the first-ever MeeGo Conference in Dublin, Ireland; the CSSU has grown steadily and surely and has been gaining more and more traction with casual users... The overall community psyche has had its fair share of ups and downs to say the least. If anything, Maemo has proven that it can stay active despite everything else that's going on around the open source ecosphere.

Now, the time has come to begin work towards the next term (March 2011 - September 2011) for the Maemo Community Council. This means publishing a list of all of the maemo.org members who are eligible to run, opening the self-nomination period, voting, etc. To add to the urgency of these tasks, we are running a little behind schedule as well. But, the Council has developed a timeline and long-time maemo.org supporter, Dave Neary, has accepted our request to assist us in with the technicalities of the election process (this is one of the things that Dave always took care of as a paid employee of maemo.org and he has graciously volunteered to help again). Thanks, Dave!

The timeline breaks down as follows:

• 2011-02-24 (Thursday): List published, nominations open
• 23:59 UTC, 2011-02-10 (Thursday): Nominations close
• 00:00 UTC, 2011-03-14 (Monday): Voting opens
• 23:59 UTC, 2011-03-20 (Sunday): Election closes

Hopefully, we can stick to the 24 February start-date, but it is all contigent on getting a list of elligible candidates published, etc. So, please allow for some fudging on the dates and time.

If you have been with maemo.org for a while and have over 100 Karma-points, you are elligible to run for canditacy. Please consider doing so, as our community needs the support of a cohesive Council now more than ever.

My interest in the future of MeeGo is quite intense, both professionally and personally. Today the CEO of my employer wrote his thoughts into his blog. It was quite interesting read, and hopefully gives new hope for those in doubt.

In this in-depth feature we look at the thinking behind the smartphone portion of Nokia's new strategy, which was announced on February 11th and sees, in essence, a transition from Symbian to Windows Phone. We consider Nokia's three options and explain that ultimately the necessecity for a competitive and sustainable ecosystem proved to be the vital factor in the decision. 

I've been working on the MeeGo Input Methods project (codename "Maliit") for nearly a year now. The project provides a pluggable framework for input methods. It comes with a reference plug-in for a multi-touch-capable virtual keyboard.

It had bothered me that, even though our source code was available at gitorious.org, there were nearly no contributions from the outside. I attribute that to the difficulties when it comes to compiling all required components, but also to the lack of perceived openness.

We now offer packages for Ubuntu, through the Openismus PPA for MeeGo Input Methods, thanks to the packaging efforts of Jon. This is an offer for those interested in developing input methods for MeeGo. It's not targeting end-users (yet?) - a virtual keyboard might not be useful on a desktop, unless you have a touchscreen.

We also have a public wiki and if you wish you can visit us in #meego-inputmethods @ freenode.net.

Telepathy is a big user of D-Bus, both on the GNOME desktop with Empathy and on the N900. When I have a lot of Telepathy accounts and contacts, the start-up time could be about 10 seconds. How much is the D-Bus communication responsible for the start-up time? When I tried the D-Bus in the kernel prototype on the N900, I win 1.3 seconds. It shows it is not negligible and there is room for improvements. But the slowness may not be due only to D-Bus itself but the way it is used. It is interesting to look at the D-Bus traffic pattern. This topic was already largely covered by Will’s  talk on Profiling and Optimizing D-Bus APIs but I want to give a preview on future D-Bus analysis tools. The existing D-Bus tools dbus-monitor, D-Feet and Bustle are still very useful of course.

Firefox for Mobile Firefox 4 for Mobile Beta 5 – Performance Improvements - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... February 24 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Context switches are expensive. When do they happen in D-Bus communication?

Firefox for Mobile New Recommended Mobile Add-on: Quit Fennec - http://blog.mozilla.com/mobile... February 25 from Mobile Blog - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile New Recommended Add-on: Quit Fennec - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2011... February 25 from Missmobile's Blog » New... - Comment - Like

Firefox has released the Firefox 4 Beta 5 for mobile phones running on Android or Maemo operating systems. The Beta 5 brings in a lot of changes and fixes. It is also said to have improved the performance and become less power hungry. The final version is set to be released within the next two … Continue reading "Firefox 4 Beta 5 for Mobile Released"

The post Firefox 4 Beta 5 for Mobile Released first appeared on Fone Arena.

Firefox for Mobile Zippity – Using the Crowd to Collect Performance Data - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... February 25 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

fMMS now reached a million downloads (a few days back, actually) on the counter at http://maemo.org/downloads/product/Maemo5/fmms/. Thank you everyone that keeps using my application! Thank you also for the patches and suggestions you keep sending me, even though I might be a bit slow to reply at times I do appreciate it and try to integrate/fix things sooner or later. :)

PS. 1.3.3 needs your vote to make it to Extras http://maemo.org/packages/package_instance/view/fremantle_extras-testing_free_armel/fmms/1.3.3/ ;-)

PPS. I still appreciate the donations, keep them coming ;)

I was trying to figure out how to connect button click to C++. Here is very short how (sorry for bad formatting due to this html which does not like code):
main.cpp:

For this I had these includes:
#include < QtGui/QApplication >
#include < QString >
#include < QDeclarativeEngine >
#include < QDeclarativeView >
#include < QtDeclarative >
#include "qmlapplicationviewer.h"
#include < QDebug >

Then continued with my program specific includes
...

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
QApplication app(argc, argv);
QmlApplicationViewer viewer;
qmlRegisterType < Metar > ("MetarClasses",1,0,"Metar");
viewer.setOrientation(QmlApplicationViewer::LockPortrait);
viewer.setMainQmlFile(QLatin1String("qml/PilotHelper/main.qml"));
viewer.show();
Metar met;

return app.exec();
}

metar.h (from my unfinished application):

#include < QDeclarativeEngine >
#include < qdir.h >

class Metar : public QObject {
Q_OBJECT
public:

explicit Metar(QObject *parent = 0);
~Metar();
QString readMetar(QString location);

public slots:

void replyFinishedSlot(QNetworkReply *reply);
void retrieveMetarClickedSlot();

private:
QNetworkAccessManager* nam;

};

metar.cpp:

implements clicked function


void Metar::retrieveMetarClickedSlot(){

qDebug ()

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-02-21 through 2011-02-27