A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-03-26 through 2012-04-01

I thought I'd see how well some pledgie tasks would do in the wild. Some of this code is stuff I've been wishing to write for a while but unable to make the time.

If you want to get at some of the funky filesystems offered by libferris from your KDE desktop, you might like to support my "KIO Slave for libferris" pledgie:



If you've always wanted to add support for Off-the-Record messaging to your project, or help entice somebody else in that direction, I have a tutorial article on offer here:



If you want a REST interface for libferris, listing directories and getting at files over HTTP/HTTPS, you can help make that happen here:



And finally, last for today but not least, if you want to get at jpeg images on your Zoneminder server using nice normal command lines like the following:

$ fcat zoneminder://server/monitor | okular -

Then you might like to throw a little loose change at the zoneminder plugin pledgie:

Front Page

Maemo Community Council elections: nomination period extended

The Maemo Community Council election nominations have been extended for an extra week. If enough interested candidates come forward during the extension the voting will be extended another week as well. Anyone interested in running is encouraged to come forward on the mailing list to express their candidacy.

At the time of writing, RM Bauer claims there have been three nominations, but none of them has accepted it on the maemo-community list.

Read more (lists.maemo.org)

Nokia "working on two new low end MeeGo smartphones"

Last week the Internet was set a twittering with the report, via NetbookNews, that "according to an industry insider Nokia is working on 2 new low end MeeGo handsets, and information was recieved directly from Nokia’s Next Billion Group." This is, almost certainly, referring to "Meltemi": Nokia's not-so-secret-now project to replace the aging S40 on their low-end devices with a Qt+Linux platform. Ideally, this new platform would have binary compatibility with Harmattan so that Harmattan apps would run on Meltemi, and vice versa. This would give an enormous boost to the Qt ecosystem: a "superphone" in the form of the N9 and a range of "little sisters" running Meltemi. Combined with smartphones running Symbian and a push to standardise Qt Components across Symbian & Linux, this could reinvigorate Nokia's cross-platform and next billion strategies.

Unfortunately, the article itself repeats many "well known facts" about Harmattan, including its ability to run Android applications. Myriad may have demoed Alien Dalvik on video, to try and entice OEMs, but this is a long way from an end-user being able to run Angry Birds Space.

Read more (netbooknews.com)
Read more (slashgear.com)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Maemo Community Council elections: nomination period extended
   • Nokia "working on two new low end MeeGo smartphones"
2. Applications
   • gPodder updated to 3.1.0 for N950 and N9
   • get_iplayer works on N9
3. Development
   • Maliit Keyboard: Word suggestions and error correction
   • Testing requirement for Harmattan PR1.0 removed from N9 Nokia Store
4. Community
   • maemocommunity.org - a fragmentation too far?
5. Devices
   • USB audio on N900
6. Announcements
   • ZoneMinder on Nokia N9

There’s one thing that my Nokia N950 has been lacking and that’s a StatusNet client, so I set about hacking one together. I love the way that the N9/N950 events feed displays messages from Twitter and Facebook, so my main focus so far has been to integrate with this. I’ve now got my client to a stage at which it covers most of my own needs so I thought I’d make an early release for others to play with.

Once I’ve extended it a little further I plan on submitting it to both Apps For Meego and the general Nokia Ovi Store, but for now you can download the Debian package directly here.

One thing to note is that you will need to restart your phone before events will start to appear (this is due to a limitation in the way the SyncFW framework loads plugins).

The client is written mostly in Python, with a little C++ for integrating with the events synchronisation framework. It makes use of the StatusNet module written for the command line StatusNet client IdentiCurse and the python-eventfeed module written by Thomas Perl.

Features

* OAuth login for identi.ca.
* Standard login for any other StatusNet services.
* Shows messages in the events feed.
* Fetches (and caches) user avatars.
* Displays messages from the events feed in the browser when clicked.
* Automatically fetches new messages in the events feed based on your events feed preferences.
* Can manually fetch new messages via the events feed ‘Refresh’ button.

Not yet implemented

* Posting messages.
* Displaying messages locally within the application.
* Displaying rich content (messages with multimedia attachments)

Download

Ovi Store: StatusNet for MeeGo
Direct download: statusnet-meego_0.1-3_armel.deb

Source

License: GPL version 3.0 or later
Gitorious repository: https://gitorious.org/statusnet-meego-plugin
Ohloh project page: https://www.ohloh.net/p/statusnet-meego

Overview

StatusNet for MeeGo makes it possible for Nokia N9, N950 and similar phones to connect to StatusNet compatible microblogging services such as Identi.ca. It supports viewing statuses in the phone’s event feed alongside Twitter and Facebook updates, viewing conversations, posting new status updates and replying to other people.

Assuming no issues are encountered by testers I plan on submitting this version to the Apps For MeeGo repository, and later also the Nokia Ovi Store.

You’ll need to restart your phone before statuses start appearing in the events feed, although you’ll be able to use the main app straight away. Because of some changes in the dbus services its also necessary to restart your phone even if you’ve already installed version 0.1 (this won’t be needed after future updates though).

New features

• Posting updates.
• Posting replies.
• Viewing messages in the application.
• Display full conversations.
• Load additional statuses from earlier in time.
• Splash screen while connecting.
• Improved dbus handling.
• Asynchronous message loading and posting.

Planned features

• Support for displaying rich content (pictures, videos, etc.)
• Ability to mark statuses as being “favourites”.
• Option to subscribe to new users in the app.

Download

Ovi Store: StatusNet for MeeGo
Direct download: statusnet-meego_0.2-4_armel.deb

Source

License: GPL version 3.0 or later
Gitorious repository: https://gitorious.org/statusnet-meego-plugin
Ohloh project page: https://www.ohloh.net/p/statusnet-meego

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-04-02 through 2012-04-08

Front Page

Quim Gil soundly settles ceaseless suggestions surrounding a "sudden switch-off" of certain servers

In an email to the Community mailing list, Quim Gil firmly put down rumours of any unannounced shutdowns of maemo.org or its services in the near future: "Ok, this is not going to happen. Whatever happens we will know 3-6 months in advance since this is how budgeting goes. All 2012 is covered as we speak (and afaik it was never under question). The time to discuss about 2013 will start approximately after the Summer. It's always like this, by the way. You have my word with my @nokia.com domain and all. You can quote this whenever someone has fear, uncertainty or doubt about maemo.org hosting." About an unambiguous an answer as you could want. Hopefully it will put to bed the FUD about maemo.org and Nokia's continued infrastructure support, which has been one of the most pernicious and infectious distractions which has afflicted the Maemo community since Harmattan was revealed to be branded "MeeGo" (despite, under the covers, being Maemo).

In the last weeks Miguel, Calvaris and myself, developed an application for the N9/N950 mobile phone and we called it Aura.

Basically it uses the device’s camera (either the main one or the frontal one) for video recording, as a normal camera application, but also it exposes a set of effects that can be applied, in real time, to the video stream.

For example, here is a video using the historical effect:

Aura is inspired in the Gnome application, Cheese, and it uses many of the effects available in Gnome Video Effects.

The list of effects that were possible to port to the N9/N950 are: dice, edge, flip, historical, hulk, mauve, noir/blanc, optical illusion, quark, radioactive, waveform, ripple, saturation, shagadelic, kung-fu, vertigo and warp.

Besides of these software effects, it is possible to add, simultaneously, another set of effects that the hardware is capable, such as sepia colors. These hardware capabilities do not impose extra processing as the software effects do.

Because of this processing cost, imposed by the non-hardware video effects, Aura has a fixed video resolution. Otherwise the performance would make the application unusable. Also, we had a missing feature: the still image capture. But, hey! there is good news: Aura is fully open source, you can checkout the code at github and we happily accept patches.

Honoring Cheese, the name of Aura is taken from a kind of Finnish blue cheese.

We hope you enjoy this application as we enjoyed developing it.

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-04-09 through 2012-04-15

Front Page

Maemo Community Council meeting, 17th April @ 15:00 UTC

RM Bauer has announced a new Maemo Community Council meeting, tomorrow (Tuesday) at 15:00 UTC: "Preliminary Agenda:Welcome (back) to Quim Gil/Update from Nokia(?); Community OBS; Council Election voting; Left-over topics from last council meeting (if timely):Qt style license agreement for maemo; Co-maintainership for CSSU repo." The discussion continued to try and define what a "Qt style license agreement for maemo" meant, as there have been various different suggestions. The conclusion was that it was a grant of a licence for maemo.org to continue distributing Nokia binaries for the purposes of the autobuilder, SDKs and firmware images.

Read more (lists.maemo.org)
Read more (timeanddate.com)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Maemo Community Council meeting, 17th April @ 15:00 UTC
2. Development
   • How to port Qt 5 to N900 Fremantle
   • Latest Harmattan updates plug security hole used by Inception; Inception updated to bypass
3. Devices
   • Replacing housing of Nokia N9
4. Announcements
   • Mosh - high latency & roving IP supporting SSH bridge - for Harmattan
   • Aura - video recording with realtime effects on N9 using front or rear camera
   • Pre-release of Sociality, Facebook client, for Harmattan
   • QZeeControl - control Harmattan phone using Zeemote

As my colleague Víctor at Igalia has said before in his post, Aura was released to the Nokia Store. Miguel, Víctor and I are quite happy with the result achieved with this app, which intention was to be kind of a port of the Cheese application of the GNOME platform to be used in the N9 or N950 Nokia phones.

The apps allows you to use both cameras (front and principal) to record videos, applying a lot of funny effects (a subset of the GNOME Video Effects) and changing them during the recording. Being Nokia a Finnish company, we decided to name the app after a Finnish Cheese to both honor the GNOME Cheese application and Finland

The world hasn’t heard much about Tizen since September, when it was first announced. To refresh your memory, Tizen is the brand new HTML5 centered OS that is backed by Intel and Samsung, a partnership which was forged after Nokia and Intel’s ambitious MeeGo project was stopped in its tracks in February 2011.

When the announcement was first made, an initial release was supposed to come out in Q1 2012, with retail Tizen devices only later in the year. While that hasn’t happened yet, there are promising signs. A visit to HTML5test.com shows that Tizen 1 is well into internal testing and its HTML5 test results are off the charts. It scored a very impressive 408 points, with 15 bonus points. That’s better than Chrome for Mac that manages 400 points with 13 bonus points. A few weeks ago, Tizen was at about 363 points with 15 bonus points. So the development seems to be progressing nicely and the upcoming Tizen Developer Conference scheduled for May 7-9 in San Francisco should be a perfect venue to show it off.

The first annual Tizen Conference engages and educates developers on Tizen technology and HTML5 app development for Tizen devices. This conference is for Tizen developers, app developers, platform designers, operators, OEMs, hardware vendors, software vendors, open source enthusiasts, and anyone engaged in Tizen. The Tizen conference will be hosted at the downtown Hyatt in San Francisco, CA on May 7-9th, 2012.

The Linux Foundation isn’t giving away much about what will be shown off, if anything. The agenda has now been posted, and all we can tell is that the keynote sessions are scheduled for 9 am onwards on May 8th. No info yet on who will be present and if Samsung will finally show off their Tizen device. An important thing to note is that a lot of the sessions mentioned in the agenda will be hosted by Intel and Samsung employees, so the companies will definitely be there in full force. There has been talk of Samsung merging its Bada OS with Tizen, but there has been a bit of back and forth on that as well. The upcoming Tizen Conference should serve as a good opportunity for all involved to clear the air about all these questions, and finally get to what its about – great software on shiny hardware. Registrations are now open, and free.

I have in mind an app to use RFID over the NFC hardware on the n9 to allow the phone to be unlocked by an RFID tag. This way the password can be nice and long for locking the device, but I don't have to interact with the virtual keyboard in order to use the phone. If the phone locks, I just tap the RFID tag to it, it unlocks, and I'm away. Yes, two phase would be a logical next step, but that assumes that the "lock" on the phone is very hard to break.

Reading the RFID on the n9 is the simple part, I have that working fine with physical keys. Unlocking the phone is proving not so simple. I was hoping that MeeGo::QmLocks::setState would do the trick, but it is not to be so as the API docs explain.

Anyone stumbled on a way to unlock the n9 from a program?

Users of the Nokia N9 have longed for a Whats App client for their device since a long time, but it finally looks as if their prayers are close to being answered. While Whats App isn’t doing an official version of the app, the community has come up with a solution of its own called Wazapp.

Wazapp is a community port of the hugely popular IM application, and its developer Tarek Galal has realsed a first look video of it running on the N9. The video is proof that the project is progressing nicely, and shows messages being sent and received between the N9 running Wazapp, and a Samsung Android device running the official WhatsApp application.

When is it coming out you wonder? The developer has this to say:

If you cannot wait, a dedicated website for the project has been setup at wazapp.im and you can keep checking in, otherwise rest assured that I’ll let you know once its out. I hope that the makers of Whats App support this development, and not try and kill its functionality with an update to their official clients.

[via: My Nokia Blog]

I've been in Copenhagen in January (creating a 20-controller PS Move installation game with friends) and more recently in Evora, Portugal for the Science and Technology Week, talking about the history of gPodder. With some sightseeing squeezed into each trip, and no compact camera around, the N9 did a great job making some nice photos that work great as wallpapers of the standby screen.

Just in case you're looking for a way to spice up your standby screen, have a look at the wallpaper photo set for all wallpapers or click on one of the preview images below.

Copenhagen

 
Evora
 
Find all images in the photo set on Flickr. In related news, a small update for gPodder should be ready soon that fixes some minor bugs since the last release in March.

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-04-16 through 2012-04-22

Front Page

Maemo Community Council meeting outcomes

On Tuesday, a Maemo Community Council meeting was held with the following agenda:

We have published an updated version of the MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan API showcase application.

This version contains the following new features:

 

• Internet radio (including recording of streams and featuring events feed and notification APIs).
• Seven wonders of the world (featuring the use of the landmarks API)
• Accelerometer / tap sensor visualizer (featuring sensor APIs)

You can get the binary from harmattan-dev, and the source code is also available.

 

Overview

StatusNet for MeeGo makes it possible for Nokia N9, N950 and similar phones to connect to StatusNet compatible microblogging services such as Identi.ca. It supports viewing statuses in the phone’s event feed alongside Twitter and Facebook updates, viewing conversations, posting new status updates and replying to other people.

New Features

• Support for followings links in posts.
• Links to groups, tags, and users.
• Support for posting messages using UTF-8 characters.
• Slight improvements to the clarity of the login screen.

Download

Ovi Store: StatusNet for MeeGo
Direct download: statusnet-meego_0.2.1-1_armel.deb

Source

License: GPL version 3.0 or later
Gitorious repository: https://gitorious.org/statusnet-meego-plugin
Ohloh project page: https://www.ohloh.net/p/statusnet-meego

As part of my work at Igalia I had to work with video and GStreamer for some years. I always used Gtk+ for that so when I needed to do things with Qt and QML, things were different. In my projects I always used pure GStreamer code instead of the Qt bindings for GStreamer because at the moment those bindings were not ready or reliable.

Overview

A while back a wrote a little game for the Nokia N9 and N950, mostly as a way to explore the QML Box2D bindings. However, whilst packaging up my StatusNet client I thought I might as well release this as well since it can be a fairly enjoyable distraction. Below is a short video demonstrating how it works, and at the end of the post you can find details on where to get hold of it.

Download

You can either download it via Apps for Meego, or get hold of the package directly here: http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/seagullstrike_0.1-2_armel.deb.

Source

License: GPL version 3.0 or later
Gitorious repository: https://gitorious.org/seagull-strike
Ohloh project page: https://www.ohloh.net/p/seagull-strike

As part of my work at Igalia I had to work with video and GStreamer for some years. I always used Gtk+ for that so when I needed to do things with Qt and QML, things were different. In my projects I always used pure GStreamer code instead of the Qt bindings for GStreamer because at the moment those bindings were not ready or reliable.

Firefox for Mobile Firefox for Android: Fx & Mobile Work Week - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... April 28, 2012 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

A new version of gPodder, the podcast manager, has been released, and with it (as always) come some new features for the Harmattan (N950 and N9) version. The most visible on (apart from bugfixes) is the new multi-episode selection sheet, which allows users to select multiple episodes at once to either download, playback or delete. Options for "Select all", "Select downloaded", "Select none" and "Invert selection" are provided by the longpress context menu in that list and will modify the selection accordingly.

And yes (as some people are still surprised to learn that): With gPodder, you can also subscribe to YouTube and Vimeo channels (users) and download the videos to your device for easy offline viewing and archiving. Combined with the N9 Media Pushing plug-in by Georg Jens, you can then even play back your YouTube or Vimeo videos on DLNA devices on your home network. Of course, this also works for the RSS "video podcasts" that gPodder also supports in addition to YouTube and Vimeo.

gPodder 3.1.1 "The Preachification of Convincing John" has been uploaded to the Community OBS (Apps For MeeGo) and to Ovi Publish (Nokia Store), and should be available to users in the upcoming days. As always, enjoy this new release and report any bugs or feature requests at bugs.gpodder.org :)