A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-04-30 through 2012-05-06

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-04-23 through 2012-04-29

Front Page

How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?

A chance encounter with Henri Bergius and Michael Hasselmann in California led Quim Gil to share a few beers with them. Part of the conversation involved their shared experiences with Maemo and maemo.org. Quim reports that "Henri had a very good point: [top-level] pages like Intro or Development have been unchanged for years and now they don't reflect anymore the community that exists here."

"Updating these pages would require to think what is this website and this community today, and what does it want to become. It sounded like a good task to be driven by a newly elected Council. Six months is a decent period for discussion, planning and implementation considering that we are talking basically about editing plain web pages."

"In our discussion we agreed that maemo.org is still strong in the mobile user aspect. It is a community continuously active since 2005, open to discuss, experiment and collaborate on Maemo but also on related mobile topics where "related" can have a flexible definition."

Quim had to clarify he was asking this as a member of the community, rather than in any official capacity from Nokia. Separating Quim as an active and independent member of the community from his official role at Nokia is something that many people seem to have difficulty with. However, it would be a shame if such opinions prevented Quim from sharing his thoughts.

Read more (talk.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?
2. Development
   • Cocos2D port for Qt for Harmattan and Symbian
   • Fremantle on OBS status update
3. Community
   • Rob Bauer (SD69) running in Maemo Community Council election
   • Help improve maemo.org Packages interface
   • Proposal to rearrange TMO to provide common home to Maemo, MeeGo, Mer, NITDroid
4. Devices
   • Slideout Bluetooth keyboard turns N9 into N955
5. Announcements
   • Work-in-progress: Ubuntu One client for Nokia N9
   • gPodder 3.1.1 for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan

We have been hard at work developing and improving the Nokia Data Gathering solution, and will be launching an exciting new version in May 2012. The Nokia Data Gathering 4.04 (Dazzling Dourado) release will include bug fixes and new features on the Java mobile client, as well as a brand new Nokia Data Gathering server and user interface. We will also be launching the first Windows Phone client of Nokia Data Gathering.

Come discover and try out Nokia Data Gathering 4.04! On 16 May 2012, the Nokia Data Gathering team will be at Seton Hall University to tell you all about the new Nokia Data Gathering 4.04 server, the new Windows Phone mobile app, mobile data collection case studies from around the world, and to give you a chance to try out Nokia Data Gathering 4.04 for yourself.

Please join us!

Event Nokia Data Gathering 4.04 workshop Date Wednesday, 16 May 2012 Time 09:00-12:00 AM Place Seton Hall University, 400 South Orange Avenue, South Orange, NJ 07079, USA Room Beck Rooms A, B, and C (Ground Floor of Walsh Library)

Nokia Data Gathering 4.04 is the result of a collaborative effort between Nokia, the Center for Mobile Research and Innovation at Seton Hall University and Microsoft. Learn more at http://projects.developer.nokia.com/ndg/

For more information about the workshop and/or Nokia Data Gathering, please contact kulsoom.ally 'at' nokia.com

Another May, another Ubuntu Developers Summit. This time I am in Oakland, California, USA (even if my tweets shows Dallas, Texas as geolocation).

As usual with US trips this one took insane amount of time. But I was 3cm from not going here… Why? Because I got stuck in toilet at home. Hopefully with help from neighbour I was able to bash door out and get to the bus stop on time.

Then standard set of bus, plane, plane, train and finally arrived in hotel. As my room was not yet ready I got 30$ coupon to bar to not waste time on waiting. Free meal/beer

After 5 wonderful years working with passionate and skilled people I am now moving to São Paulo to work at Facebook’s office for Latin America. My official role will be Partner Engineer.

This doesn’t mean that I will go away from KDE, neither from Qt. It just means that I will contribute more on my free time (as it was before Nokia acquired Trolltech) than during working hours.

I am thrilled with this opportunity and I am sure that all of you who know me are also happy with this announcement.

I will be a little bit offline the next days due to my move, but I will be checking emails regularly

 

This year’s Summer of Code has already started, and Epiphany has been lucky enough to get two students assigned. Let’s see who they are and what they’ll be working on.

The Linux Foundation sponsored me to travel to and attend the Tizen Conference 2012 in San Francisco and as part of this sponsorship, I'll be blogging about the conference and my insights and thoughts of the talks and keynotes at it. While some parts may seem negative, please keep reading as I have a point with those parts that is illustrated later on.

During my stay in Oakland, CA (due to Ubuntu Developer Summit) I decided to attend also Tizen Developers Conference. Not that I have any relations with this platform — just wanted to meet some friends from Maemo times. And I did not had plans for Tuesday evening while Tizen visitors had social event planned in The California Academy of Sciences.

Turns out I’ll get to spend the next two weeks in Tokyo, starting next Sunday. It will be third time I visit this weird and fascinating place, but I’m still excited to be there again.

Some time ago, in another trip, I proposed anyone who might be reading me to meet up and talk about all things GNOME or WebKit. Turns out I met some interesting people that way (hi everyone from Caixa Mágica!), so let’s try again: if you are reading this, are in Tokyo, and would like me to talk to your friends/colleagues/whatever about GNOME or WebKit I’d be happy to do so. We can also improvise a hackfest or anything else we can come up with. In exchange I only ask of you to show me around (always better with a local) and an unwavering commitment to freedom and justice.

Drop me a line at xan AT gnome DOT org, or leave a comment in this space.

In the context of a personal ad-hoc app (I will come to that later) that I wrote for my Nokia N9, I needed to send an email to a specific person with an attachment. After the first research at Harmattan APIs you come to QMessageService.

The first thing I did was writing Mixed QML/Qt object that I could instantiate from the QML code so that I could do something like:

Message {
    id: message
    from: "my@Address"
    to: [ "destination@Address" ]
    subject: "This is not Spam for sure!"
    body: "Trolled! Enlarge...!"
    attachments: [ "/a/path/to/an/attachment" ]
}

Button {
    onClicked: message.compose()
//    onClicked: message.send()
}

There we have an object with two send and compose methods, three string properties representing the from, subject and body and two string list properties representing the to and attachments (we leave the CC and BCC as an exercise

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-05-07 through 2012-05-13

The Linux Foundation sponsored my trip to the Tizen Conference 2012 in San Francisco last week, and I'm supposed to blog about it. Also, I think it's good to share what I've seen with fellow Maemo/MeeGo community members, even if Tizen is something different. You can find my photos of the event on Flickr.

Front Page

Delays in getting Maemo Community Council election started

An administrative mix-up seems to be to blame for delaying the start of the Maemo Community Council election, which was scheduled to start on May 6. There has been lots of back-and-forth on the forum thread about whose responsibility it was to start the voting process and who should be initiating communication to get it started now. After a bit of a rough start it seems the wheels are moving on the process, thanks in part to the level-headed Quim Gil stepping in. It remains to be seen when the voting will actually begin, but hopefully there will at least be an announcement made soon with an updated timeframe.

Read more (talk.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Delays in getting Maemo Community Council election started
2. Applications
   • Plonk running on BlackBerry Playbook
   • Update on reverse engineered WhatsApp port to N9
3. Development
   • Qt Creator 2.5.0 released
   • Why bundling apps which can be installed via Extras is a bad idea for Maemo CSSU
   • Why "shell apps" and HTML5 apps are a bad idea
   • Sending emails in Harmattan with Qt/QML
4. In the Wild
   • First Tizen Conference gets mixed reviews
   • Nokia N9 removed from Nokia's Finnish website
   • N9 increasingly available direct from US retailers
5. Announcements
   • Late - real-time public transit info for North America
   • Mobile check-in app for SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) now available to download for N9
   • KhtSimpleText editor available for N9
   • last.fm client under development for Harmattan
   • USbS - Useful Standby Screen - gives configurable N9 sleep info

The number of available phone applications is growing at top speed. I am trying to learn new languages and love traveling, so a good grasp of several languages is what I really need.



Recently I came across a superb course of English language history and begin to understand better grammar rules and language phenomena.

Hopefully there will be more other applications for language learning and I will review them with great pleasure.

In the last few weeks, as part of my work here at Igalia, I’ve been playing a bit with the concept of hybrid applications. In this case, I’ve created a basic prototype of a mail application, with its user interface completely written using JQuery Mobile, and with backend code in C and GObject. The result is iwkmail.

Screencast of iwkmail in action

Though it’s a simple experiment, I’ve added some mail basic functionality, so I could try to catch as much as possible of real requirements for how  we could improve the developers WebKit+GNOME experience creating hybrid applications.

My first conclusion is that it’s surprisingly easy and fast to develop such applications. Second, I could reuse tons of source code and modules from my old projects. This approach surely provides a way to create cool GNOME applications, using the most fashionable web client technologies.

So, you’ll get:

• Browsing messages
• Read/unread flags
• Deleting messages
• Creating and deleting mail accounts.
• Storage protocols supported: IMAP and POP.
• For sending mails, we support SMTP. There’s support for an outbox holding the messages to be sent.
• A plain text composer, allowing to add attachments.

The UI is completely written in Javascript + HTML, using JQuery Mobile.

The backend side is done using Camel library inside Evolution Data Server, so we rely on a library well tested for more than 10 years.  All the code related to this is implemented in C+GObject, and I reused a good set of code from Modest, the default mail client for Nokia N810 and N900. I’ve got involved on its development for 3 years, so that’s a bunch of code I know well enough.

For communication, I use the AJAX-like JSONP protocol, and custom SoupRequest URI scheme handlers. Basically I expose some methods as iwk:addAcccount, iwk:getMessage, etc, and arguments are passed as usual in a web request. The result I obtain from this calls is a JSON object with the results of the call. Simple, and works very well.

I’ve pushed the work on github: https://github.com/jdapena/iwkmail. Feel free to try it!

Oh, I guess it’s very obvious that I did not spend too much time thinking on the project name… So, anyone proposing something that matches the IM acronym (I don’t want to rewrite the class names!) would deserve a beer.

Last, lots of thanks to Igalia for giving me the opportunity to do this experiment. As usual, fun stuff to work with.

Overview

Recently I’ve spent a little time getting the Ogre3D engine into a state where it’ll work on the Nokia N9 and N950 MeeGo phones.

To test the port out a bit more extensively I decided it’d be a good idea to try porting an existing game, at which point rzr suggested Those Funny Funguloids. So after a fair amount of hacking to make it compatible with my version of Ogre and to make the controls work reasonably on a touch screen device I have a playable version.

The aim of the game is to collect mushrooms (…IN SPACE), and bring them back to your base without running into any asteroids. Only mushrooms of the same colour as your base are added to your score and your base changes colour each level (but you can hang on to mushrooms between levels and score them later). The controls are fairly simple, touch the left side of the screen to turn left, the right side to turn right and the middle to start moving.

When I have a bit more time I’ll see about writing a little tutorial on making use of my modified version of Ogre3D to create 3D applications and games in a way that’s easy to distribute.

Screenshots

Video

Video of gameplay

Download

funguloids_1.0.6-4_armel.deb

Source

Modified version of Funguloids 1.06
Modified version of Ogre 1.7.4

As I already said the other day in Twitter, I became Qt Ambassador because of Aura. The only problem is that is a project-person program, meaning that it is granted to a person because of having worked on a project. Aura was a project developed by three Igalians, who were Miguel, Víctor and me and I consider a bit unfair that it was granted only to me because they deserve it as much as I do.

The procedure I followed was:

• Applying with Aura
• When that was accepted, I submitted Aura project page.
• After the publication I was told that I was going to receive the Qt Ambassador Merchansise

Does anybody know if more people can become ambassadors for the same project and how?

Last month I mentioned that a community based solution for bringing WhatsApp to the Nokia N9 was in the works, and today it is finally available for download. Its developer Tarek Galal had realsed a first look video of it running on the N9 a while ago, and now you can grab the .deb file and install it on your own device.

The application is still beta so there might be a few bugs here and there, but its a pretty great accomplishment for the community. Head over the Wazapp.IM and download the app.

The lack of a WhatsApp client was a huge blow to the N9, and I hope WhatsApp reaches across to the developer and helps him in his efforts, rather than try and kill the unofficial port.

[via: My Nokia Blog]

Twitter’s last Privacy Policy Update helpfully informs all users that they do now support the Do Not Track (DNT) browser setting, which aims to stop the collection of information at the user’s request (a collection which Twitter is actively engaged into).

Spurred by all this I sat down and added DNT support in Epiphany, which thankfully is an extremely simple spec to implement. It’s now in master, so anyone willing to enable just needs to go to the Privacy tab in Preferences and click:

Now the pages that choose to respect this setting (unfortunately not everyone does; by a long shot), should be able to detect your request. We can see that things are working in the donottrack.us page itself.

Note that the page claims our browser does not support the feature, yet it is enabled; this is because DNT being an HTTP header extension the only way for the page to tell you whether your browser supports it in theory is by having a hardcoded list of supported browsers, which does not include Epiphany. Oh well. Either way, enjoy your newly untraceable goodness, which should make its way into the next unstable release.

Front Page

Despite additional timing difficulties Maemo Community Council election is now running

The seven candidates in the Maemo Community Council election are now after your votes. Voting runs until May 23nd 2012, 23:59 UTC. If you have not received your voting tokens, but think you should be eligible, contact Niels Breet.

Read more (wiki.maemo.org)
Read more (bugs.maemo.org)

Launching the Summer'12 Device Program: N9s and N950s to giveaway

Quim Gil has consolidated discussion on the N9s and N950s Nokia plan to distribute to the Maemo community, and branded the efforts under a "Summer'12 Device Program" moniker: "Nokia is sponsoring a maemo.org device program consisting of 60 Nokia N9 + 40 Nokia 950 with free delivery. One of the goals of this program is to help reducing the list of missing apps (or alternatives & related features). The devices will be distributed through 4 activities." Hopefully this will result in a burst of high-quality, innovative, Qt apps for Harmattan.

Read more (talk.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Despite additional timing difficulties Maemo Community Council election is now running
   • Launching the Summer'12 Device Program: N9s and N950s to giveaway
2. Applications
   • Showing current song in N9 standby screen
   • FM Radio updated with new theme and RDS capability
   • Official ESPN Formula 1 app for Harmattan
3. Development
   • How to have service-specific notification icons in Harmattan
   • CSSU decides how to ship rewrites of non-core Maemo Nokia binary components
   • Demo of Cordova (PhoneGap) Qt version running Wikipedia Mobile on Nokia N9
4. Community
   • Speakers and programme announced for Devaamo Summit
5. Announcements
   • Wazapp public beta for Nokia N9 - access WhatsApp IM from Harmattan
   • Ogre 3D engine and example game to Harmattan
   • PushUp - fine-grained DLNA/uPNP content sharing on Harmattan
   • reset-root-password for times you've forgotten your root password

Overview

Eyrie is an application for the Nokia N9 and N950 phones that can find out information about music that’s playing nearby. It does this by making use of the EchoPrint algorithm to extract musical features from whatever you’re currently hearing. This is then used to find out the name of the artist and track from The EchoNest. Currently the database of songs accessible via EchoPrint fingerprints is a bit small, but it has the advantage of being an open database that anyone can submit fingerprint information to (although at the moment the process for adding new fingerprints isn’t very clear).

Screenshots

Video

Video of Eyrie

Download

eyrie_0.1-1_armel.deb

Source

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

Firefox for Mobile Here's a thing that would be awesome - http://madhava.com/egotism... May 25, 2012 from Planet Mozilla: Madhava Enros - Comment - Like

At the last Hack-A-N9 meetup, I've been working on a test app to show the currently-playing song. This has then been extended to a fully-fledged app that is easily configurable for the user, so that non-developers could use it (after all, hacks and scripts existed before that did the same thing).

The app is called "Billboard", and its goal is to provide useful information on the low-power-mode screen of the N9 in a way that "normal" users can use it. It also tries to be very lightweight on resources, and smart about updates so that updates are only made when needed, which saves battery power.



Billboard website: http://thp.io/2012/billboard/
Nokia Store link: http://store.ovi.com/content/279408

The currently-released version on Nokia Store is version 1.0.0, and an update (version 1.0.1) with some fixes to allow co-operation with MeeCast, fLPMC and other applications has been uploaded today and is currently waiting in the Ovi QA queue.

There's also a support thread on TMO in case you need help or have suggestions.

Community Council is pleased to announce start of Community Awards program!

maemo.org Community Awards are part of Nokia's '12 Device Program.
Community Awards (short. CA) are meant to be way of recognizing people, that, for months/years contributed - and continuously contribute - to Maemo Community. Unlike other programs, target audience of CA aren't only developers - suitable candidates include (also) dedicated testers, helpers, hardware modders, contributing participants of brainstorms and so goes on. Usually, it's a mix of all presented above.

From all submissions, Council will choose 25 winners, that will receive prize, from pool of 10 N950's and 15 N9's.

Rules for submissions are, as follows:

1. Receiving submissions will start at Monday, 28 May, 00:00 UTC. It will last for 3 weeks.

2. *Only* self-submissions are allowed, via community mailing list. Submissions may contain rationale - a short description about Your deeds for Community, but it's not required. Contributions of anyone submitting will be analyzed by Council, nevertheless.

3. Submission must contain info, if candidate is interested *only* in one particular type of prize (N950 or N9 - so, in case of not enough devices of preferred type, no prize), or if is going to be satisfied by any.

4. Community Awards are granted for past deeds, so no future projects/promises are considered by Council.

5. Someone, who received N950's in any form before (dev programs, etc) can't submit for/receive another one, but *can* submit for N9.

6. Winners will be chosen by Council in it's discretion, in no more than a week time (so, winners will be announced no more than four weeks after start of program).
---

Community Council would like to say huge "Thank You" to every dedicated Maemo contributor!

Front Page

maemo.org and Nokia 770 turn seven

On May 25, 2005, Nokia announced Maemo, the Nokia 770 and maemo.org went live. Ferenc Szekely highlighted the go-live of the community on the community's mailing list. At the time of the launch, GSMArena wrote: "Today Nokia announced the new Linux based Internet Tablet product category, the first device in this category is Nokia 770. The tablet has no phone functions, but it's a very powerful accessory. It can connect to the internet via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and it's optimized for internet browsing and email communication. The Nokia 770 features impressive wide touchscreen with resolution 800x480 pixels, the resolution is enough to see most of the web sites without a horizontal scroll bar. Additional application for Nokia 770 include Internet Radio, RSS News reader, Image viewer and Media players."

It's been a rollercoaster ride for the past seven years. As November 2005 approached, your editor was repeatedly hitting F5 on store.nokia.com to order the 770 as soon as it was available. Each device, from the 770 through the N800, N810, N900 and now N950 & N9 have offered something more than the previous one; though usually at the expense of another feature, which was bound to be a "deal-breaker" for someone.

Unfortunately, Nokia's change in direction has meant we're approaching the end of that journey. Rumours abound that Nokia will continue the Maemo spirit with Linux on a range of new low-end Qt-based phones. Nokia's brief encounter with Intel has re-energised Moblin as MeeGo and now Tizen. It would be easy to be maudlin looking back at the promise, and hope and the current situation. However, let's take time to look back on the successes of the last seven years, rather than bemoan the future in store.

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

Results of Maemo Community Council election announced

Ivan Galvez Junquera (ivgalvez), Piotr Jawidzyk (Estel), Craig Woodward (woody14619), Niel Nielsen (NielDK) have been elected as new members of the council. They join RM Bauer (SD69) who was re-elected from the previous council. The new council have already sprung into action, launching the Community Awards (see later) and selecting Piotr as their chair.

Read more (lists.maemo.org)
Read more (wiki.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • maemo.org and Nokia 770 turn seven
   • Results of Maemo Community Council election announced
2. Development
   • Shared Harmattan space on github
   • Open source replacements of Fremantle's hald-addon-bme and libbmeipc
3. Community
   • Launch of Maemo Community Awards - apply to receive a Nokia N9 or N950
   • Maemo & MeeGo community meet ups at BlackBerry BB10Jam events
4. Announcements
   • MeeCoLay - run Harmattan apps on Fremantle
   • Wazapp - WhatsApp client for Harmattan - is open sourced
   • Eyrie - identify music you're listening to on Harmattan
   • Billboard now in Nokia Store for N9

webOS reloaded.

It has been a tough year but webOS is on the rise again. I am  in charge of development for the whole webOS software stack as well as the community and developer relations that are behind Open webOS.
With the help of our wonderful team, we are already in the process of defining a great roadmap. We need people...and we are already recruiting. Bellow you will find a few interesting positions related to my organization.
Director, Systems Software Engineering-991801
webOS- Software Infrastructure Tools / Release Engineer-976550webOS- Software Engineer QA-970251webOS - Sr. Software Engineer-991551webOS - Sr. Software Engineer-991832Just go to HP site (http://www8.hp.com/us/en/jobsathp/index.html) and enter the details of the job title/Id  in the search bar. A more general search with the keyword webOS should yield you other positions in other domains such as HI, Cloud, Product Management which are handled by Keep coming. There will be more.

It's another month, and (given the monthly release schedule of the app) it's not really a surprise that a new version of gPodder has been released. This is mostly a bugfix release, but brings one very useful feature to gPodder: The ability to hide downloaded podcasts from the Music app. While this is nothing new to command-line fans who edit tracker-miner-fs.cfg by hand, there has not been an end-user friendly way to do it. Now there is: You can just flip a switch in the gPodder Settings and hide the podcasts from the Music app (which does nothing more than adding or removing the gPodder directory to tracker-miner-fs.cfg's IgnoredDirectories list), which is especially useful in a situation where your downloaded podcast accumulate (this happens to me right now - less time to listen to podcasts) and you play your music in "Shuffle all" mode.

Other improvements include a small fix for the episode list filter button for locales where the text sometimes became longer than the button:


As you can see, in the left screenshot (gPodder 3.1.1) the "Hide deleted" text (in German: "Gelöschte verstecken") goes over the toolbar button. To "fix" this, the toolbar button has been made wider (right screenshot, gPodder 3.1.2), which (in my opinion) also looks a bit nicer.

The rest of the improvements include some fixes to the CLI, updated and added translations, and some minor build system fixes - read the full changelog if you want the gory details :)

The MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan package for gPodder 3.1.2 has been uploaded to Apps For MeeGo and Nokia Store already, it should hit Apps For MeeGo Staging in a few hours (please do the QA procedure for it then, so it can land in Apps For MeeGo proper) and it should hit Nokia Store in a few days when QA has finished.