Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)
Attending: Woody14619, Ivgalvez.
SD69 was unavailable due to work.
NielDK is on holiday.
Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):
Review of hand-over activities (repos, FB page, etc)
Review of bylaws for NFP
Misc, other, etc?
Topic 1 (Review of hand-over activities)
Waiting on X-Fade to grant permissions to selected rep for maintaining repos.
Additional volunteers would be useful for other infrastructure items.
Woody14619 has admin privs now on the Maemo FB fan page, should consider when/how to inform user community there of CSSU and other non-Nokia efforts.
Woody to folow up at OBS meeting Monday.
Topic 2 (Infrastructure discussion)
Waiting on SD69 to update bylaws and post to blog/TMO.
If things aren't moving by late week Woody14619 may take a stab at the updates.
Topic 3 (CSSU and Extras issues)
Currently anything depending on CSSU can't go into Extras (no way to handle dependencies).
If we had an installer pacakage for CSSU, we could depend on it for such apps, and/or promote that installer as a proper method to do the install.
Ivgalvez will look into getting a proper package in place to promote CSSU and cross-apps in Extras for normal promotion.
Action Items:
SD69 to retouch bylaws and post as a blog entry for review by full community
Woody14619 will post bylaws to wiki for markup and review edits
Woody14619 to follow up with IRC topic links and announcements once blog/wiki are up
Woody14619 to follow up with X-Fade on getting admin into role with repos & election setup for next election cycle.
Up early to follow EDL of Curiosity. Follow it live here. Go NASA!
Edit ‘We are on Mars again. Photo of a wheel and a shadow of the rover’:
Recent app developments in NemoMobile
A Talk thread on NemoMobile saw more activity last week when it was populated by posts of new applications that are undergoing development for Nemo. Highlights include qmlcalendar, contacts using gallery's picker for avatars, Tizmee Tizen compatibility layer, Conversations, Dialer, and a proof of concept QML desktop (lipstick) from Timur Kristóf. There is a lot of cool content in the thread and that particular joy from watching an open source mobile OS form into something amazing is acute, so check out the thread and revel in the awesome.
Read more (talk.maemo.org)In this edition (Download)...
- Front Page
- Recent app developments in NemoMobile
- Development
- Open source replacement for configuring N900 wifi driver
- Replacing and accessing the Harmattan lock screen
- mxr.meego.com scheduled for decommission 10th August
- Maemo 5 Community SSU meeting last week
- Community
- Minutes of Maemo Community Council meeting (July 27th, 2012)
- Devices
- New release of MeeGo TV demoed on Intel CE4200 - community carrying on
- In the Wild
- Are Nokia going to try to divest of Qt?
- Announcements
- Alternative N9 status menu extensions, without requiring Inception or open mode
Council logs for meeting on August 3rd, 2012
Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)
Attending: Woody14619, Ivgalvez, SD69, Zogg, javispedro.
NielDK is on holiday.
Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):
- Update on bylaws and presentation/setup for NFP
- Infrastructure migration issues
- Jolla questions and representation
- Misc topics
Topic 1 (Update on bylaws)
Discussion on when Board election will happen, and interim Board for formation.
Council members will act as interim Board until elections in September.
SD69 will update bylaws to reflect topics discussed and post to blog/TMO for further discussion.
Topic 2 (Infrastructure discussion)
Per discussion on Monday, X-Fade and Merlin1991 were to sync Tuesday.
Tuesday's sync appeared to not happen, so still no repo admin access.
Woody14619 will follow up on Monday @OBS meeting and try to resolve.
Side-topic with Zogg on OBS:
Zogg asks why info on progress is slow, and why is it not open for more people to work on.
Woody replies that the hardware in Nemien owned, and those in the community with the required skill set to work on OBS are for the most part already involved, or lack the time to become involved. Access is not the issue, free time is. Especially since Nokia is no longer paying for development time from X-Fade, who is contributing personal time to this project now.
Topic 3 (Jolla)
Ivan has a list of questions for Jolla (assembled by Jalyst, from the community), some simple, some not.
SD69 has made contact with Jolla's CEO, thinks we need to have a "friendly meeting" before barraging them with technical questions. Woody agrees.
A meeting should be setup, or at least a discussion started with Jolla and Council.
SD69 will forward info to the Council ML to facilitate that.
Topic 4 (Misc)
Thanks to Ivan for posting meeting minuted to the blog this week.
Woody14619 will be on holiday August 17-25th.
SD69 will be on holiday August 19-25th.
Woody is looking at voting machine docs to see if he can help in the setup for the next election, to reduce time needed by X-Fade to do so.
Action Items:
SD69 to retouch bylaws and post as a blog entry for review by full community
Woody14619 will post bylaws to wiki for markup and review edits
Woody14619 to follow up with IRC topic links and announcements once blog/wiki are up
Woody14619 to follow up with X-Fade on getting admin into role with repos.
Hi again! It’s been a while since I’ve had something to write about, and it’s filesystems again, but with less April Fool’s.
Overview
With the (unexpected) release of Sviox‘s HTML widget runtime I thought it about time that I made my own efforts in that direction a bit more public. TizMee is designed to make it possible to run Tizen (and other) apps on MeeGo, supporting general HTML5 apps, apps using Tizen specific APIs and Cordova/PhoneGap apps (with some slight modification).
This first early release should support general HTML5 apps fairly well (although there are still a few that have issues), some aspects of the Tizen API (this is by no means complete however) and pretty much all of the Cordova/PhoneGap API.
It’s based around the QT Cordova port with Tizen specific functionality implemented as Cordova plugins in a mixture of C and javascript.
Video
Video of Tizen apps running on a Nokia N9
Apps
A number of test applications can be downloaded here: http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/tizmee/
To install them simply place their .wgt files in the TizenApps directory on your device (/home/user/MyDocs/TizenApps).
Download
MeeGo Harmattan (N9/N950): tizmee_0.1-1_armel.deb
Nemo Mobile: My personal OBS repository (also requires python-pyside from that repository)
Source
License: Apache 2.0 License
Gitorious repository: https://gitorious.org/tizmee
Ohloh project page: https://www.ohloh.net/p/tizmee
Today I’m releasing the first release of “econnman”, the EFL user interface for ConnMan.
Some time ago raster added a ConnMan module to e17, but then the API broken during 0.5 transition and I rewrote that module. With ConnMan-1.0 the API was changed yet again and our module stopped working.
Lucas De Marchi took the task to revive the module and he is still finishing this task… let’s say Enlightenment’s internal widget set (e_widget) is something that can get everyone bored to death! Also the new ConnMan API requires an Agent interface to reply with passwords, usernames and other input that the manager may need. This code was not written before, so these new API and GUI must be written.
Until Lucas can finish his work I took a weekend to play with my favorite language: Python. I was away from Python-EFL for a while, so I was wanting to write some code using it. Python-DBus is super-simple (compare it to C!), so the EConnMan in Python-EFL was a nice thing to play.
We’ll cooperate efforts: E17 module will only provide the services list and allow to connect and disconnect. It will also provide an Agent, so we can provide passwords. Everything else that is related to configuration will be left to stand-alone “econnman” application. This standalone will do the tweaks and show details such as IP and MAC addresses, proxy, tethering and others.
In less than two days I had the base of the code I’m releasing now. It supports everything I need (IOW: it does not support VPN, Bluetooth-PAN or 3G/Cellular), but it’s easy to extend to support new features…. so patches are welcome!
My delay to have it released was that I wanted to improve theme (both default and detourious) so it look better, as you can see in the screenshots. It’s still not perfect, particularly the “Segment Control” used to show mutually exclusive options (DHCP, Static, Off) is damn ugly!
It also ships with an optional agent (–agent/-a command line option) that can be used until E17 gets a proper module with agent support.
Download:
- Tarball: http://packages.profusion.mobi/econnman/econnman-1.tar.gz
- Repository: http://svn.enlightenment.org/svn/e/trunk/econnman/
Future:
Some people want IPv6, Proxy and VPN support. Those are nice ideas, but I personally don’t need them. So I’d like some people that use them to step up and do the code… or at least push me to do them! 
Some people want to rewrite it in C and while I can sponsor the idea, it will be much more work for no real gain. With a Python version working one can do the conversion easily, even the helper structures and callbacks can be known beforehand…
Social Connect is a library written in Qt that allows applications to easily connect to services like Facebook and Twitter. Recently I had the opportunity to work on this library improving it and adding support for Instagram (work is still in progress but it’s almost finished).
The main features of this library are:
- Out-of-the-box support for Facebook and Twitter
- Integrated authentication implementation
- Simplified common interface for all supported services
- Provides interfaces for native API calls
- Design enabling easy addition of new services e.g. LinkedIn
If you are writing an application that needs to access these services, this could be the library for you. It can be extended to support even other services like LinkedIn, Flickr etc… and I would like to invite people to contribute to the code. The library has been tested with Qt 4.8.1 on Ubuntu Linux 12.04 but it should be compatible with any other versions/platforms.
For more informations about getting started with the library, I suggest you to give a look at this page https://projects.developer.nokia.com/socialconnect/wiki/GettingStarted
Digia acquires Qt. Now "responsible for all the Qt activities formerly carried out by Nokia"
Digia - the company that previously obtained the commercial licensing of Qt from Nokia - has acquired the remaining portions on Qt. Digia expresses an interest in maintaining the current dual-licensing scheme (open source and commercial) and is "Committed to [a] Thriving Qt Ecosystem". "One of Digia’s key objectives with this acquisition is to improve its position within the Qt ecosystem by further strengthening Qt’s R&D capabilities and expanding its reach on many more platforms than ever before. Since Digia acquired the Qt Commercial licensing business from Nokia in March 2011, the operation has continued to be successful and has grown substantially. Digia forecasts the acquisition’s impact on its 2012 revenues to be positive. In the following years, Digia forecasts the Qt business to grow." Here's hoping Qt continues to get the level of support it deserves from Digia and the community.
Read more (digia.com)Read more (dot.kde.org)
In this edition (Download)...
- Front Page
- Digia acquires Qt. Now "responsible for all the Qt activities formerly carried out by Nokia"
- Applications
- New 'sowatch' screenshots teased for MetaWatch users
- Development
- New SDL port for Harmattan
- Widgets Engine for Harmattan, technical preview 1
- Community
- Minutes of August 3rd Maemo Community Council meeting
Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)
Attending: Woody14619, Ivgalvez
NielDK is on holiday.
Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):
- Update on bylaws and presentation/setup for NFP
- Infrastructure migration issues
- Preparations for elections
- CSSU support and issues
- Misc topics
Topic 1 (Update on bylaws)
- SD69 will update bylaws to reflect topics discussed and post to blog/TMO for further discussion.
- Woody will attempt to do changes and push this before vacation if time permits.
Topic 2 (Infrastructure discussion)
- Woody14619 attempted a follow up on Monday, but there was no reply.
- Merlin1991 informed that there was an issue using the web interface.
- Woody will try again via IRC and Ivan will try again via e-mail.
Topic 3 (Elections)
- If we want to hold elections in September (we do), we need to announce that this month.
- Elections should he held for both Council and the Board, to best use our limited resource time.
- Late August for the announcement sounds reasonable, with elections in late September? But we need to get bylaws up and stable to pull this off.
Topic 4 (CSSU support/issues)
- CSSU team looks to have stabilized where they are going.
- It could be helpful to suggest they formalize and do minutes for their last meeting to make sure everyone is resolved the same way on issues.
Topic 5 (Misc/reminders)
- Woody14619 will be on holiday August 17-25th.
- SD69 will be on holiday August 19-25th.
- Woody is looking at voting machine docs to see if he can help in the setup for the next election, to reduce time needed by X-Fade to do so.
Action Items:
- SD69 to retouch bylaws and post as a blog entry for review by full community
- Failing that Woody will attempt to do the same and post, perhaps while on vacation?
- Woody14619 will post bylaws to wiki for markup and review edits
- Woody14619 to follow up with IRC topic links and announcements once blog/wiki are up
During the past ~20 months I've made several blog posts about Qt5, QML Scene Graph, shaders and whatnot. As Qt5 beta is getting reeeeally close, I thought this would be a good time for a fresh Qt5 technology demo. This one is called 'Cinematic Experience' and looks a bit like this:
(best viewed in HD)
Cinematic Experience collects many of the new Qt5 QtQuick 2.0 features into the same UX demo application. It uses particles, sprites, path animation, custom shaders etc. features which Qt5 introduces for QML UIs. As usual, source codes are available from here.
Performance note: The GPU in N9 (SGX530, released Jul 2005) is showing its age. Especially fragment shaders need to be very conservative as the GPU just isn't powerful enough for the N9 screen resolution. To get the application perform in N9, some optimizations were required like disabling the normal-mapping lighting and reducing the amount of fog particles. As seen in the video, after these tweakings N9 can run the demo okeyish. Definitely far from velvet, but I would say it's more like butter ;P
PS. In case you own RPi, Beagleboard, Pandaboard, Snowball or any other embedded hardware running Qt5, please grab the demo and give it a go. I'm waiting for feedback and videos!
WebOS has just been re branded as Gram. Long live Gram!
Unfortunately now is also the time for me to announce that I have left webOS. I am now working at Samsung.
Before the web takes this statement and make it again one of those this-is-the-proof-that-webOS-is-dying kind of thingy.
I want to make clear the following statement.
When I left webOS, I left a great team with great people and an organization with a credible business plan, a strategy and the support and means from HP to make it happen.
I also left an organization that was mature and had thought through its DNA and culture. And I left also an engineering team that had been re-organized, re-composed, that was cranking out code, hiring, setting up processes and architecture like never before, with the budget and support to achieve their goals.
It is not up to me to predict the future and say whether they will be successful or not, Believe me when I say that Gram has a very, very good prospect. And my gut feeling is that it is not the last we hear from them.
I also left a great boss - named Martin Risau - which has been the major force behind this rebirth. A great boss, who made and said all the right thing to make it very hard for me to go.
Actually I left so much behind that it was one of the hardest professional decision I have ever had to make.
But in the end, what Samsung offered me, was- from a professional and purely intellectual point of view - simply to good to resist; I had to listen to a much lighter and selfish side of me and break away from a family to join a new one.
I needed to make this clear, as - starting next week - I will be recruiting for my new Samsung team and I did not want any confusion on the subject nor did I want this to be misinterpreted in any way.
I want to thank all the great people I have worked with at webOS.
Martin, Leonid, Steve, Itai, Dragan, Jayshree, Kent, Enda, Gray, Susan, Christine, Keith, Keith, Roger, Ari, etc..and all the other that I could not name.... I will see you around and wish you luck from the bottom of my heart.
A look back at a year of Tizen
Nathan Willis summarises Tizen's first year as the Intel & Samsung successor to MeeGo:
"Tizen's goal, like MeeGo's before it, was clearly defined as producing a baseline Linux distribution suitable for consumer electronics products: from handheld devices like tablets to more embedded-flavored-platforms like smart TV and in-vehicle systems. Samsung and LiMo added a mobile phone handset to the mix."
"The first release came in January 2012 and consisted of public Git repositories for the core OS and a "preview" of the SDK. Perhaps most notably, that release was the community's first look at how Tizen would merge in the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) graphical toolkit from LiMo and the project's HTML 5-based API for application development"
Read more (linux.com)In this edition (Download)...
- Front Page
- A look back at a year of Tizen
- Applications
- TizMee 0.1 launched - Tizen, HTML5 and Cordova web apps on MeeGo Harmattan
- Video of FireStarter, allows reading Kindle books on N9
- Development
- box.net client for Harmattan under development
- Devices
- Easier porting of Mer to Android devices using binary blob compatibility layer
Council logs for meeting on August 17th, 2012
Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)
Attending: nieldk, Pali, ivgalvez
## Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):
- Update on bylaws and presentation/setup for NFP
- Infrastructure migration issues
- CSSU support and issues
- Misc topics.
SD69 have updated bylaws document in order to publish it for community feedback. It is published here in full, for community members review, feedback and final acceptance.
This issue is blocker for several actions, including:
- Elections for next Council/Board of Directors, we'd like to use one single voting for both elections and Bylaws approval
- Legal entity, that will took place after elections.
It is by all means not a final document, and only a suggestion from the current Council for establising a legal entity to continue the Maemo society.
Therefore the feedback after review is necessary from community members and a final acceptance of the community is needed in order to establish a legal entity to be responsible for carrying out the Maemo.org infrastructure.
In an effort to increase transparency and access for the community, Council holds public meetings each Friday at 18:00UTC. Meeting logs are available at any time, and minutes are posted to the Council blog soon after (usually the following Monday).
Council logs for meeting on August 24th, 2012
Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (http://mg.pov.lt/maemo-meeting-irclog/%23maemo-meeting.2012-08-24.log.html)
Attending: nieldk
## Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):
Update on bylaws and presentation/setup for NFP
Infrastructure migration issues
CSSU support and issues
Misc topics.
## Topic 1: Update on bylaws
SD69 have updated bylaws document in order to publish it for community feedback. It is published on wiki (http://maemo.org/community/council/by-laws_for_hildonfoundation/) for community members review, feedback and final acceptance.
This issue is blocker for several actions, including:
- Elections for next Council/Board of Directors, we'd like to use one single voting for both elections and Bylaws approval
- Legal entity, that will took place after elections.
Other open issues from previous Council meeting is postponed due to Council members on vacation.
Proposed by-laws for 'Hildon Foundation'
RM Bauer has posted the latest draft of the proposed constitution of the "Hildon Foundation", the not-for-profit organisation intended to takeover management of maemo.org and the Maemo community:
"The mission of the Foundation is to promote and progress the future availability of maemo derived or inspired open source software, and related toolkits, for mobile pocketable devices. The Maemo operating system and Hildon user interface was originally developed by Nokia Corporation and used in several commercially available devices, including the N900. Most of Maemo and Hildon is currently open source software as defined by the Open Software Foundation and, as such, continues to be improved upon by a volunteer community at www.maemo.org. Nokia intends to cease its operation of www.maemo.org and has indicated a willingness to transfer it to a suitable organization."
The links below cover the original Community Council blog post; the threads on maemo-community and TMO which were automatically created from it; and the previous discussion. At the time of writing, the responses have been limited to the maemo-community mailing list.
Read more (maemo.org)Read more (maemo.org)
Read more (talk.maemo.org)
Read more (maemo.org)
In this edition (Download)...
- Front Page
- Proposed by-laws for 'Hildon Foundation'
- Applications
- Breeze allows quick installation of apps whilst browsing on the desktop
- Development
- Succesful build of stable Thumb2 binaries for Fremantle
- Announcements
- Tweetian updated in Nokia Store for N9 and Symbian
Overview
Erudite makes it possible to use Amazon’s Cloud Reader service under MeeGo. You can either read books online, or download them for reading offline. Your progress in a book is kept synchronised between your N9 and other Kindle devices.
Screenshots
Video
Video of Erudite on a Nokia N9
Download
Nokia N9/N950 version available in the Ovi Store: http://store.ovi.com/content/307241
Nemo mobile version: com.mikeasoft.firestarter-1.0-21.4.Nemo.Apps.MTF.armv7hl.rpm
Lick Observatory from Ranch Grant, by Sean O’Flaherty.
Hi, just a short note to let everybody know that I’m in the process of leaving Nokia and joining… the Platform Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation! There I will help improving the volume and quality of community contributions in technical areas like QA, sysadmin and development of features for Wikipedia and related projects. I don’t need to tell you how excited (and impatient) I am about diving into such massive and complex project full of openness and freedom.
But before I need to deal with something more prosaic and mundane: the change of status of my US visa. Hopefully it will take just a few weeks. In the meantime I’ll have time to leave things properly at the Qt and Maemo communities, while getting more familiar with the wide and deep Wikimedia biosphere. I’ll also have time to read units of 140 pages instead of the usual 140 characters, learn something requiring full concentration and perhaps get a few samples of the peaceful Summer holidays I didn’t have with all this professional instability. Like attempting to pedal up to the Lick Observatory while, down there, Silicon Valley is pushing frantically new businesses, products, releases…
This is enough for today. Not saying “Thank You” yet.
Before uploading to Nokia Store, some things have to be fixed - a big icon and screenshots have to be made/taken, single-instance launching and being a good multitasking citizen (pausing gameplay when put into background) is a precondition for QA to not fail, so these things have now been implemented.
In order to properly maintain Brain Party for the N950/N9 in the future, and to track changes, I've set up a Git repository in the Collaborative Harmattan Repository on Github (which gets used a lot - as of today, we have 35 repositories and 16 organization members, and you can get yourself added easily).
The Git repository of Brain Party starts off with an initial commit that is just a copy of the 0.5.91-2 source package contents from Fremantle (sans the artwork/music, which got added in a separate commit later), and then has (in a single commit) all Harmattan customizations that I did back in March, May and today. The repository content is quite big, as the images, sounds and music are all included now, but that shouldn't stop you from cloning it and hacking the code ;)
As written in the announcement on TMO, you can get your .deb from the downloads page or wait until it surfaces on Nokia Store as free app. As with most repositories on Github, we have an issue tracker where you can file pull requests, bugs and other things that you notice while using Brain Party :)
Today is my last day as a Nokian, oh well, what a great and fun ride.
I still remember the day that I was introduced to the awesome Maemo Community, all the friends that I met online and later at the community conferences, my interaction with the community helped me a lot, I learned a lot with very brilliant people, and thanks to that I got the opportunity to work in one of the hottest projects at that time, big thank you to everyone that welcomed me so well in the community.
Later the road became a bit bumpy, but I’m still very proud of our achievements, specially getting the beatiful Nokia N9 out, against all the odds 
. A little bit different story for my latest project, never saw the light of the day, it was canceled in the last stages of development, really a pity, even getting all emotions out, I still believe we had something special there, at the moment there’s nothing even close in the industry, but in the end it’s business and as a good professional I’ve to respect the decisions of my employer.
Speaking of Nokia, I have to say that is a great place to work, I was always treated with respect and dignity, the company always helped me with everything, big thank you!
A big thanks to all my colleagues, specially the ones in the two teams that I worked, great people with great talent, hope to work with some of them again in the future, and I wish all the best for Nokia and for the few friends that are staying there, please make the company rock again!
As for me, I’m available for new challenges, if you need a Software Engineer with expertise in the mobile area let me know , location is not a problem, but at the moment I’m giving priority to Finland, since I really like to live here .