When the Council was first formed, one of the things we decided we were going to do was aggregate community activity to this blog. This was to reduce the workload for people who wanted to track what the community was up to, but didn't have the time to monitor every single channel for updates (the list of which is rather sizable, including Internet Tablet Talk, the mailing lists, #maemo, Planet, the wiki, Bugzilla, Jaiku, and others). Unfortunately, due partially to lack of a structured plan and partially to some lazy fellow council members who I wont name :P, this "aggregation" has been limited to posts from me about things I happen to be interested in (or think need highlighting). Which doesn't include those things that I'm not interested in, or fail my entirely arbitrary relevance test. ;)

So, today we start off on a new foot with real (and hopefully useful) aggregation in the form of a bi-monthly "community highlights" column which will come on the first and third weeks of each month (Part I and Part II).

Mer (formerly Maemo Reconstructed)

Mer started out as Maemo Reconstructed, a proof of concept implementation of "Maemo" (i.e., Hildon) on top of a basic Ubuntu release stripped down to fit into about the same amount of space as Maemo occupies. The goal being to move Maemo away from the "proprietary vendor-rolled firmware" mentality to a more general platform for tablet devices, make in more developer-friendly, and improve Maemo's alignment with upstream (to reduce the number of "Maemoisms" and make porting easier).

Mer is effectively the second step in this process (the renaming solved branding conflicts so Mer could be used as a community distribution of Maemo in the short-term while Nokia figures out what direction it wants to take Maemo in in the long term), and lots of progress has already been made, so be sure to keep an eye on it.

maemo.org server improvements

You may have noticed maemo.org running a lot faster, this is thanks to the Midgard upgrade that was pushed last week. The software is now much gentler on the database, and there have been general improvements in practically every area of Midgard. Thanks to Henri, Niels, and piotras for making the push to get it live!

maemo.org design

Dave, Tim, and Andrew have been working with INdT on the maemo.org redesign over the past few weeks. The plan is to have a new design to implement by December, so get ready for a new look in the next couple months.

Canola in Bugzilla

Canola is now a product in Bugzilla, which marks the first non-Nokia software officially tracked in the maemo.org bugzilla and signifies a milestone in maemo.org's new role as the true home of the Maemo Community. So get to filing bugs! ;)

Today I'd like to announce the beginning of Canola issue tracking on the maemo.org Bugzilla. This marks the beginning of community application tracking in our Bugzilla, and another milestone in maemo.org's transition into a true community website.

Canola's existing tracker on Garage is now closed (anybody familiar with Garage's tracker will know exactly how sweet a thing that is ;)), any remaining valid issues will be migrated to Bugzilla, and the rest of the issues will be closed.

This is only the first step in tracking 3rd-party applications in Bugzilla, as tracking for more than just a few applications will be dependent on significant software upgrades, so we're starting with a small pilot-program with some high-profile applications that are most likely to benefit from quality bug tracking.

Big thanks to Andre and Karsten (our bugmasters) for facilitating this change, and to the Canola team (particularly Marcelo Oliveira and my fellow Council member Eduardo Lima) who worked so hard to get Canola open-sourced (which was really what finally made this happen). The rest of you can show your appreciation by filing some bugs! ;)

Since a lot of you will be changing your packaging once the new categories are added to the Application Manager (which we are still missing a few translations!), now seems like a good time to discuss some of the packaging features many of you are missing out on.

Pretty names in Application Manager

Much like you can specify separate "Unix" and a "pretty" names for your project on Garage, you can specify a "Maemo-Display-Name" to show a "pretty" name for your package in Application Manager. Simply add a line with "XB-Maemo-Display-Name" to your debian/control file with the desired display name of your package, and it will show up as the package name in Application Manager. For instance, "OS2008 Feature upgrade" instead of "osso-software-version-rx34". This makes the package list look much cleaner, and package names much more readable. It's a dead-simple way to improve the user experience for everybody.

Upgrade descriptions

Typically users will either have to refer to a website (assuming you have one) or dig into the changelog in the .deb if they want to know what new things they're getting with an upgrade. Fortunately there's an easy way to provide a user-friendly change log right in the Application Manager. Simply specify an "XB-Maemo-Upgrade-Description" field in your debian/control file with a description of the update (formatted the same as the Description field), and users will see the description in a separate tab in the info dialog during updates.

Package icons

Packages can have icons displayed next to their names in the Application Manager, to have an icon, you simply need to encode a 26x26 pixel image (PNG is a reasonable choice) of your icon into base64 (uuencode -m) and add it to your debian/control file under "XB-Maemo-Icon-26". If you don't provide an icon your package will end up with the drab, ugly default package icon.

Selecting a menu location

Most of you know you can show a dialog to let the user select a menu location for your application by calling "maemo-select-menu-location" from your postinst script, but what many of you may not realize, is that doing just this will show the dialog again during updates even when the user has already selected a location, which can be quite irritating.

Thankfully there's a simple fix. Simply wrap the maemo-select-menu-location with an if statement to get something like this:

oldversion="$2"
if [ -z "$oldversion" ]; then
maemo-select-menu-location your.desktop
fi

Which will check to see if the package has been previously installed and suppress the folder selection dialog if it has.

For more information about these and packaging in general, see the hildon-application-manager packaging guide, the Maemo Packaging Policy, and the Debian Packaging Policy.

Some of you may recall my last post where I talked about the new package categories for Diablo. In order to implement these new categories, a few changes need to be made to the Application Manager. In order for Nokia to ship these changes, translations of the categories need to be provided for all of Nokia's supported languages. The appropriate steps have been taken internally to begin translation of the new strings, but this process takes time which may unacceptably delay the shipment of the new Application Manager code.

Fortunately the community can help out here by translating the list of categories. Anybody interested and able should see the wiki page and fill in any missing languages. Once these translations are completed, hopefully the updated Application Manager can be shipped in one of the next few SSU releases, and packagers and users will start benefiting from the new categories.

In an effort to improve packager compliance and user experience in the Application Manager, the list of valid package categories for Diablo has been changed. The new list should better cover the different sorts of applications available on the platform:

Key Example English i18n Example apps user/desktop Desktop Home, statusbar and taskbar applets user/development Programming py2deb user/education Education Flashcard apps user/games Games Doom, Duke Nukem 3D user/graphics Graphics Photo apps, GIMP, Inkscape, fonts user/multimedia Multimedia Canola, mplayer, Kagu, UKMP, MediaBox user/navigation Location & Navigation maemo-mapper, Navit user/network Internet & Networking Web browsers, Samba clients, OpenAFS, Transmission user/office Office GPE, Claws, AbiWord user/science Science gnuplot, Octave user/system System rotation-support, enhanced kernels, themes user/utilities Utilities or Accessories Calculators, terminals, text editors

What this means for you

If you're just a user, probably not much. Hopefully in a month or two when both the packages and Application Manager itself are updated, it'll mean you wont have to browse packages by only the "All" category anymore but can enjoy a nice, navigable list of categories. All you need to do is sit back, relax and wait.

Now, if you're a packager, it means it's time to get ready to update your packages with the new categories, but don't push those updates just yet! Part of this change involves changes to the Application Manager's code. It needs a new list of valid categories, its handling of packages with invalid categories needs to be updated and l10n for the new list of categories needs to be put together and shipped. All of which means we need to wait until the Application Manager is updated with the next SSU push until we can start using our pretty new list of categories.

Hopefully this push wont take an inordinate amount of time to come (perhaps we can even convince Nokia to finally start using SSU how it should've been used from the beginning and push a small update for Application Manager before the next big push), but it's likely to take at least a month, so don't go pushing packages with updated categories just yet. That is, unless you really want people to see ugly, un-localized category strings. Watch this space for an update when you can start using the new categories.

Just a heads up, there are only 6 days remaining until the Midgard wiki dies for good, so if there are any other pages you'd like to have moved or redirected, please list them. Otherwise, they'll all be gone after November 4th, 2008.

Harassment of package maintainers is still ongoing, but the responses so far have been quite good (no negative responses, yet, but more than a few non-responders which could be taken a few ways). A few packages have already been updated with section fixes, and I even managed to get a positive response from Boingo (thanks Marcell)!

The package categorization discussion has started to net some interesting results. Andrew Flegg proposed to use the freedesktop.org specifications as our base for developing our category list. Which makes sense, as aligning with an upstream increases consistency and helps reduce confusion. David Greaves makes a good point when he says that the freedesktop.org specification feels outdated and somewhat inappropriate for the type of device we use. Getting the specification updated might be the correct approach, but we'll see what happens.

A good set of categories isn't much use if the software doesn't make them useful (as is true of the current Application Manager). As such, Andrew Flegg began hacking on the Application Manager source today, and has already put together patches for bug #2710 and bug #3103. I've also filed bug #3822 for the corresponding changes to the application menu.

On another front, Carsten Munk's (of Deblet fame) reply to the discussion about Maemo's alignment with upstream bears some thinking on, and hopefully will hit home with Nokia.

I haven't been very productive lately. My two projects are blocked by missing people (karsten and jott, where are you hiding?). Need to harass the rest of the Council about blogging and finishing up everything on our wiki page, but I'm sure they're busy (as am I).

We did restart discussion on the categories issue, which is ongoing, if you want to weigh in (deadline for a a final list is sometime before things really start ramping up for Fremantle). There are some interesting ideas being tossed around. One of which, sub-sections, qwerty12 successfully tested with Extras and Application manager yesterday morning—a good candidate for a hildon-application-manager patch if I do say so myself. ;)

On the subject of sections, over the past two weeks I've also been harassing package maintainers about clearly invalid sections, and suggesting general packaging improvements (like using some of the Maemo-specific package fields). The response has been fairly positive so far, though there have been more than a few non-responders (Boingo just subscribed me to their newsletter when I emailed their support address). I started a very rough first draft for a Maemo-packaging overview article if anybody's interested in adding to it.

Going to bug the maemo.org guys more about the server updates today, doesn't seem like there's been much progress since the new boxes were delivered and I'm not really sure what's going on.

A recent comment on bugzilla by Marius Vollmer got me fired up on an idea jott has tossed around in the past. An osso-software-version-community—a community distribution of Maemo.

A community distribution lets us do a lot of cool things that working within the limits of Nokia's setup does not. It'll allow us to ship an OS that isn't so locked down by Nokia's corporate policy, remove dependencies on proprietary advertising (Skype, Gizmo, etc.), remove superfluous and problem-causing bundled media and documentation, modify existing packages with community patches, and ship community add-ons and community-patched Nokia applications. It gives us a distribution that is more stable, more useful, more versatile and more interesting.

I've started drafting a proposal of jott's idea in the wiki. I've outlined some of the issue we'll need to tackle, and started fleshing out the specific ideas on what packages we'll add, remove, and modify (anybody up for a graphical bootmenu with a GUI control panel applet to configure it with, perhaps? ;)). Discussion is being held on maemo-developers, and feel free to add your ideas to the wiki.

There are really a lot of cool things we can do with a community distribution not encumbered by Nokia's corporate policies. So let's take the strong software foundation Maemo Software has given us and really run with it.

In other news, I've been working on killing the old wiki for good, as it's been cluttering up google results, cluttering up maemo.org and generally making a nuisance of itself as an un-editable-wiki-paradox that's providing practically zero useful information.

I ran through the list of old pages to see what more could be salvaged and what pages should be replaced with redirects (Don't break the web!) to the new wiki. I think I did a fair enough sweep, but my definition of useful isn't the same as someone else's, so if some more people could eyeball my list and add anything they think should be moved and/or redirected, it'd be much appreciated.

During the 100 Days brainstorm, two of the biggest issues discussed were cleaning up the maemo.org content to remove cruft and keep everything high-quality, and redesigning the look and layout of the site to be lightweight, attractive and usable.

The design and layout discussion is ongoing, but we've already seen mockups from Bundyo and fms, and Quim has asked the INdT folks responsible for the new logo to try their hand at a design, too.

Before we tackle design issues, the first step is to start cleaning up existing content. Dave has outlined most of the types of use-cases that the content should cater to. So we need to figure out any additional use-cases, and get down to setting up the site to be usable for all of them.

To help kick off the discussion (and since it worked so well for Bugzilla), we're holding an IRC meeting on Freenode in #maemo-meeting on Saturday this week at 19:00 UTC. Be there!