A new version of theme maker contains a few more icons, fixes bg issue with media player bg, add new bgs for clock, call-ui and app manager, has better example files, now also PSD files are included, of which an example above, showing the cut layers and the example layers for the backgrounds template.

What else. Linux version now is also able to create debs, but seems to need a bit more mem that the shell script gives, so first build your theme, then close theme maker, reopen it, and the click on make debian button. I'll check if I can sort the memory issues at some point on linux as well.

There is a short suggestion text document included on how windows users can develop until I get the debian creation working on windows again.

Oh, link: Garage downloads section

[Edit] Always rebase your theme template, icon and background files on top of the new ones. I have again changed the resolution of the bg template.

Thanks to the great developers of nrnoksnes, we have now snes running on n900 fullscreen. Wiimote supported, as well as tv out.

take a look at the video:



[Edit] I ported wiicontrol on the weekend just to get this awesomness up and running. While it's great that you can play games on the go and to be able to continue later from your couch with wiimote, you can also just bring your wiimote with you and use that to play games. It's just perfect.

And kids, don't pirate games.

N900 is now out and we all want to make it even cooler. Even more My device than it already is. To the majority of the world that probably moot point as you don't yet have one, but you will. Soon. And then you want to make it more You. Enter Theme Maker N900.

I have updated Theme Maker (from now on, TM) to fully support N900 Theming. Not only can you convert the buttons, toolbars, all the widgets, but TM themes also convert the fonts, the icons and bacground images.

Wwhat is so different from before. Base theme template is larger than before. It's mostly legacy support stuff and you only really need to touch the right third of the template if you are lazy. In addition you will have two new templates: icons and backgrounds.

Lemme show these to you:



The icon template contains all the apps you have by default in the launcher and also for different mime types, devices and some control panel items. I'll be adding a few more later on. Ideas for good candidates are welcome. The reason these are not Nokia icons is that we need to have a CC basis for the icons so that you can work on top of them. Nokia Icons are of course strictly copyright Nokia, so I just used these beautiful Oxygen icons to set a good example for you.


Backgrounds contains on the top part a full 4 screens wide image (3200x480), so you can easily put an image that pans nicely on the device. Under it there are / will be some bgs for some additional apps.

So, even if you don't have N900 yet, I urge you to download theme maker and the example tempaltes and start hackign for a new theme, because you will surely be able to install it on your beautiful N900 very soon.

Theme Maker comes with two default templates, one for dark themes and another for light themes. This should set up the basis nicely for your new theme.

Link to download:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=36

[Edit: Forgot to mention that theme maker requires bigger java heap on linux than by default. OSX app handles it nicely, just doubleclick to open, but on linux you need to start with -Xmx1024M parameter. I'll add a .sh script to next release to easen the pain of linux users. Windows version will follow soonish. You can edit the theme template anyway already and that's the most important thing. ]

It's out!
http://maemo.nokia.com

I'm so proud of what we have achieved in maemo team.

Most of the media players need album art. So, ever application does the handling of the art by themselves (just like getting the metadata). For the metadata, we have tracker to get the metadata - one less headache. For the album art, we have tracker, hildon-thumbnailer and a standard to help alleviate another headache.

I haven't been blogging much about Fremantle yet. But, yesterday there was a question on the maemo developers mailinglist about what files are indexed to the trackers metadata database, so I though to clear out that issue and also to tell a bit about how your app can use tracker.

Almost exactly a week ago I became a dad of a very sweet little girl. Her hello world message will be coming a bit later on when a name has been bestowed upon her.

I am the happiest man on the planet.

A week of tuneups and I feel confident putting the portrait ukmp to maemo extras. It's there now available as update to previous users of ukmp.Album art downloading was greatly improved on version 1.82, so 1.83 will remove your existing cover art upon install. 1.83 added the final touches like play/pause button to work properly and some layout tuneups. Shuffle logic is still horrible and I really need to revisit that for the next version.



Other known irritations are that only fisrt 35 songs are visible on each album, so if you have e.g. Rolling Stones top 500 songs as one album, you'll be very dissatisfied with ukmp. I'm trying to bridge the gap between what is now and having 500 songs on an album, but it's not going to work on the next release. Also, everyone should be plesed to notice the exit button on top right corner, with me being the most pleased, because perhaps this will stop emails to me asking how to close ukmp. 1.82 also came with proper support for collection albums. Now the song artist is displayed in the song list view for collection albums. It's simple, yet very rewarding feature.

No more words: Click here to install .

Oh, I'll be posting a new video for the next version. Check out my previous post for the 1.80 release video.

Long time in the making bears fruit. I'm publishing ukmp 1.8 now. It's beta, I have worked today six or seven hours on it, which is probably more I've done to it for a few months. I've been doing some testing, but as you can imagine, it needs a bit more tests before I feel confident putting it to maemo extras repositories and download pages.

However, what is there is something I'm pretty proud of. It's now the music player I always wanted it to be. Very easy to use, very smooth and now that it's in portrait mode, it's finally usable with one hand. Mind you, the optimal hand is left hand.

First proper day of desktop search hackfest behind. We had good progress on the most important areas already and we are making now similar progress on the second day. The biggest one was that we agreed on the ontology changes that have been raised with variable solution candidates now for a year. The solution is clean and simple. It is future oriented by allowing proper object relations in the ontology, but still retaining the possibility to be efficient on the cases where you are only interested in a lablel-like property of the relationship rather than the actual object in the relation.

Check out mikkels post on the subject

Today we have also been able to extend the query api to reflect this ontological change. We also agreed to add proper support of nested queries that truly makes the search api powerful. Biggest issues remaining currently are in the area of live queries. Here is a very good example of a real world ;) use case. By the way, using Gobby (gnome application) makes document collaboration astonishingly easy.

<!--
Maybe we could try to draft a spec as well? Maybe just some notes?
Because it's still not really clear what everyone up to because everyone is up to slightly different things.
-->

<!--
  Match all documents with keyword "biology" which author comes from the
  same country as any person with name Jim.
-->
<query content="xesam:Document" hitFields="xesam:title, xesam:author/xesam:givenName">

  <and>
    
    <equals>
      <field name="xesam:keyword"/>
      <string>biology</string>
    </equals>
    
    <equals>
      <field name="xesam:author/xesam:country"/>
      <field name="xesam:author/xesam:birthdate"/>
      <query content="xesam:Person" hitFields="xesam:country, xesam:birthdate">
        <and>
          <equals>
            <field name="xesam:givenName"/>
            <string>Kim</string>
          </equals>
          <equals>
            <field name="xesam:gender"/>
            <string>male</string>
          </equals>
          <greaterThan>
            <field name="xesam:birthdate"/>
            <date>1979-12-24</date>
          </greaterThan>
        </and>
      </query>
    </equals>
  
  </and>

</query>