The second day of the OneDotZero experience started again with a nice chat during the breakfast, this time without devices . Was very nice to hear the ideas of my colleagues bloggers about the current state of the mobile devices market and the prosper future of this area. We talked mostly about the new N900, making comparisons with other platforms and discussing our impressions as end users of the new Maemo OS. I think in general everybody was impressed with the device.
Planet maemo: category "feed:ff8b6dc697dc403cb693cacff69f3818"
Last week I was invited to London for the onedotzero event at the BFI, where Nokia were showcasing some very cool stuff around the Maemo Plataform.
GSoC is already over, and the Maemo Community had a very successful participation this year, all students successfully completed the program, some with more difficulties than others, but in general, I’m very happy with the final results.
I hope that all who had involved in our organization have had a very pleasant time and a great learning experience. Let’s hope that we can run similar programs inside our community more times in the future, with the knowledge acquired, the benefits for the community will be even bigger, for sure .
I would like to thank some individuals and some company’s which had an important role in our GSoC participation:
Our mentors: Eduard Bartosh(ed_), Eduardo Lima(etrunko), Florian Boor(florian), Gary Birkett(lcuk), Gustavo Chaves(glima), Luis Felipe Strano Moraes(lfelipe), Rafael Antognolli(antognolli), Thomas Perl(thp), Ulisses Furquim Freire da Silva(Ryback_) and all the others that don’t had an student assigned.
Our Students: Amit Sethi(amit_usual), Andrei Mirestean(andrei1089), Andrey Popelo(apopelo), Feng Gao(derkaiser), Kasun Herath(kasun), Kirtika Ruchandani(rkirti), Lauri Võsandi(v6sa), Max Usachev(plastun), Thiago Borges Abdnur(bolaum) and Zachary Habersang(z4chh).
Our Community: Everybody that proposed project ideas and helped our students, especially the Mer guys (I’m looking at you Stskeeps et al ).
Nokia: For sponsoring the trip & accommodation of the students and mentors that attended the Mozilla Maemo Danish Weekend held in Copenhagen, especially Quim Gil for the help given during the program.
Texas Instruments: For the Beagleboard kindly offered to Kirtika, was a great help for her project.
Google: For running this successfully program, especially the GSoC team(Leslie, Ellen et al) and the Melange team.
Here’s some screenshots of our students work, more screenshots can be found in lfelipe’s blog.
Shop-mate
Moncells
Maemo OE
Mnemosyne
The Maemo Summit is a showcase for the Maemo community, so it’s important to get the word out.
We are looking for help, specially from those who have designing skills, but everybody can help
You can help us promote the event in several ways:
* Create cool promotion banners, web badges or flyers.
* Write about the summit on your website, and add the url here.
* Help in the Summit merchandise design.
* Add banners/web badges in your website, put flyers in your work place/university/user group.
* Join the Maemo Summit groups in social networks.
* Spread the word about the summit, among your friends and colleagues.
Ideas, thoughts ? Come discuss with us
After run the cool Qt/s60 demos produced by Ariya on my phone, I decided to test if Qt is really cross-platform . Well, I’ve to say that I’m really impressed, the demos run smoothly on my desktop and as you can see below on my n810
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuLySbZEcOk
Runs out of the box, I only made a small change in order to assign the device volume buttons to the three animation effects: Slide, Flip, and Rotate, because the menu doesn’t work, probably need some integration with hildon (I’m a Qt noob : ) )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB04orP25iM
An propriety used in this demo (setOpacity) only exist in Qt 4.5 onwards, and the available version on the maemo repositories is the 4.4, so I commented some lines of code, my changes led to a bug as you can see in the video, the main weather state icon isn’t correctly updated. Note that the demo runs out of the box without any change, but due to the old Qt version used, the animations aren’t shown without a small fix.
The third Qt/s60 demo requires more changes, because of the use of input methods, let’s hope that everything run out of the box in Fremantle.
More information and the videos of the demos running on an s60 device: http://ariya.blogspot.com/2009/07/like-startling-sign-that-fate-had.html
Update: Qt 4.5.x is actually available for maemo4 under the extras-devel repository, see comment below (Thanks Kaitsu).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAZh0BBOfs8
Yesterday I received a feedback comment here, saying that BlueMaemo can be used to control games in some S60 devices (Thanks Hath!!!), so just tried with my 5800 and the result is in the video above . Playing those games with the tv-out feature of the phone is even cooler
Required software and instructions here.
Note: In order to play Quake 2 in the 5800 you need to turn off OpenGL ES in the game menu.
As some already know, a new version of BlueMaemo rolled out in the last Thursday. BlueMaemo 0.3 is mostly a bug-fix release, but some new features are also available.
BlueMaemo v0.3 Changelog:
* Added support for the hardware keyboard in all profiles
* Added support for ‘key combos’ (e.g: ctrl+f, ctrl+alt+f6,…)
* Added Ctrl, Alt and F1 to F11 keys in the virtual keyboard
* Fixed bug in the bluetooth adapter state
* Moved configuration files to /etc/bluemaemo/
* Added back buttons in the ‘wait for connection’ and ‘process connection’ screens
* Fixed the sdl/openGL keystrokes bug
In other news, the BlueMaemo bug tracker was moved to the official maemo bugzilla (Thanks Andre), so now on you should report bug and submit feature requests (enhancement) there.
I would like to thank everyone that submitted bug reports and feature request, especially our package master Qwerty12 for some tips about the debian packaging, and Pycage that sent me a lot of outputs, that helped me fix a bug related to the keystrokes sent to games written in SDL/OpenGL.
Next developments will target Fremantle and improvements in the PS3 support.
I would like to give more time to my open source projects, but right now my thesis work is eating most of my time .
BlueMaemo V0.3 is available here.
Today Nokia announced a new version of the Maemo 5 SDK, here is a small video with some new UI features:
Note: other features could exist in this new SDK, I don’t searched too much. I also noticed some elements missing in this version, like the application switcher and the back menu button in the right top corner of the screen, you can also see my previous video for a better comparison with the alpha SDK UI.
Happy Hacking
Google announced today the accepted students for the Google Summer of Code 09, the maemo community will host 10 projects this year.
We received more than 40 students proposals, around half of the students proposed features/advances for Canola, seems that the ‘open sourcing’ of the project attracted much attention.
Some of my favorite projects weren’t selected, but I’m happy with the one’s selected by the democratic vote of the maemo mentors
Here is the list:
Barcode scanner and Shopping Assistant.
Bittorrent plugin for Canola.
IM Client For Canola Using Python-purple.
Integrating Maemo in Open Embedded(OE) – Creating a ‘maemo image’ in OE for the N800/N810.
Liqbase Framework Development and Application Implementation.
Mnemosyne for Maemo.
Picasa plugin for Canola.
Remember The Milk plugin for Canola.
Semantic-Based Context-aware Personalized News reader System for Maemo.
Twitter application and Twitpic support for Canola.
Some of the project titles may seem strange at the first look, so stay tuned in the maemo mailing lists for further details, criticism and suggestion around the GSoC projects.
Some people don’t like to subscribe mailing list, they are so used to internet forums that can’t use a mailing list properly.
Recently in ITT, some people that don’t use the maemo community mailing lists, complained about the lack of information about the maemo community council, because the decisions/achievements of the council are mostly announced in the community mailing lists, in order to help those users, I took the liberty to create a forum archive for the maemo mailing lists at Nabble.
What is Nabble:
“Nabble wants to improve public discussions on the web and provide useful embeddable applications to end users. This includes forums, user groups, message boards, mailing lists, photo galleries, newspapers, blogs, etc. There are many vibrant discussions in these places, so are problems such as cluttered UI, broken search, moderation, and cataloging. Nabble wants to be a place where your discussion can grow and be free of these problems.”
The Nabble forum allow users to browse the maemo community mailing lists like in regular internet forum, and is also possible to reply trough the forum.
You can found the “maemo mailing lists forum” here.
The Maemo Community received 43 GSoC students applications (plus 5 ineligible), a big success so far. Thanks to students that applied for us and to everybody that helped on the GSoC initiative.
Now is time to review the proposals
The Maemo community is looking for talented students to join us in the Google Summer of Code initiative.
We already have a good pool of ideas, but we are also looking for students ideas in the mobile/embedded field, especially in the following areas:
* Location based apps;
* Context aware apps;
* Linux kernel advances, related to mobile/embedded;
* Social apps clients;
* Mobile/embedded apps in general that can benefit a wide range of platforms (maemo, openmoko, beagleboard, etc…).
More informations about Maemo @ GSoC can be found here.