Planet Maemo: category "feed:994930aea431fd805006b92312248b2a"

Nokia and Intel has announced today the MeeGo Project, a new open source, Linux project for both Maemo and Moblin. The new Qt development environment will feature easy to use and flexible UI for a better app development experience. The Linux Foundation in turn will handle the open source project organization. MeeGo aims to target netbooks/entry-level desktops, handheld computing and communications devices, in-vehicle infotainment devices, connected TVs, and media phones.

Below are several videos about the announcement:

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

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Laser-Cut Stand for the Nokia N900

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:23:58 +0000

TMO member Fake has just announced his latest invention — a laser-cut stand for the Nokia N900.

The 3-piece acrylic or wood stand is now for sale for only $10, $15 if you buy two, and $20 for three (shipping included). Details on how to order, more stand pictures, and the long discussion is over at talk.maemo.org.

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Maemo Weekly News – February 8, 2010 Issue Now Out

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:18:16 +0000

This week’s issue of Maemo Weekly News (MWKN) is now out. Some items I would like to highlight are the following:

Below is the full list of articles in this week’s issue:

Maemo Weekly News – February 8, 2010

Maemo in the Wild

Announcements

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Maemo Weekly News Launches

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:43:44 +0000

If you haven’t seen me posting much here at Maemo Talk, it’s because I’ve been helping Andrew Flegg with his new project: Maemo Weekly News.

Maemo Weekly News is a weekly online publication that highlights Maemo specific news throughout the week. What’s good about it is that all the news are community contributed by sending a tweet to @mwkn. Editors (which I am a part of) and sub-editors will then flesh out all the tweets and the best ones will make to the weekly publication. More information here (link).

I will be posting the contents of each issue here at MT. Here’s the full list of the contents of the first issue:

Maemo Weekly News – February 1, 2010

Maemo in the Wild

Announcements

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

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Nokia N900 30-second Videos

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:55:21 +0000

Nokia Conversations have been producing 30-second videos to highlight some features of the Nokia N900. If you haven’t seen them, I’ve collected them below:

How to keep it stuffed with the best apps

Multi-tasking pub window showdown

Streaming online video to big TV

Facebook video sharing and playback

Audio and video podcasts made easy

e-coach sport buddy in action

Phone calls and data monitoring skills

Stop motion mini movie battery test

Geotagging and sharing photos online

Custom backgrounds and organizing your desktops

Broadcasting live streaming video with QIK app

Playing nice with Ovi Files and Apple Mac

Motion control and touchscreen gaming

Enhancing your contacts with Hermes App

Subscribe and read RSS feeds

Instant messaging made easy

Eccentric accelerometer apps

Talking clock talktime challenge

Juggling heavyweight tasks

Blogging on the move made easy

Enhance your music with song lyrics

Scientist survival pack

Maemo web browser talents

Facebook & Twitter status updates made easy

Pocket weather station

View important docs on the go

Sketch and send an e-card

Pocket cookbook

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Testing WordPy 2.0

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:44:59 +0000

I’m currently testing WordPy 2.0, a blogging client for the N900 that supports Wordpress, Blogger, and Livejournal.

What’s new with v2.0 is it’s Maemo 5 look, sporting new, much professional looking screens and buttons.

It lets you easily pull in images on your blog post from your local N900 drive(s), Flickr, and/or Picasa, and even gives you the option to proportionally resize, crop, roatate, flip, colorize, and change the brightness of images.

You have the option of crearting new tags and categories, although you can pull all your pre-defined tags and categories from your blog system as well. While it works great, I wish the way to select tags and categories would mimic the way you tag images and videos on the Maemo 5 gallery app.

Another feature that I like is that it lets you retrieve previous blog entries, edit, and post changes, direct from your N900. It lets you even manage comments, letting you add, approve, and delete comments on a specific blog entry.

This is easily a killer app for bloggers and I can see myself using it to blog anytime anywhere with just an N900.

WordPy 2.0 is still in extras-testing. Hopefully it gets released in Extras soon.

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

This post was fully created using WordPy 2.0 on a Nokia N900.

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Nokia N900 Online/Offline as it Happens Ads

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:14:56 +0000

Nokia Online/Offline as it Happens Ads N900 viral ads have been showing up in YouTube. I can’t really figure out where they are coming from and who the official poster is so let me know if you find the main site that has them or if you find new ones so I can add them to this blog entry. Anyway, here they are, in HD. They are all well made, funny, and definitely highlights the N900.

Wedding Catastrophe

Fishing

Tickets

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

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liqbase dazzler at YouTube, lcuk appeal

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:39:55 +0000

BY ROGER SPERBERG

Gary Birkett (aka lcuk) has posted several short single-subject videos and a comprehensive overview of liqbase at YouTube.

The overview is presented in a new liqbase presentation app that has live graphics (instead of screen captures) that he clicks into and uses to demonstrate each app along the way. (Mind-blowing when you see it and think back at the long history of buggy, slow and futile efforts to do this sort of thing before.)

Among other people, I have strongly encouraged Gary to follow his imagination and keep creating the fast, visual, and kinetic apps that constitute liqbase. He’s taken our advice to heart and devoted himself full-time to N900-and-maemo (e.g, liqbase) development.

If you want to see the apps continue to flow, you probably want to visit Gary’s website, liqbase.net, and make a PayPal contribution to enable him to keep going. I have. I hope you will too. This is one developer I want to see keep developing.

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Maemo Summit 2009 Concludes – Thank you Nokia!

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:59:58 +0000

The Maemo Summit 2009 finale video:

Three days of great talks, fifty sponsored participants, three hundred Nokia N900s, four hundred plus enthusiasts, and the best Maemo device to date. What a summit! Thank you Nokia, and thank you Amsterdam!

Would you believe that it’s less than a year before the next summit? Looking forward to that!

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

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Maemo Summit 2009 – Day 3

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 08:21:23 +0000

You can follow what’s going on at Day 3 of the Maemo Summit 2009:
Maemo Summit 2009 – Day 3

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Maemo Summit 2009 – Day 2

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 07:59:38 +0000

You can follow what’s going on at Day 2 of the Maemo Summit 2009:
Maemo Summit 2009 – Day 2

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Maemo Summit 2009 – Day 1

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:57:43 +0000

You can follow what’s going on at Day 1 of the Maemo Summit 2009:
Maemo Summit 2009 – Day 1

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Nokia N900 Browser Walkthrough

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:34:51 +0000

Nokia just released a new walkthrough video of the Nokia N900 browser. Mikko Korpelainen, Senior Product Manager at Nokia and Martin Shüle, Principal Designer of the User Interface team, demo the different features of the browser.

New in this video are the ‘hover and manipulation mode’ that pops-up a contextual menu on flash items (1:55), swiping gesture from the right (edge of the screen) to left to show the browsing history (3:50), selecting text and using copy (Ctrl-C) & paste (Ctrl-V) (4:23), and creating a bookmark to the desktop (5:15).

Full Video:

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

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The Nokia N900 User Guide

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:39:32 +0000

Need more info on the Nokia N900? The English and Spanish Nokia N900 User Guide (in PDF) is now up at Nokia USA. It’s about 111 pages.

Direct link to the Nokia N900 User Guide (in PDF).
Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

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Extensive Nokia N900 Preview

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:27:04 +0000

My good pal Michal Jerz of My-Symbian.com has just released his extensive preview of the Nokia N900. He provides a detailed run through of the hardware, software, side-by-side pics with other devices, and provides sample images and videos from the N900.

Interestingly, he mentions about playing videos from flash based sites. From some of the videos I’ve already seen online, YouTube, for example, was a bit choppy playing videos. His experience was quite opposite however:

“I have tested it with various Flash sites, including Flash videos. I’m glad to report that I haven’t found a single Flash video that wouldn’t play on the N900. While YouTube (the “full” version of it, not the mobile one) videos play 100% smoothly and with full frame rate…”

He also provides some screenshots of the software that I have not seen before like the rich-text email editor, calendar views, phone portrait mode screens, PDF reader app, and Documents To Go (Word, Sheet, and Slideshow) .

Sample Video:

Michal ends his review with this note:

“Even now, at the previewed unit’s early development stage, the N900 truly impressed me with its FANTASTIC PERFORMANCE, STABILITY (it was really ROCK STABLE, take my word), BEAUTIFUL and ADVANCED user interface, very high quality and full integration of TELEPHONY and INTERNET CONNECTIVITY, fast and powerful web browser, great support for VoIP (especially Skype), high quality camera and video recording and, actually, ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE. I don’t remember being that excited with any mobile device since the first Nokia Communicators and UIQ 2 phones. Really! Multiple questions posted on the forums about how the N900 compares to existing Symbian OS phones can only get one answer: they just DON’T compare, the N900 is a wholy different league. If any of the existing mobile devices can be (honestly) called a mobile computer then the N900 deserves such a name in the first place.”

Great review Michal!

Read Michal’s full review.

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

*Image and video courtesy of My-Symbian.com

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Identity at onedotzero: N900 as controller

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:00:17 +0000

BY ROGER SPERBERG

This is the second in a series of posts called “3 New Things About the Nokia N900.” Link to first post.

Here is a video made in London in which Gary Birkett explains the Identity controller’s features. Note that the first and last sections, showing the Identity projection, were taken on an N900 (and the middle section by a simple POS camera):

EDIT: Here is onedotzero’s official video with Karsten and Gary:

The onedotzero festival is about the moving image, not computing or mobile telephony, which made it a non-obvious showcase for the N900. It combines “collaborative music, film and live performance, and playful interactivity, digital arts and culture,” and it inhabits a creative space exciting to the Wieden+Kennedy London advertising agency. (They explain that “the ideas and curiosities of Wieden+Kennedy inevitably overflow outside the traditional world of advertising. We are constantly experimenting with new forms of communication and creative expression.”)

So it seems really natural that W+K would attempt to express the identity of onedotzero this year by visualizing all the online discussion about the event on Twitter and the blogosphere, as well as at Flickr and Vimeo. To instantiate their idea, W+K turned to programmer Karsten Schmidt, who collected the various feeds, processing them in real-time using six powerful computers (and programming in the Processing language) to stream ribbons of text, very Matrix-y in its feel, into the shapes of letters.

To accentuate the real-time and interactive nature of, well, everything, the shapes formed by the text-ribbons were actual SMS messages texted from cellphones to the system. And to make it emphatically interactive (and mind-blowingly fun), the letter-shapes and text-ribbons could be stretched, twisted, revolved, animated, enlarged and frozen interactively.

To transform this conception from a mere artistic expression on a computer screen into festivalgoer-involved experience required those six HD projectors and an easily accessible (and easily used) controller.

That’s where Gary Birkett, our own lcuk, came into the picture. That and the events of 13 November 2008.

That’s the date that Wieden+Kennedy London was named “lead global strategic and creative agency for Nokia’s Nseries business.”

So instead of utilizing a Wii remote or Apple iPhone, both familiar, handheld devices with accelerometers in them, W+K opted for the jaunty, new soon-to-be-released N900 from its client, Nokia.* And Gary created an interface for the N900 for the accidental gameplayer handed the device. His app interprets a user’s twirling or shaking or screen-drawing for a seventh computer in Karsten’s array, which causes the huge projection to respond instantaneously.

To manage this, Gary used his own liqbase framework to create his application. And, like other liqbase modules, this controller will be distributed as open-source software.

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

_______________
* That’s the real world, and I’m not complaining or ruing the events that led to my being invited to London to see the whole thing come together. Thanks to WOM World / Nokia, in fact! But the uniqueness of the N900 will come across more clearly when the PUSH project winners appear.

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3 New Things About the Nokia N900 — pt I

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:07:23 +0000

BY ROGER SPERBERG

I got my hands on a Nokia N900 recently — for which I had to travel seven thousand miles and endure the company of five cellphone-addict bloggers for 48 hours, both courtesy of Nokia’s word-of-mouth marketing efforts — and I was utterly dazzled.

At one point I was explaining why we word-of-mouth-spreaders were performing professional work for no pay and little chance of recompense. As it happened, the question arose while we were standing outside the British Film Institute, just as evening was slipping in, using a cellphone to manipulate Matrix-like text being projected on the wall of the National Theatre opposite (the “Identity Project” of the BFI’s onedotzero festival).

We were all grinning maniacally, twisting and turning and shaking the device gleefully in our turn, playing what was essentially the world’s largest video game — 138 feet wide, 10,204x1080 luminescent pixels** cast by six 18,000-lumen projectors ["the Rolls-Royce of projectors" I was told authoritatively*]. “Sheer childish enthusiasm,” I explained. “Sincere enthusiasm. It’s the blogger form of professionalism, and it’s the kind of pay that regular jobs don’t provide.”

Later that evening, I had a rematch with Identity, as evidenced in the accompanying video, and you’ll note that although I was the one who needed the video made and the app’s developer on the N900, Gary Birkett, was there to show it off, I insisted on driving and making Gary take the video. Something really exciting was occurring and I felt myself in the very center of it.

NOTE: I need to describe both the events I attended and what I discovered about the N900, so I will put these into separate posts, starting with Identity. But as I have two videos for that, I’ll put the first one here:

Also, note that the video made of the Identity projection was taken by an N900 — pretty good for a cellphone camera at night!
_______________
* Compare that to the typical home projector’s 3-4 lumens.
** That’s 11,059,200 pixels in the overall display.

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U.K. Nokia N900 – Free with Contract

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 23:10:52 +0000

You’ve seen the U.S. Amazon.com $589 Nokia N900 deal. Well U.K. folks, it’s your turn. Mobile Phones Direct is now offering the Nokia N900 (pre-order) on Vodafone and T-Mobile for FREE(!) on a new 24 and 18-month contract respectively (link).

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

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