Thousands of people are contributing content and funds to Wikipedia and related projects. What is less known is that the Wikimedia community manages a complex and diverse set of software tools and infrastructure, with dozens of projects written in PHP, Javascript, HTML/CSS, Python, Puppet and more. Above 5 million lines of code, all free software developed openly in a Gerrit instance and GitHub. My work as Technical Contributor Coordinator consists in increasing the awareness and engagement among software developers, testers, system administrators, doc writers and other potential technical contributors.

One way to do this is to reach out to existing developer communities, promoting our APIs and technologies in areas like CMS, mobile, analytics, server infrastructure, media, localization, UX, you name it. I’m also interested in exploring ways of collaboration with companies, universities and non-profit organizations.

But Wikimedia is also the perfect initiative to engage with the unusual suspects: women becoming tech savvy despite social pressure, young and old citizens of countries far from the tech hubs and, in general, regular people with little or no technical skills but with a big motivation in certain Wikimedia aspect. Wikipedia is changing little aspects of people’s lives. How far can we go in the technical side?

WikiLove

Sometimes you join a revolution too soon or too late, but my timing with Wikimedia has been about right: love at the first click about ten years ago, and an increasing involvement since then. The first day I clicked the “Edit” link in a wiki I couldn’t sleep. Literally: I went late to bed only to wake up a sleepless hour later in order to keep learning how that wiki worked. It was an empty TWiki instance and I had admin permissions, so there was plenty to learn.

Since that night I have been using, administering and contributing content to various wiki engines and communities. MediaWiki had become predominant in the past years, being part of my work for Maemo, MeeGo and the Qt Project. And there is also Espiral, my social pet project and my chance to learn the very basics of MediaWiki sysadmin.

My contributions to Wikimedia have been sporadic, diverse and incomplete:

• Started translating Daodejing to Catalan at Wikisource (directly from Chinese  although I don’t speak it; yes, fun).
• Published texts from Joan Salvat-Papasseit as soon as they landed in the public domain. That included some scans from original editions.
• After many minor contributions to the Catalan and Spanish Wikipedias, I finally found a page to invest time in the English one: Gaia hypothesis (and I got an Environmental Barnstar for this, yay!).
• Last year I started contributing in the technical front. First I helped bootstrapping the Mobile Projects documentation. Then I pushed Wikipedia as a good showcase for the initiative (partially funded by Nokia) of bringing Qt support for PhoneGap.
• … and just in the past weeks I went ahead with the tech community metrics, setting up a Wikimedia organization profile in Ohloh and publishing a first monthly report.

The chronology continues and ends with my current task list. Feel free suggesting new items and different priorities. Most of my work needs to be done next to somebody else i.e. you (yes, you!). Questions? Feedback? Willing to get involved? Let me know.

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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. 6 2 ]]> Quim Gil <quim.gil@nokia.com> feed:eeb15882984e6cb6ff412c3c7c7bd2b3 Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:49:26 +0000 http://maemo.org/midcom-permalink-3f73b1b2f06511e183f0e5a9e24084d484d4 https://flors.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/how-i-became-a-qt-advocate/ Some personal news: I’m joining the Qt team to help making the Qt Project rock. A small change of floor at the Nokia offices in Sunnyvale (California) and barely a change to be noticed by my relatives and non-geek friends. Still, for me it is a big change, the end of a phase and the beginning of something fresh.

With a stable SDK released and a new product in the shops, this is the time when I would start shifting internally to the next product iteration. In fact this is what I’m doing now as well, but this time swimming upstream. In practice this means that I´m less conditioned by Nokia products (although they still pay my salary) and closer to the work of a wide community of organizations and individuals putting their bets in Qt.

My work keeps combining the big topics of community, openness, sustainability and fun – also understood by some as marketing & communication applied to OSS development. This is how I started contributing to the free software community around 2003, this is why Nokia recruited me for the Open Source Software Operations in 2007 and this is what I have done best since then.

At the beginning there was GNOME

I was introduced to the Nokia 770 in GUADEC 2005 by no less than the great Guillem Jover. In 2004 I wanted to recruit him but he had just moved to Helsinki to work for... Nokia! Two years later I would follow the same path.

Once a full time GNOME community contributor (founded by the Catalan government to assure a great GUADEC 2006 in Vilanova), my approximation to Qt has been directly related to the steps taken by Nokia in that direction. One day Ari Jaaksi (then the boss of my boss, Valtteri Halla) started to suggest the possibility to shift our basically GNOME Mobile compliant Maemo to Qt. A big debate followed and I contributed my dose of voice and brain. My strong arguments were that GNOME had a distributed setup combined with a more suitable license, plus Nokia was lacking the skills in house. Our team moved to Qt but I was never proven wrong. One morning we read in the news that Nokia was acquiring Trolltech, getting a big load of Qt skills in house. “Fair enough”, I told surprised to myself. Then the LGPL license came (a change I had been lobbying for since the Nokia-Trolltech deal was announced). And finally the Qt Project is here, willing to reach a diversified open governance setup like the Linux kernel, WebKit or GNOME itself.

My closer approach to Qt matters started after the Nokia N900 was released. As said, that was the time when I would start shifting to the next big iteration (Harmattan, a name that I had the honor to propose). The Qt 4.6 libraries were available for Maemo 5 and I felt it was the time to test the cross-platform compatibility promise. I proposed the Miniature project with only three hard requirements: chess, mobile & Qt. At the time C++ & QGraphicsView was the way, and good that Michael Hasselman was around, otherwise I wouldn’t have progressed at all. Things were not that easy yet.

Calling the Harmattan wind

By that time Peter Schneider was my manager and I was learning from him the usefulness of keeping activities and messages simple and focused (in this case in Qt). One day I started getting some tasks related to a project that one day would be introduced to the World as MeeGo. The fundamentals of that project were for me a dream come true: standard Linux & freedesktop.org stack plus Qt toolkit and development environment, developed openly by multiple parties, targeting multiple form factor devices.

Qt Quick started to emerge between the two equivalent frameworks that Maemo and Symbian were building. I became an internal advocate almost instantly, not because of any technical analysis (I’m not the guy for these things) but because of the basic principle of following and supporting the way proposed upstream, as opposed to attempting to create shortcuts on your own. It took a while, but one day a CEO called Stephen Elop made the call that no top manager had made before: focus on Qt Quick, other alternatives to be deprecated. In the meantime other old discussions had settled with similar trends: Qt Mobility, Qt Creator and the WebKit alignment.

Next Billion, no less

Between #feb11 and the Nokia N9 launch on #jun28 a lot happened and a lot was said, inside and outside Nokia. Everybody updated their CVs and so did I. Working in the USA as a foreigner with family and a visa tied to your company can be distressing in times of company changes. One morning I got a call from Daniel Kihlberg, who tomorrow will become my new manager. In short, he described a space where different dimensions needed to be combined successfully: Nokia’s Next Billion strategy, a truly open Qt Project and a rich Qt global ecosystem across different industries. Like all real-life equations, there are more factors, more dimensions and a lot of entropy. All in all the proposal fits my views and the type of game where I feel motivated and useful.

And here I am, ready for the next step. I’m permanently thankful to Carlos Guerreiro (and Zara) who actually pulled us to Helsinki. It has been a pleasure to be involved in ideas/projects like the Nokia open devices, the Hacker Editions, the Maemo Downloads (more than 100M!) and the Summits. It has been an extreme pleasure to work together with great people inside Nokia and out in the community, including brilliant unsung heroes like Soumya Bijjal or Niels Breet.

Let me say Big Thank You for these great years – even if I’m just moving downstairs.

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Is that empty chair yours? Credit: Fleury.

The Qt team started September with a Mega Release Day topped by a bunch of fresh information about Qt Developer Days, the main and dual headed event of the Qt community. I looked at the calendar and realized that I’m starting to be late on planning if I want to make it to Munich on October 24-26. I still don’t know about the European gathering, but I’m logically planning to be in the San Francisco event on Nov 29 – Dec 1.

Qt Dev Days is a good opportunity not only to learn and get to know about the latest technical progresses and plans: it is a chance to meet a wide variety of people face to face, discuss and exchange extensively. This is an element common to any good conference, but especially in the context of the Qt project here and now this aspect is essential. Qt has been in the eyes of many in the past 12 months, but too frequently simplified and polarized to levels that go far away from the reality of the Qt project and community today. I frequently refer to Qt as a jewel in the Linux and open source software stack. A very versatile and precious piece able to play with many different products, projects and organizations. Qt Dev Days shows this in a way no blog post or analyst insight can reflect.

I’m glad to see Intel, Canonical and Telecomm Italia in the keynotes, as well as other companies like Cisco or Panasonic Aviation in the Qt In Use sessions and the many sponsors taking the floor. The Qt project has many different stakeholders, and hearing about them helps enriching the perspective that (lately) is circulating almost obsessively around Nokia and handsets only. Of course Nokia and handsets are important for the Qt project, you will have a chance to see and grasp the latest Qt based products from Nokia and there are many sessions scheduled in the Technical Track covering that and more e.g. Qt in MeeGo, Symbian and Android. There are other sessions exploring the new areas such as Qt Quick in the desktop, training and tools specific for designers or te WebKit / HTML5 neighborhood.

Even if Qt Developer Days has been an event primarily professional, the trend has been to open the doors to the increasing interest and innovation coming from developers with not-for-profit motivations. If you are one of these, you have a way to make it to Munich / San Francisco and you have an objective way to show your Qt love and dedication, please poke me here or through my nokia.com address (easy to guess). We’ll do our best getting you to the event at a discounted price. Sorry, I can’t give more details now since I just poked the event organizers myself asking for details. In this context faster is better, just post/send a couple of lines with link(s) to your project(s).

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// Skippable background

This was my debut at programming, preceded only by HTML web pages in 1995-97 and a Basic sketchy game with 3 sprites that never went beyond the Commodore 64 we had at home around 1983. In fact as a teenager my vocation was always split between natural and artificial languages, and only after a close tie I started my studies in Communication Sciences – Journalism branch. Since then I’ve written a lot and I’ve learned to describe, specify and instruct by putting words one after another (still not as good in English as I would wish).

For what is worth I’m not a designer either. At the university I devoured the splendid collection of comic books of my faculty but I didn’t succeed at drawing my own strips. Still, I had the luxury of living surrounded by creative, practical and pragmatical people with a varied range of skills and tastes. Over the years I have developed some sense of how new things could look like and behave. Conscious of the big amount of time it takes me to use Gimps, Adobes and the likes only to come up with mediocre results, most of the times I resort to concepts on paper.

But let’s go back to the chess program.

// Skippable background about the chess program

Two years ago I had convinced the great Michael Hasselman (mikhas) and a few others to create the Miniature project, being my main tools of persuasion a plan on a wiki page plus a pencil draft. Not being a programmer or a designer, these are the weak arguments you have at reach to get things done. Miniature had a short and unstable life in the Maemo extras-devel repository for adventurous N900 users. You could say we didn’t succeed… yet some of my best moments with the N900 (and I had many) had Miniature running in the foreground. For instance, playing late night with the also great Iván Frade in Meritähti, the cozy and nutritious bar no tourist guide will recommend if you ever visit Helsinki.

After the N9 launch I saw with despair that proper mobile chess was still absent in the Qt catalog. I made a second call, and almost miraculously mikhas answered again, but this time stating clearly that he would focus on the backend and somebody else would need to work on the UI. I looked around. I looked myself in front of the mirror (mentally, I mean). The first Miniature had to deal with Qt 4.6 and QGraphicsView with no cutton or oil. Hardcore stuff. Now the declarative and Javascript friendly Qt Quick was at the forefront, waiving the slogan of Programmers and Designers Unite! I decided to give it a try, getting a tacit permission from my manager to call some of this time “training”.

And yes, this is great training! Sitting in front of tutorials and code examples for the sole purpose of learning is boring – at least for me. Trying out things, copypasting code from somewhere, asking on IRC and forums, building and rebuilding until the damn thing works is überexciting – at least for me.

// Finally some actual stuff

These are some pros and cons found during the first stages of this trip. I hope they are useful for others like me, getting started in Qt Quick and in programming. They are all mixed since frequently a con leads to a pro and vice versa. In some cases it’s not even clear whether the thing is a pro or con, but it’s remarkable anyway:

The Qt SDK is such a beast
And I got my way with relative ease. Accessing documentation while writing code, connecting to the device… The first time I couldn’t believe my dummy rectangle was showing up in the N9, an icon was added to the app grid and a .deb package was sitting in a local folder of my laptop.

But Qt Designer can’t be used yet
I had so much hope in Qt Designer for my first steps. I had played with it and it reminded me the old good Macromedia Fireworks, with the additional advantage of generating actual code. Then I found out that it was basically of no use here and now for MeeGo development.

Neither the Simulator, and even the emulator…
Qt Simulator didn’t digest MeeGo either, here and now. QEMU could but… Good that I had a device because the simu/emu would have required a lot more time for someone new like me, needing to see how things progress every 2 new lines.

Getting started with Qt Quick is really simple
Without Designer I quickly realized that typing directly the code in a proper SDK was simple enough and probably lead me to cleaner and more solid structures. I started to learn how QML thinks, and starting to guess what would and would not work even before pressing the build & deploy button.

The documentation is extensive, but still not consolidated
QML and Qt Quick have evolved a lot in a short amount of time, and different audiences with different background are meeting there almost for the first time together. All in all it feels that whatever is different from Qt/C++ is explained in detail (e.g. anchors or pure UI elements) while other parts closer to traditional Qt are mentioned with more brevity. This is surely fine for Qt/C++ developers, but this is also where the less experienced or more web oriented developers might get stuck. In some points I have missed more basic descriptions, wider code examples… oh, and many more screenshots showing how demo apps and components are supposed to look like without having to run them in the SDK.

The community is savvy and very helpful
Whenever you get stuck in something you start looking for help. I didn’t rely (much) on the professional developers sitting few steps away from my desk (except for really embarrassing basic questions). I put my immediate hopes in IRC, but being August and typing from PST got me more silence than expected in #qt-qml. Still I got some great answers from e.g. special and frals. #harmattan was a second resource but the Scratchbox – Python – middleware angle of that group is noticeable. #miniature is obviously useful but I didn’t want to exhaust the patience of mikhas… Then I decided to become a Lab Rat (now a Ant Farmer) in the Qt Developer Network and since then the forum hasn’t disappointed me once. Getting the attention of a troll, a certified specialist or just the right person with the same (solved) problem is just a luxury.

The veterans don’t have always the right advice for you
These days I’ve got many Qt answers to my QML questions… since I was asking to Qt savvy developers. That helped me understanding better my own questions, and finding out where to find the QML centric answers. Like for instance “how to put a link to a web page opened by the device browser?”. Sure, Qt and DBus can do wonders for you – but actually the right answer for me was something a lot simpler: Qt.openUrlExternally(). The feeling was familiar: years ago GNOME desktop developers would answer my questions with “open terminal and type…” when actually the desktop itself offered solutions not involving a console.

Backend and UI can really be developed in parallel
While mikhas has been working hard on a C/C++ backend containing abstract models, internal logics, capacity to talk to the Free Internet Chess Server via telnet and to plug into GNU Chess, I was able to define a UI with all its interactions almost autonomously. I actually started with an own QML project separate from Miniature, until mikhas liked what he saw and decided to integrate it. I just had to leave comments in the code: // FIXME this is a static string, the backend should hook here with a real variable. Now we are basically at the point where mikhas has a backend that play games you can’t see, while I got a nice UX that doesn’t know any chess. Sewing is happening as we speak.

Open source development is just great
If I started with Qt Quick from scratch one morning, on the afternoon I was already learning how to get that code and package out of my system, to be seen and tried by others. I didn’t get much attention at the beginning, but only the fact of writing publicly brought me to structure things as good as I could (still crappy, I know) and to comment a lot more and better that I would comment just for myself. Again the Qt SDK was useful here, generating packages that install and bridging with git nicely. Additional thanks go to the maintainers of paste.debian.net and to the various authors of little but useful code snippets borrowed here and there. Every time I said “I can’t be the first one having to do XYZ” turned out to be true. Someone had gone through that and was sharing the result with the World. Thank you, thank you very much.

// This is getting longer than expected. Again.

CONCLUSION
I feel a lot better, even if these days I’m suffering a lot more. 8 1 ]]> Quim Gil <quim.gil@nokia.com> feed:eeb15882984e6cb6ff412c3c7c7bd2b3 Thu, 25 Aug 2011 22:44:49 +0000 http://maemo.org/midcom-permalink-8afd7226cf6e11e0a121e9da34412f4f2f4f https://flors.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/the-four-wheels-spinning-meego-1-2-harmattan/

[Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are mine.]

There has been a lot of discussion about MeeGo and its future, now reinforced with the launch of the Nokia N9 – a great product that seems to leave nobody indifferent. Here you have some thoughts cooked between #feb11 and tonight (even if Helsinki has little night to offer to mid-Summer visitors).

One problem in this discussion is that a lot of focus is being put in the word “MeeGo” when actually it’s a label that can mean different things to different audiences in different contexts. In fact though, the label doesn’t count as much as the actual software underneath and the projects involved in its development.

The Nokia N9 is powered by MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan, the OS equipped with this UX that has impressed to many. Now, let’s have a look under the hood to see what parts of it really matter to the MeeGo project, the OSS community, the developers and users interested in the N9:

Linux Kernel

We are talking about the mainline Kernel. Needless to say this project will continue to live and evolve. Nokia may keep contributing to this project and using it for R&D and future products – nothing announced at this point beyond this reference of ‘MeeGo’ in relation to the ‘future disruptions’ strategy.

Qt

This is another rich label meaning the toolkit, API, SDK, a variety of technologies involved… The project is in good shape with a promising future based on Qt Quick, the innovations and open governance model being implemented for Qt5 as we speak. The Nokia N9 is a Qt champion product, there are 100 million Qt-enabled Symbian devices (a lot more are expected) and Nokia just announced that Qt will have a central role in its ‘next billion’ strategy. Beyond Nokia, Qt also continues its growth.

WebKit

Another key OSS project where Nokia is a veteran contributor. Plays a key role connected to the increasing relevance of HTML5 (yet another vague label) in the mobile industry. Both WebKit upstream and the team(s) working on it at Nokia have a bright and busy future.

swipe UX

It doesn’t even aim to become a label, but has captivated already the attention of many when seen in action in the Nokia N9. As a happy user and earliest tester I’m proud of what we have achieved.  Stephen Elop has said that it will live forward and evolve in future Nokia products.

In my opinion that’s it. This is what really matters about MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan when it comes to discuss about future products, platforms and ecosystems. Note that these four pieces are very versatile and flexible, they can play with each other and they can also head towards other paths, offering many possibilities for future products.

The rest of technologies involved in MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan are also crucial in terms of functionality and success of a product, but they are more the sort of interchangeable glue, technology in motion that may change because of life cycles, hardware, providers, technology selections, etc. The projects and companies developing the myriad of pieces know this well and work hard & fast to either push new releases or jump wagon to whatever is the new future greatness.

Now, it turns that the rest is very important today for the MeeGo project when it comes to define what is a MeeGo compliant product. According to this definition, if you miss the rest then you don’t have a MeeGo product, unless you propose and obtain a trademark exception.

(((Another approach would be to simply define MeeGo = Kernel mainline + Qt + WebKit, syncing app developers around the OpenGL, Qt and Web APIs – but this is not the reality today)))

With all this background in mind, you can put a vague question in more precise terms:

Since #feb11 Nokia has a clear software strategy where high-end smartphones are covered by the collaboration with Microsoft on Windows Phone, therefore the consequent answer is the one already given by Stephen Elop: No.

However, look back at the four essential pieces above and keep in mind that Nokia is investing in all of them. Even if working on them is really fun, you may guess that Nokia is not paying the teams for the fun of it. It is sensible to expect more to come in a form or another.

Considering that Linux Kernel and WebKit will continue evolving no matter what Nokia decides and assuming that the swipe UX will continue evolving in Nokia products, in reality the concern about “the future of MeeGo at Nokia” is tied to the future of Qt: Nokia’s investment and leadership, involvement of other parties in a wide community, usefulness addressing the mobile and cross-platform challenges, increase of the developer base, increase of the quantity and quality of Qt apps… There is a direct correlation between the success of the Qt project and the satisfaction of the future N9 users, even if most of them won’t know ever.  15 0 ]]> Quim Gil <quim.gil@nokia.com> feed:eeb15882984e6cb6ff412c3c7c7bd2b3 Mon, 27 Jun 2011 01:11:09 +0000 http://maemo.org/midcom-permalink-5b4a58a8a05e11e0a578cf3001bd4d834d83 https://flors.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/nokia-n9-state-of-the-art-of-mobile-linux-and-qt/ Nokia has unveiled what comes next in its Linux and Qt fronts. Here you have links to the sources and a summary of the implications for the MeeGo and open source communities:

N9

The Nokia N9 is the ultimate Qt-powered mobile device. I find it a pleasure to watch and play with. Its polymer unibody chassis complemented by a strong and scratch-resistant curved glass makes it both solid and smooth in the hand. Multitasking is pushed forward with a combination of open tasks, events and apps. You navigate through these views with a simple gesture, a swipe of a finger. Get a grasp of this beautiful (and open!) product at http://swipe.nokia.com.

N950

While the N9 becomes publicly available, Nokia has produced a limited edition of N950 devices for the most devoted Qt and MeeGo developers with apps in the works. We are offering 250 devices to open source community developers through the MeeGo Community Device Program. Nokia Developer has more for champions, partners and other professional developers.

MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan

Nokia’s implementation of the MeeGo platform has been released. It combines a playful multitasking UX with an efficient OS that shares the same API and architecture pillars of MeeGo upstream. It’s a great demonstration of what can be done with the MeeGo platform on a mobile device. Check http://www.developer.nokia.com/swipe/ux/.

Qt updates

The Qt SDK has been updated with a Harmattan target including the Qt Quick UI Components. The way for Qt developers to target MeeGo, Symbian and other platforms is being paved. Nokia is also making Qt core to its strategy to take the Internet to the ‘next billion’. Qt is a star in the OSS stack and is at the backbone of all these announcements. The Qt5 governance plans becoming reality as we speak make it even brighter. More at http://qt.nokia.com.

MeeGo Community Edition

The community team that has brought usable MeeGo upstream releases to the Nokia N900 will add now the new devices in its scope. The planning and work will happen in the open, just like the rest of the Community Edition activities. Remember that these are not Nokia official releases, but fun R&D experimentation open to all community contributors. More at http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900

The wait is over for MeeGo developers. Now it’s time to show off your apps!

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San Francisco and Dallas are also growing a Local MeeGo Network, followed by Buenos Aires, Cambridge and Delhi.

Helsinki & Oulu, now what are you waiting for? Same for Bangalore, Manaos, Oslo, Berlin, Beijing, London, Portland, New York, San Diego and whoever else is reading this invitation with a genuine interest in MeeGo stuff.

All what you need is 5 ameegos happy to meet once a month. Let it grow if it wants to grow. See http://wiki.meego.com/Community_Office/Marketing/Local_MeeGo_Networks

If you want to start a Local MeeGo Network I’m happy to help you. Let’s reach that critical mass.

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Here you can track MeeGo related activities in San Francisco Bay Area. Propose genuine MeeGo meetups or casual meetings after interesting events.

First meetup on September 14 @ San Francisco:

MeeGo Developer Day – The After Meetup

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• Jan 2010 – kojacker joins maemo.org.
• Feb 16th – First Talk post (no firmware update for Vodafone UK).
• May 4th – First Talk thread started: Any interest in a friendly Maemo app development ‘competition’?

• May 19th – He goes for it: [ANNOUNCE] The First N900 Coding Competition! 21st May-21st July. Open to all!

• May 20th – Cosimo Kroll (aka zehjotkah) proposes that Nokia could fund prices for the winners (and contacts me).
• May 21st – Prizes agreed: “the winner of each category will be invited to the MeeGo Conference with travel and accommodation covered. If someone can’t make it then we can offer an N900 in exchange.”
• zehjotkah opens a PayPal account to pool donations.
• July 1st – A new category for beginners is created on the fly based on popular demand. 17 projects apply.
• July 22nd – 65 projects registered and ready to be voted in 6 + 1 categories.
• August 8th – The community has raised a bounty collection of €781 ($1019) to reward the 2nd, 3rd and 4th participants in each category.
• August 9th – Winners announced! (see screenshots & more)

1. Queen Beecon Widget by Alessandro Peralma (No!No!No!Yes!) (Desktop category)
2. CloudGPS by Damian Waradzyn (dwaradzyn) (Location & Navigation category)
3. Faster Application Manager by Heikki Holstila (hqh) (System & Utilities category)
4. PSX4M by Tomasz Sterna (smoku) (Games category)
5. PenPen Sketchbook by Ben Lau (benlau) (Graphics & Multimedia category)
6. TweeGo by Mikhail Ramalho (mikhail_ramalho) and Rodrigo Avelino (rodavelino) (‘Other’ category)
7. DropN900 by Jonne Nauha ( jonnenau) (Beginners category)

Congratulations for the winners and everybody involved. *You* are making a difference with initiatives like this. See you in Dublin!

More: http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Coding_Competition_1

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Running MeeGo Handset UX in the N900 has been possible (technically) since few weeks ago, but now the N900 hardware adaptation team has started releasing full raw images containing some essential hardware related binaries. The result is a simpler installation process for patient power users and a more functional software as a reward.

The simplest way to run MeeGo in the N900 without loosing Maemo 5 and all your data is to boot from Micro-SD. Nice simple dual-boot is supposed to come at some point but it’s too hackish at this point. In the meantime you might want to do this:

1. Download the latest raw image and kernel from the Nokia server.
2. Install the raw image in a Micro-SD card of 2Gb or more (Linux and Windows instructions).
3. Insert the card to your N900.
4. Load the kernel to your N900.

E voilà! MeeGo should be booting in your device, starting with the Tux and a booting log like in the old good times. Give it some more time and a MeeGo homescreen should appear, with MeeGo characters at the front, the Qt powered MeeGo Touch Framework operating in the back, a task launcher, settings, device lock… and little else at this point:

• Pictures, People and SMS have some functionality in place. Testing and feedback is definitely welcome here.
• Browser and Phone seem to be there but I couldn’t boot them.
• The rest of apps are placeholders in this week’s version. This is the current list of apps (maybe there is a way to take a screenshot already, will try in future versions). Don’t pay too much attention to the list, I guess there will be changes before MeeGo 1.1 final:
  • First screen: SMS, Clock, People, Chat, Camera, Pictures, Music, Videos, Maps, App-Up, Help, Calendar.
  • Second screen: RSS Reader, Stocks, Trailers, Lock, Fortune.

This is MeeGo Handset 1.1 unstable today. Note that a month ago stevechippy showed in a video a slightly better experience with an Aava prototype, therefore some of the problems found in the N900 might be related to the specific adaptation to this hardware. There are still some weeks to go after the planned feature set before the feature freeze arrives.

Have a look, pick your preferred area to test, find bugs to report (Hardware = “Handset”, Architecture = “ARM”)… Have fun while the battery lasts (power management for the N900 is supposed to be implemented soon). As said, the MeeGo experience in the N900 is very rough at this point. Yet exciting for some people. See you in the download queue of the next unstable release!

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This is how you look like:

Apart from the obvious big fonts, I find interesting the thick “enthusiast” & “everything”, since this somehow reflects this permanent curiosity that substitutes coffee in my life. What to think though about the combinations “anxious ceo” and “dead profesional” (sic)? Good to see “beer” in its fair measure. And “hauler” was the Wiktionary word of the day.

Anyway, thank you again! And now back to work.

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Green Dublin Letterbox - Stephens Green Dublin (CC by-sa)

A subdomain is born: conference2010.meego.com

The first MeeGo Conference will be held in Dublin’s Aviva Stadium on November 15-17. The venue has a main room with a capacity of 600 people and we will do our best to fill it up.

Currently “we” are the Linux Foundation, Intel and Nokia, who are providing the basic hands and funds needed to assure the success of the event. Now you can get involved!

• The call for session proposals is open until August 23rd. We welcome proposals about hardware support, platform development, application development, MeeGo project process and progress, and any other MeeGo related topics.
• Sponsors wanted! We expect a very interesting audience and we are putting a strong effort making the event accessible through free registration, sponsored participants, sponsored meals & parties…
• Volunteers are welcome. The meego-community mailing list is the place to be. For instance, testing and feedback about the conference website is very useful at this point.

The event registration will open soon. Early birds are great contributors to the success of the event, allowing better planning and providing louder buzz. Make your plans, see you there!

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Nokia’s Calling All Innovators developer contest is coming to a close, and there is still time to submit an app. The contest features four categories where you can demonstrate your creativity and talent developing mobile apps for use on Nokia’s latest devices:

• Eco/Being Green
• Entertainment
• Productivity
• Life Improvement

The top three submissions in each of these application categories will receive cash prizes of up to $30,000 (USD), as well as Spotlight Placement in Nokia’s Ovi Store to promote your winning application to consumers using Nokia devices worldwide.

Additionally, regardless of category, all application submissions are eligible to win special prizes. For instance, the best application for the Nokia N900 and the best cross-platform application using Qt will both receive $50,000 (USD). Check out all the prizes on the contest website.

This year, there are more chances to win than ever before. Don’t miss this amazing opportunity – submit your application right away. The deadline for entries is 10 June 2010.

Don’t delay – submit your winning app now!

PS – Do you have the next big idea? It could be worth a $1 million investment from Nokia. Submit it to Nokia’s Growth Economy Venture Challenge.

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200 Mathilda Ave @ Sunnyvale

Today an envelop arrived at home containing our passports with US visa stamps expiring on Summer 2013. This was the last step before knowing for certain that our 3,5 years in Finland will be followed by a next phase in California. In short, the plan is to empty our house in Helsinki by the end of June, fly to San Francisco during our holidays in July and go back to work in August at the Nokia offices in Mountain View. A collateral damage of this relocation is that I will miss aKademy, OSCON, GUADEC and the Community Leadership Summit that I was really looking forward to attend. At least now it will be easier to visit Jono, one of my personal local heroes.

I’m keeping the same role (MeeGo Community Office coordinator + open source misc @ Nokia) and the same manager. The MeeGo project and all its network of actual and potential connections has been a major reason for this relocation (great Mexican food being another one…) I’m looking forward for the combination of American timezones and European background when collaborating with all kinds of free software players in the MeeGo context. As usual, I’m ready to learn as much as I’m willing to be helpful.

We are living exciting times in our industry, and the Santa Clara Valley is a very exciting place to be! The second most interesting news this week after our US visas was the announcement of the future location of the Nokia Offices in San Francisco Bay Area: Sunnyvale Downtown. Nokia employees spread in the offices of Mountain View, Redwood City, Menlo Park and San Francisco are supposed to join a common building by the end of the year. Sounds like an interesting time for Nokia in the Bay Area, and I’m almost honoured of contributing my little bit in that process too.

Personal life appendix

200 Mathilda Ave @ Sunnyvale seems to be a location open to many combinations keeping me apart from car commuting – something that I deeply hate and have successfully avoided in my professional career. There are several bus stops and the Caltrain station nearby. Plus most of the valley is flat (the areas where we could afford to live anyway) and most of the year the weather is compatible with cycling, even for a Mediterranean guy like me. Also it turns out that my little kids, German native speakers, will have a good chance to have a soft immersion in the bilingual German international school that happens to be in Mountain View, quite close.

Where will we end up living? Who knows now. After some years of rural Spain and some more of quiet Finnish suburbia, Katja and me start missing a bit more of an urban, active and populated context. San Francisco city would be excellent even with the train commute, if it wouldn’t be for the real family life we are having with our 3 and 5 years old children. Maybe Sunnyvale near Downtown can bring that balance? Maybe something affordable and convenient still exists in Palo Alto? Any tips are welcome!

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BIG NEWS TODAY meego.com + video from MeeGo Steering Group + video from Nokia & Intel

This is a move that many had desired. On the paper it just made so much sense. However, not too many had really thought it would happen. Big companies have quite often big egos and it’s not easy for them to be humble and come together. I’m happy to work in a company that has been able to push and concede together with another company that has been also able to push and concede. 1 + 1 in this case will bring three and more. If these two megacorps could drop some of their priorities in order to reach a common ground, other players can do that too. Including you? (yes, you).

As a Nokia contact with the Maemo community and as an active community member myself, I expect this announcement to be big news for the maemo.org membership. Software freedom and more diversified devices have been two loud and consistent claims since the Maemo project was born in 2005. MeeGo brings that, and a lot more. In fact I think today is an historic day for the Linux and free software communities. Not only for seeing these two companies shaking hands in a Linux Foundation hosted project, but for the rest of handshakes expected to come after today’s launch. Now, where is your hand? 

Intel and Nokia are two major investors and contributors in free software development. Both have big teams in house and collaborate with a wide variety of open source companies, projects and rock stars. Now they are combining strategies and resources in order to kickstart a free Linux mobile platform. Real code will come soon although plenty of it is already available in code repositories from Moblin, Maemo, Qt…

MeeGo is just like you would expect a free Linux OS to be: based on the standard Linux and Free Desktop technologies and developed publicly in a project open to all contributors. As a huge fan of the free software community at large, I’m just amazed by the huge amount of passionate ideas and work it pushes. Every time time someone attempts to encapsulate part of that energy and bring it aside for a mobile platform I think “Nah, you really want to be part of that storm, fuel that powerful entropy and be clever canalizing the energy to your platform and products.” You don’t know how happy I was the day I knew Nokia and Intel wanted to do just that with MeeGo.

Answers in the new community

You can find more details at meego.com . However, don’t look for all answers since there are so many missing. The reason is obvious: many of these answers rely today in the Maemo and Moblin communities. Also in the open source upstream projects feeding the MeeGo architecture. Also in the application developers that ultimately will make this platform successful. Also in the chipset vendors, device manufacturers and other users and stakeholders of this platform called to spin the whole mobile industry.

All these answers are somewhere: we just must find them. It will require the best of our brains. It will be deep, it will be fun. I just couldn’t wait today’s launch in order to start the bootstrapping of MeeGo. The whole thing is actually big and digesting it takes some time. If you want to be part of this I recommend you to go through the website, subscribe to the mailing list and decide the task or area you want to push first. In other words: choose your mission in the MeeGo project.

My preferred mission here and now is to contribute in the evolution of maemo.org and the Maemo community in the new MeeGo context. I have some ideas but, to be honest, I’m biting my tongue in order to let you go first. But still I couldn’t sit just quiet waiting for the launch, so I decided to start a wiki page describing and comparing the most interesting assets of the Maemo and Moblin communities. Please help improving it. It will be useful to figure out all what we could have if we are clever integrating and merging.

And now the personal anecdote

In Autumn 2006 I was a 770 user applying for a job at Nokia. There was this interview with Valtteri Halla (now MeeGo’s Technical Steering Group member) and Ari Jaaksi (now VP and head of Maemo Devices). I was explaining them how great it was working as self-employed or in small cooperatives and living in a lovely house in Andalusia. Ari asked me what were my motivations to leave all that, move to Helsinki and join a big corporation. Well, by that time my second child was born and I really needed a source of income.   But the reason not to hesitate taking such a chance was my explicit agenda of bringing Linux and free software to the real mainstream.

Today, three years after getting that job, I feel this agenda (pushed together with many others in the World: I love you all) is about half the way. Working at Nokia you really learn the meaning of the word “mainstream” and yes it includes your cousin, your neighbor and many people you don’t even think of. MeeGo is a platform to reach them and offer them something useful and exciting for their lives. Software freedom lovers: you know what I mean.

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The fortunate users of a pre-production Nokia N900 are encouraged to flash completely their devices in order to have them as they come out of a sales box. The instructions to flash the internal memory and the eMMC can be found at http://wiki.maemo.org/Updating_the_firmware. Even if technically your backups and the current eMMC firmware should work, we recommend you to start completely from scratch. As if you would have got a new device today.

The Maemo 5 SDK is being updated accordingly (as we speak, so wait if you still don’t see it). It can be downloaded at http://forum.nokia.com/maemo. Now it comes with a GUI installer to ease the path to get you started. Current Maemo 5 final SDK users can simply update their sources in order to get the content matching the sales release.

Welcome the Maemo 5 final release! Welcome the Nokia N900!

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It all started with a UX Meets Code workshop for 50 invited Maemo developers but then we started getting questions in forums, emails and phone calls. Specially about local activities. This is something we wanted to start sometime, somewhere… So why not Barcelona next month! We are now proposing developer training en español, a localization workshop taking el català as test case, gatherings of local groups interested in Maemo and the N900…

GNOME, KDE, Debian, Softcatalà, Hispalinux & co: cuanto mejor sea la respuesta local más gorda la podremos liar.

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The Maemo 5 Final SDK has been released containing everything a developer needs to get their software ready for N900 users. Check the Maemo development landing page in Forum Nokia for the SDK download, the release notes and other technical details.

This SDK release delivers the latest, stable Maemo 5 code base, which is a reason good enough for any Maemo developer to install it an leave behind previous versions. But there is more:

• If you are new to this check the modest yet beautiful Discover Maemo 5 SDK wiki page.
• Windows / Mac / Eclipse users: you can start with the VMWare based Maemo Virtual SDK. The new release has the same content than the official Maemo 5 Final SDK. DIRECT LINK
• After clear and continuous developer feedback the SDK offers now the possibility to install Nokia applications needed for proper testing of add-ons, plugins and web services.
• A new Sharing Plug-in API has been released to help you integrate web services for sharing files. Users can install these plug-ins in one click and have new web services just as integrated as the ones that come out of the box.

Also don’t forget the Maemo 5 UI Guidelines published recently, specially the Hildon 2.2 UI Style Guide, the Maemo 5 Desktop Widget UI Guidelines and the document about Redesigning from Maemo 4 to Maemo 5.

You can check the maemo.org Development section for an exhaustive list of Maemo 5 developer resources including the community supported runtimes.

Last but not least: your questions about Qt development and the N900 developer device program will be answered this Friday in the Maemo Summit.

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There are few days in your life where you feel part of something historic. Today is one of these days for me, and I believe also for any software freedom lover out there. Maemo 5 has been launched together with its damn cool hardware body, the N900. It contains everything you knew about the Internet Tablets plus an evolved UI plus the little feature that raises the eyebrows of all your friends: yes, now it makes phone calls.

We have published a ton of information, pictures and videos about the software and the device as seen from a user perspective. Go to maemo.nokia.com and enjoy this beauty made of basically the same components many of us have in our Linux laptops. Below you have few additional thoughts for those caring specifically about Linux and free software.

Maemo 5 is a computer platform that happens to fit in your pocket: OMAP Linux Kernel, Xorg server, GStreamer, Telepathy, Tracker, GTK+ (Qt also available) and many more. The telephony stack is also there and SMS also works, but this doesn’t mean that Maemo is now transformed into a smartphone platform. Landscape mode by default, 800×480 amazing display, full qwerty hardware keyboard, a Mozilla based browser providing you the WWW as you are used to get it… We are just expanding the concept of what features a computer that is always with you is supposed to have.

No-phone-fans, are you still reading with some suspicion in your eyes? Look at this screenshot then (CLI guys please forgive me):

Exactly. If freedom is your concern then you don’t need to “unlock” or “jailbreak” Maemo 5. From installing an application to getting root access, it’s you who decide. We trust you, and at the end it’s your device. Nokia also trusts the open source community in general and the Maemo community particularly helping in getting casual users through the experience path. The N900 might just be a new and successful entry point for a new wave of open source users and developers.

But get no confused: even if a skilled Linux developer can get in the deep insights of the system, Maemo 5 is actually a beautiful and smooth gem for mobile users. I’m personally proud of the work done by the Maemo designers and developers building this beautiful and useful UI on top of Xorg, OpenGL ES, Clutter, GTK+ and our Hildon application framework. A showcase of open source UI.

There are many areas where Maemo 5 excels thanks to open source championing:

Multitasking, with that powerful OMAP3 processor being pushed by the Linux kernel and plenty more components up to Hildon, performing a very visual and usable dashboard. You need to see the videos. The implementation is very nice and makes you fly between apps, web windows and tasks. Little note: the dashboard windows are not simple snapshots, they show you the real content in real time!

I can’t describe with words the feeling of listening soma.fm on the air, through my bluetooth headset while commuting on the train. And then a call comes and you can answer pressing a button. Simple? Not with Linux & OSS until recently. 3G connectivity playing together with BlueZ, PulseAudio, GStreamer and Media Application Framework: beautiful.

It’s also refreshing to see conversations with your friends where SMS & instant messaging are mingled, thanks to Telepathy magic. Adding chat, microblogs and the likes to the mix is up to whoever wants to push it, since the framework is open.

The camera is also impressive, all sustained by GStreamer. Together with good lens and an impressive display, even my pictures look cool (sometimes, and the camera is not to blame). No hurries to transfer or upload the pictures to see them in a big screen: you get a fair impression of the real thing right there with your device. The Maemo team has several hobbyist photographers and all of us are waiting impatiently to get the green light and start uploading pics.

I could go on and on but today I better leave you with the good news. Application developers, the next post is for you.

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