Battery status graph for analysis using battery-eye
Developers can check if running their application for a long time will have an impact on battery life with Jussi Holm's new application, Battery Eye. Emanuele Cassioli has started a thread on talk.maemo.org showing particular use-case graphs: I've installed it and found that it continuously monitors the battery consumption, even when the phone is off. Due to the extreme impact battery life can have on user's perceptions of a device and a platform and the usual difficulty involved with determining the battery life impact of a particular program, this application should be a large boon to developers and users alike.
TI collaboration on getting 3D acceleration drivers for N8x0 progressing
Texas Instruments, the manufacturer of the OMAP chips which have powered all Maemo devices to date, are continuing to work with Nokia and Carsten Munk on getting functional and releasable drives for the N800 and N810's PowerVR 3D acceleration chip. Don't assume drivers that will work out of box and render happily to the screen - there's still work to be done on this as explained earlier in this thread, but this is the first step to make this possible. You will need to flash a new kernel (with extra DMA memory) and some other things as well. The drivers themselves will be in the form of a binary blob, but the kernel module which interfaces to that library will be GPL, allowing it to be ported to new kernel versions.
PySide (Python + Qt) tutorials
Python is, almost certainly, the language with the lowest barrier to entry on Maemo: it's a modern, garbage-collected language with a clean syntax and large development community. Qt is, as you'll know, the UI toolkit on which Nokia is betting the farm. Robin Burchell has recently been blogging on an introduction to developing Qt applications with Python: I recently met an acquaintance around Maemo (hi Khertan!) who was having problems coming to grips with how to use Qt in general. He's a python developer currently, with exposure to Gtk+, so I thought I'd write up some help for him to read over. Targetted at developers who are already familiar with Python, the examples each tackle a single concept and are very heavily commented, to make it clear exactly what each line does.
Open sourcing of Maemo components queue & workflow
Working from the openness report, Carsten Munk has proposed a process for prioritizing components for open sourcing. The idea of the open sourcing queue, is to have the ability to prioritise what components should be sent through the machinery that in the end decides if something is open sourced or not and in which order. [...] The important thing is to spend more time on the actual open sourcing process than in time consuming discussions. Hopefully this will help focus the community and Nokia to get the most important components opened faster.
Maemo 6 Platform Security: FOSDEM slides
Maemo 6's DRM and security provisions is one of the most talked about items in Harmattan. This is for two reasons: 1) even above the UI & Qt, more is known about it than any other component; and 2) the introduction of a security framework allowing the device owner - and that may be the network with a subsidised phone - to tightly control how and what the device does is contentious in a system which has been progressively getting more open. is tasked with explaining the technical aspects of this framework and did so at FOSDEM last week. The purpose of the Platform Security in the Maemo 6 platform is to protect the owner of a Maemo-powered device from getting her personal, private data and passwords from being stolen and used for malicious purposes, to prevent a malware from misusing a device and incurring costs on user, to prevent a user from accidentally breaking the device and to make the platform meet the requirements set by such third party software that requires a safe execution environment. The slides from her presentation are now online, and video of the presentation itself can be seen below.
Maemo 6 Platform Security: FOSDEM video
The video to Elena Reshetova's presentation at FOSDEM. In addition to being viewable through YouTube below, fosdem.org has downloadable versions in Xvid and Ogg Theora formats.
Maemo book for WRT/Qt/QML - request for content suggestions
Rajesh Lal is working on a new book about Maemo development, focusing on Nokia's strategic platforms of Web Runtime (WRT), Qt and Qt/QML. I wanted to ask you guys, what do you want in a professional book on Maemo Development. How it can best help us to develop applications on Maemo? If you have ideas on how the book should be structured, or the content and topics it should contain, drop Rajesh an email.
TpSession, simplified Maemo 5 SMS & messaging API
Kate Alhola has, on her Forum Nokia blog, introduced a new library for interfacing with Maemo 5's Telepathy-based IM and SMS API. Based on the Qt bindings for Telepathy, she says, There has been numerous questions and requests from developers about how to send and receive SMS with Maemo 5. There was even lot of rumours that the API is not public. I decided to do something for issue, find out non documented API's and write examples how to do SMS. After starting work, i soon noticed that there is nothing secret, everything needed was already documented and it was possible to do with documented API's but it was just a complicated and time consuming task that needs deep understanding how Telepathy Framework works. Writing just an example code expanded to project write simple to use API that allows SMS sending with just couple of lines code.