Command line sharing plugin allows SCP and private webserver publishing
Thomas Perl and Tuomas Kulve have been collaborating on a project to allow arbitrary commands to be used in Maemo 5's "sharing" dialogue ("share via email", "send via bluetooth", "share via service"). An initial proof-of-concept has been published, and Tuomas has been using it to get http URLs with meta information to IRC. The Irssi script needs to be modified to match the directories and IRC servers in use and both the script and the sharing plugin are still missing most of the error checking and extra functionality. Nevertheless, they’ve worked for me for the past weeks. This opens up the user-friendly "sharing" dialogue to some hacker-friendly possibilities.
Quick Launch provides four shortcuts to apps on status menu
Daniele Maio has released Quick Launch, a community implementation of a Brainstorm idea from February. It's basically a statusbar item that shows four buttons each of which can be configured through a control panel applet to set a shortcut to your preferred applications. Quick Launch is currently available from Extras Testing (usual disclaimers and warnings apply).
OCR hack whilst waiting for PhotoTranslator
Daniel Would has hacked together an optical character recognition system on his N900 to decode text from photos: This was inspired by a demo by Cybercomchannel called phototranslator. It looks cool and I’m looking forward to them making it availiable for people to try. However I am not a patient man… So considering they mentioned they simply used Tesseract I figured I could just have a go myself. Daniel uses this as an example of why this can be a great phone for developers (leveraging existing software simply and easily), but that packagers are also required for such hacks to be useful to an end-, or even power-, user.