New QA rules for command line applications wanting to get into Extras
Valério Valério has announced that the quality assurance rules for command-line applications to get into Extras have been finalised: Command line applications are a special case when uploading to Extras, so they should address two extra rules, a custom application manager icon and a detailed description. You can use two variaties of the CLI icon: the standard version that can be applied directly or the custom version that can be applied on top of another icon. The CLI application description should clearly says that the application only runs from the command line. This should meet the requirements of publicising high-profile command-line applications (such as OpenSSH Client and nmap) whilst also making it clear to end-users what they'll get with the package.
Mer^2 snapshot 40 - hackers needed to complete Fremantle backport
After the MeeGo announcment, Carsten Munk decided that Mer would, as Mer^2, focus on backporting as much of Fremantle as possible to the N8x0 in the shortest, most effective way. The first snapshot of Mer^2, "snapshot 40", has been unveiled. Stskeeps describes it as, what will turn into the Fremantle backport on N8x0. It's Mer without the idealism and with realistic short-term expectations. It's to put it simply, Fremantle base system and some UI packages put on top of Debian 5.0. Packages are built using some OBS tricks. It is closer to Fremantle than Debian and many Debian packages may break on it. It does not yet have a proper non-GL desktop for N8x0. What is planned is to whip the old desktop into feeling a little like Fremantle desktop. I will need some volunteer GTK+ coders for this. It's very much a developer preview but for anyone willing to help out with boot shell scripts, GTK+ hacking, theme development and other tasks; now's the time to get stuck in to something that'll give lots of value to old N8x0 devices.
Integrating MADDE & Qt Creator on Windows & Mac OS X for easy cross-platform Maemo development
MADDE provides a Windows, Mac OS X and Linux toolchain for Maemo development; and Qt Creator is Nokia's strategic Qt development IDE, for the same platforms. There are now instructions on how to integrate the two on Mac OS X and Windows: This is a guide on how to enable MADDE in QtCreator. This is part of the technology preview. After following this guidance you are able to build your sources within QtCreator for your device, and deploy, run and debug your applications with few mouse clicks from your OS X installation. MADDE and Qt Creator will, almost certainly, form the backbone of mainstream MeeGo mobile development and provide a step-change compared with the complexities of Scratchbox. A similar step-by-step guide for having a native, Qt-oriented, developer-friendly IDE on Linux will be published shortly, according to daniel wilms.
alarmd GUI for scheduling events under development
Tim Lee has announced the first release of Alarmed, a GUI front-end to Maemo's alarmd framework. alarmd is Nokia's proprietary, mobile-friendly, cron replacement. The application allows the setting up of commands to run at certain times, and includes a script which can reset the data counter, which allows the automatic reset everytime the user's mobile phone contract rolls over. In the announcement, Tim says, I wrote a small app that acts as a GUI front-end to maemos alarmd scheduler back-end. It's written in python and uses the PySide bindings to Qt. PySide is under heavy development at the moment and is both unstable and unreliable. A major new release is expected within weeks or months which will fix some of the knows issues with Alarmed. Alarmed is currently available from Extras-devel (standard warnings and disclaimers apply), testers and contributors are welcome.
Tinymail 1.0 released
Tinymail, the email backend powering Nokia's Modest email client, has reached version 1.0. For N900 users, the release shipped with Maemo apparently contains more or less the same code.