Time running out on Nokia's $50,000 prize app competition
Nokia is running a competition, "Calling All Innovators", where the best applications submitted for their various platforms - including Maemo - can win up to $50,000 in prize money. In reminding us of the impending deadline (submissions have to be in by 03:59 UTC on Friday, 12 June), Quim Gil quoted Forum Nokia: 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. With over 900 entries so far, the chances of a Maemo app winning one of the top four categories is small - however, there will be one good N900 application walking away with $50,000 in the developer's pockets. Your editor hopes its one of the open source applications in maemo.org's Extras; rather than a large commercial software house's Ovi Store offerings - if only due to the difference in significance the prize money would make to the recipient.
libqt4-maemo5-... packages have been deprecated and will be removed
The packaging of Qt (4.5, then 4.6 and now 4.7 experimental) for Maemo has been a pain; but erstwhile Maemo Community member Attila Csipa has been leading the charge to get it sorted. Firstly, in response to the community's requests, the experimental Qt 4.7 packages have the word "experimental" in their package name; and PR 1.2 includes Qt 4.6 out of the box. Therefore, it's now time to tidy up the mess that's been left behind by the previous experimental packages which are now shipped as standard - but with different names. Attila announced, on the Community Council blog and maemo-developers mailing lists, that the "libqt4-maemo5-..." packages were to be removed, along with any packages depending on them: We'd like to inform all Maemo developers that with the public release of PR1.2 for Maemo 5, the libqt4-maemo5-* packages have been officially deprecated in the extras-devel repository, and will be completely removed by June 30th at the latest. If you still have packages that depend on these Qt packages, please alter them or resubmit to extras-devel with either libqt4-* dependencies (for Qt4.6), or libqt4-experimental-* dependencies (for Qt4.7). If you have any questions, don't hesitate to get in touch with the council (council@maemo.org), ask on maemo-developers or on talk.maemo.org.