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In this edition...

  1. Front Page
    • MeeGo Handset UX style guide unveiled early (and now hidden)
    • Road to MeeGo 1.1
  2. Applications
    • Augmented reality on N900
  3. Development
    • Nokia opening Ovi Store up to individuals rather than just VAT-registered companies?
    • MeeGo open requirements process
    • Hosting Maemo and MeeGo build systems together
    • MeeGo developer "buddy" system proposed
    • PyMaemo's guide to packaging Python applications without Scratchbox
  4. Devices
    • Ultimate MeeGo Dictionary
    • PR1.2 hildon-desktop has random CPU eating bug when using menu sub-sections
    • N8x0 3D accelerator running OpenGL ES tests
  5. Announcements
    • Ansel-A digital darkroom for N900
    • FastSMS: portrait, T9 SMS writing
    • rotatedaemon gives 360 degree rotation
    • ...and 4 more

Front Page

Applications »

MeeGo Handset UX style guide unveiled early (and now hidden)

"Bananas and pears", that was the oddly chosen name for a wiki document on meego.com describing the "Handset UX" user interface guidelines. These groundrules for the MeeGo system, and third party applications, were uncovered by Reggie Suplido before the wiki page was deleted. However, things of interest on the Internet never stay hidden for long, so it's still available. From the introduction, MeeGo is a direct touch UI, meaning that users manipulate objects, such as a thumbnail of an image, directly through touch interactions. Content is surfaced and navigation hierarchies should be shallow and accessed through simple navigation systems. In addition to direct touch, MeeGo is optimized for multi-tasking usage and provides a rich platform integrated Applications. The MeeGo interface is scalable for different screen sizes, resolutions, and aspect ratios and it supports both portrait and landscape orientations. In your editor’s opinion, the document seems to describe a nice mix of existing Maemo 5 features (top-left button, menus from the title) with new enrichments to improve the general flow. The principles about interaction speed and flow will be just that - principles, however hopefully redeveloping the stack from the ground up, and having complete control over Qt, will mean a much more fluid UI than has been achieved on the N900 to date.

The link below goes to the original Talk discussion thread, which now links to various mirrors, including Google Cache and Engadget.

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Road to MeeGo 1.1

Quim Gil has pointed to the roadmap and timeline for release planning purposes of MeeGo 1.1, due in October. According to the document, marketing will receive the release the week commencing 14th October; with general availability (GA) the following week: 21st October.

Of course the realities of software development mean that plans are always subject to change, but it seems a weekly agile approach is being followed which fixes time and quality, but instead varies features.

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Applications

Development »« Front Page

Augmented reality on N900

After a number of tantalising videos, the first "augmented reality" application for Maemo is now downloadable. By printing some barcodes, the camera on the N900 is used to superimpose virtual objects on to reality, taking into account camera angles; light sources and so on. Pavel Rojtberg said, finally I reached a stage where I could upload my small augmented reality app to extras-devel, so all those who asked for it can now play with it. But be aware that it is in extras-devel for a reason. In case you are wondering what I am writing about, here is a video of the demo. As he says, it's in Extras-devel, so care should be taken not to update other applications when enabling the CPU.

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Development »« Front Page
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Development

Devices »« Applications

Nokia opening Ovi Store up to individuals rather than just VAT-registered companies?

A small quote on the Forum Nokia forum suggests that Nokia may be loosening the currently rather stringent requirements for publishing to Ovi: We are currently updating our platform to allow individual developers to publish in the Ovi Store. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please keep paying close attention to the Forum or other sources for Ovi Publish updates. Given the problems Nokia are facing with the “success” of their store compared with the iOS App Store and the Android Market, Nokia have to do something.

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MeeGo open requirements process

maemo.org has used Bugzilla and Brainstorm to try and have an open specification process; but with so many plans being formed behind Nokia's closed doors, success for enhancement development was limited; usually because of incompatibilities with the "UI specification" for an application, or the lack of engagement of product managers. MeeGo, however, does have an open requirements gathering process, which was unveiled by Sami Pienimäki: As earlier published, an open Roadmapping will be run by the Working Groups of each category and the Core Program respectively. They are then working further with the public Feature Requests to turn them to Roadmap items and eventually to implementable engineering requirements. Based around Bugzilla, this should form the core of all the requirements gathering for MeeGo.

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Hosting Maemo and MeeGo build systems together

David Greaves, Carsten Munk, Niels Breet and (your editor) Andrew Flegg have signed a joiend letter on behalf of the Maemo development community to push for the MeeGo and Maemo community build systems (running on OBS) to be co-located and co-managed: the benefits of supporting a smooth transition for the vibrant Maemo development community would be worthwhile both for MeeGo and Maemo: developers would be able to use the OBS' natural ability to target Fremantle, Harmattan and MeeGo from a single location. This would bring more developers and their applications to MeeGo sooner. [...] The potential hiccup is that most Maemo applications need some form of closed package in the autobuilder (at some level) from Nokia to build. MeeGo is supposed to be an open source project, so would this cause a conflict of interest? Fortunately, response from the MeeGo community has been wholly positive, with the numerous benefits outweighing any perceived downsides. Indeed, it might be that the signatories were worried more about the response than was necessary or, like most things, it could only cause problems once enacted.

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MeeGo developer "buddy" system proposed

Robin Burchell has launched an initiative to ease the transition to MeeGo and Qt development for developers: We have a lot of highly productive developers that are not sure how their skills will remain relevant in a MeeGo context. We can't afford to lose them through neglect. There are also even more developers not familiar with MeeGo. When they find us, we have to grab them and keep them. Basically, we can't afford to lose our developers, and we need to gain more. I need help. I've written tutorials and helped a lot of people Those interested in mentoring new MeeGo developers should get in touch with Robin.

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PyMaemo's guide to packaging Python applications without Scratchbox

The INdT team behind the continually successful Python port and frameworks have published a tool - and a guide - to building packages of Python applications on Linux, without the overhead of Scratchbox or MADDE. Their alternative is using stdeb, a set of extensions to distutils that allows generating Debian packages, both binary and source, that can be installed on the device or sent to the extras-devel repository. This tutorial will show how to integrate it into your project, build the packages and upload them to extras-devel. Unlike other solutions, such as py2deb, this builds the source necessary for uploading to the maemo.org Extras autobuilder and a binary package which can be directly tested on a device (or simulator).

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Devices »« Applications
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Devices

Announcements »« Development

Ultimate MeeGo Dictionary

Attila Csipa tries clarify the confusion that can/will/does exist around the various MeeGo brands in a “MeeGo Dictionary”: There is quite a blizzard of very similar terms when it comes to discussing MeeGo and Qt matters, so I decided to put together a small dictionary which will hopefully clear up some terms and help follow up info on them. Don't worry if it's slightly confusing or contradictory at a first read, that's normal. The dictionary has now been put on wiki.meego.com so that it can be kept up-to-date with the latest terms.

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PR1.2 hildon-desktop has random CPU eating bug when using menu sub-sections

One of the features of Maemo 5 has been the use of freedesktop.org standards for things like the application menu. This meant that applications like Catorise and MyMenu (and power-users) could redefine the menu structure to fit their own needs. In PR1.2, however, the default menu changed to a flat structure and, as a consequence, a regression in the sub-category code has been shipped: Hildon-desktop somehow flows into a non-blocking poll() loop because the poll() times out. It does not seem to wait for a real event anymore and start using more cpu that it should causing battery drain... The bug results in CPU spikes which can only be fixed by restarting the device, or restarting hildon-desktop. However, it does seem to be intermittent.

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N8x0 3D accelerator running OpenGL ES tests

Carsten Munk has posted that he's finally had some success getting the OpenGL ES driver working on an N810: OK, step by step guide for my current setup, from a fresh N810 with openssh installed. You'll need the Graphics SDK stuff obviously. [...] You should now see spinning triangles with some stalls. In the x-terminal you'll observe a bunch of MBX hardware recovery messages. Hopefully this will help get things like the MeeGo Handset UX working on the N810, and maybe even N800.

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Announcements »« Development
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Announcements

« Devices

Ansel-A digital darkroom for N900

The N900 has a comparatively good camera, and images can be easily shared (if you’ve got a data connection). But there are limited options for manipulating the images on-the-device before uploading them to the world. However, Ansel-A is a new, open-source digital “darkroom” with numerous features, including: Filtered-Black-&-White-Conversion; RGB-Color-Correction; Brightness, Saturation, Contrast and Sharpening; Pixel-level-Cropping; Tonal Shadows/Highlights; Kinetic Photo Browser; 360-Degree-Precision-Rotation; EXIF-Browser-with-maps [and] Unlimited-Visual-Undo The application, built with Qt 4.6 and Python, is in Extras-testing and is well on its way to Extras.

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FastSMS: portrait, T9 SMS writing

Davide Aimone has announced a new application, FastSMS, which allows writing SMS using an input style like T9: obviously it isn't the same algorithm, but could be a good starting point. The application is in Extras-testing, but has yet to receive any votes. Users wishing to help the author get the application into Extras, by testing it against the QA criteria, are encouraged to do so and vote accordingly.

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rotatedaemon gives 360 degree rotation

Robin Burchell has written a small background application which will force rotation (in all four orientations) on Maemo 5: This application, simply put, allows you to have your applications rotate depending on how you hold your phone. Known issues that I can't fix: A lot of applications look really, really ugly in portrait/reverse-portrait mode. If they are from extras, file bugs, and hopefully the authors can fix them. Future features include blacklisting certain applications to certain directions or to not try rotate them at all (e.g. browser, which has its own rotation), and anything else that people can come up with. Its use highlights how hard it is to get universal layout whilst still providing a compelling UI; and the daemon carries some warnings about conflicts with apps which try to use Hildon's own rotation support.

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MaeMoney - Google Finance client

Cheung S. H has announced a local client for Google Finance: It provides near-realtime updates for your stocks, mutual funds, etc that you have set up on Google. The package is in Extras-testing, so willing volunteers should help get it to Extras by installing it, testing it against the QA criteria and voting appropriately.

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Horizontal Call for calling contacts on the move

Eitam Doodai has announced a little application, Horizontal Call, which allows the user to navigate through their contacts and initiate a phone call. The main driver (no pun intended) was that, when the phone is mounted in the car, in landscape mode, there is no simple way of searching for a contact, and dialing it. The package is not yet in Extras-devel, so care should be taken. It also means the source isn't accessible if this enthusiastic developer loses interest, something we've seen again and again.

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Illumination Software Creator for easy, visual, programming

Introducing people to programming is increasingly problematic, with the old BASIC stalwarts of 10 PRINT "Hello world" not really suitable in these GUI-heavy days. One suggestion which keeps coming up is "visual" programming, where discrete blocks describing the program flow are stitched together. Programming by flowchart, if you will. Illumination Software Creator is one such (non-free) product, which can now target Maemo with its Python/Gtk output: It is a 100% visual software development tool aimed at making the creation of software approachable to everyone (even those with no programming experience) through the use of visual "building blocks".

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Pen Pen SketchBook quick memo & sketching pad

Ben Lau has released a new sketching application to Extras-testing: I would like to share my N900 application to you. It's name is Pen Pen SketchBook , which is designed to be a replacement of the built-in Sketch application on N900. It is a handwriting memo/sketch book for quick note taking / drawing with unlimited size of paper. The package is in Extras-testing, so willing volunteers should get stuck in, test the application and vote accordingly (although usual caveats apply).

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