Game Gripper review for better experience playing classic games
Nokia Experts reviews the Game Gripper for N900, which we mentioned last week: If you like to play classic games on your N900 and enjoy the emulator experience on the N900 then you should definitely pick one of these up for just $14.99. I plan to carry it with me in my gear bag when I travel so I can have a full gaming experience and web browsing experience with a single device on the go. Due to the mechanical nature of the button input (pressing keys on the N900's keyboard with the Gripper), users should be aware that extended and intense use may wear some keys on the keyboard more quickly than others.
KISStester lists on device installed applications which are in extras testing queue
Attila Csipa, a current council member, has been working on a PyQt app called KISStester, which streamlines the Extras-testing testing and reporting process and will hopefully reduce the burden on testers and improve the processing time for packages in the testing repository. Some of you might have already heard that there is a little PyQt app (by yours truly) to make testing less painful. The app runs on your N900 and has a few special powers compared to what you do now, most importantly being able to list the applications that you have installed and that are in need of voting, plus naturally the ability to actually vote on packages. Although the latest release is currently available from Extras-devel, the usual standard warnings and disclaimers apply doubly given the ability of the application to wreak havok on the Packages web interface. So only the most determined and careful testers should apply.
Disappearing Contacts plugins
Marco Barisione has explained the issue some users have seen where buttons added to the Contacts application, such as his own Contacts Merger, have been disappearing. He says, This happened because of a bug in Monorail, the IM file transfer application.
Command-line manipulation of various N900 features with phone-control script
Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh (aka MohammadAG, one of the Maemo Community's up-and-coming new contributors) has put together a new command-line script that provides simple access to many of the DBus commands which can be used to control many of the cellular functions of Maemo 5. Been using the commands on http://wiki.maemo.org/Phone_control for quite some time, and dbus not being my thing I always had to check the page for the commands, so I decided to merge them all into one script [...] The script is currently available from Extras-devel (standard warnings and disclaimers apply).
Transifex mobile translation tool gets release candidate
Transifex Mobile is an application which allows you to edit ".po" translation files on your Maemo 5 device, submitting the results to the crowdsourcing translation service, Transifex. Transifex is in use by many Maemo applications, as it allows the author to have their application translated in many languages, whilst having a single point of contact for the translators. Lauri Võsandi describes it thus: The main screen mimics Transfex‘s dashboard view. The user can see her locks there, browse projects etc. Left-top button shows user’s first and last name plus e-mail address. Verify that those are correct before pushing any files back to server. PO-file metadata is updated based on this information. In current release editing local PO-files is also enabled, just tap on "Open local file" in the menu. Since the post, the package has made it through the Extras QA process and is now available through maemo.org Extras.
LiveWallpaper 0.8 demo
PR1.2 brought the ability for the X "root" window to be drawn to, and this has made possible "live" (that is, animated) wallpaper. In an extensive video demo, Vlad Vasiliev shows off the application, which is integrated into the "Settings" window.
Custom Ringtones gets faster
Marco Barisione has posted an update on his "Custom Ringtones" package, analysing the causes of complaints about slowness. After an initial analysis, he found the code that needed more optimisation was the one that plays ringtones. It turned out that using GStreamer with playbin2 (the element able to detect and play all the supported file types) is not fast enough for this use case. I tried different approaches and in the end I decided to always use uncompressed wave files and stream them directly to PulseAudio. [...] My analysis was showing that, since when ringtoned gets notified from Telepathy of the existence of a new call to when it starts streaming to PulseAudio, less than 0.1 seconds passes, so why was it still slow? [...] A bug in Maemo causing a freeze that made the dispatching of new calls about 4 seconds slower when ringtoned was running. He has worked around the bug, and new versions of the package are available in Extras-devel.