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In this edition...

  1. Front Page
    • Community release of hildon-desktop, and promise of Maemo 5 community SSU
    • Community Council election time again
  2. Applications
    • tweetgo.net looking for new maintainer
  3. Development
    • Nokia-led development of hildon-desktop stopped
    • MeeGo Touch Framework (MTF) documentation now online
    • Qt Mobility APIs now available in Python
    • New PulseAudio package to solve audio stuttering on N900
  4. Devices
    • Maemo, on N900, running MeeGo Handset UX
    • Images of Nokia MeeGo (Harmattan)-running "N9" apparently surface
    • Increase N900 FM transmitter frequency range and power
  5. Maemo in the Wild
    • Researching face verification/tracking with N900
  6. Announcements
    • Fast London Tube Map viewer
    • Advanced Interface Switcher for turning on & off wireless radios
    • SMScon for remote N900 control via SMS

Front Page

Applications »

Community release of hildon-desktop, and promise of Maemo 5 community SSU

As Nokia winds down its N900 support the community will need to step up to provide its own. Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh has done just that, releasing a number of core Maemo 5 packages with updates developed by Nokia since PR1.2, but not yet introduced in "PR1.3". His particular prompt was a change to the scrolling behaviour of the applications menu: Many (including me) were particularly annoyed with the introduction of the PR1.2 menu, which had slower (much slower) kinetic scrolling. Here's a modified hildon-desktop package which has this reversed, and includes all fixes post PR1.2 (call UI glitching etc...). He goes on to say, later in the thread, that he is preparing a proper community updates repo, similar to the Maemo 4 one from Lucas Maneos. This would provide both an interim release before PR1.3 is released (if it is) and an ongoing home for community-driven updates to Maemo 5.

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Community Council election time again

One of your editors, Andrew Flegg, as Maemo Community Council chair, gets to announce the next date for elections to the community facilitation group. Every six months the community chooses five members to represent itself to Nokia, the outside world and coordinate internal activities where desired and/or necessary. Voting will be open for a week, and its last day will be Wednesday, 22nd September 2010. Nominations open this Thursday. Before then community members should be considering whether they want to stand. When nominations open, you can nominate someone via an email to maemo-community (which they must reply to to accept) or you can put your own hat into the ring by emailing the same list. A further announcement will be made when nominations open, with more information. The next council, like the current one, will still be coordinating community activities during the transition to MeeGo. Some things are much firmer than they were six months ago (no bulk move of everyone to meego.com from maemo.org; MeeGo's Handset UX does run on the N900; no commercial grade offering of MeeGo (or Harmattan) for the N900 from Nokia), but the future of the maemo.org community is still dependent on whether MeeGo-Harmattan "Hacker Edition" becomes a realistic day-to-day OS for N900 owners, and whether or not a community of developers and users gather around it.

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Applications

Development »« Front Page

tweetgo.net looking for new maintainer

The maintainer of Tweetgo, a Twitter web app optimised for small screens, will no longer be maintaining the website, so is looking for someone to take over. Interested parties should contact mbthomas on Twitter.

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Development »« Front Page
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Development

Devices »« Applications

Nokia-led development of hildon-desktop stopped

As noted on the front page, a recent commit comment to hildon-desktop (the component which forms the basis of the Maemo 5 user experience) suggests the end of Nokia's planned development: This is the end, there won't be any more "upstream" development. hildon-desktop and friends are truely free now, do whatever you want with them. With the outlet of community development in Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh's upcoming update repository, hopefully we will see community commits, and - in your editor's experience - there are bound to be Nokia engineers who've wanted to make particular changes for years, but been unable to within the confines of a corporate project.

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MeeGo Touch Framework (MTF) documentation now online

Those of you interested in getting to work with the MeeGo Touch Framework, which provides the API for applications on touchscreen devices, will be glad to hear that the documentation is now avaiable online. While enterprising souls have been able to generate the documentation for MeeGo Touch Framework (MTF) from gitorious, you may not have bothered to if you are merely curious about what it might have to offer. In the likely case that this has evaded you, you may be happy to learn that you can browse the documentation online now (well, it has been possible for a few weeks already).

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Qt Mobility APIs now available in Python

The PySide team has now released Qt Mobility API binding for Python, which allows developers to program in Python and make use of Qt Mobility. Are you a Python developer, feeling envious of your C++-coding buddies cranking out N900 Qt applications with all those nice Qt Mobility APIs? No reason for envy any longer: The PyMaemo/PySide team is proud to present PySide Mobility: Python bindings for the Qt Mobility APIs! Combining the power of Python and the Nokia-sponsored PySide Qt bindings with the capabilities of Qt Mobility, you'll be spewing out impressive apps for N900 like never before! The bindings are currently available in Extras-devel.

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New PulseAudio package to solve audio stuttering on N900

Continuing his community SSU push, Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh is looking for testers for a new PulseAudio package for Maemo 5 which seeks to address the audio stuttering issues many users experience. This is a new pulseaudio package, not sure if this is the full patch but it should solve stuttering. As it doesn't seem to work on the stock kernel, testers will need to install the kernel-power package.

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Devices »« Applications
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Devices

Maemo in the Wild »« Development

Maemo, on N900, running MeeGo Handset UX

alan bruce has previously had Debian and Mer running alongside Maemo. Now he's started having success in running MeeGo's handset user interface in its own window alongside the rest of Maemo 5. It is, however, not without its problems: I'm also hoping someone will give some pushes in the right direction, to improve performance or to suggest a way to stop the apps from segfaulting.

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Images of Nokia MeeGo (Harmattan)-running "N9" apparently surface

A set of leaked photos from China show what is, apparently, a Nokia N9 running MeeGo-Harmattan. The aluminum-and-black-plastic prototype appears to be an N97-style tilt-slider with a 4-row keyboard (which seemingly hasn't prevented Nokia from putting the Ctrl key in a bad spot). Few details have surfaced about the exact device specifications, besides what we know from last year's Summit: OMAP3 (likely OMAP36x at this point), WVGA, and a capacitive screen.

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Increase N900 FM transmitter frequency range and power

Jacek Milewicz has modified the fmtx binary to disable the power reduction that occurs when a USB cable is plugged in (essentially making the FM transmitter unusable while charging). The configuration has also been modified to allow the full range of the FM transmitter's frequencies to be used (76.1Mhz–107.9Mhz). After being fed up with dilemma - charge phone while driving or listen to music [...] I've decided to go with modifying fmtxd binary [...] After disassembling it in my favorite disassembler i've noticed that it wouldn't be a problem to disable "feature" of headphone detection as well so modified binary will keep fmtx running at high power regardless of headphones and usb cable. Installation requires replacing a system file with the Terminal, so only users with some command line experience and the ability to back up the original file should install it.

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Maemo in the Wild »« Development
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Maemo in the Wild

Announcements »« Devices

Researching face verification/tracking with N900

A Europe-based research project, MoBio, is working on security algorithms involving facial and vocal recognition. The group has released a demo of their facial recognition software running on the N900. In the Mobile Biometrics (MoBio) project, we aim to do both face and voice verification using the camera and microphone that are built into a modern mobile phone. This will provide secure access to mobile internet applications (such as e-mail, social networking and internet banking) without the need to remember passwords. Getting the computer to 'remember' (i.e. store) your passwords is especially dangerous since your phone could easily fall into the wrong hands. The MoBio project is unique in that its algorithms run on the mobile phone (rather than a high-powered PC) and must work with the low quality data that we get from a typical mobile camera. See the video after the break for more.

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Announcements

« Maemo in the Wild

Fast London Tube Map viewer

A new London Tube map viewer has been released by Amir B which gives you access to a map of the London underground from a simple application. LTM is available from Extras-devel.

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Advanced Interface Switcher for turning on & off wireless radios

A new wireless interface switch status menu plugin has been released by Kirill Plyashkevich (of Advanced Power fame) which allows users to switch each of the wireless interfaces on and off from the status menu. The package is currently available from Extra-devel (standard warnings and disclaimers apply).

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SMScon for remote N900 control via SMS

Talk user "digitalvoid" has released a new utility which allows users to control their devices with SMS messages. Features include: Autoload at boot, creates a log file (on the device), detect SIM card change and sends new phonenumber and IMSI code (return SMS) to other known mobile number, if somebody has stolen your phone and put his/hers own SIM card in it, send current GPS location coordinates (return SMS), reboot the phone, shutdown the phone, open a reverse ssh connection to your own server (WLAN/GPRS connection), control the device at CLI level from you own home, ftp a frontcam picture to your own server (WLAN/GPRS connection), send the current remaining battery charge (return SMS) SMScon is currently only available as a zip attachment to the Talk thread, which means updates won't be automatically pushed by Application Manager, and the install is more involved than it could be.

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