In this edition...

Front Page
- Community Council Election (Q3-2010): candidates' Q&A
- Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia exec ultimately responsible for MeeGo, resigns
- Peter Skillman hired by Nokia as MeeGo user experience chief
Development
- Reacting to MeeGo Touch list selections
- RFC - MeeGo connection handling
- What's it Like to develop commercial apps for Nokia devices?
- Invitation to Qt Developer days
- New release of PySide (Qt bindings for Python) now in Extras-devel
Community
- Local MeeGo group collaboration
- Minutes for maemo.org coordination meeting
- Robin Burchell election ballot confusion: mini-constitutional crisis ensues
Devices
- Nexus One's MeeGo port is booting and usable
Announcements
- TPlayer is "small, quick & easy-to-use" music player
- Wallpaeper manages desktop wallpaper groups on N900
- Flashlight-extra gives control over camera lens behaviour
- ...and 3 more

Front Page

Community Council Election (Q3-2010): candidates' Q&A

Sanjeev Visvanatha asked each of the ten candidates standing in the current election a set of questions, touching on motivation; MeeGo; priorities and community support efforts for Maemo: The format of the Q&A is 5 questions, selected by me. A few of the questions intentionally attempt to illicit discussion surrounding our future - one in which Nokia's involvement could conceivably diminish. I am not sure if that will happen, but I thought I would push those boundaries to see what the candidates thought. As you will see after reading the Q&A, there are mixed feelings on this topic. With the election closing on Wednesday night (at 23:59 UTC), there isn't much time to decide if you haven't already voted. As each of the respondents notes, this is going to be a term which is at least as important as the current one.

Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia exec ultimately responsible for MeeGo, resigns

The day before Nokia World, Anssi Vanjoki resigned. He'll be working his six month notice period, and still gave an empassioned keynote at the London event. AllAboutMeeGo continues with the thought we've all had: Coming just days after the appointment of Stephen Elop as the new CEO of Nokia, it seems very likely that Vanjoki was one of the internal candidates passed over for the job, consequently he has decided to move on.

Peter Skillman hired by Nokia as MeeGo user experience chief

Following the departure of two executives, Nokia have found someone to lead their UX & Services teams; focussing on MeeGo. Engadget said, Nokia has managed to scoop up Peter Skillman from the wreckage of the HP/Palm merger. One of the many senior VPs to leave Palm upon its assimilation into the HP empire, Peter spent 11 years with his previous employer and was in charge of the design team that produced the deliciously curvaceous Palm Pre. Now at Nokia, he'll be heading up the user experience and services division for MeeGo, which means that if you weren't excited for the platform already, you've now got a very good reason to be.

Development

Community »« Front Page

Reacting to MeeGo Touch list selections

The MeeGo Touch Framework, the MeeGo-specific API on top of Qt, has had some changes with the way that lists work. In an email to the meego-touch-dev mailing list, Nokia's Sergiy Dubovik describes the changes. In short, a list item itself should handle long tap and report that to MList. It gives a bit more flexibility to list items, since they can decide if they want to show object menu or not. But most important it makes longTap work the same way as "click". If you are not using any base classes provided by framework for list items like MListItem and you use MWidgetsController or MWidget you have to declare "click()" signal and emit when user clicks on your item, MList will find out that you have such a signal and will do the rest for you. Now you need to do the same for long tap. You need to catch long tap gesture and emit longTaped signal. With MTF still being in a rapid state of flux, such changes are inevitable. However, it's good to see such changes being highlighted and discussed openly by Nokia.

RFC - MeeGo connection handling

In a sign of the architecture discussions which (from a Maemo point of view) we'd always hoped would be held publically, Intel's Martin Xu has requested comments on the advanced aspects of connection handling for applications built on top of the MeeGo API: We can not just have all applications going of crazy when ConnMan signals online state. We need to serialize them on low throughput connections. And also the case where we switch from one bearer to another one needs to be signaled. And even the switching should happen nicely serialized in a priority order. Also we might have applications that only care about a specific bearer being active and online. If not they will sleep. Waking them up on every A number of comments were made, and the process - as well as the document itself - is interesting; at least to your editor's architectural eyes.

What's it Like to develop commercial apps for Nokia devices?

Kevin Tofel, of technology enthusiast site GigaOM, spoke to a number of commercial application developers at Nokia World about their thoughts on Nokia's developer offerings: Turning the conversation to Qt [...] I asked if the efficiency gains found in the new platform are as good as Nokia says. A resounding yes was the answer from the half-dozen developers I spoke with. Bob Rosin from Qik, the video sharing app, said, 'Using Qt has cut our development time in half, because we can build one UI in Qt and target both Symbian^3 as well as MeeGo.'

Invitation to Qt Developer days

Quim Gil has invited the development community to come together at two Qt events in October (one in Munich, the other in San Francisco). He says, Qt Developer Days are the main events gathering the Qt developer community every year. These events require a paid registration and target primarily professional developers. However, before the conferences there are 2 days of code.sprints and one day of training. The organization is inviting developers active in the MeeGo community to join these activities. As places are limited, act soon!

New release of PySide (Qt bindings for Python) now in Extras-devel

Python developers wishing to target Maemo, MeeGo and - possibly even Symbian - will be delighted to learn of a new release of PySide into Extras-devel. Matti Airas announced it on Talk, describing the benefits of the bindings: PySide is the Nokia-sponsored Python Qt bindings project, providing access to not only the complete Qt framework but also Qt Mobility, as well as to generator tools for rapidly generating bindings for any Qt-based libraries. If you want to future-proof your Python project in anticipation of Harmattan and MeeGo, PySide is the way to go!

Community »« Front Page

Community

Devices »« Development

Local MeeGo group collaboration

Jarkko Moilanen has started a discussion on meego-community about the number of MeeGo networks which have sprung up in Finland, and what could be done to coordinate at a national level: Has anyone thought about having national meetings/small conferences ones or twice a year? Meeting would IMO enhance the inter-network co-operation. I know the local communities and networks are still in the building/establishment process and the issue is more future related, but still. A fair bit of interest and discussion was generated, which is worth reading if you're interested in meeting "ameegos" in the flesh.

Minutes for maemo.org coordination meeting

Your outgoing community council chair and election candidate, Andrew Flegg, has posted the minutes of the maemo.org coordination meeting that occurred last week to the community mailing list. The meeting was primarily focused on what to do with the reduced contract hours Nokia is providing for maemo.org, refocusing work on the ideas from the 2010 Brainstorm, and handling the Nokia handover of maemo.org to the community. See Andrew's post for the relevant points.

Robin Burchell election ballot confusion: mini-constitutional crisis ensues

As most of you likely realize, the Maemo Community Council election is in progress (remember to vote!). In an unfortunate, though not nefarious, oversight, council candidate Robin Burchell neglected to disclose his professional affiliation with Nokia as required by the election rules. Robin explains, As many of you may know, I stood for council in the current elections. It was a spur of the moment decision, partly based on the (at the time) lack of candidates in what I consider an important time, but also due to my feelings on what I consider to be many key issues. However.. taking decisions on the spur of the moment often has consequences, and it certainly did in this case. [...] You see, as some of you will probably know, I am employed by Collabora Ltd. Amongst Collabora's clients is Nokia. Although the option is open for the Community Manager (currently Quim Gil) or the council to invalidate a candidacy if affiliation is not disclosed, the limited bearing Robin's affiliation with Collabora has on his candidacy and the good-faith nature of the oversight led the council to decide to keep him on the ballot.

The crisis will be taken as an opportunity to give the election process documentation a fresh going-over to clarify points like these.

Devices »« Development

Devices

Announcements »« Community

Nexus One's MeeGo port is booting and usable

Martin Brook's port of MeeGo to the "Google phone", the Nexus One, has reached the point where it has: software X, EGL and GLES, touch is working but I need to get it roated. A promising photo, and links to instructions are on the MSMQSD wiki page.

Announcements »« Community

Announcements

« Devices

TPlayer is "small, quick & easy-to-use" music player

A new music player, TPlayer, has been released by roman deninberg. The Qt-based player is Anyone interested in testing or contributing can find both the application, and its source code, in Extras-testing (<usual legal jargon>).

Wallpaeper manages desktop wallpaper groups on N900

S Dijkstra has released an update to his application, Image Set Maker, big enough to bring with it a new name: Wallpaeper. The application allows users to work with wallpapers (panoramic, in particular) without having to edit .desktop files. The update is available from Extras-devel, the usual boilerplate still applies.

Flashlight-extra gives control over camera lens behaviour

N900 owners who like to use the camera's LEDs for flashlight functionality have typically had difficulty doing so because the camera lens cover launches the camera application when opened. Which makes turning on the flashlight a difficult task. Cuong Tham has come to the rescue with a new application that lets you select what happens when the lens cover is opened. Flashlight-extra is available from Extras-devel, blinding bursts of light are probable, so torch users should take head of the usual warnings and disclaimers.

TwimGo: Web Runtime-based Twitter client

A new Qt WRT-based Twitter client, TwimGo, has been released. Here is a first downloadable alpha release of TwimGo 2.0 for Nokia N900. There were rather positive feedback for the teaser shots so I thought that it’d be best to release this as early as possible to get more feedback for the next releases. The application is available from the developer's website, but requires the installation of Qt WRT from Extras-devel first. As Qt WRT isn't yet stable, users interested in testing it out are recommended to approach it with extra care.

EasyList: a simple task/shopping list app

Willem Liu has announced "EasyList", which is a very simple task/shopping list app. You can enter plain text where every newline results in a new list item. The list item is a checkbox. The list is saved and also which items are checked. With one button click you can also clear all checked items from the list. As the app is in Extras-devel, and under rapid development, care is advised. However, given it's a simple list-checking application, the chances of it eating your dog are low.

Dicer under development

Willem Liu has announced another application, this time an app to simulate those little cubes which make board games so much fun: Ever wanted to play Yahtzee, Warhammer or Dungeons & Dragons but don't have enough dice arround? This app is the solution. I've created a small app which I want to share with all of you. With this app you basically "throw" dice. You're able to add any number of dice with any number of eyes and generate a random outcome for all of them. You can turn on the Shake functionality which allows you to shake your device to generate a random outcome. It's gimmicky, but you might like it. As with EasyList, the package is currently in Extras-devel only, so caveat downloader.

« Devices