In this edition...

Front Page
- Maemo Community Council election results
Applications
- Maemopad+, MaePad and Trophae updated
- Review of TwimGo, a new Twitter client
Development
- Calling All Innovators N900 prize winner(s!) announced
- Prevent battery drain with suspendprocess
- Recent security email reports lost, please re-submit
Community
- Voting for the MeeGo Conference t-shirt design open
- Mailing lists for local MeeGo networks
- New MeeGo mailing lists for kernel, security and porting
- Details forming for MeeGo Conference's day 3 "unconference"
- UK MeeGo meetup: Birmingham, 9th October
Devices
- Respinning MeeGo: only if you ship MeeGo (or don't use the name)
- Hands-on with MeeGo-running WeTab
Maemo in the Wild
- FoneArena's "Smartphone Championship" final: N900 vs. Samsung Galaxy S
- Orange testimonial video on MeeGo
Announcements
- Openismus hiring C++ developers
- theme-customizer allows tweaking your current theme

Front Page

Applications »

Maemo Community Council election results

Dave Neary announced the official results from the Community Council elections on Thursday: The Maemo Community Council elections closed last night, and the results are in! Congratulations to the incoming council members. The winners are:

* Attila Csipa (achipa)

* Andrew Flegg (Jaffa)

* Andrea Grandi (andy80)

* Tim Samoff (timsamoff)

* Kathy Smith (revdkathy)

At the time of writing the new Council has yet to select a chair. However, the Council homepage has been updated.

The full results, including how the votes were transferred using the "Single Transferrable Vote" system, is available from the link within Dave's email.

Applications »

Applications

Development »« Front Page

Maemopad+, MaePad and Trophae updated

Thomas Perl brings us another round of application updates this time for Maemopad+, MaePad, and Trophae. The updates include minor (and one major) bugfixes, a few new features (including new translations and a search bar in Maemopad+), and improved packaging. So be sure to test and vote if you're using Extras-devel.

Review of TwimGo, a new Twitter client

A review of TwimGo (the new Qt-WRT client we wrote about last week) has been posted to The Handheld Blog: All in all its the best combination of a great looking UI and functionality among all the Twitter apps available for the N900. To use TwimGo, you need to have Qt Web Runtime on your N900. As TwimGo requires Qt-WRT (which is still in Extras-devel) testers are advised caution before installing it, but for the adventurous among you, you can get TwimGo from the developer's website once you have Qt-WRT installed.

Development »« Front Page

Development

Community »« Applications

Calling All Innovators N900 prize winner(s!) announced

A few days after the announcement of the overall winners of Nokia's "Calling All Innovators" competition, the special prize for the "Best application for the N900" has been awarded to two separate projects: Stellarium Mobile by Fabien Chéreau (Germany) and FrontView900 by Ben Lau (Hong Kong). Congratulations to both. Hopefully this will encourage the developers of Stellarium to continue its development (there is only one version in the maemo.org Extras-devel repository and it hasn't been updated since June); Ben Lau's FrontViewN900 has been stable in Extras since July.

Prevent battery drain with suspendprocess

Battery drain is a frequent issue for application developers targeting mobile platforms (especially when those developers are working with code from a desktop environment). To assist with these issues, Mikko Vartiainen released suspendprocess which simplifies process suspention when, for instance, the screen turns off. Attila Csipa writes: It has been difficult for many developers to comply with many of the recommended power-saving practices for Maemo, especially those porting apps from desktop environments. I'm not sure how many of you noticed already, but in the best hack-tradition of the N900 mikkov made a suspendprocess package, not unlike what was talked about on this list - which could allow many of these power-guzzling apps to become a little more suspend-power-friendly with little to no effort. If you're an application developer looking for easier ways to powersave (especially for SDL), be sure to check it out.

Recent security email reports lost, please re-submit

According to a post to the Maemo Developers mailing list, a mail server issue has resulted in emails to several of the maemo.org aliases being lost: There was a misconfiguration in the email forwarding on maemo.org that caused email to get lost without a bounce being sent back. We detected that about two weeks ago and got it fixed. However, we have lost all mail sent to this address during the breakdown, and would kindly request that you resend them if possible. This was really unfortunate and in a hindsight, we should have had a system in place where we would have detected this sooner. We now have a "heartbeat" pinger which should be able to alert us if something like this happens again. If you've sent a security email in the last couple of weeks, be sure to resend.

Community »« Applications

Community

Devices »« Development

Voting for the MeeGo Conference t-shirt design open

The designs are up and voting is now open for the MeeGo Conference t-shirt design. The MeeGo Conference T-Shirt Design Contest has received 13 submissionsand now is the time to select the one that we will all wear in Dublin. You get to decide! Any meego.com user can vote, and you can vote for more than one design. The election closes on September 30th at 23:59 UTC.

It will be interesting to see what, if any, tweaks the winning design will need for printing. The current favorite, for instance, may be impractical to print cheaply due to the complexity of the wraparound design.

Mailing lists for local MeeGo networks

Ronan MacLaverty, Nokia's MeeGo Developer Advocate, has asked whether the local MeeGo groups which are springing up should get one (or more) mailing lists to discuss and coordinate best practices: Can the meego.com infrastructure support the local network mailing lists? If not, could it support national mailing lists? (or even better both?) If it can, what is the process for creating these mailing lists? and can the helsinki-meego-network at meego.com be created? Dawn Foster answered that many lists would be an unnecessary burden, and - after further discussion - focus now seems to be on a single "meego-meetups" mailing list.

New MeeGo mailing lists for kernel, security and porting

meego.com now has three new mailing lists for kernel, security and porting topics. If you have an interest in discussions on these subjects, or have issues to bring up, be sure to subscribe. The mailing lists will not appear on the integrated panel within the meego.com account management until the page has been redesigned, according to Dawn Foster; therefore, you must subscribe via the mailman interface.

Details forming for MeeGo Conference's day 3 "unconference"

Day 3 of the MeeGo Conference will be a BarCamp-style "unconference" day. An "unconference" is an informal, but facilitated, participant-driven conference, where no agenda exists before those people who'd like to show something off turn, and sign, up. In November, this will be for the rest of the conference content that doesn't fall well into the first two days: An unconference is an ad-hoc gathering organized by the attendees for the attendees. The concept originated out of a desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants. You never quite know what to expect at an unconference, since each one is shaped by the attendees. When you arrive on Wednesday morning, there will be an agenda framework (times / rooms), but the content for the sessions will be decided by the participants. Details for it are being decided now, so if you have experience or interest in helping to formulate the third day, please get involved.

UK MeeGo meetup: Birmingham, 9th October

WOMWorld has details of a local MeeGo-oriented social get together in the UK: If you live anywhere near Birmingham in the UK and love MeeGo... then there’s a date to clear in your diary! The MeeGo Experts meet up is happening on Saturday October 9th from 6pm until late at the Bennetts Pub in Birmingham (B2 5RS).

Devices »« Development

Devices

Maemo in the Wild »« Community

Respinning MeeGo: only if you ship MeeGo (or don't use the name)

Andrew Wafaa, of openSUSE, kicked off a discussion on the use of the "MeeGo" trademark to discuss projects which treated MeeGo as an upstream of various software and user interface components: My understanding is that to use the word "MeeGo" in any direct naming is a no-no unless I pass compliance, of which part of that would mean taking on Connman and other parts of the MeeGo stack that just aren't in my preferred distro and to be honest, we wouldn't want them in there as we have a well tried & tested stack. Further discussion lead back to the draft spec which is currently under review. A distribution can only be called MeeGo if it uses the same package set as MeeGo itself (and the same versions thereof, albeit with the possibility of additional packages). This obviously causes problems for those which just want to use the MeeGo user experience and build it on top of their own base: to use the name "MeeGo" they have to *be* MeeGo.

Hands-on with MeeGo-running WeTab

Carrypad has posted their first thoughts after playing with the "WeTab" tablet which runs an OS derived from MeeGo: The WeTab is the first MeeGo-based product to hit the market and although it’s not quite what you’d expect if you’ve tested out MeeGo betas on your netbook, it does show what’s possible with the core system and QT-based user interface. Shipments started yesterday and we’re expecting the first retail reviews very soon. As MeeGo's compliance and trademark policy is still somewhat vague (see above), whether or not the "MeeGo" brand makes it through to the resulting device will depend on how jumpy the Linux Foundation lawyers get. It's also worth noting that the tablet UI on the WeTab is bespoke, and is not based on the proof-of-concept "MeeGo Tablet UX" that Intel previewed a few months ago.

Maemo in the Wild »« Community

Maemo in the Wild

Announcements »« Devices

FoneArena's "Smartphone Championship" final: N900 vs. Samsung Galaxy S

FoneArena's ongoing "Smartphone Championship", which tallies votes from website visitors to determine their preferred device among two handsets, has entered the final round, bring our N900 up against Samsung's new Galaxy S: I was waiting for the final match from a long time, and now we are heading to our final match. But lets talk about the previous match first. First round of Semi-final was between the Nokia N900 and Palm Pre, where Nokia N900 won by a very close margin, and the second round match was between the Xperia X10 and Samsung Galaxy S, and the winner is Samsung Galaxy S. We got a total of 2,703 votes, from which Samsung Galaxy S got 1,481 votes, and Xperia X10 got 1,222 votes. So the final is between the Samsung Galaxy S and Nokia N900. Be sure to vote for your favorite! It will be interesting to see if the year old N900 can really muster the votes against one of the best Android handsets currently available.

Orange testimonial video on MeeGo

Yves Maitre, SVP for Device & Mobile Multimedia at Orange - one of the largest mobile phone networks - provides a testimonial on MeeGo to Intel. In the two minute video, he says it is very important for developers, for operators, for manufacturers, for chipset makers, and, more importantly, for customers to have a unique platform, building a unique experience across all devices. And that's what MeeGo is providing to this community.

Announcements »« Devices

Announcements

« Maemo in the Wild

Openismus hiring C++ developers

Murray Cumming has announced that Openismus, a company who works a lot with mobile Linux, is looking for experienced and mature C++ coders again in Berlin and Munich. gtkmm or Qt experience is persuasive. I hope you can find my email address. Presumably, if your Google-fu is insufficient to find his email address, you're unlikely to progress far in the interview process.

theme-customizer allows tweaking your current theme

Ricky Tournee has released a new application, theme-customizer, to make it easier to tweak settings in your current theme: Theme Customiser is a control panel util to customize your theme: Change system font family, change system font size, change font colors, change icon theme, change application shortcut sizes at homescreen, show or hide the backgrounds for application shortcuts at homescreen, change web bookmars sizes at homescreen, and adjust snap to grid value at homescreen. As the software is in Extras-devel, and messes with the configuration of your desktop, extra care should be exercised. There is a real possibility of a reboot loop if one of the configuration files is written incorrectly.

« Maemo in the Wild