Nokia Panorama for creating wide-angle photos
Nokia has released a new application, Panorama, which allows N900 owners to take panoramic photos with their device camera: Wide-angle high-resolution panoramic views are now possible on N900. Panorama application produces high-quality smooth panoramic images by automatically capturing and processing input images into a panorama, directly on your device. The (free) application is available from the Ovi Store.
FaceBrick working again
Thanks to community efforts, the Facebook downtime we noted from a report by Robin Burchell a few weeks ago has ended with a new update which allows FaceBrick to continue working with Facebook's new API. FaceBrick was down for about a month earlier due to some unannounced changes to the Facebook API which caused FaceBrick, amongst other Facebook apps, to stop working. The latest update to libqfacebook (0.1.3-2) contains a fix for this - in other words, FaceBrick is up and running again! Thanks to Ahmad Mushtaq for fixing this. :-) The update is available from Extras-devel, and should be handled with the usual care.
Experimental portrait support in N900 email client
Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh is forging ahead on his quest to continue the development of Maemo 5 by building a test version of Modest, Maemo's email client, featuring portrait mode support: This is based on the newest modest source from gitorious, which means it includes a lot of fixes that make modest faster. I've added (experimental) portrait mode support to modest, I might go on and do this to some other stock open source apps (the settings app would be one) Mohammad says "it's very usable as it is", but he doesn't "expect you to type in portrait mode :)". As the install procedure requires installing a binary package from (effectively) a random site on the Internet, care should be taken.
Experimental portrait support in Control Panel
As Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh said above, he did get round to adding portrait mode support to Control Panel: I'm looking into adding portrait mode flags into most open source apps on Maemo 5. [...] Some applets don't work in portrait mode, such as the display one and the themes one (it kicks the window into landscape mode). Most of the ones I use do. The glitches found show that although both Modest and Control Panel are mostly useful, there would be a long way to go to productise every single application to fully support portrait mode; finally giving a practical example to those users who've demanded that Nokia provide it in the next PR1.x release. As the install procedure requires installing a binary package from (effectively) a random site on the Internet, care should be taken.