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In this edition...

  1. Front Page
    • No Terminal, email client or third party apps in MeeGo 1.1?
    • Sign-up for "Early Bird" events in Dublin the weekend before the MeeGo Conference
  2. Applications
    • Nokia Panorama for creating wide-angle photos
    • FaceBrick working again
    • Experimental portrait support in N900 email client
    • Experimental portrait support in Control Panel
  3. Development
    • Help verify Qt development example bug
    • Empty Frequencies Finder for use with N900 FM transmitter
    • Creating battery-friendly Qt apps
  4. Community
    • Bugzilla 3.4 needs your help testing
  5. Devices
    • USB hostmode on N900 pre-alpha for willing guinea pigs
    • MeeGo N900 images move to repo.meego.com; latest version includes modem code
    • MeeGo on an HTC Desire
  6. Announcements
    • Todoy - sketched alarm & schedule app
    • DigiClock widget for Maemo 5
    • Situare allows location sharing and friend-finding through Facebook
    • Nokia's "Here and Now" service on N900

Front Page

Applications »

No Terminal, email client or third party apps in MeeGo 1.1?

In a surprising turn of events, the next major release of MeeGo (1.1, which is due this month), may not ship with an email client (due to quality issues in it); a terminal to access the underlying OS or the ability to run any third party Qt applications. A number of bug reports in these critical pieces of software, and a bug in a common part of the UI, have been commented that they are "not targetted for 1.1". Carsten Munk, a member of the MeeGo ARM adaptation team, says on bug #7881, regarding the ability to run plain Qt apps: Frankly, it's a marketing disaster waiting to happen. MeeGo Handset UX will be a joke if we can 'only' run MTF applications and not Qt apps in MeeGo 1.1 Handset UX - ruining the goal of multiple verticals with a common API to write against. It's worth bearing in mind that this is MeeGo 1.1, which should not be confused with Nokia's "MeeGo 1.0 N", aka Harmattan, aka Maemo 6. This is also due in the final quarter of this year (although with a much less firm release date), but apparently does not suffer from this bug and, almost certainly(!), will ship with an email client and support for third party applications.

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Sign-up for "Early Bird" events in Dublin the weekend before the MeeGo Conference

The MeeGo Conference is going to be held during from Monday to Wednesday in November. To facilitate attendance and enjoyment of the gathering by community members unable to attend the conference during the week, Attila Csipa , Dave Neary and others have started work organizing an "Early Bird" event for the weekend before the conference. Join the MeeGo Conference Early Bird events in Dublin on November 13th and 14th, right before the MeeGo Conference begins. Events include programming tutorials, introductions to Qt and MeeGo SDK, a geocache treasure hunt, and an application writing competition. This is an informal event handled by skilled people and anyone can get involved. The events will be held at the D4 Hotels, next to the Aviva Stadium. Signup is free but required for planning purposes. Details about the events, planning for the events and volunteer opportunities are located on the MeeGo wiki page.

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Development »« Front Page

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Development

Community »« Applications

Help verify Qt development example bug

Have you done any Qt development for Maemo? If so, Dave Neary would like your help verifying a bug in the documentation: I'm not set up to even confirm the bug, I'm afraid, so I definitely would appreciate someone doing Qt development on Maemo 5 getting the source code, trying to compile with PR 1.2, confirming the bug, and ideally helping by submitting a patch. Ville Vainio has attached a patch to the issue, but independent verification is always helpful.

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Empty Frequencies Finder for use with N900 FM transmitter

Talk user "Blizzard" has released a usable version of his script which allows users to scan for empty frequences which can be used with the FM transmitter: Interestingly, the Silicon Labs Si4713 FM transmitter used in the N900 actually features low-power frequency scanning, but support for it isn't implemented in the drivers available for Maemo 5's current kernel. The script is downloadable from file-sharing site MediaFire. Downloading scripts from such websites should be done with care, although the comparitively simple nature of the script means its functionality can be easily checked.

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Creating battery-friendly Qt apps

An article on the Symbian wiki covers coding battery-sensitive applications for both Symbian and Maemo: The goals of this article are to: highlight the key areas of Qt code design where developers can minimise power consumption; give desktop Qt developers an appreciation of the issues to consider when coding for power efficiency. The article does focus on Symbian tools, but the techiniques and prinicples give a good grounding in the problems to all mobile developers and the examples should be applicable on Maemo via either the Qt SDK or Scratchbox.

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Community

Devices »« Development

Bugzilla 3.4 needs your help testing

David King has picked up the Bugzilla 3.4 upgrade mantle and would like some wider testing before it can be rolled out: It has taken some time, but regressions from the current 2.22 code have been fixed (hopefully) and it is now time for public testing. There is a test instance of the new code, with a dump of the bugs.maemo.org database from mid-August and mail sending disabled. All interested users should test for regressions and report them as bugs. Screenshots showing layout issues are welcome, as in bug 11330, for example. If you have actively reported bugs against either Maemo itself, or third party software using bugs.maemo.org; or you manage your packages' bugs through it, you are encouraged to test and report any problems you find.

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Announcements »« Community

USB hostmode on N900 pre-alpha for willing guinea pigs

Efforts to get USB host-mode working reliably on the N900 continue with a new package from Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh which provides an easier way for developers to start working with the code. It seems Mohammad finally managed to track down which were the important details of his procedure when he made hostmode work with Sarah Newman's debugging kernel (plus some more patches we stacked on top of it). So today he's going to ship a proof-of-concept package or whatever, plus instructions how to reproduce his success [...]. Though this package with the 'shiny GUI' looks like targeted to production, it's strictly a DEBUG kernel with a lot of nasty botches. Pay head to the warning from Joerg Reisenweber, due to the current instability of the implementation and as this package messes with both the kernel (and, thus, hardware), only those interested in contributing code to the project. Users who just want USB host should likely stear clear for the time being. Technical details are available on the other end of the story link.

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MeeGo N900 images move to repo.meego.com; latest version includes modem code

MeeGo N900 images have moved from their former home on tablets-dev.nokia.com to repo.meego.com. Efforts continue to reduce the amount of Nokia proprietary code is required to have a bootable, and usable, N900 operating system; but in the meantime, Nokia has given permission for the necessary blobs to be distributed through meego.com. Given the latest release contains code to send and receive phone calls and SMSes, this is a major step forward for MeeGo and the N900.

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MeeGo on an HTC Desire

Following on from the Dell Streak, the HTC Desire - another Android device - has booted MeeGo up to the UX level: charging works (and the charging symbol moves) [but] battery Status doesn't show though when the charger is out.

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Announcements »« Community
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Announcements

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Todoy - sketched alarm & schedule app

andrea cadeddu has released an innovative new todo list, scheduler and alarm clock: Todoy is my secretary [...] It looks just as drawing application, but has some pepper inside: The main idea is to draw around the clock image, for fast setup of your daily todos/appointments. And this is just the sketch mode. But the idea around this template was so intuitive (imho) that I decide to add also an AUTO mode, that has proven to be amazing: just draw your finger around the clock, wrote in text field and press enter. That's it! new appointment added. The app is currently available through Extras-devel, so care should be taken when testing it and ensure you don't upgrade any other packages unintentionally whilst it's enabled.

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DigiClock widget for Maemo 5

Alek Terekhov has announced a simple desktop widget showing time in digital format. I don't like analog clocks and haven't found any digital one. The widget uses battery-saving best practices and is fairly configurable. If you're happy installing Extras-devel packages and want a large, configurable, digital clock on your Maemo 5 desktop, it may be worth a look.

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Situare allows location sharing and friend-finding through Facebook

Situare is a new application from Jussi Laitinen that allows users to share geolocation data with their contacts using Facebook. Situare application introduces a concept of social locating. It allows users to view, update and share their location using Facebook accounts. Situare utilizes OpenStreetMap database for mapping, CloudMade for route calculation and device GPS for automatic locating. The application is currently available from Extras-devel, so only those testers who wish to entrust their location data to a development release should apply.

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Nokia's "Here and Now" service on N900

One of your editors, Andrew Flegg, has created a wrapper for Nokia's new Here and Now web application: Nokia's N8, a Symbian^3 device, comes with a service called Here and Now. This reads the cell tower information you're currently connected to and opens a web page detailing the current events (cinema listings and weather, for example) near you. I've done a quick port to Maemo 5 and the N900. Given the simplicity of deploying web-based applications to Maemo, one wonders why Nokia didn't bother going to the effort to do it themselves. Whatever the reason, Andrew's answer is available in Extras-testing so go test and vote.

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