Ovi Store requirements vs. maemo.org Extras QA
Thomas Perl is a long-standing member of the Maemo community, however having developed a couple of games in Qt, he's also gone through the Ovi Store submission process. In a recent blog post he compares the QA requirements of Nokia's official store and the maemo.org Extras repository: If you want to publish your applications on Ovi Store for Maemo 5, you have to fulfill certain criteria for the package to be accepted. The technical ones are listed in the document 'Maemo 5 Applications: Ovi Store Entry Requirements'. Here are some problematic entries that were not clear to me in the beginning (coming from Extras QA and a Debian-based background). In addition to the technical items he lists, he wonders if there's anything to be learnt from the formal language of the Ovi Store requirememnts for Extras.
NTFS MeeGo feature and conspiracy theories
Carsten Munk has asked on the MeeGo project management mailing list for more clarification around the closing of bug #1980: There was a bit of weirdness about the way the NTFS FEA# was rejected for MeeGo Core, where it was not entirely clear why it can't go in, especially with GPLv2 licensing existing for the software. [...] now suddenly "Tuxera joins Intel Embedded Alliance to provide total file system interoperability" shows up, mentioning MeeGo as target as well as being Intel-specific, then it might arise to conspiracy theories as to why this feature was rejected, with a decent open source implementation existing (from same company, too). There has been no official reply to Carsten's email, nor updates to the bug. However, when Doug Fisher had Carsten on stage during the MeeGo Conference opening keynote, this was exactly the sort of enquiry Doug encouraged: to keep the project open and so keep the differentiating factor in MeeGo. It would be a shame to see this turn into another instance of the project's openness talk being much louder than its actions.
Desaturate, rather than blur, to emphasise UI context
Maemo 5 uses a blurring effect to indicate when background UI elements are unfocused (for instance, when you open a dialog). Thomas Perl has put together a patch based on an idea from Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh to desaturate, rather than blur, unfocused UI elements. Another patch, after an idea by MohammadAG - removes the blurring and instead amplifies the desaturation. I'll leave it to others to clean up the patch and merge it into MHD or any of the builds that are floating around Thomas has posted the code to his website, a link is available in the topic. With a number of these changes floating around which modify hildon-desktop, a developer could help them get into the Community SSU by making them default to being switched off; but enabled via setting a gconf switch.