Hildon UI on MeeGo core

An interesting idea for continuity for came from Carsten Munk: provide a Hildon UI on top of MeeGo core for Maemo users. Tomasz Sterna has started working on cloning the Fremantle UI on top of MeeGo core. Their M0 milestone now has the following status: We need hildon-desktop and its dependencies to be able to be built for MeeGo. They should be installable from the MeeGo repo by anyone. Done, thanks to Smoku, as of 2011 february 15 As part of the "Cordia" project, progress is continuing.

Core MeeGo OBS is now open for anonymous read-access

Anas Nashif has announced that the OBS instance used to build MeeGo is now available for read-only access so that developers can see how the core packages are put together, and monitor their builds directly: It took a while but now it is finally open. Go to http://build.meego.com/ and take a look.Now you can browse the projects and packages and see what is going on in the build service. Thank you for the patience and have fun browsing through the MeeGo content. This sits alongside the Community OBS, managed by Niels Breet and David Greaves.

Qt: "superior technology"

Kaj Grönholm puts together a demo, on top of QML & Qt's scene graph rendering engine, as to why he believes Qt is a superior technology (for users and developers) compared with Microsoft's Silverlight: I decided not to blog anything right after Nokia & Microsoft deal was published. And I'm glad about that, because I have now reached the state where I'm actually excited again! Volker Hilsheimer made a very good summary about the situation from Qt perspective. Instead of going deep into politics and sales speeches, I decided to approach this from a technical perspective. Keeping things simple and concrete, here's one example UI implemented in few hours with Qt Quick & QML Scene Graph.

Please spend a bit time looking at what is really happening in there: wave, colorize, fading, water, text highlight... This is ~300 lines of QML + GLSL, performing smoothly on good ol' N900 hardware. Same can not be done using WP7 Silverlight & XAML, period.

How to build a "cover flow" widget in QML

A new page on the Forum Nokia wiki, by Alessandro La Rosa, guides developers through the process of building a "cover flow" component in Qt Quick: A CoverFlow component is composed of multiple items placed on a (typically straight) path, with variable size and angle depending on their position on the path itself. Specifically: items closer to the path center are bigger in size, and with angle closer to zero; items closer to the path boundaries are smaller in size, and the item face is oriented towards the path center.