Valtteri Halla, one of the two members of MeeGo's Technical Steering Group, has resigned from Nokia. In a tweet, he said: Let's say it in plain english: I have resigned from #nokia today but I still have a heart for #meego What this does to the make-up of the MeeGo TSG is uncertain, as is his next role.
The recently launched Maemo 5 Community SSU is continuing to gather contributions, from developers; testers and documentation writers. Now with a changelog (maintained by Christian Ratzenhofer), the project - shepherded by Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh, features:
* A number of new desktop transitions;
* Portrait mode support in Application Manager, Settings and the application launcher;
* Bug fixes in hildon-desktop, Modest, X Terminal and more;
* Community patches to Modest to make it better behaved. Although still in its testing phase, future developments will see portrait mode in Modest, File Manager, Backup, Conversations and Notes; orientation locks and anything else to which you can encourage existing developers to contribute.
Raed A has written up a detailed walkthrough of using Qt Creator on Windows to build open source software to upload to the maemo.org autobuilder: I have spent some time trying to upload my first N900 app to Maemo repository extras-devel. Below are the steps needed to upload your app. I am using Qt SDK 1.1 TP under Windows XP. The steps required are from existing resources like posts, links, etc… and some are from my own experience.
Two videos show the progress the "Cordia" project is making on bringing Maemo's user interface on top of a MeeGo base. Tomasz Sterna says: This is a basic Cordia's Hildon-Desktop running on Lenovo Ideapad S`10-3t
Whole Hildon Desktop with Hildon Home and Hildon Status Menu running on Ideapad. Tomasz says the aim is to go "far" down the stack of Maemo, "unless there is already a subsystem doing the same in MeeGo". He already has, for example, "osso and skeleton DSME support".
Ultimately, the aim would be to run many Maemo 5 applications on a MeeGo core with a bit of tweakery and a recompile. If succesful, this is the next step for Maemo, after the Community SSU; and developers from both teams are liaising on changes and approaches. If the Community SSU provides a short-term evolution and continuation for users; Cordia may be able to deliver the medium-term solution; whilst MeeGo's own Handset UX and application ecosystem provides the long-term evolution.
Simon Pickering has asked for assistance with his port of MeeGo to the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which runs Android by default. Specifically, how to use the multitouch-capable capacitive screen: I've got Meego booting and up to showing the handset "desktop" and understand that I should be able to recompile Qt to support multitouch input events as produced by mtev (currently with mtev I receive no inputs so can't do much other than admire the desktop wallpaper), but I've really no idea which version of Qt and/or the multitouch driver one should use, and which combinations work, etc. If anyone understands Qt and Linux's multitouch capabilities, please help Simon on the mailing list thread.
Michael Hasselmann, I've been working on the MeeGo Input Methods project (codename "Maliit") for nearly a year now. The project provides a pluggable framework for input methods. It comes with a reference plug-in for a multi-touch-capable virtual keyboard. It had bothered me that, even though our source code was available at gitorious.org, there were nearly no contributions from the outside. I attribute that to the difficulties when it comes to compiling all required components, but also to the lack of perceived openness. To increase openness, and attract more contributors, packages are now available for Ubuntu. Anyone that's interested in contributing to MeeGo's input framework should probably consider this their cue.
As part of Forum Nokia's mission to improve developer understanding of Qt, and the best way to build MeeGo, Qt, Symbian and Maemo, an application is available which demonstrates a number of discrete capabilities along side each other: This QML application demonstrates the features of Qt Quick with a set of demos and the possibility to view the source code of the demos. Each demo shows different areas of the Qt Quick features. The application is compatible with the Nokia N900, S60 5th Edition devices, Symbian^3 devices and Windows desktop with Qt 4.7.0 or higher. Binaries, source code, screenshots and an introductory video are available.
Karoliina Salminen has posted a snippet of code from her recent experiences learning QML: I was trying to figure out how to connect button click to C++. Here is very short how.
The recent Elopocalypse (from which we're all still reeling) created a lot of uncertainly about the future of maemo.org and its infrastructure in Nokia's accounting books. Quite a lot of discussion has been taking place about what we, as a community, could do if Nokia decides to pull the plug on the funding. In particular, it has been suggested that the council could manage a fund to support maemo.org: [...] a number of people have been pushing that the As Quim Gil has pointed out on more than one occassion (and I believe the council concurs with this opinion), if changes are coming here, they're not likely to come without warning. So if we do end up needing to pay for the infrastructure, we're likely to have plenty of time to figure out how. Still, given Nokia was unlikely to pay for maemo.org forever (Microsoft partnership or no) alternative funding strategy planning is probably a good idea.
A blog, quoting significantly from Andrew Wafaa - developer of the doomed Smeegol openSUSE/MeeGo "respin" - explores Nokia's experience with open source, from Symbian and Maemo through to MeeGo: Maemo, which was begun as far back as 2005, was a relative success, but was targeted at a virtuous but limited 'geek' market. Between its launch on the first internet tablet, the 770, and its last appearance on the N900, the Maemo community had resolved most of the issues it had been asked to address. Within its own terms, Maemo was an unqualified success, but that wasn't enough. A small and focused team, given the job of refining the APIs and user interface, might have brought a competitive smartphone to market, but the Maemo community was instead asked to switch from Gtk to Qt, and then to merge Maemo with Moblin to form MeeGo, and then, on the eve of launch late last year was asked to re-write again, this time using QML instead of custom Qt based widgets – and the impetus was lost. Carsten Munk, team lead for the MeeGo N900 adapatation project, disagrees with the tone and the content of many of the points. Indeed, as Andrew Wafaa was primarily involved in Moblin and MeeGo Netbook ports, he is an unlikely choice to comment so extensively on Nokia's open source experiences.
Somehow the time for another Maemo Community Council election has rolled around again. Tim Samoff writes: Time sort of swept right by us during this term of the Maemo Community Council. The Maemo Community has seen a lot happen within the past six months: MeeGo gained its wings (and then had them proverbially clipped); we watched and attended the first-ever MeeGo Conference in Dublin, Ireland; the CSSU has grown steadily and surely and has been gaining more and more traction with casual users... The overall community psyche has had its fair share of ups and downs to say the least. If anything, Maemo has proven that it can stay active despite everything else that's going on around the open source ecosphere. The timetable outlined has been delayed by the lack of availability of maemo.org staff to do the database extract of elligible candidates. Niels Breet and Henri Bergius are both travelling, with intermittent connectivity. Hopefully someone at Nemein will be able to perform what Dave Neary describes as a "two-second MySQL query" in their absence.
Nikolay Tischenko has announced, after six months of development, the availability of their comprehensive media player, Someplayer: I am pleased to inform you that after six months of development, testing and usage in Russia SomePlayer now available in the official repositories. Main features: MP3, FLAC, WMA, AAC, OGG, ASF, APE, WAV support; Equalizer [...]; User playlists and dynamic playlists; Playlist sorting; FMTX support; Bluetooth AVRCP support; Ability to control volume or tracks with locked screen using zoom keys; Auto-stop timer; Auto-pause on headset unplugging; Landscape, portrait and auto-oriented mode [...] Because of the lack of "release early, release often", there's a lot of overlap here with Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh's Open Media Player; although Someplayer is not a direct clone with additional features, and does not use all of the same underlying middleware that Maemo provides.
The release is available in Extras-testing, so please test and vote in accordance with the QA criteria.