Prototype transitions.ini editor for Maemo CSSU
Work around the Maemo CSSU continues. A new contribution from Christos Saturn, CSSU Features Configuration, allows users to edit settings in Hildon Desktop's transitions.ini file: My small contribution is a simple PyQt app that allows you to change the options shown in the [Community SSU Features] page. [...] The operation of the application is simple: 1. choose the options you would like to have (for info on the options look in the wiki link given above), 2. press the "Update" button. The transitions.ini file controls Hildon Desktop's behavior, and contains the settings for CSSU features for animation transitions and things like the task switcher layout. More information is available from the wiki page.
The application is still under active development, but if you're running the Maemo CSSU and interested in testing it, it can be found in Extras-testing.
Reverse engineering the Maemo 5 dialer app
Jonathan Wilson is attempting to create a new open source "dialer" (that is, phone app) for the N900 and has started by reverse engineering the symbols used in the Nokia-provided closed source version: I am now trying to work out which ones I need to focus attention on and which ones I can ignore (i.e. functions which wont tell me anything usefull about what non-ui actions the dialer is doing). Some help with this would be appreciated.
Imad Sousou gives timeline for open sourcing of Tablet UX
When Intel revealed the MeeGo Tablet UX in the middle of February, those of us with long experience with Nokia's Apple-derived "big-reveal" mentality experienced a certain sinking feeling at the time. Imad Sousou (Intel's representative on the TSG) has sent an email to the MeeGo-developers mailing list about the timeline for open sourcing the new UX: Hi everyone... I know there are a lot of questions about the open sourcing of the meego tablet pre-alpha that was shown couple of weeks ago... I just want to let you know that we are planning on open sourcing the tablet UX code in the next few weeks. This was planned to go open source at the same time we showed it, but given few complications, we had to delay this a bit... Hopefully no more complications will crop up.
Qt SDK 1.1 beta released
The Qt team announced 4.7.2 of the framework, v1.1.1 of Qt Mobility and Qt Creator 2.1. To combine these together for developers, they also announced the immediate availability of the Qt SDK 1.1 beta. As mentioned in our previous release, the Qt SDK describes a merger between the Nokia Qt SDK, which provided a development environment for mobile targets, and the Qt Desktop SDKs. This allows you to develop applications for all platforms, which Qt supports. Compared to the Technology Preview we have included a significant amount of updates. Your editor has used the SDK to build a Qt Quick & C++ application (on Linux) which can be deployed and run on both Maemo and MeeGo. Nicely automating MeeGo deployment with this release should be straightforward, but not something your editor has yet attempted.
QtMobility 1.1.1 released for Maemo
A new update to Qt Mobility has been released by the Maemo Qt team. Attila Csipa announced the release on the maemo-developers mailing list: We are happy to announce our Qt Mobility 1.1.1 release. This release is a The new update is available from Extras-devel (so the usual care should be taken), but will be headed to Extras once it passes QA.
PySide (Python for Qt) v1.0 released
PySide, the Python library for Qt, has reached 1.0: The PySide team is thrilled to announce the release of PySide: Python for Qt version 1.0.0. After a long bug-fixing period, we now consider PySide to be releaseable quality and we will restart feature development.
This release signifies the end of the long feature freeze: in addition to the continued bugfixing effort, we will start to optimize the codebase to further reduce the memory footprint and improve the performance. Also new features such as Python 3 support are planned. The updated libraries are currenty available from Extras-devel, so they're for testing and development use only.
Cross-platform development: deploying to Symbian from Linux
One of your editors, Andrew Flegg, has posted a guide on building and deploying Qt applications to Symbian from a Linux environment. Deploying to Maemo is "easy", but Symbian requires a bit more setup, due to the historic Windows nature of its development environment: I chose the last three. On Linux, there is no native support for deploying or compiling for Symbian. Compiling can be dealt with by the "remote compiler", but what about deploying? I can, now, to the following; all from within Qt Creator: Compile Qt applications and get a signed SIS file for installation; Install the SIS file on to a USB-connected N8; Start the application and get its console output back in the IDE. Andrew promises further posts on the niggles he finds doing Qt Mobility cross-development.