In this edition...

Front Page
- Meet the new (Q1 2011) Maemo Community Council!
- Call for papers for MeeGo Conference gets extended period
Applications
- Use main camera live image as desktop background
Development
- Performance comparison between EDS & Tracker for storing contact data
- Caller ID daemon to use web to find caller
Community
- Launch of meego-central.org app catalogue for MeeGo
- Robin Burchell nominated for Maemo Community Council
Devices
- MeeGo Community device programme looking for champions
- Customising N900 keyboard & X Terminal
In the Wild
- Nokia, Qt and Digia, facts and fiction

Front Page

Meet the new (Q1 2011) Maemo Community Council!

Last week, the call for candidate declarations for the next term of the Maemo Community Council closed, resulting in five total candidates. Because of this, the idea of foregoing a formal election and issuing a blanket acceptance of these candidates as elected was posed. This situation had been anticipated when the election process was drafted (as was the possibility of getting fewer than the requisite number of candidates); with the aim to ensure there were either three or five members on the Council.

The community response agreed on allowing these candidatess to step into their elected seats without an election. Tim Samoff, announcing the conclusion, introduced the new Council and reminded us the position of Community Council member is completely voluntary and unpaid. These fine people are serving you, the Maemo Community, in their free time, out of the goodness of their hearts and a passion for what Maemo is and means. So, please congratulate the five, newly elected Maemo Community Council: RM Bauer, alan bruce, Felipe Crochik, Attila Csipa (aka 'attila77'), and Randall Arnold.

Call for papers for MeeGo Conference gets extended period

The call for papers for the next MeeGo Conference in San Francisco in May 2011 has been extended to Friday March 25th, 2011 at 23:59 Pacific Time (2011-03-26 06:59 UTC): From application developers to platform designers, hardware vendors to open source enthusiasts, anyone engaged in MeeGo is invited to contribute and participate. Much of this event will be the same as in Dublin. There will be MeeGo Warm-Up events on site the weekend before the conference and there will be lots of time to network and talk (the ever important "hall-way track"). Be sure to go to the MeeGo Conference website to submit your talk proposal.

Applications

Development »« Front Page

Use main camera live image as desktop background

Nicolai Hess has documented a hack, which he is calling "Poor Man's Live Wallpaper." This fun, albeit battery eating, setup uses the N900's rear camera's live image as the desktop background: Not that useful and a battery killer for sure. You need the packages x11-utils, gst-tools, and maybe gstreamer0.10-plugins-good and gstreamer0.10-plugins-good-extra... Aside from being a bit difficult to get running, it also requires the use of some command line code. Unlikely to be useful, considering the 20% battery usage, it's an interesting hack which may encourage others.

Development

Community »« Applications

Performance comparison between EDS & Tracker for storing contact data

One of the topics which came up in the MeeGo architecture discussion we reported on last week involved EDS (Evolution Data Server) versus Tracker. Likely because of that discussion, Philip Van Hoof has put together a performance comparision of the two for contact data storage: I've done a performance analysis and comparison of Tracker's RDF store versus E-D-S (Evolution Data Server).

Caller ID daemon to use web to find caller

Ove Kaaven recently released a Caller ID application for the N900, "callerid", which will automatically look up a phone number on the Internet and display who the number belongs to: It primarily uses XML configuration files to find out which web server to use for any particular country code and area code. Once the name has been looked up, it's displayed as a Hildon banner. (Yes, you need a working Internet connection for this to work. Also note that in many cases, 2G doesn't allow you to use voice and data simultaneously, so if you're using 2G and don't have WiFi, you may be in trouble...) The app can be found in the Extras-devel repository and comes with all of the standard warnings about using non-tested software; with extra sprinkles because of the integration with the telephony subsystem.

Community

Devices »« Development

Launch of meego-central.org app catalogue for MeeGo

As a twist on the usual lecture format, Andrew Zhilin is asking for application developer's interested in getting input on their UIs to submit them for redesign on his blog. He'll then use them as part of his UI talk during the confernce. Since I’m not a big fan of boring lectures, tribunes or formal declarations of any kind, I’d like to introduce new format for my talk at the San Francisco conference, which, in my opinion, suits the idea of open collaborating community much better. I want those of you, who want their application to be re-designed in a fancy way, to send me links and descriptions of your work and I’ll do it not only for free (as always :), but using techniques that I’ll be talking about on stage. And I’ll use your particular application to show things in real world. To my mind it’s a totally win-win solution. I’ll have great examples to show during the talk, much better than imagining fake ones, and you’ll have nice UI/UX mockups to use (or not to use if you’d like to) in your application. Actual presence in the room during my talk is a great bonus :) So if you're the developer of a free application and are interested in some input (and some plugging on-stage), submit your information.

Robin Burchell nominated for Maemo Community Council

Andrew Flegg, one of your editors, nominated Robin Burchell to the Maemo Community Council. In the nomination, Andrew said, that Robin stood in last year's election. His contributions to Maemo are numerous: patches to Qt, community assistance for Qt developers, an informed opinion on Twitter and talk.maemo.org. He would make an excellent member of the Community Council, and I hope Robin subsequently declined the nomination, leading to the five candidates who did stand being selected (as per our front page).

Devices

In the Wild »« Community

MeeGo Community device programme looking for champions

Randall Arnold has opened the MeeGo Community Device programme up to new champions who wish to take on a device: This is defined very simply: excited about a product? have some expertise with it? Know someone in the right position inside a provider's organization? All of the above? Then YOU are a device champion! So jump in! Edit the wiki, contact providers, or whatever else you think you can do to contribute...

Customising N900 keyboard & X Terminal

Paul Hartman has offered some advice in mapping the N900's keyboard in order to type special characters; pointing to instructions on the wiki, and for xterm-specific usage you can change your xterm on-screen keys or your hardware keyboard mappings to include more useful keys like those. For example in my Xterm I have: Ctrl Esc { } < > | %... It is also possible to remap the hardware keyboard so that Fn-Up is PgUp, Fn-Down is PgDown, Fn-Left is Home, Fn-Right is End, etc. Lastly, if you're interested in customizing your N900 in these ways, you might also want to check out the "key bar for xterm" conversation at Talk.

In the Wild

« Devices

Nokia, Qt and Digia, facts and fiction

Sebastian Nystrom, last week announced as Nokia's new head of MeeGo Computers, has posted on the Qt blog to give more details on Digia's purchasing of Nokia's Qt licensing business; in particular to clarify "facts" reported by some - as incorrect: The Qt commercial business is important, but it is not the majority of Qt. An estimated 400,000 developers across more than 70 industries use Qt. There are 3500 commercial customers. Some have one license, some have dozens of licenses, but commercial customers do not make up the majority of the Qt user base.

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