In this edition...

  1. Front Page
    • 2011 MeeGo Coding Competition
  2. Applications
    • Khweeteur development update
    • Mussorgsky (music meta-data editor) now in community QA phase
  3. Development
    • Dialler application for MeeGo gets openness boost
    • Intel's MeeGo Tablet UX Components are now available for Ubuntu development
    • Another MeeGo architecture direction mail
    • Multi-button headset protocol progress
  4. Community
    • Next MeeGo Technical Steering Group meeting on 14th April
  5. Announcements
    • Nokia "Pure" font packaged for Maemo
    • Tablet UX for MeeGo is now open source - no word on open development

Front Page

2011 MeeGo Coding Competition

Cosimo Kroll has announced the successor to last year's Maemo Coding Competition, which saw community donations awarded to the best apps submitted in a number of categories. Cosimo describes some of the draw of participating either with a prize-fund donation or as a programmer: To make this year's competition bigger and better, we urge all MeeGo enthusiasts to organize events during the MeeGo Coding Competition 2011 in their Local MeeGo Network. We are sure that Intel and Nokia are going to assist you doing that. [...] Developers of promising apps will probably receive a MeeGo device. If you will be selected by the community as one of the main winners, you will fly to the MeeGo Conference in November and sleep there in a nice hotel. There you will meet a lot of like-minded. Without having to pay a single cent. If Nokia likes your app, they will preinstall it on their first MeeGo device! But even if you won’t win one of the main prizes, that does not mean you get nothing! We will have cash prizes this time, too. Independent of sponsorship funds, last time the community extensively donated. About $10000 came together! Will we be able to beat this record-sum this year? Your donation is just a click away.

Applications

Khweeteur development update

Benoît HERVIER has posted about how his Twitter client, Khweeteur, is progressing: The next release of Khweeteur use a daemon for retrieving and sending post. This daemon can run all time to provide notifications on new tweets, dm, or mentions while the ui isn't running. Of course this is optionnal. The communication between the daemon use dbus and so didn't require to create thread on the ui, which use less memory and cpu. This result on a faster ui, while the daemon do the hard work in background. Combined with some screenshots, this architecture is appealing if it's well implemented (and Benoît's stuff usually is) for having Twitter services constantly running, without continually draining your battery.

Mussorgsky (music meta-data editor) now in community QA phase

Ivan Frade has promoted his music metadata maintaining tool to Extras-testing. Mussorgsky allows the manipulation of ID3 tags on one or more files, and the assignment of album art either locally or from the Internet. In announcing the move, Ivan says: Better later than never. Today i promoted Mussorgsky to extras-testing. Now it needs some thumbs up from the power users to get into the famous extras repo, reaching a wider audience. If you have used it, and think it passes the Q&A checklist, please give mussorgky some karma! If you are willing to test and rate according to the QA criteria, please do so.

Development

Dialler application for MeeGo gets openness boost

Intel's Shane Bryan has posted an announcement intended to stimulate contributions to MeeGo's reference dialler application: In an attempt to improve communication among the currently active (and increasing daily) dialer contributors and to increase general community awareness, I will be kicking off the first weekly Dialer Project meeting on #meego-meeting starting next Tuesday, April 5th, at 15:00 UTC (07:00 PST).

Intel's MeeGo Tablet UX Components are now available for Ubuntu development

Antonio Aloisio has announced that Intel's MeeGo Tablet UX Components are now packaged for Ubuntu by Forum Nokia: Intel´s MeeGo components are now ready for Ubuntu! You can download the packages from our FN PPA repository. As noted in the thread about the open sourcing (see our Annoucements page), the MeeGo Tablet UX Components are supposed to be building on top of the base provided by the official Qt Quick Components.

Another MeeGo architecture direction mail

Following the previous architecture announcement (and the flurry of concerned and confused emails it caused), another MeeGo architecture announcement mail came to MeeGo-dev last week. Again from Arjan van de Ven, Late last year, in the Architecture meeting, we had agreed to include timed, MCE, Sharing Framework, Non-Graphics-Feedback (NGF), Profiles, and Qt style APIs (QmSystem) identified on thehttp://wiki.meego.com/Architecture as new technologies into MeeGo. We had hoped that all the documentation and source code would end up well integrated into the 1.2 release of MeeGo. Recently we have been evaluating these features and feel that these technologies, as integrated into MeeGo, haven't reached the maturity that we want to commit them into MeeGo 1.2 core. [...] As a result we are proposing to, for MeeGo 1.2, not include these components in the official architecture diagram or the compliance spec since either means a compatibility commitment going forward as well as a requirement for everyone who makes products with the MeeGo brand to include these components. As these things mature going forward, we hope that for MeeGo 1.3 we can put a much more mature policy layer as part of the core architecture and compliance set. Once again it's unclear how "we" is to be defined here, given last time it didn't actually include the Nokia half of the MeeGo architecture team. It's also unclear where, and with whom, the discussions took place (and whether the meeting minutes are public).

It remains concerning that the governance described in the documentation still doesn't seem to match up with reality. As it stands, the closed-door unilateral direction certain things seem to be moving in isn't likely to encourage much in the way of outside contribution in the future. If the process is invisible and impenetrable, well, you're not going to get a lot of interest (excepting the negative sort).

Multi-button headset protocol progress

Joerg Reisenweber and Jacek Milewicz have been looking again at the communication mechanism used by multi-button (that is, play/pause/next track and so on) headsets, but still would appreciate information from engineers in the know: Brilliant Mr. jacekowski checked serial protocol of multibutton headsets for DocScrutinizer, so we got a clue now how to finally support those on N900. Nevertheless info from Nokia regarding specific format/codes on that interface much appreciated and asked for.

Community

Next MeeGo Technical Steering Group meeting on 14th April

The next MeeGo Technical Steering Group meeting will be moving to a new time (at least for a while): 06:00 UTC. Dawn Foster on the change, I wanted to let everyone know that we have a new time for our Technical Steering Group meetings. While the 20:00 UTC meetings were convenient for the Americas and Europe, it was very difficult for people in Asia to participate. The new TSG meetings will be on Thursdays at 06:00 UTC (Wednesday at 11PM Pacific), which puts the meetings in the early morning for Europe, late evening for the US and the middle of the day for Asia. The first meeting will be on April 14 at 06:00 UTC (April 13 11PM Pacific). There was some question as to the value of the change, given that it puts most of the rest of the US, Canada and South America out of reasonable participation range (and a fair bit of early morning stress for much of Europe). The recent addition of China Mobile and LG Electronics to the working groups means meeting times which facilitate participation from Asia are probably a good idea. If the times rotate to distribute the late-night/early-morning burden, there will likely be little issue.

Announcements

Nokia "Pure" font packaged for Maemo

Nokia's new "Pure" font has been causing waves (both positive and negative) as they announced their new "brand image". Olli Laasonen has packaged it for Maemo and it's now available in Extras-testing. Nokia have posted a number of pictures on their blog, so you can get an idea of the font: This is the new typeface that’s been created for Nokia by the branding people. It’s called Nokia Pure and we like it a lot. The first picture, with the lower case ‘c’ and ‘e’ up close is worth particular attention – and comparison with Helvetica and the old Nokia Sans font. Not only does it look… well, pure and simple, but the letters flow into each other somewhat, creating the impression of forward movement. The idea of flow and movement appears frequently in the new branding. Your editor has installed it and used Font Changer (from Extras) to use it instead of Nokia Sans. It is wider and took some getting used to, however after a few days it does provide a refreshing feel. As the package is in Extras-testing, if you participate in the testing programme (or are willing to start by checking it against the QA criteria and voting appropriately), give it a try.


Tablet UX for MeeGo is now open source - no word on open development

Imad Sousou (of the MeeGo TSG) officially announced the open sourcing of the MeeGo Tablet UX. The tablet user experience project, developed mostly in QML, is still under active development and considered pre-alpha code. It introduces a panels-based home screen as the core user experience navigation model, providing users with fast access to applications, settings, recent and favorite content. The tablet user experience includes a traditional application icon-grid view for application management. It also includes several built-in applications as part of the user experience: a touch optimized browser, based on Chromium; a Camera, Photo Viewer, Video Player and Music Player to capture, view, play and share media files; Calendar, Contacts, Email, Tasks and Notes applications to manage your personal information; a Chat application that supports instant messaging on Jabber and Google Talk networks; and a Clock application, which includes alarms, timers and multiple time zone displays. The tablet user experience also includes APIs for sharing content to social networks and other Web targets, adding third-party content into the panels, and centralizing Settings for built-in and installed apps. No word so far on the development model to be employed, but the sources are now available on the MeeGo Gitorious.