Status and plans for developer.meego.com

The developer portal for MeeGo, developer.meego.com, went live in beta at the end of last year, but hasn't yet gone live officially. Dawn Foster announced plans for the portal and the MeeGo 1.2 release on MeeGo-community: After further discussions with Bob Spencer, Quim, Ronan, Mike Shaver and others, we thought that it would be better not to launch developer.meego.com with the 1.1 MeeGo SDK content, since we are closing in on the 1.2 SDK release.

Quick fixes for impressive QML performance gains

"elpuri" has explained how you can simply improve the performance of Qt Quick applications by preventing unnecessary redraws of backgrounds: Most mobile QML UIs (at least the stuff I’ve done and seen other people doing) explicitly paint every pixel on the screen. By that I mean that the QML scene has a set of elements which cover all of the pixels inside the QDeclarativeView in all situations. For example if your root element is a Rectangle, you’re painting every pixel.Guess what? You’re likely painting them twice (or maybe even three times) and I’m not talking about overlapping elements. Before the QDeclarativeView (which is a QWidget) paints all of your QML elements in back to front order, it also paints the whole area with a background brush! He posts the code snippet necessary, and details some of the issues involved in dealing with earlier Symbian devices.

Systemd for MeeGo 1.3

Auke Kok has started a thread explaining the transition, for MeeGo 1.3, from sysvinit to systemd. These technologies control the initialisation of the system from boot to the UI, and so the transition needs to be managed carefully. I'm happy to announce that work has started to integrate and convert MeeGo from sysvinit to systemd. This has some major implications for anyone working with MeeGo Core/Base, so this is a little heads-up e-mail The main perceived benefit is an architectural one: instead of hardcoded dependencies (for example, networking might depend on a USB 3G dongle being initialised), they are automatically managed. Previously, MeeGo architects at Intel have been critical about the performance such systems can give, though, as carefully optimising an explicit dependency set can lead to better optimisations and faster boots.

The most notable thing, though, is that this is the latest in a series of open and well-explained architectural decision emails; something which is a marked (and laudible) shift from MeeGo in the past.

Submit your apps for a UX makeover

We covered Andrew Zhilin's proposed presentation for the upcoming SF MeeGo Conference a few issues ago, but for those of you who missed it: 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. So if you're working on an application you'd like some expert help on the UI with, then get it submitted.