Offscreen's cross-platform IDE now available free-of-charge
Offscreen, one of the first publishers in the N900's Ovi Store, has announced the release of its in-house integrated development environment (IDE), free of cost to anyone who wishes to use it. Named Origo, it can be downloaded from origo.offscr.com, along with various guides and further information on its use. Origo allows users to write once and automatically package their application for Symbian^3, S60 5th Edition, S60 3rd Edition, Maemo 5 and Windows Phone 7. Offscreen Technologies Ltd. states that it has published over 150 applications, and has had over 70 million downloads via the Ovi Store. Many of their apps are relatively simple: graphically pleasing applications which respond to sensor stimulation in straightforward ways. However, having more ways of building such applications quickly and easily, across multiple platforms, is a good thing.
That Rabbit Game running on an ExoPC
Thomas Perl has recently begun work porting "That Rabbit Game", a game that was originally created for Maemo devices, to MeeGo. The linked video shows the game running on a MeeGo ExoPC. Public packages aren't available yet, but Thomas plans on submitting something to AppUp in the near future.
Maliit, MeeGo virtual keyboard, moves to its own home to target multiple OSes
Michael Hasselmann, posting to the MeeGo-dev list, has announced that Maliit (formerly MeeGo's input method framework) will be moving upstream from MeeGo to target the wider audience of Linux in general. Today Maliit, provider of the MeeGo Input Methods, moved into its new home. It's a bit unfurbished, but we have our own domain (currently forwards to our wiki page at meego.com) and our own Gitorious project. [...] With our own project website and our own Gitorious project, Maliit will finally be an open project, independent from Harmattan or MeeGo. This will allow us to focus more on what we *want* do to, instead of always By targetting other OSes, Maliit will also become more architecturally consistent with MeeGo itself, by losing a dependency on the deprecated MeeGo Touch Framework.
BOSS, MeeGo build workflow tool, development discussion
David Greaves, working within Nokia on release engineering tools & processes, has started a discussion about how to better align with MeeGo's own Release Engineering (RE) team: I see that several of the projects have been cloned (well, not cloned, just copied for some reason) and there is some active development there. There are commits going back to January ... and as far as I'm aware we've never really been approached to discuss how these tools are evolving in MeeGo RE. We've had a couple of merge requests (incidentally - gitorious doesn't seen to notify very well so if you talk to us we'd look at them a *lot* faster). I know Islam has made several enquiries about changes to your tools but we didn't get any reply. The thread, with Anas Nashif, seems a little fractious with a tone which seemed to be one of guarded teams trying to protect their own turf. However, Carsten Munk seems to have suggested an approach which has been well received by both teams.