In this edition...

  1. Front Page
    • Nokia's CTO, Rich Green, allegedly leaving Nokia over MeeGo and Elop's strategy
  2. Applications
    • Fixing Twitter authentication in Maemo Conversations app
    • Tweed Suit (Twitter client) now in Extras-testing
    • Got a MeeGo ExoPC? Mong now available in pre-built binary
  3. Development
    • Offscreen's cross-platform IDE now available free-of-charge
    • That Rabbit Game running on an ExoPC
    • Maliit, MeeGo virtual keyboard, moves to its own home to target multiple OSes
    • BOSS, MeeGo build workflow tool, development discussion
  4. Community
    • Provide feedback on MeeGo Conference
    • "MeeGo Pong" (re)naming competition!
    • Full video feeds for MeeGo Conference?
    • MeeGo Community Office meeting, Tuesday 14th June
    • Stskeeps drops out from talk.maemo.org due to noise & trolls
  5. Announcements
    • WolframAlpha front-end
    • ReSiStance RSS client updated
    • Stockona - Yahoo!/Google finance app
    • Mieru - a flexible manga & comic reader

Front Page

Nokia's CTO, Rich Green, allegedly leaving Nokia over MeeGo and Elop's strategy

BBC News, amongst many others, carried the news that Nokia's Chief Technology Officer, Rich Green, is no longer working at Nokia: An official Nokia statement said he had left to resolve a "personal matter" and gave no date for his return. However, a Finnish newspaper quoted sources inside Nokia saying he had left because of differences over strategy and would not return. Mr Green was known to champion the MeeGo mobile operating system which Nokia recently sidelined. If, as seems likely, it is a disagreement over strategy, it is unclear what - if anything - triggered Green's decision now. Recent statements from Stephen Elop, including those we covered last week, pour even more cold water over MeeGo; a move which does not seem sensible when about to launch a MeeGo-compatible device. This has led some to conclude the Harmattan programme - even at this very late stage in its development, and about to launch - may be cancelled.

Such an outcome would be very unfortunate, both for us in the community and those in Nokia who've been working so hard on it for so longer. However, in your editor's experience, it's not unheard of. Acorn's next-generation ARM-based desktop, Phoebe, was cancelled weeks before launch in a strategic shift of the company after a change in the board. After Acorn & RISC OS, Psion & EPOC and Nokia & Maemo, companies should strongly resist having your editor as a champion.

Applications

Fixing Twitter authentication in Maemo Conversations app

Simon L R has been looking at the Twitter plugin for Maemo 5, which allows mentions and messages to appear as IMs and SMSes: Remember back when Twitter put the kaibosh on Basic Auth and took out a plethora of older, yet fully functional plugins and clients? I know I do, because ever since that day - Maemo 5 no longer had Twitter integration with contacts. What's the point in Telepathy and Mission-Control if the plugins don't work? We all love it on our desktops, that's why the Maemo team brought it to mobile. After futzing with the deprecated plugin, attempting to backport prpltwtr and kludging Pidgin, I shelved it and moved on. Using a Basic Auth proxy, Simon has managed to get rtcomm Twitter integration working again. See the link for details.

Tweed Suit (Twitter client) now in Extras-testing

Marcus Wikström has recently released Tweed Suit 0.7.8-2, a "heavy-weight Twitter client and RSS reader." Tweed Suit is a desktop style Twitter client and RSS reader for people with good eyesight and the need for massive amounts of information. You don't actually have to have a Twitter account to use it. You can just use it as a information gathering tool, but obviously without the direct messages, home and mentions. Tweed Suit is stable enough to use and available in the Extras-testing repository, but it still possesses a number of known bugs.

Got a MeeGo ExoPC? Mong now available in pre-built binary

"Mong," the working title for a game begun at MeeGo Conference San Francisco by Cornelius Hald, Tim Samoff, and Thomas Perl is available to install and play on MeeGo-powered, multi-touch devices. The game is still a work in progress, but is already quite fun to play.


Development

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.

Community

Provide feedback on MeeGo Conference

It's time again to provide feedback about your experience of the 2011 Spring MeeGo Conference To make the next MeeGo conference a success, we are asking attendees to fill out a general survey. You can provide feedback on things like the conference facilities, registration, hacker lounge, evening events, website, warm-up activities, and more.

The overall results will be published for the MeeGo community, but all individual submissions will be kept strictly confidential. Please take a minute to let the conference organisers know how they did.

"MeeGo Pong" (re)naming competition!

The MeeGo Pong team is now seeking a new name: "Mong," a new game that is currently in development for multi-touch MeeGo devices, needs a new name. Unfortunately, "Mong," derived from combinging the words, "MeeGo" and, "Pong," has some negative connotations. Because of this, the Mong developers are holding a (re)naming competition. Entries must be posted to the discussion linked to below by 30 June 2011, 11:59:00 UTC. The winner have their name added to the game credits.

Full video feeds for MeeGo Conference?

A complete feed of the Spring 2011 MeeGo Conference is apparently missing from the Linux Foundation's website for the videos. Currently limited to only the most recently posted "episodes", Niels Mayer is exploring options for retrieving the whole feed. In either case, proper full-length feeds would be a much nicer way for some of us to catch up on all the sessions missed, especially since most media-savvy feed-players can help track what you've watched or get back to where you left off after pausing to watch something else. Can someone at the Linux Foundation fix the MeeGo conference feeds to return the full list, or suggest a way of getting the full list? As there was quite a bit of interesting and useful content presented during the conferences that was missed even by those of us attending, a full feed would be quite useful.

MeeGo Community Office meeting, Tuesday 14th June

The MeeGo Community Office meetings are recommencing, After a long hiatus, the Community Office Meetings are returning and will be held every other Tuesday at 14:00 UTC (7am Pacific) starting on June 14 in the #meego-meeting IRC channel. We've tried several formats for this meeting, but we're moving back to a status update format, since that seemed to work a little better than some of the others. For every meeting, we'll have status updates from key areas within the community office or related projects that have an impact on the community. Most notable on the agenda are the Community Apps update (from Niels Breet) and the proposed nominations for the Technical Steering Group to consider.

It does not appear that this is intended to vet new members of the TSG itself. As some of you may recall from the conference keynote last month, a number of questions were fielded about the vacant TSG spot and possible applicants. Imad Sousou (currently the only member of the TSG) indicated interested applications should put their names forward. As there is no publically documented process for doing so, one of your editors (Andrew Flegg) put his forward on the spot. Although met with humor by Jim Zemlin, your other editor believes this to be an excellent and worthy proposal. Hopefully additional clarity on the process will be gained during the CO meeting this week.

Stskeeps drops out from talk.maemo.org due to noise & trolls

Carsten Munk, one of the widest-ranging and helpful members of the Maemo community, has decided to turn away from the place most of us started: the Talk forum. Think it's enough by now. And this isn't going to have one of those drama comebacks. I've been on here since a long time, helping out with your devices, problems - and it's stopped being fun. And that's a signal for me that the activity has to end. I've had enough of toxicity. Carsten has made clear that his decision to stop contributing on talk.maemo.org has nothing to do with Nokia's decisions (either personally or professionally), and he will continue to work on his MeeGo-oriented projects, such as the N900 MeeGo Developer Edition.

In the second link, "gerbick" is also leaving.

This is an ongoing trend as those of us who started in the Maemo community on InternetTabletTalk back in 2005 increasingly less likely that we'll visit TMO on any given day.


Announcements

WolframAlpha front-end

Wolfram|Alpha - a well-known, online, computational engine - has just been given a QML-powered front-end for Maemo, by Daniele Maio. Wolfram|Alpha's strives to make systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible. Now you can easily access this knowledge with your Maemo device. The application is available in Extras-testing.

ReSiStance RSS client updated

Igalia's Sergio Villar Senin has found some time to update their RSS feed reader: For this release there are 3 major changes: item window new appearance; open links in external browser; labels support. Screenshots and a video are provided. The package is currently only available in Extras-devel.

Stockona - Yahoo!/Google finance app

William Su has put together a new stock tracking application which utilizes data from Yahoo and Google. Stockona is currently a Google/Yahoo finance client in QML for Maemo/MeeGo. It pulls your portfolios from Google finance and shows the quotes for one of the portfolio in a clean interface. Yahoo finance currently provides the ask/bid price info and the chart. Currently available from Extras-devel, care should be taken while installing and testing.

Mieru - a flexible manga & comic reader

Maemo community member, Martin Kolman, has just released Mieru, a flexible manga and comic book reader. Mieru (見える) is a Japanese word that can be translated as to be seen, to look or to appear. Among some of the Mieru's features are support for all commonly used formats, history of last open titles, touch friendly interface and keyboard shortcuts, and more. Mieru is still in Extras-devel, so use at your own risk.