Community apps' repositories on Nokia N9 and other MeeGo devices
The Nokia N900 shipped with maemo.org Extras repository present, but disabled - and later firmware updates had it enabled by default. The N9 does not ship with anything similar, according to the answers to Andrew Flegg's question: Does the N9 ship with any community repository enabled by default, like the N900 did for maemo.org Extras? Although the answer is "no", the community is working on getting Harmattan targets available in the meego.com Community OBS and the app client available for Harmattan. A package in Nokia's repo should allow the applications installed through the client to have all the necessary privileges.
Qt SDK, Harmattan, Scratchbox and autobuilders
To populate the community repositories and the apps.meego.com download site requires packages which can be built by OBS. The Qt SDK isn't quite geared up to this, leading Andrew Flegg to create the mud2 (MeeGo Unified Distribution) a tool which produces various source tarballs and uploads for the maemo.org autobuilder (for Maemo) and the Community OBS (for Harmattan and MeeGo).
Release schedule for MeeGo 1.3 finalised
Rolla Selbak has announced that the exact dates for October's MeeGo 1.3 release have been set down: Main dates are:
MM2: Jul 26 - Intrusive (high risk and priority) changes phase complete
MM3: Aug 23 - Feature development phase complete
MM4: Oct 04 - Branch 1.3 - Stabilization phase complete
MM5: Oct 27 - 1.3 Release More detailed plans are in the wiki.
Icon generator for Harmattan
Javier S. Pedro has done artistically-stunted developers an enormous favour by producing an automated tool for producing Harmattan (and Symbian Anna) style icons from a source SVG: Since I'm an awful designer, I made an autogenerator for Harmattan-style (or Symbian Anna-style?) icons with their background layer from a source SVG icon. It will get the icon's predominant color to build the icon background, and it will also suggest a matching color theme for your application widgets. The tool has a few options and produces very stylish looking icons, doing a good job at extracting the relevant colours.
Using Scratchbox with Qt Creator for faster Harmatan development
Qt SDK ships with an experimental, qemu-based emulator for Harmattan, allowing testing of applications without a device on WIndows, Linux and Mac OS X. However, it's slow. On Linux-based platforms, the "Platform SDK" is Scratchbox-based (as earlier Maemo SDKs were). This gives an opportunity to link Qt Creator into Scratchbox and have the benefits of faster testing with a realistic environment. Andrea Grandi found the page on developer.nokia.com.