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In this edition...

  1. Front Page
    • MeeGo and Harmattan: Clearing a path
  2. Development
    • Community apps' repositories on Nokia N9 and other MeeGo devices
    • Qt SDK, Harmattan, Scratchbox and autobuilders
    • Release schedule for MeeGo 1.3 finalised
    • Icon generator for Harmattan
    • Using Scratchbox with Qt Creator for faster Harmatan development
  3. Community
    • "MeeGo Pong" (re)naming competition winner!
    • Additional features for MeeGo forum?
    • Should talk.maemo.org have Nokia N9 sub-forum?
  4. Devices
    • Update on Nokia N950 Developer Device Programme
    • Hot Summer release for MeeGo 1.2 Community Edition for N900
  5. Announcements
    • WhoAreYou? - facial recognition

Front Page

Development »

MeeGo and Harmattan: Clearing a path

One of your editors, Ryan Abel has started the conversation about what's necessary to ensure the N9/Harmattan and MeeGo communities work together: The lack of interesting devices shipping MeeGo is currently the platform's biggest problem. Despite the technical differences between MeeGo and Harmattan, leveraging the N9, its users, and its developers is likely to play an important part in determining future success for MeeGo. If Nokia's plans for MeeGo end with the N9, we want to retain as many of those users and developers as we can when they decide to buy new devices. So capturing them early and ensuring they're welcome in MeeGo.com is important. Discussion is trying to capture the obstacles and differences between Harmattan and MeeGo proper, to ensure a seamless adoption of MeeGo for developers enticed by N9.

Read more (forum.meego.com)
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Development

Community »« Front Page

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.

Read more (forum.meego.com)

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).

Read more (forum.meego.com)

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.

Read more (lists.meego.com)

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.

Read more (forum.meego.com)

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.

Read more (developer.nokia.com)
Community »« Front Page
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Community

Devices »« Development

"MeeGo Pong" (re)naming competition winner!

Tim Samoff has announced that Randall Arnold has won the competition being held by the "Mong" developers to find a new name for their multi-touch, two-player, pong game. Randy's name will be displayed in the "About" box, and there's a stylish new logo for

Plonk

Read more (forum.meego.com)

Additional features for MeeGo forum?

Andrew Flegg has reintiated his forum <-> email integration campaign in the form of a multi-feature forum request thread: It'd be great if forum.meego.com had two additional features: The newsub.php feature from talk.maemo.org, which lets you see new posts in a subset of the forum, and push participation (i.e. the forum <-> email bridge). This has been a long-standing request that started in the heady days of maemo.org's middle years. When the forum was started at MeeGo.com, the feature was requested again, but put off due to "server constraints" waiting on the server migration. The migration is now months past and no progress has been made on the integration.

Read more (forum.meego.com)

Should talk.maemo.org have Nokia N9 sub-forum?

An interesting question has been raised about whether to add an N9/N950 forum to talk.maemo.org. RM Bauer has weighed in on the discussion on behalf of the council: Even when this thread was started, Council had decided to add a new sub-forum for the Harmattan device(s). We are just waiting for Reggie to put it up. I am not sure what the delay is, but hopefully it will be resolved soon. The new sub-forum is just for the purpose of organizing threads since N9/N950 threads are popping up in sub-forums where they don't belong and don't read anymore than that into the decision, especially based on subsequent posts to this thread. Your editor is somewhat hesitant to weigh in on the issue given the likely emotional involvement in the discussion, but it does seem like a good opportunity for a fresh start for Harmattan and MeeGo to get away from the poison which has cropped up in talk.maemo.org.

Read more (talk.maemo.org)
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Devices

Announcements »« Community

Update on Nokia N950 Developer Device Programme

Quim Gil has been working tirelessly to get the N950 developer kits into the hands of the 250 lucky meego.com developer who will be loaned one to prime the N9 with open source applications on its release. At the time of writing, four rounds have now been completed, with a handful of devices left to allocate. Quim describes the process: We will continue deciding on 3 (approved) and 0 (declined) today. Let's see how far we go. We have a mix of

- Several developers applying for the same kind of app/feature: music player, comic reader and the likes. We need to find a balance and see who can squeeze the device with great skills and other features.

- Several developers proposing interesting stuff but leaving no record about why they are capable of actually develop what they promise. We need to distill the shy developers out from the dreamers - if you know what I mean.

- Several developers promising to implement features that actually we are not so sure they are possible at all in this platform, or maybe the developer is no aware of the difficulties. Here we also include many projects that require porting of libraries, and we are not sure whether the developer knows the status of those dependencies.

Your editor was a guinea pig for the process and received his N950 on Friday (your other editor notes we all hate Andrew). It's an excellent device, and he looks forward to (at least) 200 packages being in apps.meego.com in time for the N9's release.

Read more (forum.meego.com)

Hot Summer release for MeeGo 1.2 Community Edition for N900

Jukka Eklund has announced the latest release of MeeGo 1.2 CE:

Another week, another milestone for the Community Edition! Since there were some issues and missing items in last week's (mid)summer image, we wanted to keep on improving and now we can all enjoy the results. So head on to http://wiki.meego.com/N900 to download the image. One hint: when you boot it up for the first time, let the system stabilize for some time before taking it into use. For the adventurous, you can also try the MeeGo Tablet UX image for N900, which remains in a very experimental stage.

I am happy to tell that there is a new Helium Mobile Browser [1] included now for the first time. This is a light-weight browser using WebKit, with a Qt Quick UI. We have placed the icon for that in the quick launch bar (the yellow globe). We want to thank Orange Labs UK for developing the browser, and helping to bring it to Community Edition. Mozilla's Fennec browser is also there in its familiar place, and you can recognize that from the MeeGon character icon. Also Fennec has seen continuous improvement all the time, thanks for that!

Since last week we managed to fix the critical "screen wake-up" problem, that made the battery life suffer in many cases. Now the lifetime of battery should be in the regular range of a full day or even several, instead of few hours.

Read more (forum.meego.com)
Announcements »« Community
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Announcements

« Devices

WhoAreYou? - facial recognition

Davide Aimone has ported a facial recognition project to the N900: This is a release to understand how many people can be interested in this and how it works on a phone different from mine. At the moment the program is able to mark some points on face like: eye inner and outer points, mouth vertical and horizontal points, and nose points. This is an university project that I ported to N900 but if I get a good feedback from community I will continue this project and I will add features. The package is now available from Extras-testing, so interested users who are willing to vote on it should check it out.

Read more (talk.maemo.org)
« Devices