Reduced character support for N900 users in Greece

Michael Demetriou has made a pre-alpha piece of software available for testing to allow texting in Greek without unicode.

The only thing that is missing now from the N900 so that it can be fully used as a phone in Greece is "reduced character support"

This is a mode that was used in older nokia phones (all symbian phones and dumbphones) and some other brands' phones in order to enable users to send messages in Greek without unicode support.

There are installation details in the thread, but the process isn't a simple package installation at this point.

Built-in CLI tool for triggering Harmattan's "Sharing" UI

In a thread which Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh used to announce a small command-line sharing tool, "ab" pointed to an existing feature in Harmattan which did the same: Share-ui then also filters out list of supported sharing methods based on the MIME type of items to be shared. If MIME type cannot be discovered, there are only few methods that support sharing *any* content (email and bluetooth in default firmware are two examples) but all of them expect FileItem to accept the content which would not happen if files are not registered in Tracker.

Warnings for various Harmattan apps

Randall Arnold has started a thread in order to share critical warnings about applications for Harmattan (a pattern which could be followed once other MeeGo platforms get a larger number of applications and users): Starting this thread to notify the community of app behavior issues [...] note that I created this for alerting, not bug managing. The first warning is for "Video Poker" which seems to have caused Randy some phone UI issues.

Customising the Harmattan swipe model

{url:epage} blogged about a change to the Harmattan swipe UI which he thinks would be cleaner:

My idea centers on a spatial model that spans home screens, the lock screen, and applications. This could roughly be translated to virtual desktops with rules controlling which desktop different windows get launched on based on the desktop's role.

Launch an app, no matter from what screen? As it is opening the device also slides home screens over to the task switcher. Now with the app up a swipe down reveals the task switcher below. If instead you swipe up the app closes. Also you can swipe to the right to move to the launcher or left to move to the events feed.

Felipe Contreras then stepped in to say he had a similar idea, and so made the swipe behaviour configurable. Unfortunately, the configuration file is introduced in a later image than the one currently on N950s.