In this edition...

Front Page
- Future of Nokia's PySide project for Python & Qt
- Do you read talk.maemo.org? Want to help MWKN?
Development
- Core MeeGo OBS API experiences frequent downtime
- Quim Gil's experiences with Qt Quick
- MeeGo Architect team changes?
Announcements
- Perth Trains - live departures for N950
- MyMoves - system gestures for Harmattan
- EmuMaster for console emulation on Harmattan
- Miniature chess engine for Harmattan
- TwimGo updated with auto-loading of tweets and pull-down-to-refresh

Front Page

Future of Nokia's PySide project for Python & Qt

PySide was a Nokia-led project to produce a more liberally licenced set of Python Qt bindings (compared with PyQt). Matti Airas has started, on the PySide mailing list, a discussion on the future of the project:

Currently, the vast majority of the PySide core development is done by the OpenBossa INdT team in Brazil and funded by Nokia's MeeGo Computers team - the PySide project has internally been an enabler for the MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan Python project. Unfortunately, the Nokia N9 is the only MeeGo (Harmattan) phone to be published by Nokia, and Nokia's MeeGo team is being ramped down already in the near future. Because of this, the Nokia MeeGo funding for PySide is slated to end after this year, and I have also failed to find a new sponsor for the project within Nokia.

So, what are the implications? What I hope and believe will happen is that the project is already sufficiently healthy to stay alive and grow without Nokia acting as a midwife. This would imply the community to take a leading role in both the project guidance and actual development. This can of course happen in several ways. First, independent open-source developers may pitch in. Second, there are many companies using PySide by now. They might want to contribute to PySide due to their own interests. Third, there might be some companies providing support and services for PySide. (INdT?) Finally, their might be some company with sufficient interest to take the main responsibility for future development.

Pleasingly, Luciano Wolf has come along and said that "INdT/OpenBossa intends to maintain this project even without monetary support from Nokia".

Do you read talk.maemo.org? Want to help MWKN?

Your editors are doing the majority of finding of content (as well as fleshing it out). A lack of time has meant that reading talk.maemo.org isn't getting the attention it deserves. If you read TMO, we're interested in knowing what threads and posts you think are valuable. All you have to do is "tweet" the URL to the @mwkn Twitter account with a set of keywords. Details and examples on the link below.

Development

Announcements »« Front Page

Core MeeGo OBS API experiences frequent downtime

MeeGo's OBS woes grow deeper, now, with investigation by Thomas Rucker revealing that, past the near-weekly http downtime issues, the are more severe backend problems with the service: It looks like core OBS has serious stability issues with its API service. This seems to have been masked by the http downtimes so far. There are still frequent, albeit mostly shorter, downtimes of the whole OBS as seen over http(s), but the major problem as seen from linked OBS perspective is that the API remains inaccessible after such downtimes. The unavailability of the Core build service, which also brings down the Community OBS, is something of a major productivity hinderance. Hopefully the team behind it can get the kinks worked out without too much hassle.

Quim Gil's experiences with Qt Quick

Quim Gil describes his experiences in reviving the "Miniature" chess game on top of the N950 developer device programme: After the N9 launch I saw with despair that proper mobile chess was still absent in the Qt catalog. I made a second call, and almost miraculously Michael Hasselmann answered again, but this time stating clearly that he would focus on the backend and somebody else would need to work on the UI. I looked around. I looked myself in front of the mirror (mentally, I mean). The first Miniature had to deal with Qt 4.6 and QGraphicsView with no cutton or oil. Hardcore stuff. Now the declarative and Javascript friendly Qt Quick was at the forefront, waiving the slogan of Programmers and Designers Unite! I decided to give it a try, getting a tacit permission from my manager to call some of this time “training”.

MeeGo Architect team changes?

Compare and contrast: Sunil Saxena is Chief Architect and Senior Principal Engineer in the Open Source Technology Group of the Software & Services Group at Intel Corporation. He leads the MeeGo Architecture effort, and is responsible for determining what is included in MeeGo and what is not. He works with the industry in driving MeeGo acceptance and helping to get products created with MeeGo for Intel(r) Atom (tm) based platforms.

Arjan Van De Ven is the Chief Architect for Meego, responsible for the overall MeeGo architecture, day-to-day technical decisions, and architectural evolution, while leading the Distribution Development team. One of these things is not like the other. It is saddening that it's not actually surprising that there's no mention or highlighting of this change on meego.com; although it's possible that this is a mix-up and there are similar, but unrelated, titles.

Announcements

« Development

Perth Trains - live departures for N950

A Talk user "mattaustin" has put together a departures information application for trains in Perth for Harmattan: This application provides a simple interface to check the 'live' departure times of train services across the metropolitan area of Perth, Western Australia. N950 and N9 owners can grab the .deb from the developer's Nokia Developer site.

MyMoves - system gestures for Harmattan

Topi Santakivi has hacked together a utility for Harmattan that should prove useful to many users by extending the swipe interface in Harmattan. MyMoves is an attempt to bring configurable gestures to Harmattan, written in QML/C++. The idea of MyMoves is to be able to create a gesture, and attach an arbitrary shell command into it. Topi includes a video showing how to set up gestures and several custom gestures opening system applications, and also plans on extedning the functionality and making the application more user-friendly.

EmuMaster for console emulation on Harmattan

A blogger going by the name of "elemental" has release a console emulator (it looks like just NES for this release, but more are planned) called EmuMaster for Harmattan The aim of EmuMaster project is to emulate popular consoles like NES, SNES, GB, C64 and more. I know that there is a lot of emulators out there. But what I saw is they are not so easy to use or lack some cool features. So I decided to bring my ideas to the world of emulation. I have started with NES but there will be more. The most important thing now is to let you know how I see an emulator should look like. The video accompanying the post looks pretty compeling and there are some very interesting features - such as the cover flow-like game selection and nice on-screen control design.

Miniature chess engine for Harmattan

Quim Gil announces "Minature 0.3 Berlin Defense" - a chess project for Harmattan devices. Miniature won't play games yet, but it provides a fully featured user experience and a backend with its foundations in place. We are looking for a new breed of testers and developers and we couldn't wait to share the good stuff that is being cooked. You can find screenshots and more at http://wiki.maemo.org/Miniature There is progress toward playable games already being made and contributors are welcome.

TwimGo updated with auto-loading of tweets and pull-down-to-refresh

Tommi Laukkanen has released a new version of his TwimGo Twitter client featuring everybody's favourite mobile Twitter client feature: pull-down-to-refresh If you’d like to help and test this release, please download your deb (MeeGo and Maemo) or SIS (Symbian S^3 and S60 FP5) files from TwimGo project page It would be nice to see TwimGo in a repository for eaiser installation and updates, though presumably this will come in good time.

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