In this edition...

  1. Front Page
    • Measuring MeeGo activity?
  2. Applications
    • Wordsler updates
  3. Community
    • Follow forum.meego.com with forum<->email bridge
  4. Devices
    • MetaWatch shipping
  5. In the Wild
    • Nokia N9 commercial leaked
    • Samsung buying MeeGo? (No.)
  6. Announcements
    • glol - global orientation lock on MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan
    • Developing Harmattan sharing plugins
    • Spectrum, NES, GameBoy and TI emulators now available for Harmattan

Front Page

Measuring MeeGo activity?

Via: @Jaffa2

Editor: Andrew Olmsted

Jarkko Moilanen has a thought-provoking article that sets out to try to measure MeeGo community activity by the participation in various mailing lists:

I noticed someone mentioning that mailing lists seem to be quite quiet. I agreed with the statement. In the past months there has been a lot more activity, but lately not so much. One obvious reason came to my mind immediately: holidays. Yet I was not completely convinced that all can be explained with that. So I decided to take a closer look.

The author acknowledges that a straightforward conclusion cannot be drawn simply by looking at mailing list participation, but he offers some interesting insights as to why the numbers may be trending the way they are.

Applications

Wordsler updates

Via: @silkswift

Editor: Andrew Olmsted

Wordsler - a cross-pltform latter rearranging game - has been updated for Maemo 5 and Harmattan, as well as the other systems it runs on. Wordsler 0.3 is now available, mostly for fixing a portrait mode bug, where cards became inaccessible. The online experience has also been improved, with some spinning icons, and some more information when logging in (like words from the previous day).

Community

Follow forum.meego.com with forum<->email bridge

Via: @Jaffa2

Editor: Ryan Abel

The continuing saga of the forum <-> email bridge (which we've covered here a number of times before) is finally coming to an end: Integration is done,please use emails like general@forum.meego.com to create

Devices

MetaWatch shipping

Via: @GeneralAntilles

Editor: Ryan Abel

The Fossil/TI supported MetaWatch has started shipment of their new Bluetooth-enabled digital watches (the analog model will follow soon). For those of you unfamiliar with the Fossil-designed devices, they integrate a TI MSP430 microcontroller and a CC2570 Bluetooth host in a digital or analog time piece (the analog watch features two small OLED displays). The watches are designed to act as dumb terminals to display information from a paired cellphone (notifications, weather, plane departure times, etc.) Both Javier S. Pedro and myself have ordered devices and a Python library already exists for Maemo 5. Hopefully happy hacking will ensue.


In the Wild

Nokia N9 commercial leaked

Via: @GeneralAntilles

Editor: Ryan Abel

MeeGoExperts picked up a leaked Danish television commercial on YouTube for the upcoming Nokia N9: If it is a New TV Ad that Nokia are Launching the N9 with or if it is not is up for debate, what is not debatable is that this damn thing is Gaw-jus ! The Launch of the Nokia N9 is creeping closer and I’m sure it will make lots of people HAPPY (excluding some key countries like UK, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Canada and the US) The commercial is just as slick most of the N9 advertising material has been. Too bad the excitement is undercut by Nokia's multifaceted and significant campaign to kill anything not Microsoft or Windows Phone 7 related, especially in tranditionally large Microsoft markets.

Samsung buying MeeGo? (No.)

A rather hilariously uninformed piece came out of Mobiledia last week asserting that Samsung may be looking to buy MeeGo: The South Korean company is considering purchasing MeeGo, according to tech industry sources, since Intel reportedly shifted its attention away from the little-used mobile OS. While Intel said it will remain committed to MeeGo and its users, the software may not be further developed if another company doesn't purchase it or decide to use it in mobile devices. A CNET piece from later in the week details Samsung's (excellent) response to the rumours, "MeeGo is an open-source project which cannot be a target of acquisition."


Announcements

glol - global orientation lock on MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan

Via: @Jaffa2

Editor: Ryan Abel

Harmattan currently lacks any sort of user controllable orientation lock which, as anybody who's used a device sideways in bed knows, can make it difficult to use the device in non-standard position. As an effort to address this is the short term, Javier S. Pedro has put together a small application, glol, to temporarily lock global orientation: The design is quite simple: it is a "fake" contextkit provider that lies about the orientation. [...] It is a command line application: it needs to be invoked as "glol l" for landscape, or "glol p" for portrait, and use Ctrl+C to kill it. Harmattan users can grab the .deb from a link in the post.

Developing Harmattan sharing plugins

Via: @Jaffa2

Editor: Andrew Olmsted

MeeGo.com user "ab" describes the methods developers can use to implement a sharing plugin in Harmattan: [It] allows applications to share much of service-specific code and keep us all from re-implementing the wheel -- you don't need to have dozens Flickr or Facebook sign-on plugins on the device to write an application that uses Facebook sign-on, for example. The post contains links to working, documented examples of the different ways to acheive this. The good news is - it looks like Harmattan follows the MeeGo sharing framework.

Spectrum, NES, GameBoy and TI emulators now available for Harmattan

Via: @Jaffa2

Editor: Ryan Abel

Those of you who haven't been living under a rock and have some use for emulators are probably familiar with Marat Fayzullin's series of emulators, which he's kindly maintained for free for Maemo for years and has now ported to MeeGo (the ports for both platforms are free): I have ported my retro computer and console emulators to Harmattan. Those of you who own N900s or N8x0s, probably know what these are. For the rest, there are: fMSX - MSX/MSX2/MSX2+ home computer emulator, Speccy - emulates Sinclair ZX Spectrum and its clones, ColEm - ColecoVision console emulator, iNES - Nintendo Entertainment System, Famicom, and DiskSystem emulator, MasterGear - Sega MasterSystem, GameGear, SG1000, SC3000, and SF7000, VGB - GameBoy Classic, GameBoy Color, and Super GameBoy, VGBA - GameBoy Advance, and AlmostTI - TI82, TI83, TI85, TI86, TI84 programmable calculators. Both a direct link to the .debs and a link to a repository for them are available in the thread.