Lipstick QML UI: MeeGo CE/Mer
Via: @GeneralAntilles
Editor: Ryan Abel
Robin Burchell and Tom Swindell are working on a new QML-based UI and UI toolkit for MeeGo CE/Mer: Lipstick. So, I'm aiming at using MeeGo CE on a day to day basis.. and I personally really hate the interactivity of that stupid launcher / switcher mode button, amongst many other things. A while ago, I had a thought to re-imagine the desktop in QML, to allow for a lot more flexibility, and thanks to some help from Tom Swindell / alterego and input from a lot of other people, it's starting to take some shape. All the stuff you see on screen is QML (well, with possible exception of the applications themselves), and can be changed easily. Hopefully, once this matures a bit more, the other CE folks will accept this as the new default UI, replacing the aeons-old ugly handset one. Robin has put a demo of the new homescreen on YouTube. The source is available on github.
Mer & Plasma Active collaboration meeting minutes
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Andrew Olmsted
An IRC meeting was held with the Mer community members and the developers of Plasma Active last week. Carsten Munk introduced the current state of the Mer projects thusly:
Core: what does a core mean? Our initial goal is to provide a lean and mean ultra-portable quality Linux/Qt mobile stack. .. and how do we do this? We are here to work together on a mobile core - all of us have many different user interfaces, aims, products, philosophies - in practice, we're all 'vendors' (both commercial and open source) utilizing (or want to) utilize a core in order to share the effort of maintaining one. We want to be able to easily put it on any device and add our stuff on top and ship it. To do a quality core we need to work together on processes - we probably have to do requirements management, QA, release schedules, integration freezes to get there. But we also want to make it possible for people to hack and modify the core as they want and at same time still being able to follow it.
There is lots of good discussion in the meeting log and a lot of work to be done, but it is nice to see direction being discussed openly.