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In this edition...

  1. Front Page
    • Help Woodchuck schedule downloads better
  2. Development
    • Lipstick QML UI: MeeGo CE/Mer
    • Mer & Plasma Active collaboration meeting minutes
  3. Announcements
    • Woodchuck, delayed retrieval engine, ported to Harmattan
    • Bedside - a simple LED-style clock
    • XMCR: an XKCD reader

Front Page

Development »

Help Woodchuck schedule downloads better

Via: @Jaffa2

Neal Walfield has asked for assistance in improving Woodchuck (a library which schedules downloads to the "most suitable" time) by asking users to complete a user survey which will feed into a university research project:

We suspect that significant amounts of data that you use are downloaded on demand and that this data could be effectively prefetched. Although prefetching sounds easy enough, there are a number of issues that need to be considered: when should data be prefetched? what data should be prefetched? how do we avoid exhausting free space? How do we enable applications to coordinate the use of shared resources?

To this end, we are conducting a user study. We'd like you to participate by running our data collection software, which gathers information about the data you use, your network connectivity, and your battery use.

Read more (lists.maemo.org)
Development »
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Development

Announcements »« Front Page

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.

Read more (meegoexperts.com)

Read more (youtube.com)

Read more (github.com)

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.

Read more (dl.dropbox.com)
Announcements »« Front Page
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Announcements

« Development

Woodchuck, delayed retrieval engine, ported to Harmattan

Via: @Jaffa2

Neal Walfield has ported Woodchuck, which we mentioned on the front page, to Harmattan and made it available to fellow N950 developers: I've finished an initial port of Woodchuck to Harmattan. To get it, you need to manually add the source repository. [...] The following packages are available: the Woodchuck server (package: murmeltier), the Python bindings (package: pywoodchuck) and the Glib-based C bindings (libgwoodchuck and libgwoodchuck-dev).

Developers looking to add Woodchuck support to their software should follow the extensive documentation; and contact Neal for assistance, if needed.

Read more (hssl.cs.jhu.edu)

Bedside - a simple LED-style clock

Via: @Jaffa2

Editor: Andrew Flegg

Your editor has published a full-screen clock for Symbian, Harmattan and Maemo, with the aim being a simple LED-style bedside clock which should be easy to read in the dark, without your glasses on.

They've been submitted to Ovi for QA and publication in the store (free), but until that's sorted you can install the binary debs from the linked forum page.

Read more (forum.meego.com)

XMCR: an XKCD reader

Via: @Jaffa2

Editor: Andrew Flegg

Simón Pena Placer has published an XKCD comic reader for Harmattan. XKCD is a "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language" which veers between the insightful, the hilarious and the downright weird. Fortunately, those of us affected by an addiction to it (your editor included) can get their fix through the Ovi Store.

Read more (forum.meego.com)
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