FM radio GUI for Nokia N9
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Andrew Flegg
Thomas Perl has put a GUI around Javier S. Pedro's work on enabling the FM radio receiver in the Nokia N9 and N950: I've spent this afternoon working on the GUI. Thanks to javispedro for releasing the fmrx code. Modified the fmrx code to accept new frequencies on stdin and then wrote a QML UI around that. Both pieces of software are at an early stage of development, so if you'd like to help out be prepared to risk possible, albeit unlikely, breakage. Videos, screenshots, source code and an unsupported binary are on the other side of the link.
libconnui-dev and operator-name-cbs-widget for N900
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Andrew Flegg
Jonathan Wilson continues his exploration and exposing of Maemo's connectivity innards with the release of it works pretty good, it applies the patch and it displays the right output (except for the operator name which I am still working on) but I want further feedback on what I should be doing differently.
n9-apps.com launches
Editor: Andrew Flegg
The folks behind n9-apps.com have unveiled the new aggregate application directory for Harmattan. Developers will have to upload the information themselves, and with no QA processes of their own, your editor asked what the selling point is, and why developers should care. Mikael said: Originally, we had the idea that Nokia Store and apps.formeego.com are 'primary' or 'trusted' sources, but others would be available too. I don't know if there's any real need for other sources though and I think we'll eventually allow just these two sources.
We will be working in the direction that it would be as easy as possible to submit new apps. So, we will definitely pull meta information from apps.formeego.com when that's possible. However, we quite probably won't index packages from there automatically, but developers would have the option to pull the information for their apps.
Certainly primarily pointing to Nokia Store or apps.formeego.org will solve the QA issues, and providing a unified storefront will be advantageous to users. It also looks pretty. However, the developer experience will really need to be very simple for it to avoid contributing to a similar fragmentation of "app stores" that afflicts Android, with a much smaller number of apps to do that with.
NFC tag writer for Nokia N9
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Ryan Abel
As most of you probably know, the N9 features support for NFC (Near Field Communications—think RFID), but there isn't much software for expiremantation available out of the box. Rodrigo Linfati is working to rectify this shortcoming and has released software to allow the N9 to write to NFC tags: It's program can write Text, URI, VCard and Smart Poster to a NFC Tag using the Nokia N9. The software is currently available from the developer's personal repository on MeeGo.com.