In this edition...

  1. Front Page
    • Community Council meeting: time to fold Harmattan back into maemo.org?
  2. Development
    • Aegis "open mode" discussion for Harmattan moves to Talk
    • PR1.2 beta release for N950 coming soon
    • SDL and PyGame available for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan
  3. Community
    • Spam comments on the maemo.org wiki
  4. Announcements
    • Command-line/arbitrary service sharing for Harmattan
    • TV-out control for Nokia N9 and N950

Front Page

Community Council meeting: time to fold Harmattan back into maemo.org?

Via: @Jaffa2

A Maemo Community Council meeting took place Thursday last week, with RM Bauer and Momcilo Majic from the council; Niels Breet from Nemein and Matti Airas from Nokia.

Although no firm policy decisions were made, some discussion about Bugzilla upgrades (3.4, which bugs.maemo.org runs, is going EOL) and Downloads repository issues was had.

The interesting bits cropped up with Rob's objection to apps.formeego.org moving to the maemo.org infrastructure. Niels Breet highlighted that moving off meego.com "this quarter" was sensible; and Matti Airas expanded on that:

we might start to promote maemo.org as the backup for meego.com as the latter will be going away pretty soon. we might start to promote maemo.org as the backup for meego.com as the latter will be going away pretty soon. and with that move (and with apps.formeego.org using maemo.org facilities in the future) I don't see maemo.org being shut down any time soon. but that's not a promise.

Re-reading the discussion, it seems there may have been a communication problem - with both Matti and Rob talking, presumably, about the Harmattan aspects of meego.com; rather than the defunct netbook and tablet sections which Nokia has no interest in.

In your editor's opinion, this would be a good move to solve the fragmentation issues which Thomas Perl has raised recently. Obviously such a move would be need to coordinated carefully, but the opportunity could be taken to drop the antiquated bits of maemo.org (e.g. Brainstorm) and consolidate under-the-covers technology around Downloads/Packages/AppsForMeego.

Unfortunately, participation ahead of time wasn't possible due to poor communication about the meeting happening ahead of time. A follow-up meeting is going to be scheduled within the next few weeks to discuss the real policy issues that were only touched on in last weeks meeting. Hopefully we'll know ahead of time this time.

Development

Aegis "open mode" discussion for Harmattan moves to Talk

Via: @qole

Editor: Ryan Abel

Just a heads-up that discussion about Aegis and "open mode" has moved to talk.maemo.org: Starting this thread upon recommendation of javispedro... The original at FMC has become somewhat outdated, given where everything's at now. Those of you looking to track the discussion should update your bookmarks and change your subscriptions.

PR1.2 beta release for N950 coming soon

With many of the goodies awaiting users in Harmattan's PR1.2 being teased, or leaked, it's good to see that developers will get the chance to sanity check their apps on the new version: We will be shortly releasing a developer edition of MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan 1.2 beta (feel free to crack a joke v 1.2 here) to developers with Nokia N950 Developer Device. The goal of this early access release is to enable developers to verify that their applications do not exhibit any regressions in the new platform version.

SDL and PyGame available for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan

Via: @Jaffa2

The N9 Developer blog has announced that thanks to initial porting efforts of Javier [S.] Pedro, Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is now available for the Nokia N9. The packages can be installed from the Platform SDK and Nokia Apps repositories. As is the case with other packages in the Nokia Apps repository, applications submitted to Ovi Store are allowed to depend on them. Therefore, you can submit your SDL games to the Ovi Store!

Community

Spam comments on the maemo.org wiki

Via: @Jaffa2

Editor: Ryan Abel

The wiki on maemo.org has been increasingly bombarded by spambots over the past few months. Andre Klapper has started a discussion on increasing the level of protection: Looking at you can see that spam comments are added rather often nowadays, both by registered accounts but mostly by anonymous edits. [...] I wonder if those changes happen automatically (not really sure) and if some better protection should be introduced (and if it would help), such as CAPTCHAs. This has been discussed before, see http://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3860 for some context. It's probably not the biggest issue, but annoying for those that spend time trying to keep the wiki clean of vandalism. According to comments on the list, the math captcha plugin in use on maemo.org has been cracked. A real fix will likely require a new captcha plugin and more active moderation of the wiki. In the meantime readers (especially those with administrative privileges on the wiki) can help by making a quick check of the recent edits and rolling back spam changes.

Announcements

Command-line/arbitrary service sharing for Harmattan

Via: @Jaffa2

Tuomas Kulve has announced a port of his Command Line Sharing plugin for Harmattan: I use IRC and I want to be able to share photos there easily. For n900 I had implemented a sharing plugin and that worked nicely. When I got the n950 I of course wanted to do the same with that but it turned out to be a difficult task. His icon is, however, shown as a red square. Contributions from other developers are welcome.

TV-out control for Nokia N9 and N950

Via: @Jaffa2

Editor: Ryan Abel

Ville Syrjala has put together a port of the maemo-tvout-control widget for Harmattan: I finally managed to make some progress on "porting" maemo-tvout-control to harmattan. What you'll find there is a a very simple QWidget based GUI, and backend code utilizing XRandR. The backend supports a few extra knobs, when compared with fremantle. However, I was too lazy to write the extra GUI code. So the current GUI offers the same controls that maemo-tvout-control has. The ultimate plan is to write a nice QML GUI for this stuff, although I don't know when I'll have time to learn QML. You'll have to compile the source yourselves for the time being.