The seven candidates in the Maemo Community Council election are now after your votes. Voting runs until May 23nd 2012, 23:59 UTC. If you have not received your voting tokens, but think you should be eligible, contact Niels Breet.
Via: @Jaffa2
Quim Gil has consolidated discussion on the N9s and N950s Nokia plan to distribute to the Maemo community, and branded the efforts under a "Summer'12 Device Program" moniker: Nokia is sponsoring a maemo.org device program consisting of 60 Nokia N9 + 40 Nokia 950 with free delivery. One of the goals of this program is to help reducing the list of missing apps (or alternatives & related features). The devices will be distributed through 4 activities. Hopefully this will result in a burst of high-quality, innovative, Qt apps for Harmattan.
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Ryan Abel
Last week, Thomas Perl tweeted a video demo of an N9 hack that displays the currently playing song on the low-power standby screen. It works by rendering the song information in a PNG and setting it as the operator logo. See the link for the video.
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Andrew Flegg
AllBoutN9 reviews an update to one of the commercial FM radio applications in the Nokia Store: The new theme is a very welcome addition. Even though the beautiful classic theme has found many admirers, there are also users who prefer a more modern look with a design which flawlessly fits the N9 interface. [...] FM Radio can receive and display RDS (Radio Data System) informations. This allows the application to automatically show names of channels, running shows or playing music.
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Andrew Flegg
ESPN is the latest big-name content owner to produce an application for the N9. Their F1 app shows stats, results, a countdown to the next event and promises live commentary during the race. As there's still a week until Monaco, this is something your editor wasn't able to verify.
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Ryan Abel
Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh has outlined a method for applying service-specific icons to notifications. I figured out how to have an icon other than the flag for notifications. He's looking for an artist to help create icons, see the thread if you're interested.
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Andrew Flegg
Last week, the Fremantle Community SSU project leads, Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh and Christian Ratzenhofer, held an IRC meeting to discuss how the project should organise the distribution of rewrites of functional, but closed source, Nokia components which do not have to be distributed via the privileged mechanisms of the CSSU: We decided to introduce / work on a deployment system, which allows the Christian describes the proposal in more detail.
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Andrew Flegg
PhoneGap is a popular cross-platform development environment targetting iOS and Android. Having been acquired by Adobe, it's now known as "Cordova" and a version of it has been demoed targetting Qt and, specifically, the Nokia N9: Building Wikipedia Mobile for Cordova (PhoneGap) Qt with Qt Creator and a Nokia N9 phone.
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Andrew Flegg
In a few weeks, the Devaamo Summit will be held in Tampere, Finland. The free programme features many alumni from Maemo, MeeGo and Mer: Open Web & Data, Open Mobile & Hardware! Join the first Devaamo Summit in the beautiful city of Tampere, the largest inland city in the Nordic countries. Devaamo Summit is a developer-oriented event packed with sessions and showcases about openness in development. Unfortunately, work commitments make it unlikely your editor would be able to attend, despite it falling on a weekend.
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Andrew Flegg
WhatsApp is a popular IM service which, instead of manually contacting each of your friends to see if they're on the service, matches entries in your phone book directly. This has caused some consternation in the past with the privacy of people's contact details, but the application remains popular. So popular, in fact, that a concerted effort has led to a reverse engineered version being released for Harmattan by Tarek Galal. Since its first release earlier in the week, it's now had an update with numerous bug fixes and a more polished user interface.
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Ryan Abel
Recent efforts by Michael Sheldon have resulted in the porting of the Ogre3D rendering engine to Harmattan: Recently I’ve spent a little time getting the Ogre3D engine into a state where it’ll work on the Nokia N9 and N950 MeeGo phones. To test the port out a bit more extensively I decided it’d be a good idea to try porting an existing game, at which point rzr suggested Those Funny Funguloids. So after a fair amount of hacking to make it compatible with my version of Ogre and to make the controls work reasonably on a touch screen device I have a playable version. See the blog post for a video demo, a link to the Funguloids port, and the modified OGRE.
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Andrew Flegg
Jens Georg announced his "PushUp" DLNA sharing plugin back in April; but your editor had cause to use it recently and it does exactly what you'd expect. Jens describes the background: Ever since the announcement of the N9′s DLNA support people were looking for a feature called DLNA +PU+ which allows you to send media files to e.g. DLNA-capable TVs without enabling content sharing on your device, giving you a really fine-grained control about what and where to share to. Your editor used it to stream a TED video from his N9 to a Linux media PC running XBMC.
Via: @Jaffa2
Editor: Ryan Abel
Thomas Perl and Christian Ratzenhofer have put together a small installation package to reset a device's root password: I found myself in a situation where I forgot the root password of my device in closed mode, and I didn't want to go through a reflash, so together with the help of merlin1991, we figured out a way to reset the root password without any "dirty tricks" like open mode or inception. This does nothing more than a "passwd -d root" in the postinst script, and is trivial to rewrite from scratch, but just for convenience, here it is as a nice package. As Thomas notes in his post, this is why it's inadvisable to install random .debs from the internet from untrusted sources—and why your humble editors at this fine publication continually remind you of that point.