In this edition...

  1. Front Page
    • Quim Gil leaving Nokia, joining Wikimedia Foundation
  2. Development
    • Last week of the maemo.org coding competition
    • Reverse engineered open source version of N900 virtual keyboard
    • Lipstick-powered Maemo 5-style homescreens for Nemo Mobile
  3. Devices
    • New Nemo Mobile release for N900, N950, N9 and x86
    • Android 4.1 - Jelly Bean - alpha release for N9
    • Leaked details of RM-581 - the N8-like Harmattan device from 2009
  4. Announcements
    • Mini-web server for wifi transfers updated for N900 and N9

Front Page

Quim Gil leaving Nokia, joining Wikimedia Foundation

Via: @jaffa2

Editor: Andrew Flegg

Last week Quim Gil announced he will be leaving from Nokia after more than five years with the company and joining the Platform Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation: There I will help improving the volume and quality of community contributions in technical areas like QA, sysadmin and development of features for Wikipedia and related projects. I don’t need to tell you how excited (and impatient) I am about diving into such massive and complex project full of openness and freedom.

Quim has been a fantastic link between Nokia and the Maemo community, by being *part* of the community. It's been a real pleasure to work with him over the years - including the exciting times when Maemo/MeeGo was Nokia's future. We wish him well, and poignantly stop to think what could have been.

Development

Last week of the maemo.org coding competition

Editor: Andrew Flegg

Developers looking to bag one of 14 Nokia N950s or 11 Nokia N9s have only a week left to submit an entry to the 2012 maemo.org Coding Competition: Competition entries must be submitted by 12 midnight on Sunday 9th September (UTC time). [...] New applications for Maemo and MeeGo Harmattan devices (and significant updates to existing ones) will be eligible to enter in this years competition. Whether you are an experienced developer or a beginner on your very first application, we have a category that suits you and your application! [...] There will also be a community bounty made up of individual donations which will also be shared out amongst the best placed entries.

Reverse engineered open source version of N900 virtual keyboard

Via: @jaffa2

Editor: Ryan Abel

Ivaylo Dimitrov has released an open source reverse engineered version of some of the Fremantle virtual keyboard components: More work will be required to implement a complete open source replacement, but this raises the prospects of a portrait version.

Lipstick-powered Maemo 5-style homescreens for Nemo Mobile

Robin Burchell has posted a short demonstration of the flexibility of Lipstick, a QML framework for building mobile user interface home screens which is now used by Nemo Mobile. In the demo he shows off a Maemo 5-style panoramic desktop, multi-tasking view and application launcher running in Nemo Mobile on an N950.

Devices

New Nemo Mobile release for N900, N950, N9 and x86

Via: @jonquark

Editor: Andrew Flegg

The Nemo Mobile distribution, built on top of the open Mer core, has released a new version. In the announcement, Marko Saukko said: New nemo snapshot is now available and contains a lot of fixes, thanks to all from the contributions. I don't have exact list of the fixes, but here are the hilights:

- meegotouch-home is replaced with lipstick-colorful-home

- SMS application was replaced with QMLMessages

- Poweroff was added to statusbar

The version also includes an update to Mer which updates a number of system components. One of the most heartening things is that it's easy to see that Jolla is more than just hot air with the number of commits and pushes referenced in the release from "@jollamobile.com" email addresses.

Nicolas SUFFYS has posted a video of the latest user interface running on an N900.


Android 4.1 - Jelly Bean - alpha release for N9

Editor: Andrew Flegg

The NITDroid project's fifth alpha release for the N9 has bumped the Android version from 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) to 4.1 (Jelly Bean). Although voicecalls don't yet work, a surprising number of features do. In addition to full release notes and installation instructions, a short video demo is included; featuring YouTube and Fruit Ninja. Obviously, it's still a work-in-progress, so be careful before attempting this on your main phone.

Leaked details of RM-581 - the N8-like Harmattan device from 2009

Editor: Andrew Flegg

My Nokia Blog received an email purporting to show pictures of one of the original Harmattan/Maemo 6 devices: I was just sent this in, and the email is already dead. So the info is limited. What we have is a Protoype, supposedly from 2009, that ran Maemo6, more commonly known as MeeGo-Harmattan. Remember the post I wrote about the various prototypes in production? Well this is the Prototype I was told styled off N8, however, if this was from 2009, I believe the N8 was styled off this!

From the sounds of it, this was running a version of Harmattan similar to that discussed at that year's Maemo Summit in Berlin, and subsequently leaked as a mockup: a widget-laden panning/zooming user interface, described by Nokia in 2009 as a "Canvas-style UX".

This is a far cry from the stripped down, swipe user interface which was eventually released on the N9. This refocus on a simpler user interface probably was the reason why the OMAP3-touting hardware was released so late (and too late to be Nokia's hero platform); but also the reason the N9 was released to such glowing reviews.



Announcements

Mini-web server for wifi transfers updated for N900 and N9

Wesley Chong has released a new version of WifiTrans - a personal web server designed to make it easier to transfer files to, and from, your mobile device. Moving forward from Wifitrans v0.1.0 to v0.1.1, v0.1.2 and finally the v0.2.0 is released today. Compare with the initial release, Wifitrans has more variant now (the paid app, Wifitrans, the free version WifitransFree and the full version for Maemo 5 WifitransN900). It has more functionality than the initial release which users can create directory from their browser, folder archive selected directory and also able to delete files and folders.