Maemo Weekly News: 3 May 2010
 

Nokia Qt SDK beta gives preview of MeeGo application development

The next stage in Nokia's Qt strategy, and the evolution of Maemo, Symbian and MeeGo was unveiled this week through the beta of the Nokia Qt SDK. Building on top of the Qt SDK, this bundles Nokia's Qt IDE (Qt Creator) with simulators and targets (via MADDE) for all three of the above OSes. This should make targetting multiple platforms easier but, above all, also massively lowers the barrier to entry of Maemo/MeeGo development. Hopefully, this will provide a platform on which hundreds of developers can build applications with relative ease.


Maemo 5 PR1.2 leaked

A new Talk user posted a link, on Sunday, to what was claimed - and seemingly turned out to be - a version of the next update to Maemo 5: PR1.2. The new version, which is well understood from both from Bugzilla and its SDK, introduces a faster version of the Gecko-based MicroB engine (which powers the browser); options for browser portrait mode; Qt 4.6 and a host of bug fixes. The image, which claimed to be the same version as that installed on the Hong Kong N900s caused pandemonium on talk.maemo.org. Randall Arnold was amongst those warning caution: The thread ended with Reggie Suplido, after discussion with other moderators and the Community Council, removing links to the unauthorised image. This is consistent with the stance taken over the unauthorised distribution of other company's copyrighted material (such as emulator ROMs) and was decided without the involvement of Nokia (as far as your editor, and the council, is aware).

There are many reasons why the Hong Kong N900s may have a newer firmware than the rest of the world, including bugs with features not used in Hong Kong; or the introduction of a new hardware variant in Hong Kong which doesn't experience issues faced with earlier devices on the same firmware.

Further threads have highlighted a few problems with the release (which is why it's not been released to the world!) including breaking the cellular modem on downgrading - resulting in an inability to make calls. It is strongly recommended that you avoid flashing random pre-release firmware images to your device!


MeeGo Conference 2010 team formed

Quim Gil has announced the initial team responsible for the MeeGo Conference - which replaces the Maemo Summit this year. He and Dawn Foster will head up coordination; with Dirk Hohndel, Thiago Macieira, Michael Meeks and Carsten Munk forming the content committee. Quim said, If you've been to particular good (or bad) conferences in the past, chip in with your ideas.



In this edition...

1. Front Page
   • Nokia Qt SDK beta gives preview of MeeGo application development
   • Maemo 5 PR1.2 leaked
   • MeeGo Conference 2010 team formed
2. Applications
   • "Super" testers wanted to ease Extras' bottleneck
   • fMMS now considered ready for Extras
   • Crowdsourcing the FaceBrick UI
   • ...and 10 more
3. Development
   • MADDE moves to open development
   • Clarified packaging guidelines
   • Behind the scenes of the Nokia Qt SDK
   • ...and 8 more
4. Community
   • Maemo gets 10 slots in the Google Summer of Code 2010
   • MeeGo Community Working Group meeting: Tuesday, 4th May
   • maemo.org Bugday: help triage and manage open bugs
   • Evaluate the maemo.org distmaster's last six months
   • MeeGo conference likely to be held in Dublin, 9-11 Nov
5. Devices
   • Videos and presentations about MeeGo at Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit
   • Fisheye lens hack for N900 camera
   • LG's Atom-based "MeeGo" (i.e. Moblin) device canned
6. Maemo in the Wild
   • Controlling IR-controlled helicopters again with an N900
   • 3D head tracking on the N900
   • Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo reported to be on wrong side of shareholders
7. Announcements
   • Beta version of Firefox Mobile 1.1 available
   • Macuco (iPhone-site browser) ported to Maemo 5
   • KFZcheck search German car registration database
   • Hack-A-N900 at MetaLab, Vienna: Tuesday, 4th May

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 3 May 2010
 

Thanks for another great issue. However I do have a couple of objections to editorial comments:

(Disclosure: I was the link submitter[1], but not affiliated with the project in any other way)

First of all, citation needed. I don't believe Google is anywhere near being the most used provider, nor do they claim so. I don't have any "official" stats, but it looks like ejabberd may still be the most widely deployed platform, even after jabber.org's migration to M-Link.

It may be true that google don't support pubsub (most of their re-implementations of IETF protocols tend to be incomplete anyway, just ask gmail IMAP users) but most other implementations do and no one has to use gtalk either as there are loads of free services out there.

Also, there has been enough interest here in getting proper user location support instead of the append-random-text-to-status kludge Maemo5 chose to implement.


This has been a known issue with all previous upgrades that touch the modem firmware, and most likely will be with the official PR1.2 release as well.

Someone should also mention that flashing an unverified firmware image downloaded from some random location on the net can be risky. Who's to say that it doesn't contain "additions" that send your account passwords to the publisher or make premium rate calls in the middle of the night?

[1] incidentally, sent with XMPP via tweet.im, which is very handy if like me you use too many computers and don't feel like setting up extra accounts/apps on each one for this :-)

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 3 May 2010
 

Fair enough.

I wasn't referring to number of servers, but number of users. Google Talk's implemented front & centre in Gmail; out-of-the box on all Maemo devices and so on.

If not the most widely used Jabber service, it almost certainly is with regards to Maemo.

Indeed, I wasn't trying to suggest otherwise. However, it seems that more people have tried downgrading (as it's unfinished), and there are dire warnings coming out of Nokia.

Indeed. That point is made numerous times in the thread linked to, including by fatalsaint. Repeating it seemed like overkill: sometimes a warning is more clear without further explanation alongside it.

As I've said, volunteering for editing is welcome - and we'll try and do better next time.