Maemo Weekly News: 17 May 2010
 

MeeGo's "big reveal" mentality hurting the project?

Carsten Munk, maemo.org distmaster and MeeGo contributor, has asked a question many have been thinking: does the desire for a large splash - a "big reveal" as Carsten puts it - hamper, now and in the future, the openness and viability of the MeeGo project? This desire is understandable for closed product launches, but was always the biggest impediment to true community collaboration on Maemo itself. However, the noises made by both Nokia and Intel - both of whom have a lot of experience now with open source development - at the launch of MeeGo were promising. Carsten doesn't think they're walking the walk, though: Carsten poses three questions to MeeGo's Technical Steering Group:

Has this mentality been hurting the project to date?

How will they prevent it continuing after the user interface is unveiled?

How will they prevent it the next time the commercial requirements of a "big reveal" occur?


maemo.org future direction meeting: Monday, 13:00 UTC

The maemo.org meta-meeting, which will seek to address the overall direction of the community - and in particular the paid contributors - will be held today (Monday, 17th May) at 13:00 UTC on #maemo-meeting. Everyone is invited to attend. The agenda, put forward by Dave Neary and Andrew Flegg is: It may be still early to make some decisions - and the viability of MeeGo as a day-to-day operating system for N8x0 and N900 users will play a large part - however the framework for these decisions will be made here; as well as the overall goals so that maemo.org doesn't descend into a "wait-and-see" mode for the next six, nine or twelve months.



In this edition...

1. Front Page
   • MeeGo's "big reveal" mentality hurting the project?
   • maemo.org future direction meeting: Monday, 13:00 UTC
2. Applications
   • Opera release Opera Mobile 10 for Maemo 4 & 5
   • maenotify puts SMSes and missed calls on the lock screen
   • Standalone flash launcher application
   • Lens Cover Reminder shows lens cover status on the N900
3. Development
   • Introduction to OBS build system
   • OBS and Fremantle Extras: huge success, but help needed
   • Getting Qt 4.6 apps (from PR1.2 or Nokia Qt SDK) working on PR1.1
4. Community
   • "Less is more" why big app numbers aren't everything
   • Urho Konttori joins the MeeGo Harmattan team
5. Devices
   • USB host mode on N900 possible
   • MeeGo N900 hardware adaptation layer goes open source
   • Efforts underway to get 3D drivers working on N8x0
   • NITDroid gets Android 2.1 with working touchscreen
   • MeeGo to use btrfs as default file system
6. Maemo in the Wild
   • Nokia launches N900 in Taiwan
7. Announcements
   • Diablo5 theme gives Maemo 5 look & feel on N8x0
   • QtGas: cross-platform mileage and vehicle maintenance tracker
   • Zim notepad/wiki app
   • Carbon theme under development
   • iStyle themes (in various colours)

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 17 May 2010
 

1) What is the difference between the "Applications" section and the "Announcement" section?
In the Applications section there are items like:
"Lens Cover Reminder shows lens cover status on the N900"
and in the Announcement section there are items like:
Zim notepad/wiki app -
and should "Carbon theme under development" be under Announcements or Development?

2) The link "Top 10 downloads" shows, as far as I can tell only the Maemo5 download page http://maemo.org/downloads/Maemo5/

3) You write, about the Diablo5 theme:
"Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the theme developer has elected to host the theme on his own repository. Users hoping to try out the theme will need to add the repository to install it."
Kroll, the developer has been very clear about him not wanting to release it to Extras until more testing has been done (hence the note about it being an alpha release on the first post). Also, seeing how active he is here you would probably had gotten a reply within hours if asked him about it.

Apart from that, good stuff.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 17 May 2010
 

Applications is intended for big or important releases of apps; or links to in-depth articles about applications. Announce is for people who may do an initial announcement about something (anything), but it's not yet got anything particularly large to link to from Applications.

It seems to be broken.

History has shown that developers who cite such good intentions often leave without their source code being anywhere. Extras-devel is a perfectly sensible place for things which are very much under testing.

At the moment, I don't think we have time to chase up every developer for a quote. Similarly, if there's nothing particularly quotable, or there aren't exciting screenshots, it's more likely to be relegated to the Announcements section.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 17 May 2010
 

This can mostly be blamed on me for this issue. I added a number of stories and wasn't particularly careful about slotting the apps vs announcements properly.

That was me, not Jaffa. In this case I didn't do particularly thorough research, but there are only a very few specific cases where not pushing your package to Extras is acceptable. The whole reason we have the tiered Extras setup is so packages that aren't up to production quality have a place to go that isn't anywhere-on-the-internet.

I've dealt with a lot of the issues created by the Repos Everywhere-phase we had back in the early days, and I've been working to help fix that for a couple of years now, so you'll have to excuse negative reactions to watching that trend start again. :)

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 17 May 2010
 

Could we add an Editorial section to MWKN?

Rationale: when I write an editorial on my blog (see last 2 articles before "Diary of a Qt noob") I pull together references to numerous relevant sources. Adding such editorials to MWKN would be like a digest in a digest. ;)

Of course, an Editorial section would need to be clearly separated from strict News content... and I see "the big reveal" article as an editorial, by the way.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 17 May 2010
 

And until a few bed bugs has been fixed. >:3

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 17 May 2010
 

I think "editorial" is a meta-category, to be honest. Editorials tend to be about something, so might fit into an existing category if they're relevant.

For example, Will 2011 be make or break for Nokia? could fit into the Wild category (tangentially related to Maemo/MeeGo and also a little US centric, in Europe I think Nokia "made it" ages ago ;-)). However, I'd say America Offline: Fall of a walled gardener, despite being a well written and interesting article, isn't of sufficient relevance (IMHO) to make it into MWKN.

Agreed. It's notable for two reasons:

1. Carsten's working on it and can use phrases like "we're not working like we should"
2. It highlights whether the TSG are as open and collaborative as they're supposed to be, because whether they reply or not is almost as important as what they say. If the TSG don't reply, they're not participating and probably can't steer the project well in the long term.

However, if it hadn't made the front-page it'd've probably gone in Wild or Development. Probably the former.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 17 May 2010
 

I agree that the "America Offline" article wasn't relevant enough. I only referenced it and the Nokia article as logical examples.

I would still prefer that editorial content be made very distinct from pure news items, but that's just the old-fashioned journalist in me speaking.

(as for Nokia making it in Europe: understood and agreed-- the point was whether or not they've crested. ;))

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 17 May 2010
 

That makes perfect sense, I think, when the news is being written by the journalists; perhaps less relevant to a digest? Although, given the way the UK press dealt with our recent general election, the line between editorial and news was non-existent.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 17 May 2010
 

Eh, I'm not looking to wrangle over it, just my 2 bits. ;)