PulseAudio really excites me here. My n810 is the device I have long desired to have connecting to the PulseAudio server on my bigger laptops and desktops. Very, very nice

Upnp is also good. Upstart, on the other hand, I hopefully won't have any encounters with. (Always-on device and all that :P)
Not that it isn't great software, of course.

A2DP! Finally!

The original slides: http://flors.wordpress.com/2008/09/1...evsesh-slides/

It probably means libical (with perhaps a userland utility) is ported to Maemo 5.

This opens the door to a PIM application for Maemo 5 because iCalendar is an open standard to import and export PIM data to and from an application to another. Many programs support the iCalendar standard already (sometimes with 3rd party plugin). Think of Mozilla Thunderbird, KMail (Kontact), Novell Evolution, and many other groupware suites ((incomplete) list).

You see, all of the mentioned changes are frameworks or otherwise deeply engrained in the OS. They allow Nokia or 3rd party developers to program and/or port applications which use these frameworks. Quite a few of these frameworks are part of the freedesktop.org initiative which is leading towards standardisation in 'the Linux desktop' (although not excluding other Unices).

Here are the project pages of the new technologies (frameworks):

* Meta Tracker
* PulseAudio
* OHM
* gUPnP
* upstart

By going to the homepage you can get an impression what it is about although its written for developers rather than for end users.

OHM is the one I'm the most excited about. I remember when Robert Love announced HAL, and I immediately saw the need for this because it'd allow hardware to work out of the box like other OSes do (or try to do). OHM is like an extension of HAL, thinking ahead with the user, providing her the user experience she most likely wants. This opens the door to a more user-friendly environment. I'm thrilled about OHM. Not only on Maemo, on *NIX in general. I'm very happy Maemo is going to include this. However, its important to note all of the above are quite related to usability one of the weak spots of the open source desktop experience. Ubuntu is also investing in this.

While OHM looks very nice (it's about tied with PulseAudio for me), the one irritating factor is the notion of all policy logic being compiled, coupled with the lack of a convenient compilation solution for Maemo to date; it'd be nice for everyone to be able to hack on that sort of stuff without the entry barrier of setting up a whole cross-compilation SDK.

Hmm, I'm not sure everyone should (or wishes to) be able to hack on such.

What would you suggest to make the barrier smaller? Have you tried Maemo + VMware with the newest SDK? I find it pretty convenient. This method works on Windows, Linux, and MacOS X.

Why both with a sucky cross-compilation setup at all? With all the power of OMAP3, you might as well just do the dev work on device. No nasty cross-compiling, no difficult to set up build environments. Just grab the build tools and make away.

Heck, for only a little more than the price of an iPhone SDK license get yourself a Beagle Board and use that as your dev machine.

Nice although having all development utilities on your NIT, and using the NIT to test out software... I'm not sure I want that. What would a Beagle Board approx. cost?

Dunno what shipping would work out to, but it's $149.

...and sooner or later, we're gonna need Maemo Server to run on our beagleboards.