About baby-monitor. Great idea - for audio we ALMOST have perfect solution with bt-headset and Qole's gnome-mixer but... it's auto muted (with fancy auto checkbox selection in mixer panel) 8-| after few seconds of work <cry>

This is similar to something I've had in my mind for a while. Whether it's "cool" or not is for others to decide, but for me it would be useful. For lack of a better name I'll call the app "lifebase".

The app runs whenever you're not using the screen for anything else. You can add notes and jottings and sketches, which get stored chronologically. You can scroll back in time to find old stuff, or you can find old stuff by using powerful search facilities.

But it's also integrated with the rest of the device. Whenever you take photos, mini thumbnails get added automatically. Whenever you travel somewhere, a GPS track of the journey gets added automatically. Whenever you browse the web, a (collapsible) set of thumbnails gets added automatically. Whenever you play some music, a collapsed list of songs played gets added automatically. Any app can submit notifications to add content.

Whenever you have internet access, everything gets uploaded to the cloud and synchronised with your other devices.

Everything is private by default, but you can mark any item as "share with friends" or "share with everyone". Others can then access the shared parts in all kinds of interesting (cool?) ways. Your public articles and sketches become your blog. Your travels can go to twitter ("10.15am - roger arrived at university"). Your friends can play your playlists on their devices. The stuff you share with your friends becomes available to them in an RSS feed.

And at this point I remember that the Nokia 5800 lets you put thumbnails of four of your contacts onto the home screen, each of which can be associated with two RSS feeds, so that you can keep track of what your friends and family are up to.

So the receiving client already exists. We just need the sending client and the cloud storage and processing.

What's my motivation for an app like this? If I want to jot down a piece of information, I don't want to have to open up an application, write something, save it somewhere, remember a filename, then close the application. I just want to put it straight into an app that's running all the time, and whose data I can access from any of my devices, and which can be readily searched and shared.

Roger.

roger,
i hope you are aware you just described some of the future version of liqbase

the GTD (get things done) principles inside liqbase allow me to instantly throw things into a media stream, at the moment its sketches and images, but I want everything from GPS crumbs, barcodes, text notes, urls, accel events ("omg I dropped my nokia), pictures sketches and any other logical data.

it all comes to time and priorities, night times are meant to be for rest, and this year has really strained me just building as far as I have.

Hey that's great to hear! I'm impressed by the software that you have already created.

That's for sure.

Unfortunately, I can't bring myself to do any substantial work on the tablets until I see what's coming with the N900 hardware. I can't stomach the thought of putting hundreds of hours into a project, if I might decide to move to a different device.

Roger.

for me the 810 I got at the start of the year is proof of concept, the time is not wasted.
I've never had a touchscreen device powerful enough to even glimpse what I would like to create, though the ideas have been on thousands of sheets of paper over the years.

Its felt so good to actually start to touch my own code, and I'm looking forward to doing more.

wouldn't it be cool to get rid of questions like 'why don't you see me - I have a camera!' and have Video Enabled Skype client since we alll (not to mention 770) have built-in cameras?

xtc, I have to admit, that was the first shock I had with the device.
I read in the reviews it had skype, and everyone I know with skype has a cam.

It was a big let down to know it was voice only.

I just can't see time spent developing for the existing tablets as any kind of "waste of time". Unless, like lcuk, you are writing really low-level stuff. But if you are a good developer, you go only as low-level as you need to get the speed you want, and you only write that low-level code once. Then you start building on top of that. If the hardware changes, you have to change the low level stuff, but you should be able to drop your higher level stuff on top of it and just recompile. We know that newer maemo devices will be using most of the same toolkits (like GTK), so I don't see how you could waste your time...

I am of the opinion that if the Skype client had been video capable, and the Gchat also video capable there might have been a different sales scenario for the tablets.

I already run liqbase whenever I am not doing anything else on the tablet by default so any added functionality to this great proof of concept is awesome.

funny thing is that what liqbase is aimed at becoming, one could do today without having to build it all into one app.

whats needed is really a interface for the filesystem(s) that tie into a database and can rapidly pull up a cronological story of the content, complete with previews.

desktop search basically.

but then full screen "swiss army knife" style apps always irks me for some reason. its bordering on stacking one os on top of another.