Nokia Qt 4.6 to replace Community Qt 4.5 in PR1.2

Nokia will be launching official Qt 4.6 support for Maemo 5 with the PR1.2 release. This may signal an accelerated timeline for pushing Qt support in Maemo 5, which will give a clearer migration path for existing applications to Maemo 6 and allow developers to start preparing for the transition to Harmattan.

Given that the largest criticism for the transition to Qt as the mainstream supported toolkit came from the lack of a developer migration path, this goes a long way in continuing the moves made at the summit to ease that transition. Combined with tools like Qt Creator and MADDE, cross-platform development and deployment with rich tooling support is finally becoming a reality for Maemo.


Council election timeline

Dave Neary has posted the timeline for the March 2010 Maemo Community Council election, with 2nd March being the deadline for electorate karma, and 23rd March marking the opening of voting. Users interested in voting should be sure their Talk and maemo.org accounts are linked before 2nd March - indeed, given it can take 26 hours for a full karma recount, the sooner the better.

The Community Council are the primary interface between the Maemo community and Nokia but, beyond that, they're also responsible for facilitation within the community; making sure that a random developer on IRC is connected with someone on talk.maemo.org or the mailing lists.



In this edition...

1. Front Page
   • Nokia Qt 4.6 to replace Community Qt 4.5 in PR1.2
   • Council election timeline
2. Applications
   • Maemo 5 themeing on Windows for dummies
   • Video how to on using MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, ICQ and more with the Maemo 5 Telepathy system
   • How to use Facebook Chat via the built-in instant messaging
   • ...and 5 more
3. Development
   • Battery status graph for analysis using battery-eye
   • TI collaboration on getting 3D acceleration drivers for N8x0 progressing
   • PySide (Python + Qt) tutorials
   • ...and 5 more
4. Community
   • How to avoid "me too" replies to bugs
   • Should maemo.org have a "mascot" in addition to the community-sourced logo?
   • Efforts to launch a maemo.org store of branded caps, mugs etc.
5. Devices
   • Desktop stand for N900
   • XMPP credentials vulnerable to MITM attacks
   • Mer with working 3D acceleration on N900 with open source kernel (closed libraries)
6. Maemo in the Wild
   • maemo.org group on LinkedIn hits 1,000 members
   • Running Windows 95 on the Nokia N900
7. Announcements
   • Diablo & Fremantle openness reports
   • Quick Brown Fox font viewer in Testing
   • wizard-mounter allows browsing of remote filesystems (incl. SMB & NFS)

As I understand it at the moment, only "contributors" can suggest content? (As the twitters bot will only follow contributors). I guess this stops the editors being overwhelmed with suggestions but does limit the amount of suggestions. Is this the long term plan?

Also, I can't see "apply to be a contributor" link on the website anywhere or am I blind?

(Each of the first three issues has been excellent BTW, thanks very much).

Yes, see http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Weekly_News. I'd love a much larger pool of contributors, but ones with direct access to content in the issue are selected.

Not added yet, sorry. Give a few examples of the things you'd post @mwkn (see the Contributor Reference) and that's all the interview you need :-)

Thanks. I can't quite think what's going to be on the front page of the next one... Suggestions welcome ;-)

Hmm, it seems to me like it would be useful to have some mechanism for the great unwashed to be able to suggest things without the hurdle of becoming a "contributor".

Well two things that I've seen recently spring to mind but they are both only of interest to a segment of the readers:

For UK users:
@mwkn apps BBC iplayer for the Nokia N900 http://bit.ly/9nPTN7

For developers using Fedora:
@mwkn Basic tutorial on creating a QT Maemo app with Fedora http://bit.ly/csBEWm and http://bit.ly/90lVR6

Well the whole MeeGo announcement happened since that last issue so it really has to be related to that, doesn't it? Which links to use should probably wait a few days as I'm sure there'll be further developments, e.g. plans for a MeeGo summit might develop: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=534249

Anyone can do a "@mwkn ...." which I will see, and in future they may go into a section of the pool more visible to the sub-editors.

Thanks for those links, I've sent them through the MWKN process.

And yes, I think MeeGo'll be on the front page ;-)

Ah, of course, I'm being stupid, just because they won't show up in your timeline and they can't dm you, doesn't mean that you can't search for mentions.

No problem, I'll keep mentioning @mwkn until I pass your bar for being a contributor. (I'm @jonquark on Twitter).


Cool