As you may have already noticed in the recent Meeting Minutes, current Council is about to prepare a Coding Competition (CC) for 2016. In times like these, without Nokia or any other corporate entity sponsoring prizes/devices, there are of course limited resources for big giveaways. Nevertheless we believe the approach is worth it. :) We are relying on your donations.





Looking at last CC's, this time it will probably be more of the supportive kind than rival in the first place. Basically we want to support the ongoing AND future software development in a way that ideally, the winners will get the "right" devices to carry on their efforts or even to the next level (e.g. cross-platform).



Now since no current Councilor has ever arranged a CC, we would like to hear your thoughts on how to get it "right", satisfying community demands (SW) as well as individual developer demands (HW). Please share your ideas! And if you've been involved in organizing recent CC's and are willing to help, please holler. And we sure need help in having an uptodate wiki page.



Furthermore, we are calling all owners of now unused devices to consider donating* them for this CC, respectively to MC e.V., who will be responsible for collecting donations and funds. Especially we are looking at those that got rewarded in recent CC's or device programs (N950 anyone? ;)).

* or selling them for a reasonable price.

The voting webinterface will be the same as for the Maemo Council elections, so jury will be you. We also need you to scrutinize the submitted code (ideally installable/executable + binary). It is undecided yet wether or not to accept closed source apps. As the Council is organizing this CC, it will only intervene if a need occurs. Please help make sure conditions and rules are distinct.



Ideas for categories:

- Old NIT‘s |---New released apps only |---Completed |--- |---

- Fremantle |--- |--- |---

- Harmattan |--- |--- |---

- Sailfish OS |--- |--- |---

- "Port it/cross-platform" |--- |--- |---

- "Maintain it" (packages, CSSU) |--- |--- |---

- "Update/Fix it" |--- |--- |---

- "Bugfix it" (known, yet unresolved bugs) |--- |--- |---

- Core development or "Free it" (backport, clone, replace or supersede closed packages) |--- |--- |---

- Recent contributions (recent major releases) |--- |--- |---

- Wishlist (rewarded if/when completed) |--- |--- |---

- Beginner (first release) |--- |--- |---



A variant could be to have category "Update/Fix it" for each of the 4 device categories if it can be expected to have enough entries (and prizes).

Ideas and suggestions welcome. :)



Link: Original article.

<reseved for future comments>

Good plan - I know from the GP2X/Pandora community competitions can be really fun and a great motivator for devs.
Is it possible to make categories and donations per device?

I still have my N900 which got me into coding and development so it holds a special place in my heart. But actually it was the wonderful community that made owning N900 a great thing. Also, without TMO I don't think I would ever become a software engineer.

It is time for me to pay back. This wonderful community deserves more applications so I would like to develop new applications for N900. However I must say I have no experience writing app(lication)s for Fremantle or any other mobile Linux distro. I have made a bunch of apps for iOS/Android/WP8 though.

What is the path I need to take nowadays to create apps for Fremantle? The C++ language shouldn't be a problem for me as I will pick it up since I have experience with OOP languages like C#, Java and Objective-C but I need some advice on the use frameworks. There are some forum posts/wiki pages on setting up Qt but I think they are outdated. Things must have been changed while I was away from TMO.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Well, currently Qt no longer supports Maemo in any manner, but the SDKs for Qt4 (which do support Maemo) can still be found. In particular, this site:

ftp://ftp.informatik.hu-berlin.de/pu...l.no/QT/qtsdk/

has most of the Qt4 SDKs (I just checked, and they are still there).

If you are planning to go the Qt route for writing Fremantle apps, the SDK gives you a great head-start: it comes loaded with dozens of simple example apps for the N900, and a wealth of documentation.

One caveat: as Nokia's servers have been down for a long time now, and Qt itself no longer provides on-line support for Qt4 SDKs, you'll need to get the version of the SDK installer that has everything built-in to it. So, the "offline" installer is the one you want. Moreover, version 1.1.1 was the last version of the SDK that had the Maemo toolchain built-in, so you'll want to get that one. So, for example, if you want to run the SDK on a Windows machine, you'd choose the file:

Qt_SDK_Win_offline_v1_1_1_en.exe

Similar choices go for Mac or Linux, just replacing "Win" with a different identifier.

Or more simple, just grab a VM fully prepared by endsormeans or halftux.
Links to follow (or just do a search)...

For information:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=95387
For short info and download:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...78#post1472078

Or:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...0&postcount=57
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=95806

I would like to see a little emphasis on fixing some most wanted/popular packages from Extras.
We have a host of broken packages in our repos that possibly only need a bit of TLC.
Most people would prefer to go there own direction when designing an application, I can fully understand that.

But take into consideration that someone may have thought about your idea in Maemo's past leaving a half working package in the repos that just needs a little love.

Take a look through the existing packages, see if you can contact the maintainer (e-mail etc), ask if you could be a maintainer. If you get no answer techstaff and CC maybe able to do that provided your package is QA'ed first.

Also have a look at the wiki there is a raft of information there for developers.

Or do like me, forget the SDK and code directly on the phone.

That is quite a good idea.
Do you have a list of affected packages?

Not really there are packages even in Extras with mysterious undiagnosed issues.

I started a working list of "known broken packages" while I had time to package test, but please don't treat this as a list of packages that need fixing exclusively.

Some are not worth messing with at all, some would be nice to have working again. There are many more that I imagine should be added here.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU/...roken_packages

These are all tested on the latest CSSU Stable before being added.