Updates for MaePad & GPodder - now both PR1.2 ready
Thomas Perl has announced updates to both MaePad and GPodder. The first is a quick, hierarchical, note-taking tool and the second is the leading podcast manager for Maemo. So, what's in it for you? Let's start with gPodder: Progress bar for loading episodes (and optimized episode list loading); "All episodes" view is not grouped per-podcast anymore (all episodes are now sorted descending by date); Faster download resuming on application start (with progress dialog); Automatic clean-up of finished downloads. And now for your favourite productivity tool, the MaePad: Fullscreen mode of checklists uses portrait mode (for shopping use, etc..).
PrayerTime app under development
Mohannad Hammadeh has released an application to help call you to prayer: After battling with C++ and Qt for a few weeks I am pleased to announce that I finally have a working and stable prayer time calculator app for the N900. For the time being im calling it PrayerTime, that name will change. The application is not yet in a repo, so extra care should be taken when installing random third party debs from the Internet.
Simple Search Tool for files and content
Kamen Bundev has released the first versions of a simple Tracker-wide search tool. Tracker is the central meta-data database in Maemo 5: A temporary plug for a temporary hole. Simple Tracker-wide search (not system wide since by default Tracker only indexes /home/user/MyDocs and /media/mmc1). I basically got Tracker-search-tool which is lately written in Genie, converted it to Vala, replaced the SparQL queries (in 0.7) with the old RDF ones (0.6, which we have) and severely butchered and hildonized the interface. The result is silently sitting in Extras-devel for the brave to try (and to disable your Extras-devel after that). Its called Search Tool.
Track Extras-testing and Extras releases through Twitter
Thomas Perl has deployed a Twitter bot which will post updates as packages move into Extras-testing and Extras: If you want to be informed about which packages enter Maemo Extras (and Extras-Testing) in the Maemo.org repositories, you can now follow the user "maemoextras", which will automatically post links to the packages interface whenever a package is promoted to Testing or Extras. Along with tools such as Attila Csipa's AppWatch, this should make tracking new and exciting software easier.
Brain Party ported to Maemo 5
Thomas Perl (again) has announced that Brain Party, a game popular on the iPhone and recently open sourced for Linux by its authors, has been ported to Maemo 5: It's good to see developers porting their games to Linux and open sourcing them, which makes learning from their code and porting the games to other platforms very easy. If you like the game, please support the developers by purchasing Brain Party for the iPhone (you probably don't have an iPhone, so show the N900 game off to your freedom-hating friends and tell them that they should purchase the game for their iPhone/iPod touch on the App Store). The game is also available for Windows Mobile and Xbox 360. No-one can complain about having more high quality games released for Maemo, especially if they are open source and released through maemo.org Extras.