"Super" testers wanted to ease Extras' bottleneck
The Community Council has put out a call for volunteers to act as "super" testers to try and get more software - especially niche software - through to the end-user facing Extras repository: A package which has been in the QA queue for 20 days without the requisite votes can be "swayed" by 3 votes from super testers. Testers will be shown as (tester), just like maintainers are visible now. So this process will be transparent to the maintainer too. Volunteers should sign up in the thread: the council will, in conjunction with the Testing Squad, decide who to accept. However, anyone is able to be a "normal" tester by heading over to maemo.org/packages/ and testing software.
fMMS now considered ready for Extras
Nick Leppänen Larsson, the author of the Maemo Community's answer to MMS support on Maemo 5, has released version 0.9.13, which he now considers ready for Extras. Finally, the day of days! Today marks a milestone in fMMS development - I consider it ready for Extras. Baring any serious bugs in this release I'll bump the version number up to 1.0.0 and promote it to -testing within the next few days. :) fMMS has been on a long road of development since plans were started in December 2009 that is finally nearing its end. It goes to demonstrate the power of an open operating system when its users and community developers can step up and provide features the manufacturer omitted.
Crowdsourcing the FaceBrick UI
Robin Burchell is looking to crowdsource the FaceBrick (a new Maemo 5 Facebook frontend) interface through consensus. Normally, developers of applications call the shots, sometimes through listening to their users part by part - I've decided to try something different (at least this once - maybe more): decision by consensusUsers interested in participating in this development experience should head over to the thread and vote on changes to the newsfeed UI.
Harmattan technology demo shows off music metadata
Philip Van Hoof, the lead Tracker developer and a contributor to Modest and Tinymail (its backend), has released an overview of metadata and social networking integration in Harmattan. [He's] implementing so-called writeback. It means that when you change a local resource's properties, that this integration will update Flickr, Facebook, picasaweb and Twitter. You change a piece of info about a photo on your phone, and it'll be replicated to Flickr. It'll also be synchronized onto your phone as soon as somebody else made a change. This glimpse into the workings of Harmattan's metadata features and social media integration gives us an interesting picture of the kind of connected lifestyle Nokia is pushing with the Nseries and Maemo/MeeGo devices in particular. Let's hope it pans out for Harmattan (as tight Tracker integration was one of the features dropped from Fremantle).
QSportsEvent: a community-brainstormed sports league- and team-tracking application
Users and developers on the Talk forums are collaborating to develop a Qt-based sports-tracker application called QSportsEvent. As it depends on Qt 4.6, the install process is currently fairly involved.
Proper drawing application under development for Maemo 5
Maemo doesn't have much in the way of current drawing apps, with Sketch being the extent of most people's experience. However, MeeGoPortal has recently pointed out anders_gud's port of MyPaint to Maemo 5. In his announcement, he says it's a straight port from Debian Squeeze - mainly changes to the build system (scons-local, debhelper, swig workaround) and small changes for Hildon compliance - Finger Friendly Menus, StackableWindows &c. If nothing else, the pictures in the Talk thread are impressive and show what the software is capable of. The software is quite involved to install, though, as it is being distributed as a series of discrete debs; rather than through a repository.
Sygic's Mobile Maps free 7-day trial
A 7-day trial version of Sygic's Mobile Maps for Maemo has been announced and is now available from the Ovi Store. Turn your Maemo phone into a turn-by-turn voice guided navigation system with maps stored on the phone, speed limit warnings, plenty of points of interest, multi-stop route planning and more. Mobile Maps is free for 7 days. Visit sygic.com/maemo for more information. Given the dire state of Ovi Maps on Maemo, and the ~59eur price tag for Mobile Maps, a week-long trial seems a very smart move.
Azimuth: XEP-0080 location publishing
Guillaume Desmottes has published a small daemon which implements the Jabber/XMPP specification for geotagging your location. This means, in addition to your status, you can inform your instant messaging buddies your location in a machine readable form. It's in a very early state and has some problems: Here comes Azimuth a small daemon publishing your location using the Telepathy Location interface. The interface is only implemented in telepathy-gabble at the moment. That means that your Jabber server has to support Pubsub to be able to publish. Unfortunately, Google Talk servers don't. Given that Google provides the most used Jabber servers on the planet, this is likely to be of technical interest only - for the moment.
GSoC: Canola for Maemo 5 and MeeGo
The aim of this project is to port Canola to Maemo 5, fixing problems that it shows. Also change some of the underlying libraries to adequate better to Maemo 5 infrastructure/guidelines. Moreover the project aims to prepare Canola for Meego.
GSoC: FaceBrick - Maemo Facebook client
The project would focus on adding features to the newly created application, FaceBrick. Apart from FaceBrick, there is only one Facebook widget for maemo and it does not provide a whole lot of functionality. Judging by the responses from the community, there seems to be an interest for a full Facebook client.
GSoC: Geo-location adventures using N900
The Tablet of Adventure is a tool for generating and sharing location-based adventures with Maemo devices. The adventures may be manually created or follow the Geohashing "automatic adventure generator" concept as popularised by the xkcd comic (#426)
GSoC: QT-based ebook reader
The goal of this Google Summer of Code -project is to develop an eBook reader for Maemo 5 using Qt 4.6 libraries. The eBook reader should be simple, easy to use and it should support at least most common eBook formats.T he UI should be touch-optimized and finger-friendly.
GSoC: Shepherd - task triggering for Maemo
Shepherd is an advanced scheduler that can do a wide variety of tasks depending on a number of triggers. The project will aim to improve on the capabilities of Shepherd. I plan to add more ways of triggering an action and more actions to be taken when the triggers is meet.