Autotools for Beginners
David King has posted some new tutorials to help beginners understand Autotools, the tools which make up the GNU build system: Murray wrote some autotools tutorials a long time ago, which got refreshed a couple of times, but were starting to show their age (`Wow, look at this new pkg-config thing!'). I updated them over the course of a few days, and Daniel checked that everything was as it should be. The example projects are now hosted on Gitorious for easy browsing. Lots of old and deprecated macros were removed, and it was possible to condense the information down to something that should hopefully be less scary for the beginner. This is a particularly difficult subject for most new developers and packagers, so hopefully these tutorials should help to reduce the learning curve for the toolset.
Maemo 5 notifications from Python
Daniel Would has published an article on providing email/SMS-style notifications from Python code. In the last couple of days I've spent several hours trawling the internet in search of an example of something I hoped would be fairly easy. How to trigger an IM/Email type notification event from python. Many people have asked that Witter do these style of notifications when a mention or DM is received. But how to do them? The example has already been used to good effect by Nick Leppänen Larsson in fMMS.
Business-focused development with Maemo?
Felipe Crochik asks whether any businesses are targetting Maemo - either for consumers or as ISVs shipping Maemo devices as the hardware. I imagine a lot of people on this list are somehow "sponsored" by nokia (and/or other companies) trough sponsoring open source projects. I am curious to know if there is anybody (or any software company) trying to use the maemo/n900 platform to develop software to be sold to consumers and/or companies. From time to time we see someone complaining about Ovi store not selling applications but I haven't seen anything about software being developed as some business solution. Those of us who've been involved in the Maemo community for a long time will remember companies reselling Maemo devices as a turn-key solution for their software; however the fact that your editor can't remember their name is probably indicative of their overall success - or at least their participation in the community. However, big businesses like Opera, Skype and Sygic are targetting Maemo. But is it enough?