Custom ringtones for N900 contacts
Marco Barisione, one of the developers working on Maemo 5's wonderfully integrated contacts system has released a plugin which allows the assignment of custom ringtones to each contact individually. In addition to trying to handle failure situations gracefully, it also tries to integrate nicely with the system: you can select the default ringtone in Settings > Profiles as usual; to set a custom ringtone you go to the Contacts application, select the contact and press the new 'Set custom ringtone' button in the menu; the dialog to set custom ringtones tries to be a perfect copy of the dialog to set the global ringtone; it works both for normal phone calls and GTalk/SIP/Skype calls, thanks to Telepathy; the ringtone is played only when the normal one would be played and at the same volume, thanks to some PulseAudio magic. This is an initial version and experience, according to the comments on Marco's blog, have been mixed. Marco posted an article slightly before the release explaining the technical difficulties any system trying to implement per-contact ringtones would have to overcome.
Maezer: accelerometer-based labyrinth
Whether it's a maze, or a labyrinth, is up for debate; but Andrew G's game in development offers to waste a few hours without having to debate which it is. Announcing the game, which is currently only available in Extras-devel, he described it as, A simple accelerometer controlled Maze game. You control the small red circle by tilting the phone and make it move around the maze till it finds the green box. There is a simple timer, and the ability to make new random maps or reset the current one. Screenshots, videos and comments from users are in the Talk thread below.
Exult - Ultima VII engine - now in Testing
Kamen Bundev has pushed "Exult", his Ultima-game playing engine to Extras-Testing. Exult is an open source engine for playing Ultima VII on a variety of modern operating systems and environments. The Black Gate (including Forge of Virtue) and Serpent Isle (plus Silver Seed) are both playable to the end. Obviously you need the original game files to play. Users willing to test beta software are encouraged to enable Extras-Testing and vote the application up or down if it works.
Timed Silencer switches between silent/general profiles at fixed times
Christophe Dumez has unveiled a handy little application to automatically switch to the "Silent" profile at certain times of day, on certain days of the week: This app can be used to schedule daily switching to the silent profile and back to the general one. This is a feature I was missing in the N900 so I decided to program it. There was an existing app for this (silencer) but it lacks functionalities and its UI is not really intuitive. Its UI is very similar to the one of the Clock/Alarms application so users should be familiar with it. It is possible to define several profile switching events and use different timing settings for each day of the week. The application is currently in Extras-testing, so users willing to help test beta-quality software and check its conformance with the quality assurance guidelines are encouraged to install, test and vote on the pacakge. Translators who are willing to help port the software into another language are also wanted.
Themable Maemo 5 analogue desktop clock
Nicolai Hess has created a new engine for the analogue clocks skins for "CairoClock". With many pre-existing skins already in existence, this could give a quick way of personalising your desktop, whilst still providing something of use.