Plugging the Maemo Cross-Reference
Thanks to timeless, maemo.org has long been the home of a useful tool which many of you have likely overlooked: the Maemo Cross-Reference (or MXR). Likely those of you from the Mozilla community are familiar with the tool, which provides a searchable cross-reference for all of the open source code shipped by Nokia in Maemo and most of the community code in Extras. Only few of you might know, that there is a cross reference tool for Maemo source code. Cross reference tool – what does that mean? It means that you can… browse throughout all the existing open source code of Diablo, Fremantle, Qt and more, search by keywords in the code, click and browse through references of functions, classes and parameters All that is done with a consistent and intuitive UI. To understand, how powerful the tool really is, and how it can help you understanding parts of the platform, please visit http://mxr.maemo.org and try it out. Play a little bit around and let us know, what you think about it. The index for Fremantle is based on debian packages. Efforts are currently ongoing to add MeeGo's code to the index.
Why providing custom per-contact ringtones isn't as simple as it sounds
Marco Barisione, a software engineer for Collabora (the company that does most of the work on Maemo's communications software—Telepathy, etc.), has shed some light on the difficulties involved with implementing seemingly simple features like per-contact ringtones in computer-like mobile devices. Implementing some features can actually be quite difficult and it could be better to skip those from your product and focus on other things; on the N900 one of these missing features is the ability to set customised ringtones for specific contacts. Unfortunately, however sound the justifications, the market is frequently unforgiving of faults like these (especially when competitor's devices in the same device segment manage to avoid them). This illustrates more of a failure of Nokia to properly support Maemo as a software platform than anything else, although it does provide an interesting insight into some of the hurdles faced by developers of these new pocket computers.
MeeGo Community OBS looking for beta testers
The Community OBS for MeeGo is getting closer to launch and the developers need beta testers to help ensure it's ready and dig out any final bugs. David Greaves is asking for help testing on the MeeGo-dev mailing list. We're looking for beta testers for the community OBS. The current focus is on ensuring non-core apps (and libs) can be built against MeeGo and Maemo. We need people who know how to use the OBS and can identify (and ideally help fix) issues. If you have familiarity with OBS and interest in helping out, contact lbt or X-Fade on #meego on the Freenode IRC network.