Font Changer allows user selection of theme fonts
Maemo 5 doesn't provide users the ability to easily change a theme's font without resorting to the command line. Fortunately, a new control panel applet, Font Changer, has been released by the prolific theme developer Ricky Tournee which allows users to select the system font. Many people requested an GUI for changing fonts on their N900, so here it is; a control panel application that does the trick. Due to limitations in the Maemo theming system, a reboot will be required to change all of the fonts. Interested testers or contributors can find Font Changer in Extras-devel (standard warnings and disclaimers apply).
ringtoned updated to include vibration options
A new update to ringtoned, a daemon which allows setting custom per-contact ringtones released by Marco Barisione (a Telepathy engineer), cleans up the last of the known bugs. In particular, an issue that would prevent the N900 from vibrating when a call is received. ringtoned is available from Extras-devel, but the usual warnings and disclaimers still do apply.
Open source Twitter sharing plugin for pictures
Alberto Garcia has published a new sharing service for sending pictures to common Twitter sharing sites such as TwitPic: These days I’ve been playing with a sharing plugin for the Nokia N900. You can use it to upload pictures to Twitter, using a variety of services. Right now it supports Twitpic, Twitgoo, Mobypicture, img.ly and Posterous, but it can be easily extended to support other services. The plugin is available in Extras-testing (as "sharing-twitter-multi"/"Sharing Plugin for Twitter") and, as it has reached the requisite ten votes, assuming no blockers are found will be available for Alberto to push to Extras in less than a week.
proZelect power menu key switcher for kernel profiles
Talk user "AIMehdi" has announced a small script to integrate with the menu you get when pressing the power key at the top of an N900: I am proud to announce the product of my and wellefs first try at programming. It is basicly just done in a shell script with the help of zenity. We have no clue how to package it to deb or how to put it in the repo. We would appreciate any form of feedback.. good and bad. As this is our first try i am guessing the code is not beautiful. The program will make it easier to switch between two power kernel profiles by putting a button in the powerkeymenu. The installation is very a shell script from dropbox, one wonders if writing the instructions took longer than packaging it would've!
Andrea Grandi running for Maemo Community Council
The first (and, at the time of writing, only) person to declare his intention to run in the next election has been Andrea Grandi. In describing his candidacy, he said: I really would like to be able to do more for the community and one of the best way could be to be part of the council, to help both users/developers to explain their requests to Nokia and Nokia to understand the requests from the community. There are a lot of fantastic ideas coming from the community that could improve what we are doing: the key is to organize them and giving them more attention. This is what I've always looked for: working together to Andrea ran in the last election, and he was very nearly elected.
gPodder gets Maemo 5-style notifications when new podcasts available
Thomas Perl's gPodder is the leading podcast client for Maemo, and version 2.8 has just been pushed to maemo.org's community testing repo: It's been some time since the last gPodder release, and I've been busy adding some nifty features to make the best use of the on-board facilities of Maemo 5. As already mentioned in a previous post, this new version comes with built-in notification support. After installation, you might have to re-start hildon-home (or your device) for the changes to become effective. The new version, in Extras-testing, also integrates with the multimedia framework to get suspend/resume working with the built-in Media Player. Regular (and brave) users of gPodder are encouraged to install the new version and test it against the QA criteria; voting appropriately on maemo.org/packages.