Automatic Connections: enable/disable IM accounts based on connection
To address the desire to have certain accounts disabled on certain internet connections, Jonny Lamb has released a new daemon, Automatic Connections, which allows users to limit accounts to specific connections. Once you configure which connections accounts should listen for, it uses libconic to listen for connect/disconnect events and enables and disables accounts as appropriate. You should also be able to override its actions temporarily without it clobbering your setting. The package is currenlty available from Extras-devel, the usual boilerplate still applies.
Firefox 4 beta for Maemo now available
Mozilla has released beta 1 of Firefox 4 (Fennec) for Android and Maemo: Our first Firefox 4 beta for mobile is now available to download and test. It’s built on the same technology platform as Firefox for the desktop and optimized for browsing on a mobile phone. Firefox beta for mobile comes with many of your favorite Firefox desktop features like Firefox Sync, Add-ons and the Awesome Bar. A major focus of this release is to increase performance and responsiveness. Two of the big architecture changes are Electrolysis and Layers. Our alpha contained Electrolysis which allowed the browser interface to run in a separate process from the one rendering Web content, resulting in a much more responsive browser. This beta brings the Layers pieces which improve overall performance and in graphics areas such as scrolling, zooming and animations. Though speed improvements are evident in the new beta, Maemo's chronic RAM starvation continues to hinder the experience - having two copies of Gecko in RAM (MicroB is always in memory) combined with XUL results in a fair amount of swapping. The beta is currently available from Mozilla's beta repository, the usual warnings and disclaimers apply to 3rd-party repositories.
SeriesFinale 0.6.5 released
Joaquim Rocha is bringing us another SeriesFinale update, this time 0.6.5: This version has some nice new features apart from regular bug fixing and code improvement. Juan has added the portrait mode (borrowed from the great gPodder) which surely pleases many users. To control the rotation and other forthcoming preferences, I’ve rewritten the settings class and created a settings dialog. Sometimes I get sick of getting the “Special” season on every shows, basically because I never watch those; so, I added a check button to the settings dialog where one can tell if the special seasons are to be considered or ignored, when adding new shows or updating existing ones. The new update is available in Extras-testing, so vote and test (if you've read the disclaimer). Otherwise, it should be available in Extras soon.
Homescreen Selector Widget
A new homescreen widget by Matias Perez simplifies homescreen navigation by providing a Spaces-esque overview of all of your homescreens so you can quickly navigate to any without needing to swipe through to them. I've made another homescreen selector widget The difference is that this one shows all active desktops backgrounds. It supports Matan's modified hildon-desktop (up to 9 desktops). Currently available from Extras-devel, so care should be taken when installing it.
NewsFlow - Qt Web Runtime-based RSS reader
Qt Web Runtime gives developers a lot of power to design simple applications quickly using web technologies. Tommi Laukkanen takes us through his experience with Forum Nokia's application design strategy and Qt WRT in his endeavor to create a newreader application for Maemo. There can’t be a better way of spending your Saturday night other then crafting and knitting new apps for your mobile devices. This Saturday I was missing a nice news reader for my Nokia N900. I tried to follow the Forum Nokia workflow: Design, Develop, Distribute. Here’s what happened. Get the whole story, and the application, from his blog.
SnXM: SimpleNote client for Maemo
Fred Pacquier has released a new Python & Qt-based application for integrating with SimpleNote: Think of it as a KISS version of Evernote that handles only plain text, but fast and well, especially when used off-line through native clients. There are quite a few such apps, for Windows, Mac OS and some mobile platforms : iOS and Android obviously, also Palm webOS, but no Maemo, as usual. That was bait enough for me to take the plunge. After all, it did have “simple” in it, didn’t it? Currently the application is only available as a tarball attached to a talk.maemo.org post; and Fred has asked for assistance with packaging it.