Getting Harmattan home screens in landscape
Nokia's emphasis with Harmattan and the N9 is heavily focused on easy single-handed usage. Thus landscape orientation is something of an afterthought in many areas. Unfortunately for the keyboarded N950, this makes using the phone in landscape with the keyboard open occasionally painful. In particular with the homescreen being locked to portrait. Urho Konttori mentioned on IRC that this is a theme setting that was picked due to insufficient testing and QA resources for a proper landscape homescreen implementation. As such, it's a relatively simple change to enable it, although there are a number of bugs revealed in doing so. Niels Breet gives us the recipe on the forum: I did this yesterday evening based on some descriptions Kontorri gave on irc. It now also shows home screens in landscape. There is a redraw bug, which needs to be fixed still. But it basically works. Hit the link for the changes.
Pre-release of "Trap, Shake, Kill 'em" for Harmattan
"mja" has released a preview of the Harmattan version of his arcade-game application: Additionally, new background images are included, making the package a bit more bloated though. Thanks NASA/ESA! What's more, I've changed the trap counts etc. small things to make gameplay more balanced. The game requires you to use your thumbs to set up a force field to trap alien invaders, shaking your device to dispose of them once trapped. Don't catch your allies, though, or it's game over.
Pre-release of "Plonk"/"Mong" for Harmattan
The community-developed Pong-clone "Plonk" for MeeGo now has a pre-release preview. Thomas Perl has put a link to the .deb on the forum, those interested in braving the dangerous waters of game testing (and willing to face the consequences) should try it out.
Novacut video editor preview on N900
Talk user "dmj726" has posted a link to a video that seems to be a prototype for cutting video that's running on the n900. If you look closely you'll notice Firefox Mobile flash on the screen for a moment.