Thanks be to the helpful, redux

As some of you may know our Edit-in-Chief and Glorious Leader, Andrew Flegg, abandoned us to the pitiless whims of fortune last week when he left for a multi-week vacation to France. To best facilitate his temporary replacement by automatons and monkeys, he helpfully set up a series of scripts to handle issue fetching and publication for the duration of his unavailability. Due to confusing timezone interpretations (variously to be blamed on monkeys and unclear emails), a problem arose when the scripts succeeded in publishing the issue, by my clock, an hour early. Unfortunately the result was the perfect excising of Andrew Olmsted's well-earned kudos from last week's issue--due, in no part (I'll note), to my forgetting about my omissions until 5 minutes after the real publishing time.

To make ammends I'd like you to be aware of two points: First, Andrew's blog post on testing Harmattan applications without a device should've ended up on the issue's front page. And, second, I had intended to thank him for providing copy editing, moral support and direct first-name personnel replacement in the absence of vacationing-Andrew thusly: Thanks, too, to Andrew Olmsted for filling the role of copy-editor and sounding board for this week's issue. Hopefully we'll be able to con him into helping out again in the future. That resolved, I'd like to again thank Andrew for his continued and siginificantly expanded assistance this week and publicly state my sincere hope that he elects to stay on as permanent staff (this way he wont be able to weasel out so easily).

Powerfull search page containing official and developer repos for MeeGo Harmattan:

Adam Harwell has continued Marat Fayzullin's excellent work in "Pack Rat" - a powerful package aggregation site that allows users to search through the available Harmattan packages and get details on how to obtain them. Find any Maemo package, from any repository, maintained by Nokia or otherwise. Just type in the full or partial package name or some other relevant keyword and click "Search". Optionally, you can search inside a software section and/or a single repository. Please note that a package may be available in many versions and from multiple repositories. We touched on this last week, but a tool this useful (especially in these early days of Harmattan with no central repository for community applications) deserves to be mentioned again.

SDL 1.2 community port for Harmattan

Javier S. Pedro has continued his steller work with the SDL libraries on mobile harward with his release of version 1.2 for Harmattan This port has support for: SDL_OPENGLES support: SDL_SetVideoMode(0, 0, 16, SDL_OPENGLES|SDL_FULLSCREEN) and you can then use OpenGL ES functions, multifinger input: a new field "which" in the mouse move/button up/down event structures which says which finger (0, 1, 2, ... up to SDL_MAXMOUSE = 10) is the one that is moving, full compatibility with the Swipe gesture in fullscreen modes (in the future, you will be able to enable/disable gestures with a PDL_EnableGestures-like function), when no joysticks are open, and audio is paused or closed, SDL_WaitEvent will now _really_ wait for an event, with 0% use of CPU/battery. Therefore, paused and backgrounded SDL applications will no longer eat the battery for lunch, the primary target is of course Harmattan and the N950/N9, but both OpenGL ES and multitouch work on Meego Netbook! (it is not packaged as an RPM yet). I, for one, have been looking forward to Javier's SDL work on this platform from very early on for the sheer number of game ports it opens up.