We go to MeeGo

Please forgive the cheesy title :-) As everyone wrapping up the conference has said, it was a great place; well organised and a fantastic atmosphere. Here are some of my bullet point thoughts:

• Venue was good, although visibility in the keynotes was a little poor. Doug Fisher's reveal of "everyone" getting an IdeaPad was spoiled by it only showing on half the monitors (the other half showing slides).
• Hotels were close to the venue, which was very handy. Unfortunately, a bit far out of the city centre, but cabs and buses to the touristy Temple Bar area were fine.
• Nokia and Intel are both very committed.
• People like Nomovok are doing interesting things behind the scenes.
• The Hacker Lounges, with table tennis, DVD player, Wii, Xbox, free beer and snacks were fantastic.
• IdeaPad is nice hardware. No-one's done a good netbook/tablet hybrid OS yet, AFAIK.
• It was great to catch up with old friends (Ryan, Tim, Graham, Stephen, David, Carsten, Niels, Quim, Gary, Peter, Ronan, Randy, Dave, and so so many more)
• It was great to people I've only spoken to online (Dawn and Kathy amongst others)
• Lots of new folk met: Chani, Odin, Julien, Morten, ...
• Amy Leeland, Dawn Foster, Quim Gil, Angela Brown and anyone else involved did a wonderful job. A definite successor to the Maemo Summits.

One thing which struck me, which hasn't been dealt with elsewhere (AFAICT), is the obvious struggles MeeGo is having being an "open" project. For example, during the Compliance talk, I asked Mark Skarpness where the discussions on the specification were happening; as we seemed to get new draft, with a request for comments on a regular basis; where are the discussions happening as to what goes in to those drafts? "meego-dev" was the answer, one I'm not quite sure I believe. On the plus side, my suggestion of an "Extras/Surrounds Profile" seemed like it might have some traction in solving the third-party-dependencies problem.

Similarly, in the past few weeks, the MeeGo Summit in Oulu, Finland - at the end of May - is being announced and planned in the open; and discussed on meego-community. However, at the conference, the MeeGo Community Office announced that there would now be two MeeGo conferences a year, with the next being in San Francisco at the end of the May: the week before the Oulu summit. This is not something the Community Office has pulled out of thin air in the middle of the conference: but where was the discussion ahead of time? More back channel collaboration, no doubt. Would the Oulu folks have chosen the same dates if it was known that there was an official conference being discussed for the same timeframe?

As explained in the keynotes, MeeGo's openness to OEMs, carriers and application developers is one of the key differentiating factors which is necessary for MeeGo to succeed in a market where iOS and Android have all the momentum. However, if MeeGo is to have that same openness from a community point-of-view, these kind of things have to be addressed as well.

However, I've come away feeling even more positive about MeeGo than I did before. Chats with Ville, Attila, lbt, Ronan and Peter show that Nokia (at least) gets what the Harmattan device means and the developer story they have to tell. Qt Creator 2.1, with Qt Quick, looks like a really promising IDE for both developers and designers to collaborate.

Join MWKN hacking - right *now*

At the MeeGo Conference in Dublin? Want to come and see how MWKN is put together every Sunday evening?

Come along to the D4 Ballsbridge, following signs for "MeeGo Conference 2010 Early Bird Event" and we're in the bar next to the ballroom.

You might want to bring a beer from the Dubliner, as the bar here's not (yet?) open.

MWKN issue creation @ MeeGo Conference, Sunday evening

As Ryan and I - editors of MWKN - will be at the MeeGo Conference on Sunday evening, we'll try and find some space to get together to put together the issue. We'd love to have some help!

What's MWKN?

M* Weekly News is a weekly news digest from the MeeGo/Maemo worlds; inspired by LWN and Wine Weekly News.

Throughout the week, contributors ping over links and short titles to the @mwkn account on Twitter. These then get expanded with quotes, de-duplicated etc. on a Sunday evening for the issue to be published on Monday morning.

The idea is that the community is far too large for any one person to know everything going on, so we can crowdsource the interesting bits which are happening on IRC, the mailing lists, the fora, elsewhere on the Internet etc.

Want to get involved?

Getting involved as a contributor, or an editor (to help with putting the issue together), couldn't be easier; and we'd love to have more people involved.

Please feel free to get involved ahead of time or - if you're going to be around in Dublin on Sunday evening - let me know, and you can either come along and help edit the issue; give us moral support or just get a flavour of what it is we do.

Here and Now: what's on near you now

Nokia's N8, a Symbian^3 device, comes with a service called Here and Now. This reads the cell tower information you're currently connected to and opens a web page detailing the current events (cinema listings and weather, for example) near you. I've done a quick port to Maemo 5 and the N900.

Once installed, you can launch it like any other application:

Without using a GPS, it sends your approximate position to Nokia's servers and shows you what's currently going on:

Council election time again

Voting has now opened for the next Maemo Community Council and, once again, I'm standing.

Last year I won, and the council chose me as their chair (hence the quietness of this blog compared with the Council blog, or even MWKN).

Please vote, the Council this next term will be very important in setting the tone of maemo.org, and the way the Maemo community can work with (and, where desired, transition to) the MeeGo community.

You can read my declaration, my response to EIPI's set of questions covering numerous topics. Then, don't forget to vote. Contact Dave Neary if you have not received your voting token.

Running for the Maemo Community Council... again

The election period has started for the next Maemo Community Council election and we have a number of excellent candidates, including - even if I do say so myself - me ;-)

Before I decided to run, I asked each candidate a series of questions - the answers we've given are linked to from the candidate summary page. I'd also encourage other community members to come up with questions for the candidates.

My full candidacy announcement is in the thread. The main point is that the last six months, having stepped back from the council, have given me a new perspective. The biggest issue I've seen is one of communication and clear facilitation. We need to reduce the overhead and streamline community action. Therefore, if elected, I will push for:

• A clear cooperation with the growing MeeGo community through MeeGo's Community Working Group and develop a transition plan to ensure the level of collaboration the council has with Nokia isn't lost in the new world.
• A Moblin/Maemo/MeeGo summit which looks to the present as well as to the future.

• Appropriate support and resources for existing device owners as Nokia transition to MeeGo. Exactly what form this will take will depend on whether running MeeGo is a day-to-day reality for N8x0 and N900 users:

  1. If MeeGo provides a comparable experience, without any loss of functionality, the resources around Maemo can be slowly redirected.

  2. However, if MeeGo for existing devices is - at best - of developer interest only, the existing Maemo community must continue, and must continue to provide support, help and resources to Maemo users.
     

  Mer^2 should help with the final point, and I'm proud to have been on the council which approached Nokia requesting a distmaster role; and suggesting that Carsten (Stskeeps) was the right man for the job.

• Increasing the visibility of the maemo.org sprint process and reducing the burden on volunteers. Niels Breet (X-Fade) being made the maemo.org team leader will help here. Having been involved in the running of an agile project for over 2 years, I believe:

  • Niels should chair the sprint meeting.
  • The meeting participants should be responsible for setting their priorities and what will be included.
  • Input should be provided by Nokia (Tero Kojo) and the community (the Council chair) on their issues and priorities before the meeting which should be taken into account within the prioritisation.

  This will reduce the workload for the volunteers on the council, increase the ownership of the tasks and provide greater accountability of the paid contributors.

• A summary table listing the high-level issues facing the community and who on the council will act as a point of contact for them. An example for the current council could be:

  Extras QA process         VDVsx
  Optification              gcobb
  Community outreach        Texrat
  

• Support for Randall Arnold's community outreach programme, which is trying to grow the Maemo community rather than just the Maemo platform. With the launch of the Ovi store for Maemo, much focus is given to that rather than the community provisions such as Extras.
• Empowering of community members to lead initiatives such as Google Summer of Code, conference attendance etc.
• A monetisation/donation framework for community-provided downloads.

Whether you vote for me, or someone else, I'd encourage you to vote! The transition from Maemo to MeeGo means the community's representatives to Nokia are more important than ever. Voting is open to anyone with a maemo.org account which is older than 3 months, and has accrued more than 10 karma points.

Catorise: auto-organise N900 applications

In a brief break from Hermes-related Maemo work, I was inspired by Manfred Weiss' MyMenu to create an auto-organising menu application for the N900:

Catorise organises the application menu to have top-levels corresponding to the sections in Application Manager. Features:

• Uses the section icons from the current theme, falling back to the default theme if none available.
• Determines an application's section from the same information the packager used when uploading it to Extras.
• Keeps track of application installs/uninstalls.
• Entirely non-destructive: remove the package and everything goes back to how it was before.
• "All" and "Other" sections, just as in the App Manager, to provide additional access routes.

So, with Catorise the section you find an application's icon is the same you used to install it!

It is currently in Extras-devel. This should, therefore, only be tested by people who are willing to suffer potential data loss, hair loss and the eating of babies.

It's largely feature complete, however there are some known problems/future developments:

• Applications installed from Ovi will go into the "Other" section, due to the way Ovi on Maemo has been designed. I've some thoughts on how to work around this, though.
• Changing the theme will only update the icons on the next application install/removal.
• A quick GUI editor could be created to manipulate /opt/catorise/menu which is a simple text file cache to speed-up rebuilding. This would allow the user to shuffle the apps to best suit their use cases.

Maemo Weekly News: a proposal

I've been discussing this idea with a few key contributors over the past few days to make sure it's realistic and feasible. We've polished it and would like to ask for volunteers for a new Maemo Weekly News digest.

Workload: little to some.
Benefits: glory.

Read on for more info...

Background

There are a lot of facets to the Maemo community, whether it's Bugzilla, maemo-developers, #maemo, Planet, Talk or Brainstorm. With the N900 and Maemo 5, there's been a noticeable increase in traffic in all these areas.

There have been suggestions of Maemo magazines before, but they've fallen over because:

1. The people involved haven't been integrated into the community.
2. They've been a lot of work to create.
3. They tried to move away from maemo.org/news/

Similarly, there are blogs (like Reggie's Maemo Talk) which highlight key important things; but some of them also suffer from the same problems above and none yet go into the level of detail I'd like to see.

With the increase in volume, and limits on my own time, I'm finding it harder to be aware of all the things going on. In particular, little asides and so on on talk which are key to the community, but buried in a thread. The old complaint of "too much happening outside of talk.maemo.org" is now reversed, IMHO, but the SNR is too low to follow "New Posts" religiously and develop software at the same time.

Idea

A weekly news digest of key useful/informative/interesting/insightful news from all Maemo news sources. Similar in style and approach to Linux Weekly News.

This is, in many ways, a continuation of Ryan's "Community Highlights" but doing less work, being more encompassing and more repeatable.

This is NOT an attempt to aggregate ALL Maemo-related news, but provide a selection of highlights during the week; of interest to those who are involved in the platform and the community, but without the time to follow enough of the conversations in all the places to find the ones interesting to them. By acting as a filter, more people will be able to be involved in the things which interest them, resulting in an increase of higher quality submissions for members of the community who might not be heard from as much.

Implementation

The key to its success is to produce something which is useful, integrated and deterministic; but without being a massive resource hog.

Produced weekly, every week, with a series of sections - probably similar to those on tmo. Something like:

• Front page
• Applications
• Development
• Community
• Devices
• Maemo in the Wild
• ...

To gather the news, a series of sub-editors/contributors would have access to a Twitter account (@maemoweeklynews, say). The posts to this feed would consist of the section, a few keywords and a link to the content (thread, post, email message, blog) which triggered it. For example, recently this may include:

• Applications - wazd helping qwerty12 on Transmission: http://s56.radikal.ru/i152/0911/34/a388e13890a0.png
• Devices - Release firmware available to download: http://flors.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/maemo-5-final-release-updated-sdk-and-firmware/

Suggestions on content could be directed at it from people's own Twitter accounts. The sub-editors would then be able to pick and choose from these if it's something they'd missed.

As each issue is being pulled together, one or more sub-editors would then review the posts to that Twitter feed for their sections and flesh it out with a longer paragraph/quote. Full-blown stories would also be possible, but I imagine that being a rarity (if ever). There would then be an overall editor(s) making sure there's no duplication and also including things from maemo.org/downloads/ (top 10 apps, and new apps this week) and the bug jars (top 10 activity, probably).

The completed digest would then be posted to a site and syndicated to Planet.

Hopefully this shouldn't be too much work; and sub-editors/contributors would be able to post to the feed during their daily review of their slice of the community.

To collect the sub-editors, I'd suggest a recruitment & screening process of the form "what 3 would you have done for last week?" See more details below.

Getting Involved

I'm now looking for:

1. CONTRIBUTORS: long-standing members of the community to volunteer to highlight content they see during their Maemo day. This could be whilst sat on IRC, reading the mailing lists, watching maemo.org/news/, contributing on Brainstorm or reading Talk. The only extra work you'd have to do was use your favourite Twitter client to post links you thought should be in the digest.

   Approx. number of positions: 20-30

2. SUB-EDITORS: contributors who are also willing to flesh out the links each week by selecting a representative quote. I will be ensuring we have the tools in place to make this as easy as possible.

   Approx. number of positions: 5-10

3. EDITORS: the people with ultimately responsibility. The sub-editors who make sure the whole thing is consistent.

   Approx. number of positions: 2-4

As I want to start it small (it can always grow once we work out the details a bit better and see how it goes), anyone who'd like to be involved can reply to this (it'll be on maemo-community, my blog and talk.maemo.org) with:

• maemo.org username
• Position wanted (contributor/sub-editor/editor)
• Channels you follow
• Preferred section(s) if sub-editor (feel free to make up a new one)
• One/two sentence bio.
• Two or three links you'd've posted in the last 2 weeks.

This is an opportunity to help collaborate and facilitate spreading Maemo news; if you're a long-time contributor to the platform, your insights will be invaluable. If you're a relative newcomer, looking for a way to contribute, this is your chance!

Downloading Ovi Maps without a network connection

Unlike Navicore/Wayfinder on previous Maemo devices, Ovi Maps on the N900 downloads maps on demand. This is obviously a problem if you're going somewhere abroad and don't want to pay extortionate data roaming charges.

Fortunately, S60 Ovi Maps users also have the same problem, and the solution is straightforward:

1. Scroll down this post to Direct Links for Ovi Map Version 00.01.25.114 and download the maps for the countries you are interested in. (EDIT: updated to different blog post)
2. Unzip the maps into cities/diskcache on the big VFAT partition (mounted under MyDocs) on your N900.
3. That's it!

Some of the files you may already have, I've chosen to overwrite them; YMMV.

However, as far as I can tell, searching for locations still requires a network connection :-(

Why I'm not standing for the council... but you should still vote!

As those of you who read maemo-community might know, I've decided not to run for the council this time.

I'm really proud of being a part of the first two councils, and the level of trust Nokia placed in us with the recruitment of the debmaster; chairing the sprint meetings for the gang-of-four; the decisions over the summit and inviting us to the launch of the N900 at Nokia World.

My enthusiasm for Maemo is not diminished; indeed, with the launch of the N900, I'm as excited now as I was waiting for the launch of the 770 back in November 2005. However, after a year on the council, I'm now looking forward to six months as "just" a normal community member. I've not come to this decision easily, and I'm very happy to have had such warm words of encouragement. My reasons are two-fold:

1. There are many other members of the community who should have a chance to represent us. In particular, I'm very happy that Stephen (sjgadsby), Valério (VDVsx) and Graham (gcobb) have chosen to accept my nomination of them. The fact they're joined by the likes of Alan Bruce (qole), Gary Birkett (lcuk) and Jay Carter (zerojay) - and others - is even better.
2. The vitriol and nastiness spewed by a very vocal, but tiny, minority of people on talk.maemo.org - especially regarding the transition of internettablettalk.com to talk.maemo.org - took a lot of the fun away. Given the massive investment of time my role as chair required, taking the fun away removed one of the main motivations for me.

I still plan on being an active (and vocal) community member both as a developer, a community evangelist and as a user. I hope that if you would have voted for me, you consider voting for one of the excellent candidates we have standing (and we have many). In particular, Stephen, Valério and Graham have all been long term contributors in many different ways and are tolerant, helpful people. I will struggle to cast my single transferable vote for them, Gary, Alan and Jay.

However whomever you vote for, please do vote (once you receive your voting tokens)! I think that the Community Council has been far more effective than I ever imagined it could be when I suggested it back in 2008 and I look forward to seeing where this community will go in the next six months

Vala 0.5.7 now in maemo.org Extras

After a bit of a prod; and a delay; mud-builder's vala recipe has been updated to the latest release 0.5.7 and uploaded to Extras-Devel as "vala" - this can now be used in Build-Depends lines in auto-builder packages.

What is Vala?

Vala is a modern, object-oriented programming language with a syntax inspired by C# and Java. However, it compiles to native code (via C), giving the benefits of modern programming languages and the speed of native development.

From its website:

Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C.

Example

I've also uploaded another little package - vala-sample (basically, HildonSample) - which demonstrates that a Build-Depends: vala line in a package's debian/control can be built using the auto-builder:

This is only in Extras-devel as it's use to end-users is pretty small, however it demonstrates three things:

• How easy it is to package stuff with mud-builder.
• That the auto-builder can build Vala apps.
• That unlike other modern programming languages on Maemo (such as Python, Ruby, Java or C#) there is no additional start-up lag in a Vala application.

A screenshot all the same:

Announcing my standing for council membership

I've set the ball rolling, and put myself forward as a candidate (the first) in the second Maemo Community Council election.

I'm proud to have been a member of the inaugural Community Council. In the last six months, we've seen a sea-change in the way Maemo is progressing:

• the first Maemo Summit, paid for by Nokia;
• community ownership of maemo.org;
• better use of Bugzilla by both Nokia and the community;
• the realistic vision of a community-led "hacker edition" in Mer;
• a webmaster, docmaster, bugmaster and now debmaster all being paid for for us;
• open communication and - importantly - progress indicators like the Maemo 5/Fremantle pre-release SDKs, which would've been unheard of back in 2006/2007.

The Council has been involved in many of these, but would claim credit for few. I believe we've truly fulfilled our role as facilitators and would like to continue my role there. We've not got everything right, but I think we've proved the idea; and that it can be a cohesive force within the community.

I think there's still work to be done, though. Nokia are being more open, and projects like Tracker and Rygel are being developed openly. Yet, Modest has slipped back into internal development; some patches to Application Manager have been merged, but the community's vision for application management in Diablo - and Fremantle - looks unlikely to have been realised. The system as a whole, and the application environment which so clearly defines the Maemo brand, are architected internally. Design decisions are taken internally.

Slowly, hopefully, we can change Nokia management into utilising the enthusiastic talent at their disposal in a way which is truly ground-breaking in the industry; with a root-to-tip collaboration between us all.

Thanks for reading this, and I'll happily answer any questions anyone has.

Maemo-based netbooks?

In the latest Internet Tablet School editorial, The future of Nokia, Maemo and the Internet Tablets, krisse explains why a Maemo-based netbook makes the most sense for Nokia now.

Respectfully, I've never heard a more crazy idea:

• Maemo is a touch-based OS, which doesn't work well with a larger style keyboard.
• People who don't want Windows would find Mac OS X or Ubuntu Netbook Remix a much more compelling user experience on such a device.
• What on earth is the benefit of Maemo here, vs. an alternative OS?!
• The comments when the 770 was released were "where's the phone?", and although Nokia make lots and lots of non-phone devices (such as one of our DVB-T receivers), the comments about Nokia trying to break in to a crowded market (of laptop makers) would be easily compiled into an hilarious book.

IMNSHO, it's just plain bonkers to go down that line instead of a small, tablet form factor - however unproven that may in the end-consumer mainstream.

maemo.org Community Council elections

The call for nominations for the first maemo.org Community Council elections has been open for a couple of weeks now. But I wonder if the wider maemo.org is aware of just how important this could be for the future of the platform.

So, this post'll be syndicated on planet.maemo.org in the hope that we get more candidates putting themselves forward, and interest drummed up in the wider community in terms of asking the candidates more probing questions. Hopefully we can avoid the nastiness associated with the US presidential election :-)

Of course, I'm biased. I've thrown my hat into the ring: my candidature announcement has been sent to maemo-community. I recommend you subscribe if you're interested in shaping the future of Maemo, rather than "just" developing with it.

OpenMoko UI "train wreck"

Picked up from Internet Tablet Talk, there're a couple of videos showing how bad the OpenMoko UI is on basic usability challenges.

What's interesting is that the small comparison with the iPhone shows how poor hardware (pressure-based touchscreen, bezel around the screen) combines with poor software implementation (separate apps => slow start-up times, little thought to the size of a usable target area) to emphasise the poor user experience. And, frustratingly, how many of the issues raised cut quite close to the bone for Maemo devices too :-(

Hopefully the UI changes in Fremantle (for example, #2564) will be a big help; and a concentration on finger usage may allow a more sensitive, different, touchscreen technology to be used in the N900. Will be very interesting to see the UI talks at the summit - see you there!

maemo.org: what next? (part 2)

Following on from my earlier post, maemo.org: what next?, LinuxTag has now happened (and Quim very kindly used my open source triangle), and the 10 days brainstorm for the 100 Days community action plan, and 2010 Agenda have been launched.

My main focus in the earlier post was more related to the 2010 vision: what should Nokia do as soon as possible to really fully utilise an untapped area of the community.

However, what can the community do to organise itself and present more of a consensus view? Consensus by mailing list posts and wiki-edits just means the loudest - or most pushy - individual voices get heard. So, I suggest a Community Council, elected by the maemo community, to act as a filter/co-ordinating body to present a more unified view to Nokia - and therefore help them to help us.

Comments welcome below, or just make changes in the wiki!