N9 Hackathon in Vienna (Austria) on October 8th and 9th 2011

For the launch of the N9 (yes, we are one of the countries in which the N9 will be officially available, and at least 3 of 4 operators will offer it with a contract), Nokia Austria is organizing a N9 Hackathon around the N9 on the second weekend of October (2011-10-08 + 2011-10-09) in Vienna. If you live in or around Austria, or wanted to have an excuse for coming to this nice place from abroad for some serious coding, this might be a good opportunity to meet some fellow Maemo/MeeGo community members and get some hacking done. We plan to have some hardware like NFC tags to develop cool stuff with the N9's hardware, so don't forget to bring your creativity as well as skills ;)


Accomodation and food/drinks at the Hackathon will be provided by Nokia Austria, but accomodation places are limited, so please get in touch if you are interested in coming, so I can make a list of people who plan to come, and can keep you up to date on the event. Bonus points if you want to demo and/or talk about one of your apps that you have already written (or are in the process of writing), but interested developers new to Maemo/MeeGo are also very welcome! :)

Introducing Gaberln, a soccer juggling minigame

Tim Samoff and I have been working on a game - it's a soccer juggling game called "Gaberln" (and that's why). Here's a screenshot:


For now, you can watch the Gaberln video on YouTube. There's a forum thread for all your discussion needs with an experimental build - use at your own risk! :) More infos can be found on the Gaberln homepage.

Here's a small rant: It's a pity we don't have apps.meego.com now (and it's kind of sad to see the ad-laden my-meego.com downloads section being the closest that comes to an app catalog at the moment). Anyway, I'll try to get it into Ovi Store and AppUp, and hope that apps.meego.com will become a reality soon. A Maemo 5 release is also planned, and it should theoretically be runnable on Symbian^3 as well.

gPodder QML Mock-ups by wazd, part 2

Here's the second part of our mock-up collection for gPodder's QML UI (part 1 here). Let's start off with two more recent designs: One for the bottom media player and the "tab" to pull it up (the tab would always be visible while something is playing) and the other for the episode actions, which is something that I though would be good to have in addition to the context menu - the episode actions will put the most important actions (download, delete, play, stream, shownotes) into view when an episode is selected from the list:

Next up are two more of these green-ish mock-ups, where one has a different style of playback control buttons for the audio player widget, and the other one is an example of how the settings view could look like in the new style (again, this was before any of the Harmattan UI style guidelines have been published, so the design is very unique and doesn't take into account the availability of Qt Components yet):

And finally, here is a mock-up of a possible "Summary" view, summarizing what's new and also suggesting some new podcasts that might be interesting for you, based on existing subscriptions. This is not implemented yet, but it could be added at some point with a more deeper integration with gpodder.net, which already provides podcast suggestions and a tag-based podcast directory:


Thanks for your interest, and stay tuned for some updates regarding gPodder itself (for N8x0 users, N900 users and N950/N9 users as well) in the next days!

gPodder QML Mock-ups by wazd, part 1

Andrew Zhilin has been creating awesome mock-ups for the last few months for gPodder's new QML UI. Back in December 2010, Andrew started with the first mock-ups based on the screenshots from meego.com:

After that, we decided to go a step further and make it look even more futuristic (this was partly inspired by Metro - two months before #feb11). Most of the title bar and podcast list design have been kept (although evolved) in the current design. This is also the first time that Andrew integrated the playback feature into the mock-ups - a player "widget" that can be pulled down. In the current version, it's still a widget that can be brought in with a tab, but it's placed on the bottom:

And here are two more of these rare mock-ups - the first one was a suggestion for the main menu (something which we don't have at the moment - the "main view" in gPodder/QML currently is the podcast list, with buttons in the title bar for more actions). The second one is also a very unique design in my opinion - I especially like the vertical progress bars, and the slick black-and-gray color tones. The gray rectangle at the top of the second mock-up was just a placeholder for the window manager's title bar:

Stay tuned for more mock-ups by your favorite Russian designer in the second part. Also, the real implementation of gPodder/QML is progressing nicely. Expect some additional updates on this in the next days, too :)

Panucci 0.99.3 for Fremantle is here

Jens has been working on the QML UI of Panucci (a resuming podcast and audiobook player for Maemo and MeeGo) to get it working on the N950 and he has recently fixed the Bluetooth headset support on the N950. While he does not have a N900 to test and build Panucci releases, I'm more than happy to jump in every once in a while and update the N900 build of Panucci for all Fremantle users. Today is such a "once in a while" day: Panucci 0.99.3 has been uploaded to the Extras repository and should be available in Extras-Testing soon. The default UI in this release is still the Gtk/Hildon UI, but you can opt to use the QWidget-based UI (panucci --qt) or the QML-based UI (panucci --qml) via command line switches:

We have not yet implemented a task switcher button in the Panucci QML UI, but that might come in the future, and then we might even change to using QML by default with Gtk/Hildon as an option. Jens has even written support for themeing the QML UI with colored themes:

The file selector and file details have also been (re-)written in pure QML for cross-platform compatibility:



Enjoy this new Panucci release, and thanks to Jens for keeping the application fresh and feature-rich. The Panucci bug tracker has now moved to bugs.gpodder.org, so if you find any problems with this release, please report it at bugs.gpodder.org in the Panucci product.

N900 camera protip: Get rid of flash reflections

I think it was during MeeGo Conference 2010 when I was first told that I should cover the N900 camera cover's blue and silver bevel with a dark color to prevent them from reflecting the flash light and making the photos worse than they could be. If you don't use the N900 with flash at all, this "hack" doesn't apply to you. Otherwise read on. If you look at the N900's camera cover, you see that the camera hole is surrounded by a blue border on one side, and silver borders on the three other sides:



Now, when you take a photo with the flash, the flash light is reflected, which makes the taken photo to appear as if there was some smoke or fog in front of you. In reality it is the reflection of the bevel. So, take a black marker and take off the back cover of your N900 (you don't want to accidentally cover your camera lens with black color!):



Now carefully cover the silver parts around the camera hole (and the blue part too, ideally) with black color. The result should look like this:



You might get even better results if you take a marker with a finer tip or even use black spray paint or something. If you don't have a marker ready or do not want to paint on the back cover, you can also take off the back cover of your N900 (which has the same effect), but you will probably need a small magnet to trick the magnetic switch into reporting "camera cover opened" to the camera application.

New gPodder versions for your N8x0 and N9x0

It's been over two months since I've released a new stable release of gPodder. Now it's time again to catch up with some of the fixes that have landed in the "master" branch of gPodder (while we are still adding cool stuff to the "tres" branch, where the QML UI and other improvements happen). Anyway, gPodder 2.16 "Over There" should be available in Maemo Extras for both Diablo and Fremantle soon, please test the package and (in case of Fremantle / Maemo 5) also vote for it, so it can land in Extras eventually.

For the Nokia N950 (and also for the N9), there's already a very early alpha build of the QML for you to try - please note that you might have to remove your database and downloads to be compatible with any changes when the final version is out. There's a thread on forum.meego.com with instructions on how to get it and a screenshot - please also use this forum thread for feedback and any questions that you may have.

In related Maemo/MeeGo news, That Rabbit Game has been packaged for MeeGo Tablet and should be available in AppUp already. There's also a pure OpenGL ES port for webOS, although it's missing some features of the Qt version. If you haven't been following gaming news, our multi-touch game Mong (which is going to have its new name "Plonk" soon) is available for MeeGo tablets and I'll have a Harmattan package for you to try really soon! There is also the Harmattan Event Feed Library for Python which should make posting data to the event feed awesome. And if you really want to port your PySide apps to Android, try PySide for Android, which has just been released today. Yes, lots of stuff happening - expect more in the coming days/weeks :)