I really enjoyed my time at Nokia and Finland. I was very lucky to directly work with very talented and generous people. I’ve made some good friends here and it will be hard to say goodbye soon. My last day at Nokia is March 28th.
It’s too early to tell about what I’ll be doing in the near future. Exciting stuff, for sure. :-P
Update: Xan, Tommi and Johan (who doesn’t have a blog) are leaving too. See you around guys! :-)
As other Nokians have already announced, the N810 was officialy announced! Some highlights from the Hildon side:
From my “user experience” with this device, I think the keyboard improves a lot the messaging and web browsing experience, the GPS is an excelent addition and the general UI polishing brings a smoother interaction with the device.
Last but not least, this is a device full of hacking possibilities! Yay!
As pointed out by Carlos in GNOME Mobile mailing list and Quim in his presentation at LinuxTag, Hildon will become an upstream project. The idea from now on is to make Hildon a more independent and community-driven project as it’s going to be used in different contexts other than Maemo (i.e. Ubuntu Mobile). This means that Hildon won’t be a Maemo-specific project anymore and will have its own release schedule, roadmap and community.
As a consequence, we decided to move the full Hildon stack to GNOME infrastructure. This way we can stay closer to GNOME community and stimulate collaboration between both projects. We’ve started the migration process already but it will take some time because we need to first re-organize our internal way of working to make sure everything is fine after the migration. Big thanks to Olav for the great and quick help!
For those who don’t know: what is Hildon?
Hildon introduces a new desktop for handheld devices. It comprises a lightweight desktop, a set of widgets optimized for handheld devices, a set of theming tools and other complementary libraries and applications.
We’ve created a page GNOME wiki. There you can find a brainstorming space for the release schedule and roadmap, a status page for our migration to GNOME, and how to get involved in Hildon. We already have a mailing list in GNOME servers. If you are interested in Hildon development, don’t hesitate to subscribe!
So, I’ll attend FISL this year. I’ll be giving a talk about Maemo and another about the latest news of GNOME. The latter is part of the GNOME brazilian community meeting where we’ll also have a talk by the pt_BR localization team and some discussion about marketing activities, how to bring more brazilian contributors to GNOME and so on. If you’re planning to attend FISL next week and love GNOME, you can’t miss it! :-)
I’m really excited about FISL this year because it will be a nice oportunity to go meet some of my best friends and nice free software people (well, those two groups overlap in many cases).
For those brave developers who are using Sardine to use/test/develop the bleeding edge Maemo stuff, this post is for you. :-)
Well, I’ve already shown before how to write Python plugins for Hildon Desktop. This time, I wrote a howto for writing C plugins for Hildon Desktop with the new GTypeModule-based API. All plugin types (Task Navigator, Status Bar and Home) are covered.
For those other super-brave developers who are building Hildon Desktop outside Scratchbox, it’s a good oportunity for you to test our plugin system and give some feedback, send patches, and report bugs.
The howto is available at:
http://maemo.org/maemowiki/HildonDesktopPluginHowto
Go Go Go!
Ok, now that I’ve shown how easy is to have the basic code for a Python plugin running in Hildon Desktop, I’d like to demonstrate something more useful and cool. I did this screencast presenting how to write a plugin which randomly shows images from your “Images” directory in your Home area. Cool hun?
Click on the image to watch/download the screencast (10 minutes, 8 MB).
Some (obvious) improvements for this plugin would be:
Enjoy!
——–
Sidenote 1: yes, the screencast shows Hildon Desktop running on a 800×600 resolution. :-)
Sidenote 2: some people have been asking if Hildon Desktop is available in N800 already. The answer is no. Hildon Desktop is a major rewrite of maemo-af-desktop and will be shipped in the next major releases of Maemo. Of course you could run it on your N800 at your own risk. :-P
Some people naturaly requested the Jhbuild moduleset for Hildon Desktop after I posted those build instructions in Maemo wiki. So, I added Jhbuild related instruction to the wiki page. Go Go Go!
I wrote a step-by-step guide to have Hildon Desktop running outside the Maemo/Scratchbox environment. Our major goal here is to make it easy for distributons to package Hildon Desktop so that developers can have a quick-to-setup environment for the development of plugins which doesn’t need to be built against ARM such as Python plugins. For now, this guide only applies to Ubuntu (If you can point out the changes needed to work on another distribution, please let me know). This is a call for testers and brave developers to follow the guide and report the missing/problematic bits.
http://maemo.org/maemowiki/HildonDesktopPortability
There are some issues that still block us from getting Hildon Desktop in a distribution but we’re working on that.
Ok, I created a new screencast in theora format now. It has a nice complement about how to make resizable applets.
Update: I removed the audio. The music was too noisy. :-P
As I told you before, Hildon Desktop now has a new plugin system and one of the cool things about it is the Python support. Just for the sake of demonstration, I recorded a screencast with the step by step process of writing a “Hello World” Python plugin for the Home area of Hildon Desktop.
Yes, it’s really simple. Of course, this is a useless plugin but I just wanted to demonstrate how easy and simple is to have the basic infrastruture done.
Enjoy!
Update 1: the GIF image is too heavy and people are having problems to watch the screencast. I’ll upload a new (and better) file tomorrow as soon as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience. :-/
Update 2: I removed the link to the screencast for now just to avoid other people to have the same problem and complain about the same thing.
Update 3 The link is updated with a new/more-complete version of the screencast.