Ari Jaaksi’s post in his blog got me to read his Linux World presentation, where I saw an interesting statement on slide 14 about how Armin Warda had added swap to Jakub Pavelek’s applet for controlling memory and taking screenshots. And that “What this is for Nokia [is] something we could productize. However we must ensure that it will not break hardware, and that it is easy to use, etc.”

And next to the screen capture shown here was also a capture of the X Terminal app.

Am I reading this right to say that Nokia is definitely including swap (and screen capture and X Terminal) in the OS 2006?

Well that made me want to go and read the roadmap at maemo.org that Ari mentioned.

I’m sure I’ve seen/heard of this before, but it looks very different than I seem to recall. I can’t say whether I saw an earlier version or have a bad memory.

(And the one at maemo.org is dated today. Is it really from today, or is that just an artifact of the way maemo.org presents things?)

Anway, the roadmap says the Farsight audio/video conferencing framework will be included, as well as support for python development within the Maemo SDK. We’ve heard that real package management will be included, but I hadn’t realized that every Application Installer app that works in the current version will break and in fact that every third-party app will have to be recompiled because of the “new EABI toolchain.” (OK, I don’t know what that is, but then I’m a user, not a developer.) I hope this means that OS 2006 will be available to the developers in advance of our user release.

So what have we got?

• Video conferencing. OK, cool.
• Python — faster development of brand new 770 specific apps, yes?
• apt/dpkg — more and greater automation in bringing apps to the 770, yes?
• gtkhmtl — support for html within apps? Especially those new ones I’m theorizing about?

There’s more.

The roadmap also includes such enticing items in the “To-do List for future unannounced releases” as x86 multimedia development support and support for full x86 device virtualization. That sounds so tremendously wonderful I have to stop myself and acknowledge I don’t really know what it portends. But it’s got to be good news! I think. As does the last item on the page: “Enable other languages beside C for writing UI applications (Python, Java, C++ binding for Hildon widget set).” I really think that one essential for the growth of the Internet Tablet platform is that it becomes a great place to develop new apps and that consequently other companies use Hildon or something derived from it for their own tablets.