We just received a quick note from Quim Gil about Maemo.org’s participation this year at LinuxTag 2008, a Linux and open Source exhibition, at Berlin, Germany. This is a great opportunity for Maemo.org to become more visibile, as well as showcase the best Maemo applications, and its current and future plans.
There is currently a draft of the session over at Maemo.org and Quim is soliciting suggestions for tracks and additional speakers. If you would like to suggest topics and/or nominate speakers/developers, this is your chance. The deadline is on April 10, 2008.
The first major Canola2 plug-in, the YouTube plug-in allows you to search, bookmark and save videos from YouTube. Developers can now take a peek at the plug-in source code which can help pave the way for additional third-party Canola2 plug-ins. The plug-in still has problems with the seek functionality which INdT hopes to help mplayer fix in the future.
Three additional Canola2 themes have also been added for everyone to download — Deep Blue, Flat Red, and Flat Black. They are available for download at the Canola2 Add-ons page.
If you are installing the YouTube plug-in, make sure to upgrade to Beta7 first via the Application Manager. New users can directly install the latest Canola2 version from the official Canola2 install page.
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Nokia announced today that Microsoft Silverlight will be made available to the Symbian OS (Series 60 and 40) and to the Nokia Internet Tablet.
According to Lee Williams, Nokia SVP for Devices Software:
Nokia’s software strategy is based on cross-platform development environments, enabling the creation of rich applications across the Nokia device range. Nokia aims to support market leading and content rich internet application environments and to embrace and encourage open innovation. By working with Microsoft, we are creating terrific opportunities and additional choices for the development community, S60 licensees and the industry as a whole.
What is Silverlight?
Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications. Silverlight is already powering thousands of applications around the world and organizations including Entertainment Tonight, the NBA and NBC Universal to deliver superior Web-based experiences to their customers. The arrangement with Nokia will substantially extend the reach of Silverlight by making the platform available for hundreds of millions of devices, including S60 on Symbian smartphones from a range of manufacturers, as well as Nokia Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.
How do you all think will the internet tablet benefit from Silverlight?
I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m not actually developing anything for the Nokia Internet Tablets. I don’t know C or C++ or Python*. (Or Ruby either for that matter.**)
Still, I’m intrigued by a reference to PluThon, which lets you develop Python apps for maemo without requiring Scratchbox.
PluThon is an Eclipse plug-in that allows you to interact with your N800 or N810 and run/debug your Python app directly on the tablet. You work in Eclipse, get your usual language support, and SSH the app to the device from within Eclipse (er, PluThon). And skip the emulation stage entirely.
Right now, PluThon is Linux-only, but it seems like it could be made to work with a Windows setup too.†
Not that I can use it‡. But I can dream, can’t I?
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* Hey, lucky Java isn’t available on the Internet Tablets or I’d go 0 for 4 on the big ones, eh?
** I have at least made Ruby’s acquaintance. Just barely enough to nod in recognition when we pass in the hallway though.
† And if you want that, why don’t you send a note to eclipse-integration@maemo.org and ask for it. I have.
‡ Hey, what’s to stop an Eclipse-fond Rubyist from doing the same for that language?
I think maybe I mistitled the two posts I wrote recently about setting up a environment for internet tablet software development. No one read them. And maybe that’s because people don’t realize what they’re about.
The point of these posts and the thread started by BOFH and contributed to by OSEmuTech, Run Linux on top of Windows, without a virtual machine, is that you don’t have to have a Linux computer — or a dual-boot Linux, or Linux running on a virtual machine — in order to write and test applications for the Nokia Internet Tablets.
And that seems to me to be newsworthy.
So I’m repeating myself by posting again, but this time under a more appropriate heading.
Point: You can easily install andLinux on your Windows computer. Took me all of five minutes.
Point: What you don’t get with this (to quote the andLinux FAQ) is:
another desktop
the bench of applications that usually ship with Linux distributions (you have to fetch whatever you want)
a printer driver
trouble with further drivers
Point: You can run Linux apps side-by-side with your Windows apps, and use the Windows desktop for all the file-management stuff you already know how to do. And use your Windows printer drivers.
This is way cool, and I think we should make a big thing of it!
Since the internet tablets have an ARM processor (and not an x86-based cpu the way desktops and laptops do), you need to be able to write an app for the NIT, see how it looks while you’re on your own computer, and make a version that will run on a NIT.
So you install Scratchbox and Maemo 4.0.1 to do that. Pete Savage has written a full step-by-step how-to that tells you each thing you need to do. Even I, a perennial Linux tourist (and never a resident), managed it on my first try.
I’m going to repeat myself again: This is way cool! I definitely think we should make a big thing of it!
This screen capture shows the example application from Pete Savage’s how-to on getting Scratchbox working to compile and test software for the Nokia N800. A Maemo development environment, in other words.
Being one man’s continuing quest for happiness despite years of unfulfillment
I’ve been using computers a long time (don’t ask) and using microcomputers long before Microsoft even sold an OS. I was a DOS guy before I could afford a Macintosh, though I was using Macs at work starting back in 1985. And I happily benefitted from the Mac’s strength in desktop publishing software for more than a decade.
When I re-oriented my publishing career towards XML and e-books in 1999, I was forced to be a dual-platform guy. There just weren’t any XML tools on the Mac, so I bought a cheapo PC and moved back and forth between my two computers depending on the task.
As I used XML more and my Mac grew ever more gray-bearded, I started buying new programs for the PC instead of for the Mac. This was a huge emotional issue. Where the dollars go, there follows the heart (at least in electronics). Gradually I was transformed from a full-blown Mac enthusiast (and off-hours tech support for various family members long-distance) into a full-time WinXP user. It helped that my job now supplied me with a laptop that I carried from Manhattan office to home office (where I work two days a week) to out-of-state offices every week or three.
When the replacement for XP — then known as Longhorn, now as Vista — first raised its head, I found myself unable to accept the transition. Microsoft wanted me to pay more for the OS than I thought I should pay for the computer itself. And forget Apple. That was a company everyone agreed was the next Polaroid, Xerox and Kodak combined, destined never to regain financial security or market strength.*
I figured then that my next OS would be Linux.
I won’t go into my beliefs regarding open software, copyright and monopolies. Suffice to say that I’m an extremist. Probably many of you here at ITT have followed the same path towards the sanity of open software (maybe not as far as I). But that pushed me towards Linux, too, of course. Continue reading ‘Me and Linux, round 4 and a half’
A lot of discussion brewed from this move from Nokia. A hefty discussion brewed at itT and posting the same question at the Maemo Developers List received some interesting responses worthy of a ‘free software opera’ as Quim Gil, Nokia Development Platform Product Manager puts it.
Quim, as most of us know from Maemo.org, has just posted a new entry on his blog to hopefully put some perspective on Trolltech and Maemo. Here are some snippets:
…I made some research to confirm the guess. When it comes to maemo, there are no Trolltech/Qt related plans at the moment.
On the mid term… well, nobody knows. What follows are my thoughts today.
Trolltech develops Qt, a cross-platform application development framework that powers KDE and is also licensed to many commercial software projects. Nokia pushes the Symbian OS with several own platforms on top like S60, plus S40 running on top of Nokia OS, plus several non-mobile applications like Nokia PC Suite (developed with Qt, by the way). Trolltech’s toolkit and its C++ native language (which is native in Symbian as well) fit very well in Nokia’s short term strategy to improve cross-compatibility between the Symbian platforms. If making a good use of the Qt library helps having in maemo some of the cool stuff available in S60, all the better then.
This morning, the next-to-last on the list — contributors buying from the U.S. stocks — were notified that they could now apply their discount code to purchase a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet.
Alas, the usual glitches are still preventing this — developers report Friday morning that inserting a discount code results in either an “invalid code” or “zero balance” response and operators at Let’sTalk.com who hanclle phone orders decline any knowledge of the discount.
I’m posting this info now in hopes that someone at Nokia might see this and straighten things out.
* * *
Added Jan 22: New email, new results: orders accepted and delivery due in two days.
Added Jan 24: People who placed orders as recently as Jan 22 in the evening have been notified that the N810 is back-ordered and they shouldn’t expect their devices for three weeks.
I’m a little late coming to this, but I ran across a blog by Dave Aiello at Operation Gadget about a three-part series on developing for the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet at IBM developerWorks.
Nokia 
