Maemo People

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, jfourgeaud, 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.

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.

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.

Today I was at a Qt for N8 Training/Introduction here in Amsterdam. It was a small setup with people from Nokia Benelux.

The training covered Qt for Mobile platforms.
http://events.forum.nokia.com/invitation/qtforn8amsterdam/agenda

The Qt Mobile platform

There are great differences between Symbian and Maemo in terms of platform architecture but Nokia managed to create a single API that make most differences vanish. Credits go to the Qt toolkit. This single API might the key to the success this platform needs. It will also allow Nokia to focus on a single platform for developers. With The SDK I used today it is already possible to target the different platforms Nokia currently has without much effort. So What does that mean? It means that Nokia can offer one single attractive SDK (on windows,Linux and Mac) with different developers in mind (c++ and the HTML/js people) and this sounds like quite a good offering to me.

It must have been quite a huge effort already and we are not there yet. Linux users can't yet develop
for Symbian (as I discovered during the day) and windows user are pushed to use remote services to do the hardcore maemo debian packaging.

As I already did some Qt before I decided to focus a little QML and create a mock for the Linux OutLaws CrapAlert app (something like http://crapalert.org/). I managed to get a "UI" working very fast. After that things went down my n900 is dead and I unsuccessfully tried to install the application on the N8 from Linux.

I played with the N8 but things did not work as I expected. I even surprised myself by thinking "what are all these buttons for, do I really need to learn what they do" while I usually like lots of buttons. Overall the N900 is way better (as expected).

Still when going home I had the feeling to have learned about a useful platform with enough devices "in the wild" to make it very interesting.

Some notes I made during the day(I might be wrong here):
-I think the Qt Mobility API should not end up in Qt. it clutters the very nice Qt API's with non relevant stuff for a cross platform UI. (Effectively they are creating a cross platform platform...)
-Qt Lacks serious IPC/RPC functionality
-Bonus points for "forum Nokia", During the day I filed a bug in their JIRA database and did get an answer within 20 minutes. Now that is fanatical support!.

Get started here:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/Library/Tools_and_downloads/