Well, I finaly got my hands on a N900 (given as a Christmas gift by Collabora to Gabriel).  This gave me the occasion to observe first hand that the Ovi Maps, while having a lot of features, is slow and that the Hildon Emerillon port is less than perfect.  It is hard to use with fingers and feels alien to the platform. To solve this, I created Map Buddy: a map application specifically designed for Maemo 5.  It is quite simple to use and works out of the box (no configuration or selection of plug-ins required!).  It also has something other apps don’t: it uses web-services to provide business search capabilities. Here’s the use case I built Map Buddy upon: you just arrived in Montréal and want to find a sushi restaurant. You start Map Buddy, it will be centred on the place you closed Map Buddy on.  You can click on the “Center on me” icon on the bottom left, and it will centre the map on Montréal ‒ remember you are in Montréal for this example! By the way, your position is marked by a blue dot. Later version will display the precision too. To search for businesses, you have to switch in business search mode, tap on the magnifying glass to do so. Enter sushi in the search bar and press enter! The map will be populated with markers representing the places tagged with sushi (powered by Praized Media, a Montréal start-up). To get the name of the place, tap once on the marker. To get the complete details about a place, tap once on the name: a new window will be opened with the business’ address, phone number and web site if available.  Map Buddy even provides a call button! To clear the search results, tap on the trash can in the search bar or do a new search. It’s that simple! Map Buddy includes a place search so that if you are looking for Pizza in New York, you don’t have to scroll from San Francisco to New York to get there.  Select the Place search mode, enter New York in the search field and press enter.  A picker dialog will be opened to let you select the correct New York. To switch to other maps, click on the layer icon, it will bring up the list of possible maps to display. I hope you like it!  Try it today! WARNING: Installing Map Buddy in this early stage requires adding the extras-devel repository which might install unstable software on your device.  Try it at your own risk or if you are a professional NB: Praized Media only has strong data sets for Canada and United States.  They plan to sign business partnerships to get data for Europe in 2010.  In the mean time, you can directly add businesses using this form. NB: Help is appreciated to translate it! 2010-01-12 20:24 UTC with score 7

Yesterday I finally uploaded the changes I had locally committed in my git clone of SeriesFinale and send them also for building in the extras repository of Maemo. The 0.3 version has the following changes: Added extra information to tree views While you can enter the list of episodes and check what’s the next you need to watch, it is boring to need to navigate so much just to check this, so I added some extra information to the shows and seasons views. Basically now you’ll readily know how many seasons you have in a show, how many episodes you are left to watch, what’s the next one to go and which seasons/shows are completely watched. SeriesFinale 0.3 seasons view Added configuration file handling and episodes order recall Paco Zafra, a SeriesFinale user, asked for the app to remember his episodes’ sorting preferences and with this version it will start doing so. Hope you like it Paco. This also means it now stores an XML file with these preferences and will do it for other future preferences added to the program. i18n: With this release I also added support for internationalization and included the Portuguese translation already. You can contribute to SeriesFinale by sending me a .po file translated in your language. SeriesFinale 0.3 in Portuguese Apart from the changes above, several code improvements were made. The update should be arriving at you N900 any time soon. Hope you like it! 2010-01-13 08:57 UTC with score 5

During the last days (well, actually during the last nights [*]), I’ve been spending some time in adapting frogr 0.2 to also compile and work on my brand new N900 (thanks Igalia!), and this is the humble result up to date: Perhaps you’re thinking why the hell I needed frogr to upload pictures when the N900 already comes with a nice and handy sharing application to upload pictures directly from the camera app or the image viewer, so here you have some use cases where I found the  sharing app not enough for my needs: To upload several pictures in a row to flickr, instead of having to do it one by one (tipical use case after taking several pictures that I’d like to share/backup in flickr). To set same name, description and/or tags to a bunch of pictures instead of doing it one by one (related to previous use case). To be able to upload pictures as “private” instead of “public”. Update: I’m correcting this post here since it seems the sharing application already was capable of doing some of those things I mentioned above (ups!). Anyway, as I commented there, this does not discourage me even a little bit of keeping porting my little frogr to Fremantle, but just encourage me to try to make a difference and because… why not to tell it? I’d just love to bring frogr with me wherever I go . Thanks Daniel for your comment! Current status of this port to Fremantle is still work in progress so don’t expect to find anything working out-of-the-box if you download the source code at this moment, but the idea is to get it into a stable state soon to upload it to maemo-extras, along with a packaged version for Fremantle of the great flickcurl library, which is a requirement for frogr to work (and at this moment I’m jsut packaging and using it on my own for development purposes). [*] I think the screenshot explains pretty well the main reason why I work so slowly and at late hours in frogr 2010-01-13 08:06 UTC with score 5

I was browsing my Twitter stream and saw that Mark posted a way to access the Ovi Store on the updated Nokia N900. The icon on the N900 still isn’t active to launch now takes you to the Ovi Store and you can also go to store.ovi.mobi in your N900 web browser to be taken to the Ovi Store with the N900 recognized as the device. It looks like the official, non-beta  Ovi Store application launch is getting closer and closer for the N900. You will see something like 10 games and 30 or so apps, along with themes and videos to download. I personally installed the Project Gutenberg ebook reader (found on a repository and NOT in the Ovi Store), Angry Birds, and Solitaire Touch. Check out the video below of the Project Gutenberg reader and Angry Birds game in action. UPDATE: When you choose to download an application from the Ovi Store you are taken to the integrated Application Manager where all apps are installed. I must have gotten confused bouncing back and forth between the Ovi Store and Application Manager because an astute reader pointed out that the mGutenberg ereader application is in the repositories and NOT in the Ovi Store. All applications currently in the N900 Ovi Store are free on the device, but I see you can purchase apps via the Ovi Store on the Internet so paid apps are rolling out as well. I thought the Angry Birds game was hilarious, but I also found that throwing the rabbits in Open Season (I said Great Outdoors in the video, oops.) was really funny so maybe I have a bit of twisted sense of humor. I like that the Project Gutenberg ebook program works in both landscape and portrait mode too so I can now get a ton of books on my N900 and it is getting more and more useful all the time. Did you find any good apps in the Ovi Store for your N900? 2010-01-12 12:56 UTC with score 4

Nokia Research Center (NRC), Hollywood, has begun a private pilot of its research project, the Westwood Experience. The pilot explores how a compelling narrative, combined with a user’s physical location (context) augmented with digital content as well as social interactions with other “participants” can enhance the user experience and provide the media industry with new options and business models. The story unfolds as the participants wander through the village of Westwood. They learn about a man, and the woman who changed his life through one magic evening, and how both of them are forever tied to Wes... .. . 2010-01-12 12:00 UTC with score 3

While i’m still working on PyPackager, PyGTKEditor and others projects. I’m finishing an other one for first Fremantle release. mNotes is a Notes Application, specially designed for Maemo Devices. It s feature a synchronization with a web server. It s feature : – auto link between notes. – auto indent – search – undo / redo – fullscreen – auto rotation – font/size preferences – and Synchronization ! It s still in developpment. And some feature aren’t yet implemented : ◦ search in note and hiligh when opening global search ◦ Windows Version (Currently in developpment) ◦ Linux Version ◦ Web Version (Currently in developpment) Some optimizations is needed : ◦ Defering Optimize ◦ Refactoring mnotes_window.py (window.py + editor.py) Currently synchronization is working with the web server, but there is still need to save feature of the web online editor. 2010-01-12 23:33 UTC with score 3

For this we will use the new pypackager 3.0. There isn’t currently no graphical interface (but the UI will be available in version 3.1). This new version of PyPackager is a merge between PyPackager and Py2deb. It s provide the best of the two apps. The creation of debian package and a debian source package with the same parameters. I will try to explain with a example : Packaging pychecker. Create a working dir : mkdir /home/user/MyDocs/pychecker/ Download the source of pychecker in it : cd /home/user/MyDocs/pychecker/ wget http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=24686 Create a original folder : mkdir original cd original Uncompress it : tar -xvzf ../pychecker-0.8.18.tar.gz Use dumb setup.py this will install our python libs to a directory instead of root : python setup.py bdist_dumb cd .. Create a src directory : mkdir src cd src tar -xzvf ../original/pychecker-0.8.18/dist/PyChecker-0.8.18.linux-armv7l.tar.gz cd .. In the main pychecker folder create the following script : import pypackager import os p=pypackager.PyPackager("pychecker") #package name p.display_name('PyChecker') #package display name in HAM p.version = '0.8.18' #package version p.buildversion == '1' #package build version p.description="""PyChecker is a tool for finding bugs in python source code. It finds problems that are typically caught by a compiler for less dynamic languages, like C and C++.  It is similar to lint. Because of the dynamic nature of python, some warnings may be incorrect; however, spurious warnings should be fairly infrequent.""" #package description p.author='Neal Norwitz' #package author p.maintainer='Khertan' #package maintainer p.email='khertan@khertan.net' #package maintainer email p.depends = "python2.5" #package dependancies p.section="user/development" #package section p.arch="armel" #package arch p.urgency="low" #package urgency p.distribution="fremantle" #package distribution p.repository="extras-devel" #package repository p.bugtracker = 'khertan@khertan.net' #bug tracker field (could be a link http://bugs.maemo.org) p.postinstall="""#!/bin/sh chmod +x /usr/bin/pychecker""" # A post install script to set +x flag p.changelog ="""   * First Fremantle Release """ # the changelog dir_name='src' #src directory name #Here we will loop in all files, directory in src to add it to pkg for root, dirs, files in os.walk(dir_name):   real_dir = root[len(dir_name):]   fake_file = []   for f in files:       fake_file.append(root + os.sep + f + "|" + f)   if len(fake_file) > 0:       p[real_dir] = fake_file #Generate a package src print p.generate(build_binary=False,build_src=True) #Generate a binary src print p.generate(build_binary=True,build_src=False) Execute it : python /home/user/MyDocs/pychecker/make.py You will got some debug line in the terminal … And you will get 4 new files in /home/user/MyDocs/pychecker/ The first one is a debian package that you can test now on your device : pychecker_0.8.18-1_armel.deb The others are files required for extras assistant (https://garage.maemo.org/extras-assistant/) to send source package to the extras-builder : pychecker_0.8.18-1.changes pychecker_0.8.18-1.dsc pychecker_0.8.18-1.tar.gz Now you can upload your packages to extras-devel repository. Warning : Currently PyPackager still in developpment, do not hesitate to report me any bugs or problems you got. PyPackager 3.0 is only available in extras-devel and will not be available in extras until there isn’t any graphical interface. 2010-01-12 22:17 UTC with score 3

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Another leak of the new BlackBerry Tour 9630 OS 5.0.0.230 is reported. You can download it from Megaupload (Download links for the BlackBerry OS 5.0.0.230 at the bottom of the article). However install it at your own risk since this is not official release, we can't guarantee your phone safety. If you are not sure what are you doing backup your phone data first. Ok guys, have fun and tell us if you see any significant improvements on this version.