You know the story, Nokia announced their co-operation with Microsoft. Here’s a summary of what’s been said by people who know about these things.

• MEEGO@NOKIA: Under the new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project. MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.
  Nokia Press Release
• MEEGO@ELOP: First, we cannot blame Elop for this. He did not kill MeeGo in February 2011. He was one of the finalists for CEO, who had to propose a plan to solve Nokia’s severe crisis. That involved painful cuts no matter how you looked at it. The Board approved a plan in September, where one part meant MeeGo was dead. Elop didn’t kill MeeGo now. It died last September and the Board approved that plan where MeeGo would go.
  Communities Dominate Brands – the best analysis so far (based on public information so not 100% accurate..)
• MEEGO@INTEL: “Intel is disappointed at Nokia but life goes on. Our decision and resolve on MeeGo is only stronger.”
  Intel’s response
• MEEGO@NOKIA: #info Elop: Nokia would continue to develop the MeeGo operating system in collaboration with Intel
  So, definetly this work will continue.
  #meego-meeting irc-logs from 2011-02-15. I’ve heard the same from other people inside Nokia that the work on Meego still continues. Some teams have been told to stop their work but definitely not all of them.
• MEEGO@N900: #meego – No way in hell that we’re giving up! #wearemeego and we’re ready for battle and very much alive.
  Carsten Munk, MeeGo Nokia N900 hardware adaptation maintainer
• QT@KDE: What we in KDE need are calm, stable heads to plot the lay of the land first and then examine how our strategy should be adapted and extended. Change often produces opportunity, but first one has to understand the change to recognize the opportunities. Right now it’s infeasible to speak to what the real opportunities and challenges are without first doing our homework.
  Aaron Seigo, KDE developer
• QT@NOKIA: Unequivocally, Qt is not dead. This morning we heard top Nokia executives like CTO Rich Green talk about Qt and the future. Qt will continue to live on through Symbian, MeeGo and the non-mobile Qt industries and platforms.
  Head of Web and Community & Communications Manager at Nokia
• SYMBIAN&QT@NOKIA: Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices; continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same. With 200 million users worldwide and Nokia planning to sell around 150 million more Symbian devices, Symbian still offers unparalleled geographical scale for developers.
  Nokia’s letter for developers
• QT@WINDOWS PHONE7: Qt will not be ported to Windows Phone 7. One of the key benefits of joining an established ecosystem is that there is an established toolchain that everyone uses. All Windows Phone apps will run on all WP7 devices. Adding Qt to the mix would only cause fragmentation.
  Head of Web and Community & Communications Manager at Nokia
• FLOSS@WP7: But one thing is extremely obvious. Microsoft wants to keep its platform clear of Free Software. Period. Jan Wildeboer
• SHAREHOLDERS: We are a group of nine young Nokia shareholders. All of us have worked with Nokia in different capacities in the past. We plan to challenge the company’s strategy and partnership with Microsoft in the next Annual General Meeting scheduled for May 3, 2011.
  nokiaplanb.com This was a hoax after all. Forget it.
• Backup plans for Nokia, nokiaplans.com.

So Meego will live on, both inside and outside Nokia. Qt will live on, both inside and outside Nokia. Symbian will die. Qt will not be ported to QP7. KDE will survive.

The bad news is that no FLOSS on WP7 (Market?) – and many (up to 5000?) Meego, Qt and Symbian devels in Finland will loose their jobs. Feeling sorry for you guys. Maybe now it’s time to start a new Nokia?

Share

Related posts:

• Nokia Kinect @ Nokia World, London A new concept device from Nokia: it’s operated by twisting...
• N900 Bought Nokia N900 phone two weeks ago from huuto.net, Finnish...
• VOTD: Lex Nokia “On Tuesday Parliament opened debate on the highly controversial data...

for i in `seq 1 1000`; do opimd-cli c delete $i; done

How do you do it in your phone?

Share

Related posts:

• Samsung Galaxy Tab I today had the possibility to play a bit with...
• Messing with plugins.. New plugins installed I installed wp-openid plugin to enable readers...

But it’s useless to ever think like that – you’re surprised with the variety of apps that are available and developed for Linux.
I bumped to this blog post on Planet KDE: Sports Activity Tracking App: The Baby Needs a Name.

And it looks awesome.

Reading the comments I found some other apps that do more or less the same, and Google gave me even more. So here’s just a quick list of GPS / HRM apps you might want to have a look if they’d be useful for you:

• Then Unnamed / Kardio / Kilometer / …
• Sportstracker
• Polarview
• Sonicread
• Polarscope
• Pytrainer
• Viking
• Marble
• FoxtrotGPS
• OpenDMTP
• GPX viewer
• GPSBabel
• QLandkarte M/GT
• OpenGTS
• and the list goes on….So far I’ve been using GPSBabel to convert and Viking to analyze and clean the data, but now I might find some new neat tools… I don’t have a HRM, only GPS (Openmoko Freerunner), so I’d like an app to be able to visualize the track on (OpenStreet)Map like Viking does, but then maybe also somehow store the tracks. It’s a pain to have hundreds of GPX files in folders, some kind of tool to search would be neat. Maybe KPhotoalbum will some day be extended to manage any data, not just photos and videos :)A great place to discuss free GPS software is the FOSS-GPS mailing list, you’re welcome to join!

  Do you have any experience on some of these apps? What features they miss? What’s the coolest thing they can do?

Share

Related posts:

• GPS-reitin piirtely fillarilenkkiä varten / Babelfish Kuinka suunnitella reitti fillarilenkkiä varten, luoda sille GPX-jälki ja muokata...
• Samsung Galaxy Tab I today had the possibility to play a bit with...
• N900 Bought Nokia N900 phone two weeks ago from huuto.net, Finnish...

They delivered fast, 3 days or so from UK to Finland.

Opening the package I had a closer look of the 3-in-1 stylus. It has

• Stylus tip – of course
• Ball point pen – smart & useful!
• Reset tip

Having a reset tip in the stylus must tell something about the quality and reliability of the devices nowadays. And it’s true – every now and then you need to reset your Tomtom GPS navigator, your Nokia smartphone and so on. I do still hope that the gadgets would get a bit more reliable and not having to always carry something with you to reset the device.

However, thanks Proporta, you’re good!

Share

No related posts.

Someone organizing the Ubuntufest release party at Tampere, Finland on 5th of May (Akademy 2010 will also be there this summer!) asked if we’re planning to write a press release of the new Ubuntu release. Well.. it was on our TODO list but it really didn’t look like anyone would have the resources to write one like we’ve done earlier.

So I decided to run a small test on the community – would it be possible to create a press release without making it a pain to anyone. I opened an Etherpad, copied the original English press release there and annouced it on the same #ubuntu-fi-tiimit IRC channel requesting people to join to translate it.

Etherpad

Etherpad used to be a proprietary, but free (as ‘no money asked from you to use it’) service at etherpad.com. Then came Google, bought it, disabled it for a while, open sourced it, reassigned the developers to work on Google Buzz and now finally shuts Etherpad completely down. Quite exactly what happened with Jaiku, the Finnish microblogging service some years ago: Bought it, Open sourced it, reassigned developers to work on Buzzz. Jaiku is still up&running as it was moved it over to Google App Engine.

So now as Etherpad is open source, there are open source versions of it, see piratepad.net, pad.ubuntu-uk.org and http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html

The cool thing with Etherpad is that anyone can use it without a need to register or log in. Many people can edit the same file at the same time and they will immediately see the changes the others make. You can save revisions, export the files as txt, html, pdf and so on. It’s also great to see how the text is color coded: each user has his own color so it’s quite easy to see what has changed and so on. It also features an awesome time slider letting you to see when the changes have been made and so on.

Results

Screenshot of the press release - click to see it bigger

In less than two hours we had a press release, translated by around 10 people. See the screenshot on the right to see how one sentence can be edited by many people – and still make sense. At least to us, who read Finnish ;)

Releasing (=mailing it to news papers and other contacts) started immediately. This resulted a nice visibility in Finnish IT magazines – we’re still waiting for the break through on non-IT magazines :/

You can see the pad we used here: http://pad.ubuntu-uk.org/JnzhILi8dT (Thanks Ubuntu UK for supporting us :)

So I can recommend Etherpad to you and your community – it’s an awesome tool to allow your volunteers to skip all unnecessary registrations and focus on the results.

Thanks for everyone who contributed. You can check the final press release at Ubuntu-fi wiki.

ps. My guess is that Google will buy Doodle and ‘do the magic’ there in the following 12 months ;)

Share

Related posts:

• Behind Ubuntu Suomi -haastattelu Minua haastateltiin Ubuntu Suomen blogiin teemalla ‘Behind Ubuntu Suomi’. Lue...

tangogps is an easy to use, fast and lightweight mapping application for use with or without GPS. (tangoGPS web site)

FoxtrotGPS is an offshoot of Marcus Bauer’s excellent tangoGPS application, with a focus on cooperation and fostering community innovation. (FoxtrotGPS web site)

And it’s all GPL’d (read: ‘free & libre open source software’). Read the full announcement on FOSS-GPS mailing list.

Nothing much to add to that. Now go & check http://www.foxtrotgps.org/, subscribe to the FOSS-GPS mailing list, join the #foxtrotgps IRC channel and let your ideas, contributions and wishes flow! I’d expect the first release to be out soonish so have your Ubuntus, Freerunners and eeePCs ready!

Share

Related posts:

• GPS-reitin piirtely fillarilenkkiä varten / Babelfish Kuinka suunnitella reitti fillarilenkkiä varten, luoda sille GPX-jälki ja muokata...

Someone came up with a fix: add a capacitor.

So we did.

Wiki page with instructions to detect if you’re hit by the bug: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/1024
Bug report: http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1024
Instructions to fix the bug: http://www.neofundas.blogspot.com/

After opening the case

Small, isn't it?

One end soldered to the ground

Other end soldered to the old capacitor

Thanks Antti & open hardware!

Results

The suspend power consumption dropped to around 6000 µA from around 15-20000µA when I now allow the GSM modem (Calypso) to go to deep_sleep mode. The 1200mAh battery should now give up to 200 hours = 8 days of power. Of course this is theoretical – I also need to use the phone to make calls, let GPS show me my location etc etc – and as I move, the GSM needs to wake up ever now and then because of the changing base stations. So nowadays I recharge it every other night still being able to make calls and do other stuff with it. Nice improvement!

Share

Related posts:

• Valokuvatorstai 122: Piposta vedetty Valokuvatorstai 122: Piposta vedetty Tags: photo...
• Squirrels / Oravat Tags: photo...
• New Year 2010 Tags: photo...

Tangogps is a map & gps program for Linux. Tangogps is written by Marcus Bauer and ir runs on devices like Openmoko Freerunner, but also on desktop computers. The channel I started is #tangogps, feel free to join! (Ajax client and Java client)

Smile is a slideshow application for Linux by Stéphane Gibault, see my blog post on Smile. The Irc channel is #smile-slideshow. Join the discussion there! (Ajax client and Java client)

Let the discussion flow!

What’s your experience on these apps? Using Tangogps or Smile? Best things about them?

About IRC – I think the IRC commands are a bit of a pain.. on #tangogps, I first dropped my op rights only to realize that after that I wasnt’ able to register the channel.. So 4 of us had to leave the channel to gain admin rights again.. But I’m learning :)

Share

Related posts:

• Bambuser live video stream from N900 over 3G At work we possibly have a need to stream live...
• The Wonderful World of the Internet Internet is a wonderful place, here’s something I’ve recently found...

It is still unknown if there will be a developer/user community around Wikireader and what will Openmoko do this time better than with Freerunner. You can try to find some answers on the Openmoko community mailing list

Share

Related posts:

• Samsung Galaxy Tab I today had the possibility to play a bit with...
• Nokia Kinect @ Nokia World, London A new concept device from Nokia: it’s operated by twisting...

Nokia 900

• A great device hardware-wise. Nice to see it running Linux but phone stack still closed. See ‘This is Linux from Finland
• I wouldn’t be surprised it it was already patented, but I think it’s a great idea to zoom in/out by making a circular motion on the touch screen – maybe something Openmoko browsers could use?
• When you turn N900 screen to portrait position it’ll start the ‘simple’ phone app – and on landscape it runs the ‘computer’ stuff. A nice idea again!

Paroli

• Work to make it work smoothly on SHR is being done (GREAT job Laszlo!!!), see http://git.paroli-project.org/
• Some UI hacks might be also there soon. I myself prefer having the buttons on bottom of the screen to be always able to see what’s on the screen.
• Waiting to see a working package on SHR to allow easy installation: opkg install paroli

SHR

• Settings is nice, supports stuff from power management to connections to much more, also looks good.
• Phone apps work OK though slow when reading stuff from SIM (-> opimd support, where are you…?)
• I like the buttons at the bottom of the screen – but they could use some rethinking:
  • Most of the time the ‘next’ button (be it new, OK, send) is on the bottom left.
  • Sometimes there’s a close/exit/back button on bottom right, sometimes not. This makes you have to close an app (for example call log) from illume top bar. Not very nice.
  • Now there are 1-4 buttons next to each other (settings: only the quit button, phone log: call/add/numbers/duration)
  • I like the ‘options’ -button of contacts to show more stuff. How about moving ‘new’ there and adding ‘close/back/exit’ on the bottom right?
• A single button to take you to ‘home view’ would be nice – that’s why iPhone has that one HW button.
• Hundreds of contacts in the contacts list makes it a pain to scroll. Some thoughts:
  • The finger scrolling works nice
  • The scrollbar’s too small to use
  • How about starting the view from middle of the list, not from the beginning (to reduce need of scrolling)
  • How about creating jump buttons:
    • Alphabetic, like Paroli does
    • or start/middle/end
• So far SHR’s been the most usable distro I’ve had. People are not complaining about the audio quality, suspend/resume is reliable, nice GUI’s to start GPRS & GPS etc.
• I’d like to be able to adjust the volume during call
• I’d like to see the duration of the call during a call (can I already see it? Don’t know.. :)

Misc

• We’re still waiting to be able to use the accelerometers to silent the phone / answer a call / something. Saw today Mickey started to write accelerometer support for FSO – very nice!

(also have a look at my outdated Openmoko wishlist)

Share

Related posts:

• Samsung Galaxy Tab I today had the possibility to play a bit with...
• Random stuff & demand OpenID! Demand openid! – an easy way to vote for sites...
• N900 Bought Nokia N900 phone two weeks ago from huuto.net, Finnish...