Friday, September 10, 2010

First MeeGo conference is around the corner

So, the first MeeGo conference will be upon us in two months and it's time for me to wrap up what's been going on with me and the transition from Maemo to MeeGo.

First of all, I hoped to have more spare time to dedicate to the completion of the Maemo version of Xournal. The latest version in extras-devel still need some fixing and at least a bunch of features before pushing it to Extras.
I still plan to finish it BEFORE starting some work on MeeGo.
Weird enough, even though I didn't touch it lately, some users are reporting crashes in Xournal. I do experience it myself.
I have, on my N900, the latest dev version (not in Extras, but with not many new changes) and it has always worked fine until few weeks ago I got a message from a user complaining it was crashing for him.
At first I thought it was an isolated case. But then I grabbed my N900 and Xournal was crashing on me as well! As soon as the File Dialog tries to appear, it crashes.
I have no idea, yet, of what is happening. It clearly seems some other app we've both installed changed some shared library. I'll have to try on my girlfriend's N900 and see what's happening. Her version (older, I think she's using the Extras one) seems to work fine and she hasn't installed that much crap anyway.

So, the plan is to complete the Maemo version, push it to Extras and then start working on the MeeGo version.
Hopefully by that time, the MeeGo SDK would be stable enough.

Only big issue is, again, time. I already dealt with a customer go-live deadline in July and moved to East Canada to follow a new customer go-live process since then. I can't speak of any go-live date as this is confidential, but I can tell you that a news we recently got ourselves will mean even less spare time for me and thus Xournal.
But I still think I'll manage to fix this issue, add a few feature to Xournal from the desktop version and push it to Extra before the conference.

Speaking of which, I do wish I could attend and I did apply for sponsorship, but I am not sure it'll get accepted. Flying from Canada is expensive and my contributions to MeeGo sum up to none so far.
However, that won't mean I will stop supporting Xournal and working on it for Maemo and/or MeeGo :)

That, I guess, is good news for Xournal users, right ? :)

Last thing, a user on the Xournal thread on talk.maemo.org is willing to help and I still haven't got time to wrap up a small e-mail highlighting the parts of the code where he should concentrate most... that says how much spare time I've got :/

Anyway...I'll make it work :)
Sooner or later, I'll make it work and have a final stable version of Xournal on Extras with a few new useful features.

Aniello