Second step: Berlin

At the Malpensa airport ready to board

Next step

Brothers :)

Travelling to the UK

First part of the trip from Salerno to London: Salerno - Piacenza.

maemo.org Community Council members are going to be elected!

In few days (September, 10th) we will finally know who will be the members of the maemo.org community council.

Please note the ".org", the council will help us (the community) make our voice be heard at Nokia and, vice versa, will help Nokia in listening to the Maemo community.

This is going to be really helpful and the candidates seem to be really good.
This also marks the first of this kind of council established between a strong commercially closed company as Nokia (even if Nokia is struggling to become more open) and a strong open source community.

Let's keep an eye on this link and let's get the most out of it!

Olympics Games spirit

Regardless.

Bejing 2008

It started.

Summer

I will miss this beaches in London. This one is near 'Spiaggia della Marinella' in Camerota, Salerno. Unfortunately the n810 is in the car, so...no GPS location. However, this beach is awesome!

Thank you.

Thank you Jane, little genius, for this.

Maemo Summit 2008: going to berlin!

Today I have noticed that the Maemo team accepted my sponsorship application for the Maemo Summit 2008 in Berlin, September 19-20!

I was not expecting it. I am very glad about this.
I am still trying to figure out what to actually do there.
My idea was to talk (but not a real talk where you listen and I speak,but rather a session where we both speak, ask and listen) about issues in porting desktop applications to the Maemo platform.
I would like to also underline the importance of evaluating the platform potential before even planning to port the application.
This should lead to a better integration of the application with the Maemo platform.
Porting an application is not only a matter of redefining the UI (even tho this is another extremely important aspect of the porting procedures).

Usually we think about the mobile devices as a cut down version of our desktops.
Even tho it's always true, it is also true that the mobile devices, often, provide more new features that the desktop doesn't or cannot provide at all.

Taking the key aspects of the target platform into the right account when planning a port, is fundamental for the success of the port.

I will refine these ideas during the following weeks.
Looks like it'll be an interesting summer (job hunting in London, Maemo Summit in Berlin and a few conferences/workshops/meeting related to my research).

Back on Xournal

UPDATE:
Looks like too many people have the maemo extras-devel repository installed.
They should not. Or at least, they should know what the extras-devel repo is.
The maemo extras-devel repository is intended as a tool for the developer to test out its code before promoting it to the real maemo Extras repository (the one that's pre-configured in your tablet when you buy it, disable).

Today I've uploaded an alpha version of Xournal (packaged for diablo) on the maemo extras-devel repository. Thus, those people got the notification of an update available and went straight to the Application Manager in order to update.

I see here two mistakes:

1) they should have not installed the -devel repository (unless they knew what they were doing)
2) the Application Manager should TELL from WHERE the package is coming from

However, the next release of Xournal HAS NOT YET been released.
And I strongly suggest, whoever has the maemo extras-devel repo installed, to NOT update to the Diablo version yet.

Check out this ITt forum thread for more info.
My post #198 on that thread explain how to solve the issue.

Thank you.

Original post:

Today I noticed that Xournal has been selected as "The Pearl" in the Maemo Downloads section.

Right on time, I would say as this morning I woke up and decided that it's time to upgrade my Maemo SDK to Diablo and re-package Xournal in order to make it appear in the Diablo extras repository.

So, thank you Maemo team for choosing Xournal as the current pearl!

Stay tuned, it shouldn't take too much time.

Diablo has been released!!!

Cool finally they released it!

Going to update.

You can find it the usual place for the n810 and n800.

Here you can find the announcement.

[UPDATED] Maemo: No Java and OpenGL ES support. Official.

UPDATE: Daniel Stone and Quim Gil further explained the status of the OpenGL ES and Java support in the comments to this post.
As they've pointed out, the title of my post is misleading in the sense that FOR NOW there is no support and no plan for it.
The "WONTFIX" part is, thus, temporary.
Daniel also went further and added a new comment to bug #1028

I will leave the original post below unedited.

-- ORIGINAL WRONG POST
This morning, during my usual e-mail check, I had a quick look at Maemo Bug Jar #9 and discovered this list of two bugs marked as RESOLVED: WONTFIX.

[This part is just plain wrong]
Thus, it's official: we won't get either Java and OpenGL ES support on the Nokia's Internet Tablets.

I was expecting it, but it's anyway sad to read that it's confirmed.

A-GPS support on the N8x0 is coming with Diablo

Looks like we will finally get really fast fix times, with our tablets, when Diablo will eventually come out.

ITT's forum user "qwerty12" noticed a nice "agps-ui" application to control AGPS on the tablet.
He went on and installed it and it works!

Other (lucky) Diablo (pre-release) users are reporting time to fix in the order of SECONDS!

Can't wait for the release of this new firmware.

iPhone version of Google Reader on the N810

Today I was going thru my feed subscriptions on Google Reader when I hit this interesting post from Jonathan Greene (aka atmasphere).

With no further ado I pointed my n810's browser to the iPhone version of Google Reader...awesome.
Really.

This made me think.. why they had to wait for the iPhone to come out in order to make stuff like that ?
Why other websites feel being pushed by the iPhone and not by the pletora of tablet-like devices running at the wonderful resolution of 800x480 or lower (Nokia tablets, Asus EEE PC, UMPCs, and so on...) ?

Anyway.. I am now enjoying Google Reader a lot more than before on my n810.

It would be nice to try it out on the n810 with a rotated screen :)

From another point of view, I was also thinking: wasn't Apple advertising a 'real internet' on your palm when talking about the iPhone version of Safari ?
So... what's the deal with so many websites featuring trimmed down version of their pages specifically for the iPhone ?
May be lack of screen real estate ?

TCFS Revival

Still works. :)

http://www.tcfs.unisa.it/

Xournal is skyrocketing...

Wow!!
Since I have released Xournal few days ago, a lot of people downloaded it and now Xournal is among the first 4 (yes, four!) most downloaded applications !
Thank you guys and thanks to Denis Auroux, the real developer of Xournal.

And thanks also for the great votes Xournal has got so far.

We're climbing fast :)

I was really surprised to see how many people downloaded Xournal, but really surprised to see that it was downloaded more than Canola or Maemo Mapper!
I would have never thought this was possible.

:) it's awesome!

UPDATE: We're second only to Pidgin...I can't believe it.

Xournal 0.4.2.1 available in Maemo Extras

Hello,

I just wanted to let people know that I have just finished to port the latest Xournal (version 0.4.2.1) to Maemo (sorry, only chinook for now).

The most interesting features of the new version are Pressure Sensitivity and Shape Recognition.
You can find more info about that on the Xournal page.

The Maemo port has a bunch of new features compared to the old port (version 0.4.1):

- The user interface has been fully hildonized
- Added pressure sensitivity toggle button (enabled by default)
- Added support for the Maemo File Manager (double tapping a .xoj file opens Xournal)
- Added support for the Backup/Restore application (the saved settings will be backed up)
- Menus have been shortened to contain Maemo useful options (Uncheck "Options->Shorten Menus" to get the whole menu items back)
- Color support has been greatly enhanced
- Help support added (russian translation also available, thanks to ITT forum member "sashabe")
- Overall size has been reduced to the bare minimum

You can find Xournal in the Maemo Extras repository, so just go to your Application Manager, enable the "maemo Extras" repository and refresh the list of applications.
Go to the Tools category to find Xournal and install it.
The full size should be a bit more than 1Mb.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed porting it.

Click on the image above to see it at full size.

Note: Xournal depends on the package "poppler-utils". It is actually in the "maemo Extras Devel" repository
(http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/ free non-free).
I will contact the poppler-utils maintainer to see if he can move it to "maemo Extras".
In the meanwhile you can use the install file that I have added to the Xournal page in the Maemo Downloads section.

Xournal chosen as "Featured Downloads" on OS2008 User Site

Today I was thinking...that wow! After the cool video tutorial at Internet Tablet School, Xournal made a second strike and this time on the OS2008 User Site (the old "tableteer", reachable only from a Nokia Internet Tablet).

Indeed, the description is not correct. I am not the developer of Xournal, but there are four developers behind it and I am not among them.
I only did the port to the Maemo platform.

Moreover, they listed Xournal with the blue tag, i.e. as a "Nokia or commercial partners" application.
I am glad they consider me at the very same level of a big organization, but unfortunately I am not so big, yet :-p

Anyway, I am very happy that Xournal and its port to Maemo went so far.

Thanks.

UPDATE: The OS2008 User page has been updated with the link to the video tutorial :)
UPDATE2: The OS2008 User's Site N8x0 specific version is reachable also from a regular desktop at this address: Xournal Featured on Tableteer

Internet Tablet School made a tutorial for Xournal

Today I was thinking...that while waiting for me to finish the Xournal port, you guys should have something to do with the beta released so far :)
To help came the folks at Internet Tablet School who made a nice tutorial (Nokia N800 & N810: Take notes and doodle with Xournal) on some of the features you can find in Xournal (even though they missed the most important feature for me: Annotate PDF).

Simply jump here and take a look at it!

Mp3Tunes Locker for N810 coming

Today I was thinking...the mp3tunes applet on OS2007 was cool. So I went and installed it on my N810 with OS2008. It installed flawlessly, but it wouldn't show up when selected.
Looks like the applet is not compatible with the OS2008 new desktop.

So I looked around and my friend Google found this:

Auto-yncing with tunewath from Mp3Tunes

That's even better!
No need to be on-line to get your musinc with you.. just sync it (ahhh that magic word has never yet been used with an Internet Tablet) and off you go!

Can't wait for this app to be ready and usable on my Nokia N810.
This device gets everyday more interesting.