MWKN Weekly News: 1 August 2011



Thanks be to the helpful, redux

As some of you may know our Edit-in-Chief and Glorious Leader, Andrew Flegg, abandoned us to the pitiless whims of fortune last week when he left for a multi-week vacation to France. To best facilitate his temporary replacement by automatons and monkeys, he helpfully set up a series of scripts to handle issue fetching and publication for the duration of his unavailability. Due to confusing timezone interpretations (variously to be blamed on monkeys and unclear emails), a problem arose when the scripts succeeded in publishing the issue, by my clock, an hour early. Unfortunately the result was the perfect excising of Andrew Olmsted's well-earned kudos from last week's issue--due, in no part (I'll note), to my forgetting about my omissions until 5 minutes after the real publishing time.

To make ammends I'd like you to be aware of two points: First, Andrew's blog post on testing Harmattan applications without a device should've ended up on the issue's front page. And, second, I had intended to thank him for providing copy editing, moral support and direct first-name personnel replacement in the absence of vacationing-Andrew thusly: That resolved, I'd like to again thank Andrew for his continued and siginificantly expanded assistance this week and publicly state my sincere hope that he elects to stay on as permanent staff (this way he wont be able to weasel out so easily).


Powerfull search page containing official and developer repos for MeeGo Harmattan:

Adam Harwell has continued Marat Fayzullin's excellent work in "Pack Rat" - a powerful package aggregation site that allows users to search through the available Harmattan packages and get details on how to obtain them. We touched on this last week, but a tool this useful (especially in these early days of Harmattan with no central repository for community applications) deserves to be mentioned again.


SDL 1.2 community port for Harmattan

Javier S. Pedro has continued his steller work with the SDL libraries on mobile harward with his release of version 1.2 for Harmattan I, for one, have been looking forward to Javier's SDL work on this platform from very early on for the sheer number of game ports it opens up.



In this edition...

1. Front Page
   • Thanks be to the helpful, redux
   • Powerfull search page containing official and developer repos for MeeGo Harmattan:
   • SDL 1.2 community port for Harmattan
2. Applications
   • Latitude Assist geo-fencing/SOS tool now free
3. Development
   • WarpTree UI Qt component and example file browser
   • Faster Qt Creator development turnaround
   • Using camera & video in same QML app?
4. Devices
   • Prevent flashback on N900 camera
5. In the Wild
   • Polar Mobile to Introduce over 80 Apps in Intel AppUp center for MeeGo-Based Tablets
6. Announcements
   • Initial CloudGPS port to Harmattan
   • SwipeMeeOut traffic moving game for Harmattan
   • Ghosts Overboard accelerometer game for Harmattan
   • ...and 4 more