Maemo Summit – Day Two Highlights

The second day of the Maemo Summit concentrates on community, development frameworks and applications. Presentations have lots of interesting details and hopefully the videos and slides will be available soon online for those interested in the deep content of Maemo development. Here’s the highlights from day two:

Highlight 0: Maemo Summit Party

Maemo Summit Party was held on the evening of day one. Participants had great time and many declared it the best conference party ever. Special thanks went to Russ Chimes for the music.

Highlight 1: New Maemo Community Council members introduced

The Maemo Community Council is a five-person body chosen by the “Maemo community”. The Council’s primary purpose is to represent the views and opinions of the Maemo Community to Nokia, and vice versa. New council members are Randall Arnold, Alan Bruce, Graham Cobb, Matthew Lewis and Valério Valério. More details in the Maemo wiki.

Highlight 2: Blender software introduced as a successful open-source project for building software and community around challenging and complex 3D creation needs.

Highlight 3: Maemo UI Design

Design principles behind the Maemo UI were discussed. One example being that the “x-button” to close windows is small on the screen, but the actual responsive finger touch area is larger: better usability without cluttering the screen. Maemo UI is also designed to have “soul”, distinctive from other user interfaces (like Nokia’s Symbian heritage) to make it easier for users to relate to. Simplification has been another major driver too.

Highlight 4: Maemo Personalization

Sound and Visual personalization is quite free in the Maemo platform. Examples are e.g. the continuous four-screen panroamic desktop background (by using four images). Theme Maker is available here.

Highlight 5: Qt framework development for Maemo 5 and 6 were discussed in details

Highlight 6: Maemo Co-creation session results

Maemo Co-creation session was held just before the summit, where community participants joined Nokia for co-creating ideas and concepts for future software and services.See the concept diagrams in e.g. Tim Samoff’s Twitpic stream.

Highlight 7: BlueMaemo presentation

Bluetooth support for Maemo devices in hard core manner:

• Use N900 as a keyboard to other PCs, mobile phones and other bluetooth enabled devices
• Use N900 as a touchpad (mouse) for other PCs, mobile phones and other bluetooth enabled devices
• Use N900 as a Sony Playstation 3 controller
• Control presentation
• Control Media (slideshows, music, video)

Highlight 8: UPnP support

UPnP (and DLNA) are those promising and cool technologies, which don’t really seem to catch up. Maybe it has been too hard to configure, maybe there hasn’t been real mass market need etc. Anyway, lately the standard has been adopted by more and more home electronics and N900 has basic support for it from day one on a open-source stack implementation. Advanced features are in development (like streaming your TV via UPnP).

Highlight 9: Canola media player

Canola is already a rock star application in Maemo community for earlier versions of Maemo. Maemo 5 version was reviewed and the good looks, plug-in architecture (e.g. Twitter, Picasa, Youtube, Flickr and many community created extensions) and general awesomeness continues.

Highlight 10: Lots of Maemo Summit pictures taken with new N900s

See the Flickr stream.