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N900 still awaits automatic portrait mode to take advantage of it’s accelerometer. In the mean time developers are producing applications that show it really works.
You’ve probably seen Bounce Evolution, it was installed on my N900 by default. Very nice 3D game controlled only by device tilt and space for jumping. This was the first application I remember with accelerometer support.
Some time after when Ovi store was opened another applications came, including Level or Angle Meter, small applications that show how exact the accelerometer is, showing quite accurate level or angle in degrees. I think it may be nice replacement for engineering tools, when you need to measure something and you have no proffesional level in your pocket .
Some time ago 3D and accelerometer joined their forces to show another nice application showing 3-dimentional picture of earth depending on phone position. It’s rather a toy to show power hidden inside N900 than useful software but I like the idea.
There are other applications that I’ve never tried, like PlayStation pad emulator, but knowing how bit potential hides in this small device I assume that it’s just the matter of time when something really cool will come. I’ll be waiting for that day, even if PR1.2 update won’t have full rotation support I can still use accelerometer in some way
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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial
Please visit Nokia N900 Forum

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FeedingIt is a very simple, very good RSS Reader. It is really easy to do the setup, and the feeds are shown very clear and well-arranged in a list. And the best thing, you can use it in portrait mode, which makes reading comfortable, especially on trips. Switch between the stories only with a finger wipe. It´s almost like reading a book.

First, after you installed the program from the Maemo download section, you have to add your favourite feeds in the setup section “Organize Feeds”. Tap on “Add Feed” and set a name for your news collection. Now you will be asked for the URL of the RSS feed, and your done. You can rearrange your feeds in your own order of interest or importance, edit or delete them, as you like. The main screen shows you now all your installed newsletters. Tapping on one, opens the news list of your chosen RSS feed, from where you start reading tapping again on one article. Once the article shows up, you can turn your phone into portrait mode and scroll to your news with your finger, like I mentioned before. I like this very much.

You are also able to import your feeds of interest to your N900 with OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language). For not so skilled users, as I am, this means just that you can add your feeds downloading a file from a specific location, either local or over the internet.

Credits for the author Yves Marcoz for this application.
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -

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Nokia announced, that Ovi Maps with free walk and drive is now available for the Nokia E71 and the E66. I know, that has nothing to do with our beloved N900, but some times ago it was released for the N86 8MP after Ovi Maps Navigation has been available on a small range of devices such as Nokia E72, Nokia N97 mini, the 5800 and the X6 since January.

So I just wonder, where is the version for the N900? As Anssi Vanjoki promised in the end of January it will be available soon. But what means soon? We have Arpil now, and there is no free Navigation for the N900 in sight. Does Nokia have a deal with Sygic? They released their navigation software a few days ago, since 23rd of March, I think. All in all it is really not very expensive, the European maps are available for eur 59,99 in their Online Shop and the USA can be purchased for eur 49,99. Also a Canadian map is already being sold and other regions are “under construction”. But anyway, why should N900 owners pay for something, what Nokia is giving out for free. Only in the case, when we are able to compare both (or more) systems, we can form an opinion which one suites us better (subjective considered) and then “buy or not to buy” the one we´d like to.

I am really waiting to get Ovi Maps for my N900!
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -

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Sounds like K.I.T.T. is doing the job for you, but the truth is, this application helps you to find your car. Haven´t you been in such situations where you didn´t remember, where you left your car? In a foreign town maybe, or even in your hometown? I remember one case, it was in my hometown, that I had an appointment. Being a little late, searching a parking-lot, I ran to the meeting. After a long and productive “sit-in”, I offered my client to drive him to the airport. My mistake! I nearly remembered the direction from where I ran to the meeting. So we headed for my car .. after about half an hour, I gave up, took a taxi for the meanwhile impatient client, payed it, and continued searching. It is really TRUE that it took me another hour to find my vehicle in the maze of little lanes of the first district.
So, with this application, this would not happen again.

EasyPark is a very nice light app from the Author Jaap Braam. To install just go to the application manager of your phone. EasyPark will also install the Geolocation plugin for the N900 browser, which is necessary to determine your current location. After installing be sure to configure your GPS preferably with Network positioning.

When you parked your car, just tab “park” and the app remembers the location shown as a little “P” on the map. Thats all you need to do. When returning to your vehicle tab “route” and the app will guide you to your four wheels. It will also show you your current parking time, or the distance to your car. You will get an audio alert, if your parking time is running out, so you can easily extend your parking permission.

Please goto the developers homepage, to get more information and a full manual. All in all a very useful application, especially when you need to drive a lot, having outside meetings, etc.
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -

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Working on visualizations as part of my every day job, this application could be very helpful for presentations at customers. Imagine the wow effect, when demonstrating some nice rendered project pictures or scenes with the N900 in combination with a beamer or a big screen over cable or even blue-tooth if available.
Author Juha Vesanen from the finnish company SVS Innovations Ltd. developed a 3D cross-platform, multipurpose 3D engine for desktop computers and embedded systems, as in this case for use on our beloved N900. This version is only a first sight demo, but the examples coming with the installation will give you first impressions about the possibilities of this real-time visualization tool. Capsule 3d has been designed for devices supporting OpenGL ES 2.0, i.e. majority of the upcoming high-end handheld devices.
For more technical information visit the developers Homepage. There you will also find screenshots, this example video, and the download link to your phone. The application demo can also be downloaded in the Maemo Extras section.

Potential uses for this engine are in first place engineering, visualization and entertainment, that´s what the common user is probably waiting for, the implementation to 3D games, but for me it would be the visualization presentation experience what I´ve been looking for.
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -

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If you have noticed the numerous Tux Games made for the Linux Platform, you will be not surprised that there are some Tux Penguin Games also for the Maemo OS. Of course there are not lots of them, but maybe it isn´t that hard to translate the existing Tuxers from Linux straight to our phones. If you are familiar with the X-Terminal, there might be a way to install some Linux based games, the so called deb files. I don´t know how this could be done, but in the Talk section of the Maemo site you will find lots of instructions. Still be aware of using X-Terminal for installing, and my advise is, keep your hands off, unless you know what you are doing.

But for those who are common users, like me, there are some very good games ready to install from the Maemo download section. I will begin with Super Tux, a classic 2D jump and run sidescroller, which is similar to the original SuperMario games. Author Valério Valério did a very good job to interpret this one for the Maemo platform. On his homepage you will find instructions, screenshots and more information about Super Tux.

The next game I want to mention is another Tux clone called Wormux. Written by Mikko Vartiainen as a “convivial mass murder” game it can be compared with the well know Worms, which was pretty much the source for this creation. Thank you for this one!

The last one in my list, also from Mikko Vartiainen, is Battle Gweled, a fast action puzzle game. Based on the original Bejeweled, you have to swap the jewels positions to build up rows and get rid of the diamonds. This one can really keep you trapped.

That´s it for this time. If you know some good games for the N900, let us know.
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -

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Here are some “new” shortcuts which I discovered since my last post about Tips and Tricks. Of course, some of you will already know these ones, but it is just another addition for our list to complete.

Caps Lock: If you want to use capital letters not only at the beginning of a sentence, lets say for a headline, press two times on the shift key, and it will turn on the Caps Lock. To turn off, just press the Shift key again.
The same can be done with the secondary keys, which are accessed by pressing the blue arrow, the “Alt” key. Press two times and lock the blue symbols and numbers. To turn off, just press “Alt” again.
To access the Additional Symbols Menu just press “Alt” and “Ctrl” at the same time. From there you can insert symbols, that are not found on the keyboard.

Highlight text from websites in the browser: Swipe your finger from the left site of the screen. A white arrow will appear. Tap on this symbol and you will get the “Mouse” arrow like you are used to on your personal desktops. With this function you can copy and paste text from websites for example.

Scrolling in the browser is also possible with the Space Key of your keyboard. This will automatically move the page several rows down. Of course the Arrow Keys can be used to scroll down slow, line by line.
You have heard of the browser history, which is activated with a swipe from the right of your screen, being in the browser. But maybe you haven´t heard about pressing the “Back” button on your keyboard, which instantly brings you back to the previous page.
If you have multiple tasks open and you want to go to the Multitask View of your phone fast, use “Ctrl” and “Back” at the same time. This will bring up your open applications thumbnails instantly.
That´s it for this time. If you have any suggestions, please post them as comments, so I can add them the next time to complete the Tips and Tricks posts.

- sam …

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If you look at the competitor Apple with its iPhone, it is unchallenged, that they do really have apps. Sometimes I just go through the amount of applications for the Apple phone to see if something would be interesting to have on the N900. And indeed I always find some programs, which I really would like to see on my phone.
For example the Linkedin app, which is basically the business version of Facebook. What in the world can be so difficult to adapt this social media version to the Nokia phone, when Facebook is already in it? There can´t be much differences between this two, or am I erring?
Then there is Spotify, the online music database, to listen to your favorite tracks everywhere, everytime you want to. Yes, I know there is some kind of client named Yaspot, but I didn´t really have had the ambition to test this one yet , and I have to say, that I would prefer the native version rather than some auxiliary programs.
What I am really missing is Total Recall from Killermobile. I used this app on my N73, and I loved it. It records all your calls, incoming or outgoing, automaticly and saves the files to a folder you can define. It uses the file type amr, which saves the recordings in really small files and even sends you the attachments by email, so you don´t have to worry about backups. In the Maemo download section you can find a similar program, which allows you to record your calls, but it works only manually, so its not that useful as Total Recall. (Recording of phone calls, is not allowed in some countries. So be careful when using this application).
Which apps you would like to see on the N900?

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I have noticed an active increment of themes for the Maemo (especially for the N900) platform. The author Ricky Tournee for example released six themes at once, called the livilSteel theme series. They are all consistent in design and layout, which makes them distinctively belonging together and reflecting the designers “handwriting”.
The first one is the basic theme, livilSteel:

As second livilSteel Army Theme:

The third one is livilSteel Black Winter Day Theme:

Forth theme is livilSteel OSX Theme which is my favorite one:

As fifth theme livilSteel Grunge Theme:

And the last one livilSteel High Contrast Theme:

All of them are downloadable in the Maemo Download section for free! Thank you Ricky Tournee!
Another nice theme, which I place as my second favorite is the Array Theme for Fremantle by Johannes Siipola. Kiitos!

And my last one, on my personal third place I rank the Reflect Theme also by Johannes Siipola.

With time to time it will be more and more interesting to personalize the own device. We did not have a wide range of themes yet, but with this speed of theme releases, I think we will be able to choose soon our individual one.
Thank you Theme-Developers, I really appreciate your work, and I think the most of us do, am I right, or am I right?
So long,
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -

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Long long time ago in a galaxy far far away a great war begun. Or maybe not so long ago, around mid-70s, when both sides arised on soil of Unix development. Vi and Emacs are text editors for Unix-like systems, widely used by developers, administrators etc. Many users that got used to one of the editors was claiming that this one is the best, which caused many discussions and even flame wars all around internet. This how the Editor war begun and was waged over many years. Today I’d rather think about it as a good joke, I don’t mind when sometimes my collegues still call me ‘vi worshipper’ .

Nowdays both editors have many clones, on N900 we have Vim (a.k.a. Vi Improved available in extras) and Qemacs (available in extras-devel and extras-testing). I won’t tell you which one is better and some of you may not be sure why do anyone need such low-level text editor, when having Notes, Maepad and other applications for N900. I use it to edit files that are not in MyDocs catalogue on my N900, when I’d like to test some advanced features myself, because mostly I know what I’m doing. If you would like to do such low-level changes, you might need such editor.

But why I even mention Editor war? Well, first of all to make some of you aware of open source history. Second of all, because i’d like to go back to Maepad once again and side with Vi fans . When I’ve mentioned it once in post regarding Maemo internals and software packages I haven’t stated why should you update this application. Vim fans will find useful keybindings introduced in Maepad 1.3. You can see it yourself on youtube in Vim Keybindings Demo. Enjoy!
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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial
Please visit Nokia N900 Forum

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DISCLAIMER: This software is located in extras-devel package, so it’s considered unsafe for your N900. Moreover it’s altering low-level system settings. If you want to use this software be sure you know what you’re doing!
This time I’ve found another interesting piece of software from extras-devel that helps you customize your N900. This time you can alter behaviour of LED notifications on incoming messages, charging etc. LED Pattern installs additional settings applet with a list of all available notifications.
Let’s start from the very beginning, N900 has ability to use 3 luminescent diodes, also called LED (light-emitting diode), every one of them gives one color out of red, green and blue (as in RGB palette). Single colour may be set to level ranging from 0 to 255, making 24-bit color depth.
LED Pattern gives you possibility to operate on two channels (called engines) and create plot of light brightness. Both engines may handle one, two or three diodes (lightning both to the same level), but you cannot assign the same diode to both engines. Plots are created using simple steps like Set PWM – setting light level instantly, Ramp – rising/lowering light level gradually in time, Wait – waiting for some time, Trigger – set to send to other engine, wait to receive and finally Reutrn to start – loops effect and must be included at the end.
When you finish your work on pattern you can test it, but this option is still a little buggy, sometimes you need to click few times to see what you want and sometimes it may interfere with active system notification. Ready patterns may be saved to the system configuration and you will be notified that this action may harm your device, so be sure what are you doing. If everything goes well brand new notification will be saved, daemon restarted and it’s done, new notification pattern is installed in the system and ready to be used.
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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial
Please visit Nokia N900 Forum

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“Unlock” your phone to a few new cool settings. Tweakr has to be standard in every N900, it should be integrated into the OS. But for now it can be downloaded in the Maemo testing section and it will install itself to your phone settings as a new menu called extras. Scroll down after opening the phone settings to setup tweakr.
First there is the wonderful and long waited setting option to “clean” and trim your desktop. Finally you can arrange your shortcuts and bookmarks on your desktops with “Snap icons to grid”. Gosh, I waited for this app! I always tried to get my icons in a line with the stylus, and I think you know what I am talking about. Choose the grid dimension from small to huge and your desktops will look totally classified.

“Edit desktop bookmarks” is another setting option, and as the name describes, it offers you to change the label of all desktop bookmarks in whatever you want.
The “Power key settings” enables functions to show the menu by short press, long press shuts down the phone and double locks the device. These are of course the default settings which you are able to change as you want.

At least you can set some “Profile presets”. Save the changes you made with tweakr, name it, and a new button will show up in the main menu (tap on the clock and battery icon).  Then you can choose your new profiles.

Fact is, tweakr really rocks, especially the grid function made this application a favorite.
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -

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As the headline already tells you, this is a continued blog about Tips and Tricks on the N900. As in some comments in the last post was mentioned, that most of you already know many of these hints, and others are also findable in the manual, the meaning of this information gathering is just to have all interesting material in one place shareable. I’d also like to get Tips and Tricks from you, so I can add these to our collection.

So here are the next ones:
Selecting text: hold the shift key and use the arrow keys
Selecting text with stylus: double tap for a word, or triple tap for all words (this is like the mouse double-click you are used from the pc)
Shortcuts used in web-browser:
. Ctrl + N: opens a new window
. Ctrl + R: reloads the current page
. Ctrl + B: opens a bookmark
. Ctrl + D: adds a bookmark
Shortcuts used in Email:
. Ctrl + Enter: send message
. Ctrl + R: reply to message
Taking a screenshot:
. Ctrl + Shift + P: captures current screen and saves it to the images folder (this one is for tricky fingers ).
 
Have you also known, that taping with one thumb on one side of the touch-screen and alternately with your other thumb on the other side of the screen while releasing the former finger almost at the same time, lets you swap your desktops in a horrendous speed. It needs a little bit practice, but if you got the hang of it, it is really a cool thing.
So this is it as much for today. To be continued …
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -

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There are not so many games available at the moment for the N900, and so I think it is really clear what the Top 3 games could be. Of course everybody has his own ambitions on games what is the best, but here are my Top three ones, although I don’t count me as an real game fanatic, I am more the just for fun and try kind of type.

On my personal third place I will place Bounce. This is really a quite cool realized 3D game which needs a littlebit skills to balance the ball through its way. What I like is that the accelerator of the N900 has really taken place in this one. I hope for more levels in the future, when I remember the version made for the Nokia 9210 which fortunately also ran on the Nokia 9300i.

My second choice is Backgammon, coequal with Chess. Both are wonderful timekillers and challenging games which also utilize a littlebit your brains. I am really a fan of these ones.

And as my favorite game I declare Angry Birds. Lots of fun and physics. Yes you “heard” right: physics is this games secret. You have really think about the angle and speed you are shooting the birds to their journey. There are 21 levels in the free version. You have to pass one after one to advance. Once finished all 21, there is an option to download more levels for a little fee.
So tell me, which games you like the most.
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -

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Most of you probably know sudoku, logic game of placing numbers in 9×9 grid following few simple rules. This games comes to almost every phone or mobile device in general and it’s no different for N900, even more, at the moment you have four alternative applications.
First of all we have EightyOne already available in extras, so it appears as pretty stable and well written piece of software. It has few difficulty levels, so everyone may be satisfied with playing. On exit current progress is saved, so you can take hard level and little more time in few parts. I also think that interface is quite good, numbers placed initially are different color than placed by player, you can easily tell how far you are from the beginning. Also gives few intresting options like statistics, tips or solving all game to check if you’re following good trail.
Another sudoku-based game is masudoku, for now available in extras-testing and extras-devel. It’s also equipped with few difficulty levels, but I find it more difficult to play because of one-colored numbers, only wrong placed pieces are shown in different color. It also gives you possibility to solve all, check if you can still solve the game and take hints. Unfortunately no option to save, so you have to start from the beginning every time.
masudoku – levels, marks, tips, devel&testing
Third I’ve found is gpe-sudoku (in extras-devel) and I was pretty confused seeing it’s interface, not so intuitive to be honest. It lacks level distinction, description of basic functions on screen, but also has some neat functionalities, like saving game or placing checkpoints to which you can go back to specified point.
The last one is Thumb Sudoku available in extras-devel. Following the name, it can be played using only your thumb, because runs in portrait mode, so it’s easy to operate with one hand. Nice interface, large grid, good visibility and comfort to play anywhere are most obvious pros. Save on exit is another useful thing, but unfortunately it doesn’t give you choice of difficulty level. Nevertheless still in devel, so it can improve soon.
As you see …