I’m reviewing lots of applications, themes and games for N900 and sometimes I’m adding my personal likes, dislikes and expectations. If I recall correctly that at least few times I’ve wrote ‘I hope that in future versions it will..’. But words and expectations is one, reality is… actually quite promising.
My first article on this blog is about Maepad – multi purpose notepad application for Nokia N900. Today we can see that application is really getting better. Once I’ve mentioned vi-like keybindings for Maepad and it wasn’t the last improvement. The flow of events with constant need of portrait-mode applications encouraged developer to include at least checklist portrait mode, belive me it’s awesome while shopping. Lots of minor changes, updates in translations, as for free application it’s getting better and better.
Now something more rapid, if you’ve read about Black Plastic Theme Pack and you use extras-devel catalogue you should already know that this is changing almost every day (!), 5 updates a week is minimum I’ve seen for this theme (I’m not updating every day). When I first installed there was custom transitions, theme itself and small application to configure. In time more color schemes came, configuration was moved to more appropriate place, installation or update doesn’t ask you for theme features choices, so it goes faster and something that was missing in every previous theme – custom fonts. Right, you can now change UI font using Black Plastic!
This is only example and as you can see applications are really improving, some slowly, step by step, some more rapidly almost every day, but there is a real progress. This proves that ‘I hope some day this app will…’ is not always futile
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MJ

If you follow software updates frequently you may have noticed some new updates in extras-devel and extras-testing catalogues which cannot be installed because of unresolved dependencies. I’m fully aware of the date today, but I cannot take everything as a joke and this time I think it’s not a joke. If you follow Maemo 5 development and this blog, you should already know that new system update is almost ready to be released, application developers already have SDK PR1.2 to adapt their applications to this new firmware.
Let’s have a look into App Manager and maybe some of my installed applications. As you can see Maepad 1.5 is available but trying to install it causes error, and going to details shows unresolved dependency of libhildon1 (>= 2.2.10). This package is one of base of Maemo 5 UI and it comes with system. If you’re a little skilled with console and APT you can easily check current version of this package installed (which is for me 2.2.3-1+0m5). Similar situation with QtIrreco 0.3.1-1 update with unmet dependencies of total 5 libqt4 packages (>=4.6.2~git20100224) making update unable to install.
As we know Qt 4.6 will come with PR1.2 update and I assume the same goes to Hildon 2.2.10 so I think that broken updates are not to be afraid of this time. It’s part of good job done by developers, making their packages ready for Maemo 5 PR1.2 update!
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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial
Please visit Nokia N900 Forum

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

For quite some time I was digging application catalogues to find good replacement for my worn-out notebook. Finally extras-devel provided MaePad, fairly simple yet powerful tool.