Playing with Maemo
Long time without writing, so let’s retake it. Last weeks I’ve been playing with Maemo and Nokia 770. Very interesting platform, very familiar for those (like me) with some background in Gnome SDK.
The device is fantastic. Definitely. Small, light, and with a good screen. But overall, as much powerful as free software is. As this was my main interest, Maemo as a free software based device, I’ve been taking a look at the development platform. Nokia has done a good work, not only providing full access to a Gtk/Gnome based technology, for developing applications, but also offering their platform contributions to the community.
Interesting points:
- Very similar to Gnome development. Starting to develop Maemo applications for someone with Gnome SDK background is a very very small step.
- Scratchbox. The project is interesting, and it makes very easy debian-based development of software. I can try very dirty pieces without breaking my PC environment.
- Sardine distribution, to let you work on the bleeding edge platform.
- Good tutorials for startup (see Maemo 2.0 tutorial and Scratchbox tutorial to start developing).
Drawbacks:
- Many pieces of the software inside the real device are not available as free software (yet?). Main example is the web browser (Opera), but there are more.
- A bit slow. I suppose that time will let Maemo be faster and lighter (it’s still a very young platform, so there’s a long way to run). We can expect to see heavy improvements in next months and years, and some of this work returning back to Gnome to make it also better).
- It’s _VERY_ difficult to find an RS-MMC (recommended for dual boot procedure). I’ve walked lots of shops in order to get one, and I’m still waiting for my order.
Of course, I’ve sent my first bugs and patches mainly related with file selection (filters bug, proposal for filters UI). I’ll comment more interesting things I find next days.