Community SSU features to look forward to

I've been writing some patches for hildon-desktop (the window manager on Maemo 5). For some of the more useful ones, I've reworked them to be configurable via transitions.ini (and disabled by default), so they can be merged into the Community SSU. Most of these patches try to improve the user experience and look and feel of the Maemo 5 UI, but tastes differ, so you can choose which one to enable:

• Blurless desaturation: With this feature enabled, the background of dialogs, menus, the launcher and the switcher won't get all blurry - instead, they keep their sharpness, but are darkened and desaturated. (thread with screenshots)
  
• Bigger task switcher: I think this is one of my earliest patches, now cleaned up to be configurable with different settings. You can choose between the Maemo 5 default layout, the single-column "big" task switcher and the two-column task switcher. I've left the horizontal task switcher out of this, as it wasn't working that well in some situations. (thread with screenshots)
  
• Rotation around the Z axis: This one makes the screen rotation look much more natural, just like on the MeeGo Handset UX. Instead of rotating around the X and Y axis, this makes the transitions from/to portrait mode rotate around the Z axis. (demo video)
  
• Forced auto-rotation for all apps: By default, hildon-desktop obeys the preferences of application windows and whether or not they support portrait mode. With this option enabled, hildon-desktop ignores those preferences and instead assumes every application can be auto-rotated. There's no support for the home screen, launcher or switcher, as these things are more complicated to support in portrait mode. (demo video)
  

Assuming that MohammadAG will merge these patches into the Community SSU version of hildon-desktop (a few of these have already been merged), you will get to enjoy those features in a future update. Please note that all those features are disabled by default, and need to be enabled explicitly in transitions.ini. For some of these options, a restart (of the device or hildon-desktop) is required.

In other news, the Community SSU version of H-A-M (that's the Application Manager in Maemo 5) now supports portrait mode, and this might also be merged at some point (it already works with the "Forced auto-rotation" patch, there are just some graphical glitches in the main screen that are fixed by the patch). Anybody up for some HTML hacking to make Maps portrait-aware? Should be easy to do, but I won't work on that one. Contributions welcome :)

New packages in Extras-Testing: gPodder 2.12, TV out control widget

gPodder 2.12 "The Odyssey of Flight 33" has been released, which is purely a bugfix release for those of you who found an empty podcast list after skipping a gPodder version during upgrades (this release fixes both the initial problem and tries to recover databases for which migration has failed). The updated package is also available in Diablo Extras already for N8x0 users. Please test and vote for gPodder 2.12-1 in Extras-Testing!

A new desktop widget written by Ville Syrjäl has been packaged for Extras. TV out control lets you control advanced features of the N900's TV out such as aspect ratio and scaling - those settings are not accessible from the official control panel applet, which is closed source (vote for that bug if you'd like to see it open sourced and improved through the Community SSU). Please test and vote for the TV out control widget in Extras-Testing!

U-Bahn, Keyboard Repeat Switcher and an updated RaeMote

The last three days can be described as one of the more productive weekends - at least in terms of app count. Two new mini-apps have been uploaded to Maemo Extras: U-Bahn, a scrolling subway plan for Vienna and the Keyboard Repeat Switcher widget. While the former might only be of interest to Viennese locals and the occasional tourist, the latter is really useful when you do more serious work in X Terminal and want your hardware keys to have the "repeat" functionality in the yet-to-be-released PR1.2 firmware update. If you have PR1.2, please try them out and vote for these new packages.

And last but not least: a new version of RaeMote has been released, which adds missing dependencies to the packaging information and also changes the display name of the package to be shorter and searchable. RaeMote is still not in Extras, so your votes are again very welcome on this one.

Coming up: A new version of gPodder is already in the works, bringing you lots of bug fixes and UI refinements that we introduced during the last weeks. Some progress is also being made on getting the new version of Panucci ready, which will bring play position syncing when used in conjunction with gPodder and gpodder.net.

Updated packages for Panucci, RæMote and headphoned

Now that a preview of the PR1.2 SDK has been released, it's time to push the latest updates into the current Extras repository, so users that won't be upgrading to 1.2 as soon as it's out will get recent packages until they decide to upgrade to the new release. Over the last days, I've updated some of my packages with minor updates and long-requested features:

• Panucci: FM transmitter in menu, HTTP streaming (ideal for podcasts). The "rotate to landscape mode when the keyboard is open" fix has been merged from gPodder.
  QA page for Panucci 0.3.9-5
• RæMote: Updated bugtracker URL and fixed the UI glitch where button "highlights" get stuck. It has only been out for two weeks, and therefore it has not entered Extras yet, so your votes are extra important here.
  QA page for RæMote 1.2
• headphoned: Support for pausing FM radio has been added - this is useful when you listen to FM radio using a Bluetooth headset. Please read the info comment about FM radio support on the QA page.
  QA page for headphoned 1.8

If you can spare some minutes, please help test these applications on your device and vote for them afterwards on the QA pages that are linked above.

More updates to other apps are queued for this week, stay tuned.

gPodder, Where Are Thou?

People have started asking when the new gPodder version for Maemo will appear. Installing Scratchbox is tedious, and I've re-installed a few weeks ago. A new release should be out soon, and I'll be rolling a new Maemo package then. And we have fixed some annoyances in the new version...

First, you complained about us having hardcoded the download folder to /media/mmc2/. Well, gPodder still uses this as the default download folder, but you can now simply move this folder from the SD card to your the external card (mmc1), to your home folder (/home/user) or even to an attached USB key (you can do this with a special USB female adapter). So, when you want to download podcasts to the exchangeable SD card on your N810 (or the external card on your N800), you can do so now :)

Another problem that people did not like was the fact that gPodder stored its settings and subscriptions on the SD card. This means that the Nokia Backup application didn't backup these things. So, the new version stores its settings in the user's home folder. This means that Nokia Backup and Restore should take care of you gPodder settings and subscriptions :)

All this awesomeness (or rather "less uglyness than before") will get to you with the release of 0.14.0, which should hopefully be out this coming week.

You won't get the sexy, human-readable folder names just yet. We have to work out some issues with the patches, but we are currently working on it. In the mean time (this also works with the current version!), you can set the "experimental_file_naming" advanced configuration option to "True" in order to get at least good file names (good for episodes that do not have ID3 tags).

Also, please don't hesistate to report any bugs and feature requests for gPodder to http://bugs.gpodder.org/, so we can help you and you have a better podcasting experience on your Tablet.

Another plug: Try Panucci with your podcasts if you have not already done so.