Jennifer Hudson, 27, gave birth to a 7 lb, 14 oz. baby boy on Monday. “The baby is beautiful and perfect,” confirms Hudson’s publicist. “His parents are ecstatic.” Hudson and her fiance have named the baby David Daniel Otunga. Congrats to the happy couple!Last Tuesday, I have started working on adding network-based multiplayer support to Tennix (a free 2D tennis game for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Maemo). In addition to two players playing on one computer (which already worked a long time ago), we now support playing Tennix over the network on two tablets (obviously, playing a tablet-versus-PC game will also work).
Currently, this network play runs over UDP, so WiFi connectivity is needed when you want to play tablet-versus-tablet. I might be able to add Bluetooth support later on, but the BlueZ API seems way more complicated than SDL_net's API which I currently use. Let me correct myself here: There's no real documentation for the BlueZ C API that I could find.
A small library with a clean API that abstracts Bluetooth, WiFi and maybe some other connectivity options and provides an easy way to establish a transport between two hosts/tablets would surely help boost developer interest in creating multi-player games and cross-tablet applications.
A video demoing the controls on two tablets can be found on YouTube.
The podcast client gPodder has had its 0.17.0 release some days ago, and after some testing in Extras-Devel (thanks to Dan Ramos) we fixed some last bugs. Most notable changes are an improved feed update logic and UI wording fixes (thanks to timeless for reporting these). Now it's time to hit the street, so gPodder 0.17.0-2 should appear in Maemo Extras on your tablets running Chinook and Diablo today. Please report any problems you find. Still have not got gPodder? Go to the downloads page.
gPodder for Fremantle has also seen some fixes lately, related to changed (fixed?) API behaviour in the beta 2 SDK. Downloads are now stored in the user's $HOME, as this is the location where user-specific data goes on the new devices. Please test the latest version (0.16.1-8fremantleui) and report back if it's ready for Extras-Testing in your opinion.
For Fremantle, one thing that probably does not work yet (except if xdg-open is available and works) is starting the playback of files with the built-in media player. As this is not included in the SDK, testing it is impossible for me here. Future versions will probably use MAFW to create podcast playlists, which is now available in PyMaemo thanks to the PyMaemo team and Andrea Grandi. As soon as alternative media players (Panucci?) become available for Fremantle, these will be selectable for playing back episodes, soo.
