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Task:Remarkable community projects

Revision as of 07:30, 23 October 2008

This article is continued discussion from the maemo.org brainstorm Please see the 100 Days agenda for more.

This task is completed and this page stays here for documentation purposes only. Please file bugs or propose a new, related task if you want to push this forward. Please see the talk page for discussion.

This is a subtask of Task:Defining maemo and is coordinated by Dave Neary.

There are hundreds of community projects around Maemo, but some are especially remarkable, providing a unique contribution to the project.

Getting a list of these projects would help to

• Improve their quality and promote them as ready to primetime.
• Highlight to externals some of the amazing stuff the Maemo platform can offer.
• Bring attention, testing, contributions, new users to them.
• Indicate to Nokia what is really worth promoting in their Maemo related activities.
• Cheer up the ego of promoters and contributors.  :)

Criteria

Propose criteria to select projects.

• Alive: Maintained regularly and available in the last stable release.
• Open: community feedback and contributions are part of the project - open source is a very good factor but not a must.
• Stable: feature set complete, installs flawlessly, works, doesn't harm the system, secure.
• Finger/thumb UI: stylus to be required only in exceptional and evident cases (e.g. drawing apps).
• Decent design: visually attractive and/or simple interface that works just as expected.
• maemo.org active: available in extras, complete information page in Downloads.
• Non commercial: Not developed by Nokia or commercial partners.

Proposals for Fremantle Stars

List your proposals below. Add your comments supporting/against. Provide links to their pages at http://maemo.org/downloads to get more information, see screenshots and try them out.

Release quality

• Maemopad+: pressure-sensitive sketching, available in Extras, now in development again with focus on fixing Usability issues and finger-friendliness
• Maemo Mapper : Most downloaded application for Maemo. Best map application. Can interact with lots of different mapping sites, including OpenStreetmap.
• Numpty Physics : This game is educational, hard, fun. Made for the stylus.
  • Any ideas for features making the most from an Internet connection? Adding (optionally) the online dimension would be phantastic.--qgil 06:35, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
• ScummVM: Point-and-click adventures are great for touchscreens, some free-as-in-beer games are available (Beneath a Steel Sky, etc..)
  • This is an enabler. A user can't do much twith this alone. What about proposing a specific game (or set of games) using ScummVM? --qgil 06:35, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
• gPodder: Finger-friendly UI, highlights the Internet aspect of the tablets (download podcasts); regular releases, many Maemo-specific UI changes; performance issues are worked on; tablet-related podcasts exist (example: [1]) - downloading podcasts directly on the mobile device is a thing that you can with Nokia's tablets and gPodder, but not with iPhone/iPod touch right now
• Xournal : A great notes/sketch utility. One of few apps that utilize the pressure sensitivity of the screen! Invaluable to create and annotate PDF documents on a pocket computer.
• Pimlico: PIM applications
• Leafpad for notes taking (and script programming)
  • Too geeky for this call. --qgil 06:35, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
• Gnumeric spreadsheet application
  • Impressing users with a spreadheet editor? Don't get me wrong, I see the usefulness of the application but we are looking for more shiny things in this call.--qgil 06:35, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
• Abiword document editor
  • Any thoughts on adding the real time collaborative editing feature? Still, perhaps this is another tool clearly useful but not really impressive for desktop users - nor seems to be taking many advantages of the Maemo 5 features.--qgil 06:35, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
• Pidgin for instant messaging
• Greasemonkey support?
  • Another enabler. It would be better to have an impressing candidate based on Greasemonkey. --qgil 06:35, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
• PyMaemo
  • PyMaemo is great, but it says nothing per se to users. --qgil 06:35, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
• Maemo WordPy : Blogging software that hooks to WordPress and Blogger accounts, allows image uploads, post creating and editing, tagging. Especially notable for its finger-friendly menu.
• quiver: image viewer
• FBReader: e-book reader. Great functionality, but the UI is a bit clunky (file dialogs are not Hildonized, preferences dialogs are overwhelmingly complicated, there's no smooth touch scrolling).

Alpha/Beta quality

• maemo-barcode: Alpha quality, could be a very cool application with some integration and interface development.
• liqbase: Beta (now in extras) playground for sketching with kinetic graffiti with fullscreen tearfree refresh. finger friendly and FAST. shows off your tablet in the best light.
• Bring Gazpacho back to life
  • Developer tools are out of scope in this call.--qgil 06:35, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
• BlueMaemo: Alpha quality, have a lot of room for improvement and new features, depending in the maemo 5 hw.

The Best of Maemo Applications

Please do not list new proposals directly here. These are projects that accomplish most of the criteria above. They be available in the Maemo 4.1 extras repository and offer a Download page in maemo.org. Add you comment if you think any of these candidates is not fit enough for the top selection, or belong to a different category. Apps marked with appear now in the list of featured Maemo applications.

Born for Maemo

Remarkable projects targetting primarily the Maemo platform.

• Canola2 : Canola is a media consumer: photos, music, videos...local or remote, you name it.
• Maemo Mapper : Most downloaded application for Maemo. Best map application. Can interact with lots of different mapping sites, including OpenStreetmap.
• Maemo WordPy : Blogging software that hooks to WordPress and Blogger accounts, allows image uploads, post creating and editing, tagging. Especially notable for its finger-friendly menu.
• MediaBox : A nice, simple UI for viewing photos and movies. Not as 'bare-bones' as Mplayer, not as 'tricked-out' as Canola2.
• mYTube : An youtube browsing/downloading/playing application.
• Numpty Physics : This game is educational, hard, fun. Made for the stylus.
• Vagalume : Last.fm is my favourite music site, and Vagalume is my favourite Last.fm client.
• liqbase : one of the most innovative and tablet-specific projects yet ! (-fpp)

Very nice ports

Remarkable projects successfully ported to Maemo.

• MPlayer : Simple UI, provides the best playback performance for mpeg4/divx/xvid video on Nokia 770/N8x0.
• Evince : Evince is a document viewer for multiple document formats. It currently supports pdf, postscript, djvu, tiff and dvi.
• iNES , fMSX , ColEm , Speccy , VGBA - all fms's emulators - great ports of his original ones.
• Xournal : A great notes/sketch utility. One of few apps that utilize the pressure sensitivity of the screen! Invaluable to create and annotate PDF documents on a pocket computer.

Outstanding utilities

Remarkable projects successful in a focused mission.

• Advanced Backlight : Replaces the default Volume and Brightness applets with a unified applet that also provides rotation orientation selection.
• Erminig : Allows a two-way sync between Google Calendars and the GPE calendar on the N810.
• Load Applet : Because being able to see when/why the system becomes slow makes a huge difference in user experience.
• Large StatusBar Clock : A configurable digital clock for the statusbar.
• Maemo Recorder : Turn your N8X0 into a dictaphone. Very useful.
• Mirage : Opens many file formats; allows for simple photo editing on the tablet.
• mogg : Although not as ideal a solution as DSP-side decoding, the best we've got at the moment.
• OMWeather : Critical app. When this didn't work for a whole day after the Diablo release, I had to look outside!
• Personal Menu : Sidebar plugin, customizable menu for launching up to 36 installed applications or arbitrary commands.
• WorldTV99 : TVs around the world on your tablet. Best Edutainment without monthly fee