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Task:Remarkable community projects

Revision as of 12:50, 25 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)

High scores, level/content download, maybe co-op gameplay. —GeneralAntilles 08:48, 24 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)

As mentioned above, Beneath a Steel Sky, Flight of the Amazon Queen, etc. —GeneralAntilles 08:50, 24 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
• Osmo: PIM solution supporting open standards (SyncML, iCal)
• 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)

Perhaps it lacks glitz, but it seems to me that an Office-compatible text editor might mean quite a bit to a lot of users (heck, a decent word processor of any sort is likely to make a lot of people happy). —GeneralAntilles 08:52, 24 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)

browser-extras for OS2008

• 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).
• Fennec: Mozilla Firefox-based browser made specifically for mobile devices & touch screens. Currently (23 oct 2008) in Alpha phase.
• Eboard and crafty chess engine port of the eboard chess program. Main goal is playing on fics against other human players. Analysis or games vs. engine are possible to. Can handle .pgn files and looks better than the chess "application" which is installed at the tablet after flashing the firmware.

Alpha/Beta quality

• osm2go: This is a tool to create maps. It makes use of the hirez (touch) screen, a permanent internet connection for up- and download and the GPS of course. No such tool seems to exist for any other mobile plattform.

Very interesting. Any way to make this a plugin of the very popular Maemo Mapper? Imagine that users would just use the maps, having the ability to go for an "editing mode" by pressing a key.--qgil 08:14, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Sure, that's planned to happen soon. Currently not planned in format of a plugin (does MM support plugins?) but via dbus interaction to e.g. use the current Maemo-Mapper view as the area to work on. Pretty much like gpxview also interacts with Maemo-Mapper --harbaum 12:50, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

• 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.
• Tear: Alpha quality, a simple webkit-based browser which aims for better tablet-oriented experience (and maybe cross-engine). After the alpha Fremantle SDK will probably employ a Clutter-based UI.

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