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Task:Remarkable community projects

Revision as of 20:30, 25 July 2008

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

This is an ongoing task, planned to be completed during the current maemo.org development sprint. Any help is appreciated! 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.

New Proposals

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.

• List your proposal here.

Candidates

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.

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.

Very nice ports

Remarkable projects successfully ported to Maemo.

• Labyrinth : An idea-mapping tool with a lot of potential.
• MPlayer: Simple UI, provides the best playback performance for mpeg4/divx/xvid video on Nokia 770/N8x0.
• Pidgin for Maemo : Instant messaging application, ported from the desktop.
• ScummVM : program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files.
• 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.
• MaemoPad+ : Tree-based notes and sketching application
• 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!
• PhoneLink: Send SMS or dial a number using GPE or built-in (EDS) Contacts and a bluetooth-enable mobile phone.
• Personal Menu: Sidebar plugin, customizable menu for launching up to 36 installed applications or arbitrary commands.
• Quiver: Simple UI is fast and flexible. Does one thing--displays photos--well.
• USB Control: Take advantage of USB keyboards & drives (drives require a separate power source) w/Nokia cable & adapter.
• WorldTV99: TVs around the world on your tablet. Best Edutainment without monthly fee

Ruled Out

These can be brought back to the Proposals once they meet the criteria.

Not in maemo.org extras

Appear in good condition to the user (e.g. beta/stable, page in Downloads, one-click install...) but are out of the maemo.org extras game.

• Claws Mail: The only full-featured mail program for the tablet.
• FBReader : The best free e-book reader.
• Mauku: Jaiku client designed explicitly for Maemo, and makes good use of the UI including finger / stylus / kinetic gestures.

Not available in Downloads

Being consistent, the most remarkable applications for Maemo need to be available in http://maemo.org/downloads

• Abiword : Abiword's another desktop application which has a really nice port to maemo. A document editor which is very powerful and lightweight.
• Dates & Contacts : Both part of the Pimlico suite of applications, these allow me to use the N810 as a personal calendar and address book, with desktop synchronisation to boot.
• Gnumeric : Gnumeric is a great spreadsheet application, and the maemo port has been very nicely done.
• GPE Suite : Calendar, Contacts and To-Do List are quite useful. Use Erminig to sync Calendar with Google Calendars.
• GrandCentral Dialer : A simple GUI that interfaces with GrandCentral. Dialer + Gizmo can be used for virtually free calling to and from regular phones.
• Gourmet Recipe Manager : A neat way to plan meals.
• MLB Viewer : For baseball fans, simple UI, subscription to mlb.com required for video, audio is 'free'.
• NoteCase : a full featured hierarchical note manager
• VCURLs72 : Major US TV channels on your tablet. Best Edutainment without monthly fee
• XChat : IRC on your tablet. Nice port.

Still Alpha

• Weightjinni : A simple way to track food consumption, weight loss/gain (still in alpha).

• liqbase : playtest for sketching with kinetic graffiti and fullscreen tearfree refresh

Developed by Nokia

These are left out here.

• Camera : This is the first 3rd party application I installed on my tablet.
• Fmradio : The other first 3rd party application n800 users install on their tablet.