Hi everyone,
Some of you might know what Maemo is, some may not, so I'll explain it very
briefly. Maemo is Nokia's debian-based, open source Linux OS that runs on
the Nokia internet tablets. There were many iteration of the Maemo OS and
Nokia is about to release Maemo 5 along with it's newest Phone+Internet
tablet, the Nokia N900.
You can read more about it here : http://maemo.nokia.com
And here's a nice walkthrough video showing off the device and the software
: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_WlpCpwVq4
And you can probably just google, or search youtube (or wikipedia) for maemo
or n900 to learn/see a lot more about this.
As some of you know, I'm the lead developer of the aMSN project, one of the
most successful Tcl/Tk applications. I've ported (basically just compiled)
aMSN for the previous internet tablets (N800 and N810) with deb packages for
bora, chinook and diablo (code names for Maemo 2, 3 and 4) and I'd like to
create some new ones for fremantle (code name for Maemo 5). I will soon get
my N900 (once it gets released), and I'd like to run aMSN on it obviously.
Now the problem is that the UI needs to be 'hildonized' which basically
means that it should know how to interact with the Maemo OS, a few examples
of the behavioral changes in an application that is 'hildonized' : the menu
doesn't appear unless you tap the title bar, if the virtual keyboard is
enabled, when focus is on a text/entry, the virtual keyboard appears, the
system's smart dictionary can suggest word completion, etc...
To be able to run aMSN on the previous Maemo versions, I used this port of
Tcl/Tk for Maemo (bora) : https://garage.maemo.org/projects/tcltk/
It is a hildonized version of Tcl/Tk 8.4.13 and it has been unmaintained
since it's release in 2007, but it still compiled and ran the same way
across all the different versions of Maemo, however it never was complete
and it's quite outdated now...
aMSN with that version of tcl/tk still compiles and runs fine on Maemo 5
(you can run maemo on your desktop using scratchbox, xephyr and qemu (or
build maemo for i386 and not use qemu), the nokia website gives instructions
on how to do that),
I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in making a port of the latest
Tcl/Tk for Maemo 5, or would be ready to help me make that port. Nokia gives
extensive support for developers and you can get all the info you need from
here : http://maemo.org/development/
It would also be nice if the hildonized version of Tcl/Tk would get merged
upstream (with #ifdef MAEMO if necessary) so that we don't need to redo
everything when a new version of tc/tk is released.
What do you think?
Thank you for reading (and hopefully answering),
KaKaRoTo
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