Most recommended third party software on Nokia N900
The market release date of Nokia N900 is getting closer and closer. Here is the translation of inside view from a developer of the brand new Maemo 5 system.
Nokia N900 is a product between MID and mobile phone. Though it is consider as a traditional smartphone, competitors of Nokia N900 are still those most advanced smartphones including iPhone, Palm Pre, HTC Hero, Samsung i8910 and so on. Since App Store for iPhone set a standard of business model for mobile application software, third part software have become the key point of competition between different mobile platforms. Maemo relies on open source community since when it was been created. So before N900 was officially announced, SDK of Maemo 5 has already been published. And the open source community of Maemo has already actively developed or upgraded many open source software. There is a personal list of most recommended third party software on Nokia N900.
1. RTCOMM
This software integrates IM protocols including Facebook chat, MSN, QQ (the most popular IM network in China), Yahoo into the default IM software of Maemo. RTCOMM uses libpurple open source multiple IM protocol, which is also used by pidgin, aduim as well as Palm Pre. Except IM protocols listed above, twitter is the next most wanted SNS to be integrated. There is already effort to include Twitter by developers from Maemo open source community. The tweet users are following will be pushed to N900 as chat and messages sent by users will be updated to users’ twitter status. Ovi, Gtalk and Skype are officially supported on N900, together with RTCOMM, it will provide a unified instant messaging solution.There are two interesting posts about RTCOMM:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=30843 (Trying Facebook chat and Twitter on Nokia N810 MID)
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=26531 (Discussion about whether RTCOMM will work in Maemo 5)There is another rumor. Telepathy-haze is an important module of RTCOMM. It is developed by the major contributor of Telepathy (IM and VoIP frame work used by Meamo) — Will Thompson, who is also a member of libpurple developer. According to him, code used in Palm pre to call libpurple is copied from telepathy-haze
An example of industry rumors that are difficult to confirm
2. FBReader and Evince
Both of them are ebook readers, which are most used software for many N810 owners. FBReader can be used to read chm, html, txt, RTF, epub, PalmDoc, mobipocket’s prc and so on. Evince is the best PDF viewer on Maemo. Though the screen size of N900 is much smaller than N810, let’s hope it is a good ebook reader.
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/fbreader/
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/evince/3. Mauku
Mauku is a micro-blogging client available on Maemo since N770. It supported Jaiku at beginning (which is founded by a former product manager of Maemo, who left Nokia after one month. Jaiku has been acquired by Google later and it seems to be dying now). Mauku became the most popular Twitter client on Meamo later. Since SDK of Maemo 5 has been published before N900 was announced, Mauku 2.0 customized for N900 works very well now:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=30637The biggest change of Mauku 2.0 is that its developer makes a social network software framework independent from specified networks. In other words, Mauku is only a UI application with background process interacting with Twitter. Other developers can integrate different social networks or microblogs with different API. Then Mauku can display updates from various applications. The developer of Mauku is consider to implement backend of Facebook. Programmers can also make backends for their local SNS.
4. liqbase
This is maybe the most creative work with the most wild imagination in Maemo community. Its developer introduce liqbase as a graphical playground on Maemo. User can make drawing on a black board, each object can be pulled to any direction while following physical rules. For example, you can draw two monsters fighting with each other, when one hits another, another one will be kicked away. liqbase have may amazing UI demo, such as kinetic scrolling, zoom in/zoom out, which are surprisingly smooth. It also have an animation simulating splendid stars in sky. It is difficult to described with language. You must see it by yourself.
http://liqbase.net/5. WordPy
iPhone has big advantage to download musics online with iTunes. But devices from Nokia always have good ability to make online media (such as shareonline on S60). N900 has a nice full keyboard, which make it a potential excellent tool for mobile blogging. There is a video on Youtube demonstrating WordPy in Maemo 5 SDK:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpqiIbdqYAc
More information about Maemo open source community can be from at maemo.org. There is another two interesting links:
Remarkable projects voted by the community
http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Remarkable_community_projectsAnd Fremantle Stars project chosen for Maemo 5
http://wiki.maemo.org/Fremantle_Stars
