ivi

MeeGo Conference 2010 was held in Dublin, Ireland, 13th to 15th of November. Cybercom attended the event both as audience and also on stage. MeeGo is an open source platform developed by Nokia and Intel that will power future embedded devices ranging from hand held devices to automotive IVI solutions.

Keynotes

During his keynote, Doug Fisher, vice president, Software and Services Group (SSG), and general manager of SSG’s Systems Software Division at Intel highlighted how MeeGo is an open platform targeting multiple device categories with the help of the open source community. He was in particular excited of the rapid development MeeGo has seen reccently. MeeGo was announced just 8 months ago, but already there are two stable releases. He also highlighted how important it is to work in never before seen open source development model for everyone to benefit – the MeeGo way of working.

The second keynote was given by Nokia’s Alberto Torres, executive vice president, MeeGo Computers. He shared the excitement of the previous keynote by Mr. Fisher. He also highlighted the importance of the Qt toolkit in MeeGo. Qt already is the only UI toolkit supported by MeeGo and this will only become even more important now that Nokia announced that Qt together with Qt Quick are the preferred UI frameworks for Nokia’s future hand held devices running MeeGo and Symbian. He also said that Nokia will announce its first MeeGo device in 2011.

The keynote session was continued by an inspiring speech by Dominique Le Foll, the CTO of Amino, who makes feature rich TVs. He shared his excitement on how they managed to create a product in 6 months using MeeGo as the platform instead of 18 months that it would normally take.

Cybercom taking the stage

Cybercom’s Marko Saukko had an interesting spot in the morning of the second day at MeeGo Conference when he, together with Harri Hakulinen from Nokia and Carsten Munk from Imogen Software presented the current state of MeeGo 1.1 Handheld UX adaptation on the Nokia N900.

The N900 hardware adaptation team is the pioneer in MeeGo ARM porting and has faced most of the ARM related problems while doing the first official MeeGo ARM port. Even though there has been a lot of different types of problems the N900 hardware adaptation team has been moving fast. Within two months the N900 hardware adaptation team was able to get N900 running with the first version of Handset UX. After this the team has managed to catch up the mainline MeeGo kernel and packages and the whole port is now available in the MeeGo ARM repositories.

The current MeeGo 1.1 stable release, called “Technology Snapshot”, for Nokia N900 includes a set of basic features of handset device, such as, phone calling, ability to sending SMS, video and audio players and photo gallery. Even though there are already a set of applications available there are still some features/applications missing from the 1.1 release. For these missing parts the upcoming MeeGo 1.2 release in April of 2011 is bringing a vast improvement.

Cybercom has been involved in the MeeGo adaptation work actively since the beginning. We have been working on many different areas of the Nokia N900 ARM port, as well as, giving our insights to the generic MeeGo development.

Other highlights

Qt

There were of course many interesting sessions around Qt. Qt is the toolkit of choice for MeeGo and the corner stone in the developer offering strategy outlined by Nokia. Thiago Macieira from Nokia presented the Qt roadmap. Qt will be modularized for easier maintenance,  integration and releasing. This is also related to the open governance project run by Thiago, that  aims at improving the process on how to involve the community in Qt development. Qt Components also one interesting project going on in Qt, that targets on delivering system UI components for Qt Quick developers on Symbian and MeeGo platforms. This work is done almost entirely in the open together with the community and is run by Henrik Hartz. We were also shown how to integrate QML language with C++ code to enable rapid UI development using C++ data models.

Qt Gestures was an interesting session because gestures are coming more and more important especially with handheld devices. Frederik Gladhorn introduced how to use gestures in Qt both in C++ and in QML. The presentation contained examples and demos about gestures. The interesting part was also the fact that Frederik’s slideshow was written fully in QML.

Cybercom already has a very strong knowledge in all of the areas mentioned above. We will continue to follow the Qt development and contribute to the projects. Alexandra Leisse, Web Community Manager of Qt at Nokia, highlighted the importance of getting involved in core Qt development and this is just what we are focusing on.

MeeGo IVI

One of the environments targeted by MeeGo is the automotive In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI). MeeGos roadmap regarding IVI and the IVI domain was presented by Rudolf Streif, director of Embedded Solutions at Linux Foundation. This is very interesting, as Mr. Streif  presented it, since in the past the IVI industry has been quite closed. MeeGo has a true potential to change all this and provide an open source version to the IVI industry that will accelerate the innovation in this domain. MeeGo has a long way to go to support the strict regulations and special requirements needed in a in-vehicular environment, but Mr. Streif was a strong believer in the open source community to deliver the necessary solutions.

Cybercom has also in this domain a very strong background and excessive knowledge. We have been working with distributed systems, Qt and CAN buses for over a decade when building for example  mining robots. We feel we have a lot to contribute and follow also the IVI development with excitement.

Conclusion

Cybercom has also attended the previous Maemo Summit events, which the MeeGo Conference descends from. To the most part the community feels the same, but everything around the event has grown so much. MeeGo is bigger than Maemo and this even showed it clearly. It was nice to see some familiar faces but even more so to meet the new ones. The conference highlighted that MeeGo targets many platforms, wants to exceed in user experience and to get the next billion users – all this with open source development and with efforts from two giant market leader.

Cybercom is there with MeeGo, building MeeGo and being part of the MeeGo community. See you at next MeeGo event!