Here’s NewsFlow from Substance of Code by Tommi.

The first thing that I had to do was to get my app a decent color palette so that app would feel nice and consistent through out the views. I tend to use colourlovers.com to either create or browse good palettes. This time I decided to use nice blueish palette, The First Raindrop.

Now it was time to do the actual fun part and design the overall view of the apps user interface. As I tend to use Qt Web Runtime for development it’s pretty easy to do the UI drafts with simple static HTML page. These drafts can easily be extended to be used in the final app.

via Substance of Code

With the advent of mobile devices having cameras and legendary phones like the Nokia N95 series and the N82(xenon) paving the way having a decent camera is now an important aspect in the mobile world. Last year we saw the rebirth of something new with the Nokia N86 and its low light capabilities and now again with the upcoming N8 with its highly anticipated 12mp and xenon but hold on where does that leave the ultimate pc like mobile device the Nokia N900, after all it sports a 5mp and optics from Carl Zeiss, well maemo geeks have been hard at work and now there is a new

What is FCamera?

FCamera is an open-source camera application for the N900. You can use it as an alternative to the built-in camera application. It provides significantly more manual control over capture parameters, and shoots raw (in the Adobe DNG format). It also includes some nifty features. It has an automatic HDR mode, which has an HDR viewfinder that lets you preview the full range to be captured. It has a “lucky imaging” mode in which it takes a burst of shots and only saves the sharpest. We’ve found that this simple trick lets you handhold exposures of up to half a second.

FCamera really has two purposes. It a useful camera application for photographers. It is also a base camera application that students and hobbyists can modify to experiment with new photographic techniques. Given the second requirement, we’ve tried to be fairly careful about balancing features versus the impact they have on ease-of-understanding of the source. In most cases we’ve favored the simpler source code, which is why you don’t see a lot of custom widgets or fancy icons. That said, it could always be simpler. We welcome any patches to streamline and clarify FCamera’s source.

I know a lot of you out there were waiting for this app to be released and Nokia has answered your questions N900 Office Viewer which this version supports text files, spreadsheets and presentations in OpenDocument format (ODF) and Microsoft Office formats. One word – Sweet.

Update your device to the latest OS for the N900 and head over to:

Web address: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel

via Daily Mobile

Here is a little video of a Nokia N900 running both Maemo off course and Android. This just goes to show how innovative Linux based operating systems are and what they can do. Check it out.

Recently Nokia updated the N900 to the so-called “42-11″ firmware. As before, the kernel version is 2.6.28 compiled for OMAP (ARMEL). It seems that Nokia has done some great improvements in power saving to this kernel. There were also a few software upgrades included in this new firmware, however on my review unit there are still some things that hopefully will be working soon on the units that are shipping.

The battery life has been extended quite a bit, and to my surprise the N900 battery seems to be outlasting my N810 (with a 1500mAh battery versus the N900′s 1350mAh). With this upgrade to battery life, Nokia has one more thing to show off to it’s competitors.

There have also been a few improvements to various software applications, most notably Media Player. Now when browsing your albums, you’re greeted with the album art instead of just the album name.

One of the things I’ve been hoping to see before I have to turn in my review unit, is USB-OTG host mode. However the software that was written to make this possible, has not yet been ported (successfully) to the N900. One of the things that makes the Maemo platform (and Linux in general) so successful is that most of the software written for it is open source. That allows developers to look at and use the programming code from similar programs. Doing so means that development work happens relatively quickly since programmers don’t have to start from scratch each time they create a new application. Once the N900 is available to the mass market, I expect there to be an explosion of applications.