It's only our second issue, but the response on Twitter, talk.maemo.org and the general Interwebs has been very positive. We've tried to take on as much feedback as we could this week (thanks to folks like Jason Carter and Ryan Abel for their concrete suggestions and contributions). In particular, there are now a number of ways of staying up-to-date with new issues as they come out.
Andrew Zhilin, the long-time Maemo and Mer theme developer and UI designer, has released an update to his Marina theme for Maemo 5: Dark, a bit glossy but calm blueish theme, packed with loopable wallpaper. First 3rd-party theme to be designed from scratch, every UI element is hand drawn (except for loading “flower” and navigation icons :). I really wanted to give it a finished professional look, hope you’ll feel it. The theme is available from Extras, and is also used as the default theme in Mer (the completely open source Maemo/Ubuntu hybrid).
SIO2 Interactive, the developers of an open source 3D game engine for the iPhone, have released a paid-for-copy of their game 'Hoops Frenzy': How many hoops can you get in 90 seconds? [...] Ideal for passing time, HoopsFrenzy allows you to challenge your friends with 6 unique level of difficulty, have fun! The source of the game, complete with the Blender models for the graphics and so on, is also available... for $199.
Are you a Magnetic Scrolls fan? Luca Donaggio has announced MMagnetic, a port to Maemo 5 of the Magnetic Scrolls interpreter. In the mid 80's a small British team of programmers called Magnetic Scrolls inspired text adventure fans all over the world with their fascinating games and soon evolved into the European answer to Infocom. Magnetic Scrolls met the same fate with the other commercial text adventure producers and dissappeared with the conquest of the graphical games. But their thrilling stories, a trailblazing parser and excellent graphics made them an everlasting milestone in adventure game history. Enter the mag(net)ical worlds of Magnetic Scrolls. Games can be downloaded as Zip files (but they need to be unpacked before they can be used) from the site, as well as the interpreter itself.
The MADDE (Maemo Application Development and Debugging Environment) development kit has been updated to version 0.6.14. MADDE is an easy-to-use cross-compilation toolkit for Maemo development which is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The biggest changes are the updated target to PR1.1 and the change of the toolchain, which matches now the Maemo5 SDK. MADDE has a much lower barrier to entry than the full Maemo SDK, so users interested in developing on Maemo but daunted by the difficulty of installing the SDK should try MADDE.
As already mentioned, Maemo 6 is going to have a device mode which has guaranteed application and system integrity from boot-up to userspace. The open source components of the security framework are now hosted on maemo.gitorious.org.
The open source cellular components for Maemo devices, which will be accessed through oFono in Maemo 6, are now hosted on maemo.gitorious.org; making them visible to everyone whilst still being under development, and easier for others outside of Maemo to collaborate on the code.
mStatus is a small new utility to quickly update your social network statuses in a simple manner. It's developer, Daniele Maio, launched it saying, I'm happy to announce mStatus applet, [...]that, through the ping.fm API implementations, lets user update their status on different social network in a quickly way!