Beta version of Firefox Mobile 1.1 available
A beta version of Fennec (aka Firefox Mobile) has been released. In the announcement, Mark Finkle says, the focus was some UI features we didn't have time to put in the initial release. We are also using your feedback from previous releases and nightly builds to help improve the browsing experience. Auto-completing forms, portrait mode and a range of other features are the highlights. Users who installed the earlier version via Ovi will have to upgrade to the beta manually; although if they don't, they'll receive an upgrade when the final version of 1.1 is released.
Macuco (iPhone-site browser) ported to Maemo 5
In the final months of the N810 being the most cutting-edge Maemo device available, an application using Qt and its bundled WebKit was unveiled which gave access to the iPhone-optimised version of Gmail. Now, Felipe Crochik has updated Macuco for Maemo 5 and expanded its capabilities. Summarising its capabilities, he says it provides much more than access your gmail account, it can give you access to many other web sites optimized for the iphone (google, facebook, twitter, cnn, ...). It is not supposed to replace your current web browser but some times you don't want to see the web site on the n900 like you do on your desktop just because you can! Most web sites optimized for the iphone will give you instant (or quicker) access to the real information you are looking for without many distractions. This is a first beta release, but Felipe is looking for feedback and other sites to include on the quick-access homepage.
KFZcheck search German car registration database
Patrick Beck has announced the release of a program to search for the home region of car number/registration plates: It searches for car (in german kfz) license plates shortcuts and the citys according to the searchword - german example: S for Stuttgart. A German, Austrian, Swiss and Poland license plate list is till now included. It works in portrait and landscape mode. KFZcheck displays a emblem from the state, the license plate itself, the name of the city and the state. The application is in Extras-devel, so should be treated carefully. Patrick is looking for people to provide lookups for other countries.
Hack-A-N900 at MetaLab, Vienna: Tuesday, 4th May
Thomas Perl will be among those attending MetaLab in Vienna on Tuesday, at a get-together of N900s geeks to discuss, and hack, on their favourite devices. The evening'll be very informal, they might: make our n900 boot various distributions from partitions and/or disk images; explore the possibilities of dedicated pre-built images; dig deep into the guts of maemo to find out what makes it different from an ordinary desktop linux distribution; ...