Yesterday, I attended and presented at the MeeGo Developer Day event, a side event running in parallel with the larger Intel Developer Forum (IDF) event. We had a full day and a great audience, who asked smart questions.
We had a nice tour of MeeGo netbook functionality, with a demo of most of the commonly used features from Guy Lunardi from Novell. Novell has been heavily involved in the MeeGo project, going back to the Moblin days. Guy, who uses MeeGo as his primary system, showed off some of the integrated social networking services, along with the Evolution calendar and email. He also demonstrated the media player, which uses Banshee to play videos and music.
Because our event was running in parallel with IDF, we were able to live stream Renee James’ IDF keynote for the MeeGo Developer Day attendees. Renee announced that AppUp is launching out of beta, along with partner stores from Best Buy, Dixons, Croma, and Asus. She talked about some of the AppUp developer challenge contests, and she brought one winner up on stage to present the key to his new car and had him talk about his winning soccer game app that he ported to MeeGo in only a couple of days. Renee also mentioned several vendors with interesting new devices hitting the market shortly. DeviceVM’s MeeGo Splashtop, the WeTab MeeGo tablet, and a connected TV from Amino were all featured in her keynote.
Sunil Saxena spent some time reviewing the MeeGo Architecture, along with our current thoughts on how we plan to define MeeGo compliance. The MeeGo compliance spec is still being developed, so now is a good time to review it and provide feedback.
Bill Pearson was the next presenter talking about AppUp and the Intel AppUp Developer Program, which helps developers focus on what matters: platform sexiness, making money, getting recognition, and low friction deployment, while Intel helps with boring things like validation. Developers can create applications or components that they can sell to other developers. In addition to revenue from selling applications, the Million Dollar Development Fund provides additional incentives. Robust analytics are also available on the developer dashboards, to learn more about how your application is selling.
Rajiv Ranganath gave us an overview of Qt, which has over 350,000 commercial and open source developers. Qt started out as a better way to build user interfaces with productive application logic and cross-platform APIs. These three goals, that were there from the beginning, continue to be the focus today. He also pointed out a couple of important caveats: cross-platform APIs are not the same as cross-platform apps, and not all Qt APIs are created equal. With the direction in the industry moving from keyboard / mouse to direct touch manipulation, this is a big area of focus now for Qt. Qt is also focused on cross-device APIs to enable application development for MeeGo running across various devices. You can learn more about Qt by attending an upcoming Qt Developer Days event.
After Rajiv, I took the stage to talk about the MeeGo community. My presentation is posted online, and it focused on several aspects of the MeeGo Community. I define the MeeGo Community with a broad, inclusive definition, encompassing all of the people who participate in the MeeGo project, across all of our many community tools. I talked about how people can get involved with technical and non-technical contributions and gave a quick overview of some of the numbers and metrics for the community:
- 12,600 MeeGo.com members (9626 at the end of June)
- 8,400 mailing list posts
- 10,230 wiki page edits
- 8,600 forum posts
- 470+ people in #meego IRC most days
We also had some time for people to provide demos of some interesting MeeGo devices and applications, and we had a repeat of Bob Spencer’s and Horace Li’s hands-on SDK lab that I attended on my first day of IDF. We wrapped up the day with an evening meetup of the San Francisco Bay MeeGo Network.
Thanks to everyone who presented, attended, and helped make this a great event. We look forward to seeing you at other upcoming MeeGo community events.
