The N9: what MeeGo could have been

Posted Mar 20, 2012 19:41 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: The N9: what MeeGo could have been by corsac
Parent article: The N9: what MeeGo could have been

So how does one obtain word prediction when, say, typing a text message or an email? I'd sure like to know, having looked for it for some time.
I did nothing to install the terminal, it was just there. Developer mode may somehow enable it, but it's already on the system.
Getting into the discussion of whether this is really MeeGo or not does not seem fruitful; there has been no real agreement on that in the past.

The N9: what MeeGo could have been

Posted Mar 20, 2012 19:51 UTC (Tue) by corsac (subscriber, #49696) [Link]

* I might not know what you mean by “word prediction“ (I never touched Android). What I know (which isenabled by default and which I disabled in input settings) is more like word autocompletion,
* it's *installed* when you enable developer mode (not sure it's really important, but you seem to insist)
* it seems relevant when you talk about the future, and how MeeGo could see releases on other devices. MeeGo /might/ continue, but it'll just move more away from Harmattan than it is right now, that's all

The N9: what MeeGo could have been

Posted Mar 20, 2012 19:56 UTC (Tue) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link] (3 responses)

1. Open the settings application, go to time and language followed by text entry and turn on error correction and word recognition (exact texts might be different, translating from my Swedish N9).

2. If you enable developer mode and then turn it of again, the terminal stays installed (at least it did for me), perhaps you got a phone that had been used internally by Nokia first, and not been re-flashed with a vanilla rootfs image.

3. MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan is MeGoo by virtue of having gotten a trademark usage exception from the Linux Foundation for use of the name. However, the underlying OS is closer to Maemo 5 than to the reference MeeGo 1.2, down to using dpkg rather than rpm for package management, which is why some people like to call it Maemo 6.

The N9: what MeeGo could have been

Posted Mar 21, 2012 8:07 UTC (Wed) by alexbk (subscriber, #37839) [Link] (2 responses)

I can't for the life of me understand why people make such a big deal out of package management. A platform is defined for the most part by its middleware and application frameworks, and that's where Harmattan and MeeGo are very close indeed.

The N9: what MeeGo could have been

Posted Mar 23, 2012 10:58 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

well, at least for the sort of developer I am, the package manager, and thus the associated tools for making the packages, define the entire development environment. So it is a big deal. I know a great deal about the debian tools ecosystem. I know almost nothing about the equivalent rpm world/tools. And I'd choose a mobile environment on that basis too, because I know I could relatively easily hack things.

So yes if you just _use_ a package manager for managing packages then it's a trivial matter. If you develop for a platform, at the infrastructure/packaging level (i.e as opposed to actually writing apps, when again it doesn't matter much) then the package-tools ecosystem is almost everything.

The N9: what MeeGo could have been

Posted Mar 23, 2012 18:22 UTC (Fri) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

It also mostly defines your upstream.

Debian has the longest history on ARM, it has been most used ARM distro for a decade and it started the OABI -> EABI and soft-fp -> hard-fp transitions first of the major distros. And nowadays Linaro works with Ubuntu. RPM world plays a bit of catch up and seems more fragmented/marginal on ARM.

The N9: what MeeGo could have been

Posted Mar 21, 2012 16:38 UTC (Wed) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link] (1 responses)

I recommend activating swype for text input. It makes text input considerably faster once you get used to moving the finger around instead of typing.

The N9: what MeeGo could have been

Posted Mar 21, 2012 19:32 UTC (Wed) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

If you have enabled multiple keyboard layouts, being able to swipe between them is also quite nice feature (independent of Swype).

How to remove annoying apps

Posted Mar 21, 2012 21:48 UTC (Wed) by cfischer (guest, #3983) [Link] (5 responses)

When you've got developer mode, you can remove annoying apps like this:

   dpkg-divert --local --rename /usr/share/applications/facebookqml.desktop

After a reboot (properly with shutdown -r now) facebook is gone for good.

The browser on the N9 is apparently a safari clone, or at least it reports as such. It has some features as double-click to zoom in on text. All in all, I'd much prefer a Mozilla mobile browser. Hope it comes soon.

The keyboard is, IMHO, better than on Android - at least better than the Android versions of 1 year ago.

How to remove annoying apps

Posted Mar 21, 2012 21:51 UTC (Wed) by corsac (subscriber, #49696) [Link] (1 responses)

You mean http://store.ovi.com/content/257468 ?

How to remove annoying apps

Posted Mar 21, 2012 22:06 UTC (Wed) by cfischer (guest, #3983) [Link]

Got it - many thanks!

How to remove annoying apps

Posted Mar 21, 2012 22:11 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (2 responses)

It's a webkit browser, but obviously not a safari clone...

How to remove annoying apps

Posted Mar 23, 2012 0:20 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link] (1 responses)

Not only that, Nokia always had Webkit forks ever since they had the S60 platform I believe.

I read somewhere that Webkit browser on the N9 is the most capable of the 3 platforms: iPhone Safari, Android Browser and N9.

How to remove annoying apps

Posted Mar 23, 2012 8:58 UTC (Fri) by corsac (subscriber, #49696) [Link]

N900 has a gecko-based browser (and so did N8x0 and N770)