Today at the IAA (Internationale Automobil Ausstellung), Nokia announced Nokia Car Mode, a standalone application optimized for the in-car use of Nokia smartphones. Nokia Car Mode features an optimized user interface simplifying the access and use of Nokia Drive (voice-guided car navigation with Nokia Maps), traffic updates, music and voice calls while driving.

Nokia Car Mode is the first commercially available solution supporting MirrorLink, formerly known as Terminal Mode. MirrorLink is a standard smartphone-to-car connectivity platform driven by over 20 major global brands from across different industries within the Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC). With MirrorLink, smartphones can be connected to in-car displays, car controls systems, and car audio systems. Thus consumers can control their smartphones via the car dashboard, as if the device and its apps were integrated into the car itself.

Full press release at http://press.nokia.com/2011/09/13/nokia-car-mode-drives-fusion-of-cars-with-smartphone-services/

Video presenting the Nokia Car Mode based on Mirrorlink solution from Alpine and Nokia is avilable at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdHBFsy930A

The Car Connectivity Consortium announced yesterday the launch of its MirrorLink™ trademark. The first MirrorLink products will be presented by multiple member companies at the IAA International Motor Show, taking place in Frankfurt, Germany, September 15-25, 2011. Press release is available at http://www.carconnectivity.org/en/Communication/pressrelease.

You might have seen the news on Car Connectivity Consortium LLC (CCC) been founded earlier this year. It was launched by 11 leading automotive, mobile communications and consumer electronics companies. This consortium targets to further develop in-vehicle connectivity solutions and standards. Current consortium members include e.g. Alpine, Daimler, General Motors, Honda, HTC, Hyundai Motor Company, LG Electronics, Nokia, Panasonic, PSA, Samsung, Toyota and Volkswagen. You can visit the CCC website at http://www.carconnectivity.org/.

Consortium also further develops the Nokia originated Terminal Mode standard. Terminal Mode offers a seamless connectivity between a mobile device and the in-vehicle infotainment system. Terminal Mode technology is extremely simple from the consumer perspective utilizing existing standards and technologies. Such examples include Universal Plug and Play (UPnP™), Virtual Networking Computing (VNC™), Universal Serial Bus (USB) and Bluetooth™. The mobile device can be controlled through the in-car touch display, control buttons, and steering wheel controls, when the connection is made via Terminal Mode.

As the consortium focuses on further developing the in-car connectivity standards, it will also create new business opportunities for application developers. Keep your eyes open and stay tuned for more news!

With best regards,

Marko Tuukkanen, Senior Product Manager, Nokia Automotive

 
C++ gets occasional flak because of memory management issues and language complexity. While those issues are mostly obsoleted by Qt (regardless of the objections presented by the ever decreasing segment of developers still keeping the faith with managed runtimes , a real problem is the fact that you need to manually duplicate function signature in header and cpp file. 

Not anymore (thanks, Qt Creator guys!). Looking forward to ever increasing amount of refactoring features you can throw at us (here, less is not more). Blog post for Qt Creator 2.1 beta announcement here.

While enterprising souls have been able to generate the documentation for MeeGo Touch Framework (MTF) from gitorious, you may not have bothered to if you are merely curious about what it might have to offer.

In the likely case that this has evaded you, you may be happy to learn that you can browse the documentation online now (well, it has been possible for a few weeks already).

The documentation is here:

 http://apidocs.meego.com/mtf/

Or, you can jump straight to tutorial about writing your first MTF application:

 http://apidocs.meego.com/mtf/tutorial.html 

I think I’ll proceed with porting my qtdone & qreddit applications to MTF one of these days – MTF works in N900 as well, so the effort would not be "wasted" despite most people not having access to the next_device yet. MTF also makes it possible to avoid using device (or scratchbox) for testing, because on desktop MTF looks just like on device (whereas plain Qt doesn’t, due to how the Fremantle style is implemented). This might peel out some idle seconds from the development flow.

Opera Mobile 10 preview build for Maemo now available.

What makes this particularly cool is that Opera went all the way to release an N800/N810 version as well. It’s not a second rate build either; it scrolls around smoothly, has nice animated transitions and seems quite reliable on a quick trial.

If you can score a cheap second hand N810 somewhere, you may want to buy it just because of this release.

TweeGo is a new Twitter application for N900. What makes it interesting that it’s not a mere dumb frontend to the twitter protocol, but a nice showcase application for Qt Graphics View and Qt Animation Framework. If you’ve been wondering what you could do with graphics view (and how you should go about it), the codebase of TweeGo, available on gitorious, is a good place to get started!

While the app is intended for N900, there doesn’t seem to be anything N900-specific about it. I was able to compile it for desktop Ubuntu just fine, though it does need Qt 4.6 or newer (the default Qt on karmic won’t cut it). 

Note that this kind of application is exactly where QML will shine, once it’s widely deployed.

With moderate fanfare, the trolls have released a new preview of the grand, upcoming Qt Creator 2.0.

This is not a "bugfix release" – rather, it introduces integration with MADDE (of interest to Maemo developers – even seasoned scratchbox veterans will appreciate the seamless hardware debugging), and the ability to do Symbian development (which I didn’t try).

What I did try, on the other hand, is the QML (now called "Qt Quick") subsystem. It has improved quite a bit from the previous "raw" Bauhaus preview. The QML designer ("Bauhaus") behaves much better, and the QML code completion actually works (in the sense that it provides completions that make sense). 

Now might be a good time to start looking at QML (apart from merely watching the impressive demos). It may mean you have to flex your mind from the deep-burned imperative programming instincts, but you’ll be better off for it.

And yeah, you’ll need to learn Javascript. With the rate the world is turning, there is no way around the fact that you’ll need to learn it in any case. Console yourself with the fact that Javascript is not the same copy-paste language it was 10 years ago, and read a good book.