Hello everybody, hope you’ve spent your hollidays quite well.
I’m starting this year with great mood and feel for something extremely new. So I’ve broke all my previous rules and entered great project outside of Maemo OS, but it’s 100% maemo related. Let me introduce – Mer!
So, first of all, some information bout the project itself.
The Mer platform is a Linux distribution for mobile devices based on the Maemo platform from Nokia. Mer goals include:
- Improving and developing parts of Maemo that are of interest to the Maemo community.
- Making it easier to port existing desktop applications by hildonizing and adjusting them to the tablet form factor.
- Encouraging third party experimentation and development.
- Supporting outdated tablet hardware no longer supported by Nokia.
- Making Maemo a generic platform for all tablet devices, including non-Nokia ones.
For more information go to: http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer_Blueprint_New
So, Stskeeps, one of Mer’s head voodoo shamans, has asked me if I can make some stuff for newborn project and I gladly agreed. The results are shown below: Mer now has modern simply looking logo and brand wallpaper (since “Mer” means “Sea” in French”. You can easily save it to your tablet and use if you like :)
It’s really great to get back to work on something after holidays and theres more stuff to come, and not only for Mer. Stay tuned!
* – Rest at the sea
Maemo UI improvements blog. 
Looks good – and I especially like the start-up screen version of it containing the mer logo you’ve been showing on IRC.
Personally, I think desktop backgrounds should have a bit more variation than the above (but shouldn’t include the hard white of the logo), and in keeping with the bubbles (which Diablo’s felicia theme also has) theme of the logo, I knocked together this variant:
http://bleb.org/software/maemo/mer_9b.xcf
Comment by Andrew Flegg — January 12, 2009 @ 18:45
This is really, really beautiful.
Cant wait to try this background on my N800. It looks great and must be a lot better with transparent applets than the one I use now. Above all, it’s blue. The only color for my precious device. ;)
Comment by ossi1967 — January 12, 2009 @ 19:11
“Supporting outdated tablet hardware no longer supported by Nokia.”
You mean the _current_ N800/N810(w) Nokia tablet hardware which has already been in bugfixes-only mode since last summer?
It is amusing to hear it called already “outdated” since it will be all there is in the market until the unspecified new gadget is released, maybe sometime in Q3.
But yau! The logo is really nice.
Comment by Peet — January 12, 2009 @ 21:09
I would love to see your UI improvement ideas in mer!
Comment by zehjotkah — January 12, 2009 @ 21:25
Love the logo and background, and I’m glad you will contribute to Mer!!
Comment by allnameswereout — January 12, 2009 @ 21:49
“Supporting outdated tablet hardware no longer supported by Nokia.” – yeah, that was an error on my part :) When I say outdated, I mean hardware with no direct vendor support in their future OS releases :)
Comment by Carsten Munk — January 12, 2009 @ 23:18
FWIW, here’s a screenshot of my bubbly variant in Fremantle:
Comment by Andrew Flegg — January 13, 2009 @ 12:51
Very very nice. Wow. :)
Comment by timsamoff — January 13, 2009 @ 18:10
I’m happy to know about this effort, I would want to help you. Is there a forum, or developer mailing list to make contributions and/or learn about current discussions?
I’ve already made a Maemo fork in the past (chinook). It was never released to the public, so I’m currently the only person using it. I portedupstart and many other standard utilities in Ubuntu, replaced some propietary components and made random improvements (for example, modified libconic to support usbnet connections).
My fork is obsolete now, needs to be updated, but I think that some parts may be useful to you. For example, I’m very happy with the theme, itis based on plankton but modified so the Home screen looks more like the default theme (and it is free license unlike the default theme):
I’ve started to move it to scratchbox2, I currently have custom toolchains for maemo/scratchbox2 and a script to build toolchains from source,since codesourcery toolchains are very difficult to build with their provided script. I can help you with the base system if you want.
Comment by Roberto Gordo Saez — January 13, 2009 @ 18:57
Very cool! Mer looks very appealing indeed, time to take a serious look…
Comment by Marius Vollmer — January 13, 2009 @ 19:31
Looks like you and the Windows 7 graphics team are drinking from the same pot
Comment by flatfeet — January 13, 2009 @ 21:34
bad URL
try this
Comment by flatfeet — January 13, 2009 @ 21:37
Aaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwww shit….
How the hell I supposed to know that?! :(
Comment by Andrew Zhilin — January 13, 2009 @ 23:22
thank you…very much ;)
Comment by nokia tema — January 24, 2009 @ 13:44
[…] I’ve, as always, helped various unique projects, such as Mnemosyne, BlueMaemo, Ati85 and even Mer. You can even see some of my UI ideas for Fremantle live […]
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