New gnome-phone-manager maintainer

Seeing as I haven't given gnome-phone-manager enough love lately, Daniele Forsi, of gnokii fame, is stepping up as the new maintainer for it. Bug fixes coming your way very soon!

I'll still be handling the packaging of gnome-phone-manager in Fedora.

Bit jammy

Yesterday, I was trying to fix getting the phone's own number on that Sony Ericsson phone using gnokii. It didn't work, and created a new bug in the Sony Ericsson AT variant.

Turns out the responses returned from the phone are encoded using whatever is the current encoding on the phone. So 004D0045 instead of ME, if UCS2 was selected.
Making sure we use the right encoding all along the AT driver means we could remove some Sony Ericsson specific code, and fix in one fell swoop: Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Sagem phones.

Yay! gnokii 0.6.24 should be out tomorrow.

There's also a stupid fix in gnome-phone-manager if you tried to use IrDa or a cable. Expect release soon.

Gadgets and gifts

The great sport that is Vincent sent me a copy of Hacking vim for my troubles. Hopefully, I'll be able to get more code written, as requested.


In the free stuff department, last week, a kind soul at Ericsson sent me 2 Sony Ericsson mobile phones, one being the pretty new Sony Ericsson k850i. The other (less interesting) phone is already on its way to one of the gnokii developers without such a device.

I've started playing around with it. It has a good bunch of interesting modes when plugged in via USB, or over Bluetooth, which beg to be (better) supported including:

• MTP device (Rhythmbox and gvfs)
• Mass Storage media player (Rhythmbox)
• ObexFTP over USB and Bluetooth (gvfs, obex-data-server)
• Serial port (NetworkManager, gnome-phone-manager, gnokii)

Funnily enough, poking people at Nokia didn't get me a test phone in the ~2 years I tried. My wishlist is online :)

New Totem

Mathias blogged about one new feature in Totem, the playlist sharing. This allows peer-to-peer sharing of the current playlist using libepc.

I've done 2 releases of Totem today, 2.21.3, the old-school Totem, and 2.21.4, the new Totem depending on the split totem-pl-parser.

This means I can finally commit my big patch for Rhythmbox.

Next up, the big gnokii automake patch.

gnapplet support

Thanks to Zaheer, who provided me with a Nokia 3650 some time ago, I've added support for gnapplet for the phones that handle it. This means better support for extended functionality, as the AT interface is severely limited on a number of those phones.