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.

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.

gnome-bluetooth kill kill

Last week, I did more work on the Bluetooth device selector, to avoid some of the problems we saw with the one in gnome-bluetooth (mainly the "I work with loads of nerds and there's 500 Bluetooth devices in the vicinity" use case). The patch is available on the bluez-devel mailing-list.

It looks pretty good, but would require some work before it's something bluez-gnome can export as public API.


Anyone fancying some cut'n'paste fest for gnome-phone-manager?

New gnome-phone-manager and Telepathy

I just released a new tarball of gnome-phone-manager, version 0.40. New in this version is the Telepathy backend. It's still a work-in-progress. But it allows you to send and receive messages from any number of phones.

Here's a little screencast:



There are obviously a number of bugs, including the fact that none of the contacts from your phone show up in the buddy list, so you can't send new messages. Try using gnome-phone-manager itself for now, but the future lies here.

PS: Get your distros to update gnome-phone-manager. Fedora has the latest versions in rawhide and Fedora 8. Some distros *cough*buntu*cough* still ship ancient versions.

Interviews

After the Bluetooth interview a couple of weeks ago, another one popped up about codeina/Codec Buddy, starring my good friend Thomas.

In other news, I want to stab Nokia and Sony Ericsson (I stabbed Motorola a long time ago) for their inexistant proprietary protocols specs, and their sub-par AT protocol implementations. Look at the recent commits in gnome-phone-manager for proofs.

Update: I forgot to mention the interviews were the work of Jon Roberts. The interviews make a very good read if you're interested in what's new in Fedora 8.

g-p-m/g-p-m integration

Richard sent me that little screenshot, showing off the gnome-phone-manager/gnome-power-manager integration, now in SVN of everything.

Yay! Integration! D-Bus! Buzzwords!

Hope I'm not stealing your thunder, but for once, you showed up on IRC after I did :)