Salvatore Iovene

One lit­tle known new fea­ture of Maemo5 PR1.2 is the sup­port for cus­tom smi­lies in Con­ver­sa­tions (<bragging>which I implemented</bragging>).

I have made a smi­ley theme based on Tango icons, but it’s not yet in the repos­i­to­ries. Here’s what it looks like:

Tango smi­lies

You can install it by down­load­ing this file: conversations-tango-smilies_0.1_all.deb, and copy­ing it over to your N900.

Then open an X-Terminal, become root and do:

cd /home/user/MyDocs
dpkg -i conversations-tango-smilies_0.1_all.deb

Once it’s fin­ished, switch to Con­ver­sa­tion, go to Set­tings, and you will have a new but­ton, called Smi­leys theme. You can select your newly installed Tango theme.

Note: the theme will not work with SMSs and Skype chats. All the other accounts, and SMSs, will use the new theme.

After set­ting the new theme, go to an IM con­ver­sa­tion and see if the new icons are in the smi­ley picker. If not, a reboot should do.

Enjoy!

Tweakr has been finally pro­moted to Maemo Extras, check it out at http://maemo.org/downloads/product/Maemo5/tweakr/.

You can now eas­ily install it from the App. man­ager. I’ll write up a new tuto­r­ial some­day soon.

Hi. I have released tweakr 0.0.16, which you should be able to install from Maemo Test­ing in a mat­ter of min­utes. A cou­ple of bugs fixed and the Silent pro­file hard­coded is what’s new. Update!

Hi, a quick update on Tweakr: it has now been pro­moted to extras-testing, since the reboot loop bug (thanks, hildon-home!) has been fixed.

Also a new fea­ture present: the Pro­file but­ton in the Sta­tus Menu gets replaced by Tweakr’s own but­ton (which looks iden­ti­cal), so that you won’t have get your Sta­tus Menu too crowded.

A new fea­ture in Tweakr allows you to extend the sound Pro­files to more than just Gen­eral and Silent.

Tweakr intro­duces the con­cept of Pro­file pre­set. Pre­sets are Pro­file set­tings which can be saved, deleted and assigned to the Gen­eral pro­file. This allows you to prac­ti­cally use as many pro­files as you want on the N900.

The nor­mal use-case is to first tune the Gen­eral pro­file for the new pre­set you want to save, then open Tweakr and choose the Save cur­rent Gen­eral pro­file to new pre­set but­ton. This will allow you to save the set­tings of the Gen­eral pro­file with a new name.

After that, you will find a new but­ton in your Sta­tus Menu, as shown in the fol­low­ing screenshot:

You can now select what­ever pre­set you have cre­ated before, and its set­tings will be applied to the Gen­eral profile.

If you’re not using Tweakr yet, go get it from its down­load page!

I have been work­ing on a lit­tle util­ity pack­age for Maemo 5, called Tweakr. It’s a Settings applet that lets you tweak lit­tle known set­tings that could oth­er­wise be changed only by edit­ing con­fig­u­ra­tion files by hand.

It has a plu­gin archi­tec­ture, so you could write your own plu­gin too. The ones I have so far are Desktop and Hardware keys.

Desk­top

This plu­gin allows you to edit the labels of the book­mark short­cuts you have on your desktop.

Hard­ware keys

You can con­fig­ure the behav­ior of the Power Key, and whether uncov­er­ing the cam­era lens unlocks the device.

More plu­g­ins and fea­ture com­ing soon!

Here’s some screenshots: