Hildon/GTK+ update for N800 & N810

You heard it, the new N810 internet tablet is there, and together will come a new OS for both N800 & N810, based on Chinook beta SDK.

On the UI toolkit side, we now proudly ship gtk-2.10, a clean stable hildon API, and a much improved theme framework. The fork of gtk-2.6, experimental code and historical names are now gone!

This colossal tedious work has been done by fer, mdk, tko, and xan in close collaboration with the community, and especially with expert help and support from GTK+ people. It was not easy every day, and took lot of time and energy. They did it, Congratulation to each of them!

The new hildon stack will be stamped 2.0.

Because of the resulting API incompatibility, all applications using GTK+ and Hildon need to be updated. Overall it is a minor technical update, with mostly name changes and other trivial changes. See the migration documentation, and run hildon-audit which can give you hints too. Our toolkit heroes will support You through mailinglist or #irc.

I wish we could get most applications updated before the N810s hit the shops, so we would offer the very best open source applications to all future N810 users too!

Read more at:

• MDK's post
• Xan's post
• Hildon 2.0

To all developers, good luck with the update!

And to all, Enjoy your brand new OS!

Hildon sketchy theme

A few days ago tigert pointed me at an interesting article from the excellent blog "Creating Passionate Users". The main points are:

1. Don't make the demo look done,
2. How 'done' something looks should match how 'done' something is,
3. The more "done" something appears, the more narrow and incremental the feedback.


Following Michael's post about hildon theme tools, I have been playing a bit with the tools, and started to work on... a sketchy theme. Sketchy is based on Plankton. The current release has basic support for "desktop", menus, dialogs, buttons, scrollbars, and banners. More to come!

Here is a preview of the result:



I could get this in a couple of hours (I am not really an artist specialist). The tools make it really easy to make a complete theme, BIG thanks to Michael and tigert :-) I encourage anyone to give it a try! Michael promised some tutorial, and I'll write more later about my experience.

Here is the sketchy theme package (and its source). You also need the hildon theme cacher to be able to install the theme on your N800.

Enjoy!