Maemo development

Maemo applications are developed by the Maemo community of which there are over 22,000 members and 900 projects in progress at the time of writing. There are three stages to the development of an application for Maemo:

• The application project is placed in the Maemo Garage in an alpha status
• The application which has reached beta status is prepared for installation and placed in the Application Catalog
• Nokia selects novel and useful applications which are then promoted on maemo.nokia.com

Applications are built using the Maemo SDK. All of the development tools are included in the Scratchbox. This is a nearly complete GNU/Linux system and as such the developer can make use of all of the GNU/Linux development, debugging and testing tools. The toolkit also emulates the operation of a Maemo device on a standard PC.

The Maemo operating system is also actively developed by its developer community. Incidentally, Nokia has an annual prize of $50,000 for the best N900 application.

Resources:

• maemo.org
• Maemo forum