This Week in CyanogenMod

“This Week in CyanogenMod” is an ongoing feature that aims to serve as a one-stop shop for weekly updates. Topics discussed are culled from our social media accounts, gerrit, status updates and general thoughts.

And we’re back! Its been a while since the last TWICM, and I have to confess that as your narrator much of the blame in the delay falls back on me. Let’s get everyone’s favorite semi-recurring blog post back on track

Sony Xperia Z1 Compact

The ‘amami’ has been officially added to the CM roster, courtesy of the crew known as FXP. The first test-build and nightly are both available on our download portal.

Translations Galore

Our translation team and contributors have been on a tear! These guys have not only volunteered to update and maintain the existing languages supported (which have been growing steadily), they have also created documentation and tools to help assist new-comers to their fold. Take a look at theirtranslation guide for more information and possibly see where and how to contribute. The team is also looking into a web-based translation solution to make submitting your changes even easier. Look out for more information in the coming weeks on that effort.

What’s new in Source? 

We did a pretty decent changelog for CM 11 M4′s release, so let’s look at what has changed since that code was branched:

Multi-sim (MSIM) support which will debut in full on the Moto G dual SIM model. For updates on this device keep tabs on Dhacker29.

QCRIL merged. This was not without its headaches, but such is life with ‘bleeding edge’ code. Some of you may have seen some odd behavior with APNs and Messaging. That dust should be settled (or will be shortly).

The Data Usage Cycle display got a more granular control – you can now set day and week on data cycles to better manage your non-unlimited data plans.

Faster booting on multicore devices. This nice tweak should benefit most of the devices supported in CM 11 by enabling multi-threading support for various boot-time processes (including that ‘optimizing apps’ dialog).

Nokia X? 

During our trip to MWC at the end of February we were able to secure an X from the Nokia team. There has been a substantial interest in this device from the community. While we won’t commit to releasing a proper ‘release’ (the hardware is more than a bit lacking) we have sent our X to dhacker29 to get up a source tree for the community. Just because CM won’t release a build doesn’t mean we can’t help other ROMs in the process. Nokia, to their credit, has already provided kernel source upon request and the bootloader is unlocked on this device – plenty of fun for the community to be had.

Privacy Guard gets beefier

With the help of CAF we’ve brought in changes to allow for an ‘Always Ask’ mode to Privacy Guard. Now, should you choose, your apps will trigger a dialog on first run for the permissions they need, and you can choose to allow or deny accordingly. To prevent this from being overwhelming, the ask dialog is currently set to be ‘stricter’ on the larger permission sets, example: it won’t ask for ‘vibrate’ permission, but will for ‘course location’. You can see what the behavior will be for any given permission on Github.

CyanogenMod @ CeBIT 

Sven and I were invited out to the Open Source Park at CeBIT this year. There we met and hung out with folks from Tor, Git, Knoppix, KDE, LibreOffice, Bitcoin and various other open source projects. The event also brought with it the Linux New Media Open Source awards.  And guess what? We won in the category of Best Open Source Software App for Android. Some of you may recall we won an award here last yearas well, focusing on ‘Best Open Source Mobile App for Inclusion and Accessibility’. We couldn’t have received either of these without the continued support of our community of users and developers alike. So to all 11 million+ of you, thank you!