A few days ago Nokia released a Maemo 4.0 “Chinook” alpha SDK, as a preview of the next stable Maemo release, which will be released at an unknown time in the future. It’s basically the easy way to get a Maemo Sardine scratchbox target set up.

Sardine is the Maemo version that is always the latest work in progress, but it’s generally been difficult to install because it required an upgrade from the stable version, and tended to break quite often. But now that it’s easier for people to start using Sardine maybe it will become more stable.

It doesn’t have the closed-source applications, so there isn’t much to see. It’s just meant to help people port their applications to the new platform.

But for developers there are big improvements. If you have ported software to Maemo then you should be testing with this new SDK now. We finally have GTK+ 2.10 instead of ancient GTK+ 2.6, and there are no longer eccentric API-breaking changes to GTK+, thanks to a shot of sanity from Maemo developers like Lucas Rocha. Most of the good stuff has been cleaned up and is already upstream in GTK+ itself, I believe. hildon-libs is now hildon-1 and has had much of the irrelevant crap removed, so it’s easier to see what is useful.

We can now also upload “extras” packages for Sardine, so our software can be ready for Maemo Chinook on the day that it’s released. I’ve already uploaded gtkmm and I’m working on the updated C++ bindings for hildon-1, hildon-fm, and friends.