As seen over blogs.igalia In case you don't know what's all HAM about (Hildon Application Manager), it's a program to manage add-on software components for the Hildon Desktop. It uses the Debian package management tool provided by the maemo platform (namely APT and dpkg) and presents a 'end user oriented' interface to them...

There will be several new features and some eye candy:

- The section view has been improved greatly GtkIconView instead of the old buttons grid.
- Several user interaction (work flows and dialogs appearance) optimizations.
- Keep the cursor position in the package lists among operations.
- Add live search support, dropping the old search dialog.
- Avoid the update icon blink when the screen is blank, saving power
- maemo-confirm-text can show the package name who launched it.
- Minor fixes in logic strings and text display.
- Speed up the HAM launching loading the back-end using a lazy strategy.
- Speed up the package list processing in the back-end, so the package list are shown more quickly in the UI.

For the packagers there are also some bits:

- Adapt the .install files in order to interact with the packaged catalogs.
- Initial support for OVI store packages.
- Add a dbus function to search packages so other applications can interact with HAM (hildon-application-manager).

And for the SSU, specially handling the reduced space disk in the root file system:

- Use always the eMMC for downloaded packages, avoiding the rootfs even as fallback.
- Stop as much process as possible when going into the SSU (stop prestarted apps, camera-ui, browser, rtcom-messaging-ui, alarmd, etc.) in order to reduce the double mappings of large files.
- Go into rescue mode if the SSU fails and change its looks to a less scary one.
- Sync the disk before fetching it status, moving the operation to the back-end.
- Because the documentation use a lot of disk space, we hack a way to get rid of it during the SSU.
- Use the higher disk compression during the SSU

Head over http://hildon-app-mgr.garage.maemo.org/testing.html to learn how to install it and test it !

When will we see an app that gives us a list of new packages each day?! ;)