I'm currently playing around with more hildon-desktop patches (see here and here). Turns out that the "Maps" application doesn't support portrait mode (among other built-in apps), but it turns out it can be relayouted using simple HTML/CSS hackery.

The first result of this 5-minute-hack is this: http://thp.io/2011/maemo/portrait_mode_maps.sh. Pretty trivial, and as you can see on the photo, some parts would still need manual layouting. Also, this patch fixes the application into portrait mode, so landscape mode won't work after that (changing the script to change the layout back is left as an exercise for the reader ). I won't pursue this specific app (Maps) any further, but this should get interested community members who know HTML and CSS started on implementing portrait mode support in Nokia Maps