thp on Maemo

gPodder 3.0.4 for Harmattan

2012-01-24T22:38:00.000+01:00

Version 3.0.4 of gPodder has been released today. A new Harmattan package has been built and uploaded to Ovi Store (still waiting in QA) and Apps For MeeGo. You can already get gPodder 3.0.4 for Harmattan from Apps For MeeGo Staging now. Please test this version and review/rate it on apps.formeego.org so it can be put into the non-staging (stable) area of AFM.

While you can look at the complete list of changes in the release announcement, Harmattan users might be happy to know that the episode prefix elimination has been further improved and a play queue (screenshot 1, screenshot 2) and episode list filters (screenshot 1, screenshot 2) have been added.

The play queue feature comes in handy when you have a long car commute and want to listen to several episodes back to back without having to interact with the screen to play the next episode. It is also helpful to queue up several music podcasts to use as background music while working.

The episode list filters help you to quickly find the episodes you want, e.g. only show episodes that have been downloaded. Text search is not yet possible, but you can now hide deleted episodes just like on Maemo 5.

gPodder/QML on the N900 - Yesteryear and today

2012-01-21T16:32:00.000+01:00

I just found this pre-feb11 gPodder/QML on a N900 on 2011-02-04 video and someone on TMO recently asked me about the status of gPodder for the N900, so I thought I'd try the current version of gPodder on the N900.

The result is a new video of gPodder/QML on a N900 today, which shows what works and what does not.

If you want to try it yourself, get the latest CSSU for your N900 and enable Extras-Devel (the usual disclaimers apparently still apply). Now, make sure to install all of PySide and Qt Mobility 1.2, and the packages qt-components and qt-components-blanco-theme. The theme package is broken right now, so you need to copy /usr/share/themes/blanco/meegotouch from a Harmattan device or the Harmattan SDK onto your N900 manually. When you have done that, simply checkout gPodder (master branch) from its Git repository.

What doesn't work yet:

Text input fields are missing their backgrounds
Screen rotation doesn't work (Qt Components bug?)
Task switching is only possible with Ctrl+Backspace

Apart from these annoyances (and the problem with the missing blanco theme files), everything else works as one would expect. If these problems get fixed (so that all dependencies are readily available from Extras-Devel), I might be able to make some time to package gPodder 3 for the N900.

Harmattan (N9/N950) users: Have a look at the video to see how the play queue and episode list filters work, which will land in a new gPodder release "soon".

The N9 week: Hack-A-N9, gotoVienna, Camerra, gPodder

2012-01-14T23:52:00.000+01:00

While the first week back in Vienna after the holidays was sad for a Maemoista walking around in the city (aka Admazing (sic) Everyday), there was also enough time to release gPodder 3.0.3 (already in AFM - thanks, testers!), catch up with local Maemoistas at the Hack-A-N9 and work on gotoVienna, the Camerra hack and even more post-3.0.3 gPodder goodness. But one after the other..

gotoVienna is a public transport live ticker app by kelvan. In the days after meeting at the Hack-A-N9, we implemented a nice line number input UI that makes it easy to quickly get live information for a given line - the code is in Git, and as a side-product, merlin1991 has implemented a stdeb/distutils extension to inject an Aegis manifest and create the digsigsums file - check it out if you want to build Python packages for Harmattan without Scratchbox/the SDK.

Next up is the Camerra hack, a quick'n'dirty "app" that monitors the Volume+ hardware button and (when the Camera UI is in the foreground) simulates a click on the shutter button, effectively making the Volume+ work as a shutter button. Ideal for all your self-portraying needs! It's called a hack, because it uses the likes of xprop and xresponse directly - a "proper" implementation would use QmSystem, XTest and Xlib from C/C++, just in case someone feels like spending time on rewriting something that Works For Me ;) There's a support thread on t.m.c, the Python and PySide powered code is available on Github, and the package is available on the website and (hopefully soon) also on Apps For MeeGo.

As for the post-3.0.3 gPodder goodness: Episode list filters (bug 1527) are currently being developed, a first patch is already written, and screenshot 1 and screenshot 2 show you how it currently looks. Don't forget to report any bugs and feature requests over at bugs.gpodder.org - don't keep them for yourself! :p

And now for the next two weeks for something completely different (i.e. Uni semester wrap-ups, exams, lab interviews and lab exercises).. ;) Enjoy the newly released stuff!

gPodder 3.0.3 for Harmattan

2012-01-09T23:56:00.002+01:00

A new version of gPodder - a podcast and video manager - has been released today. In addition to improvements to the existing YouTube support, this version adds support for downloading videos from Vimeo (so if you wanted to get ahold of ye olde Maemo 5 "Getting Started" video from two years ago, subscribe to metalab on Vimeo, but I'm pretty confident that you can come up with better uses of the Vimeo support ;).

Anyway, the new king of Harmattan repos is Apps For MeeGo, as everyone knows, and so start your Community QA engines and review gPodder 3.0.3 in Apps For MeeGo Testing. If you don't have the Apps For MeeGo Client on your N950 or N9, click here to download the enabler. It has also been uploaded to Ovi Publish, but if and when it appears there is anyone's guess. Don't hold your breath and switch to Apps For MeeGo for downloading (and publishing if you do!) your open source Harmattan apps.

The 3.0.3 version of gPodder packs some long overdue improvements to the Harmattan QML UI (for example, the toolbar has been cleaned up, an about box has been added and you can now check for new episodes from the toolbar) with more to come in the future. In general, 3.0.3 should provide you with a more Harmattan-esque user experience. You can always get your wishes and problems heard at the gPodder bug tracker - make use of it! :)

Maemo devices in movies: 770 and N950

2012-01-08T01:52:00.000+01:00

Jukka just posted "No such thing as silver N950 except for Transformers 3 ;)", which reminded me of the movie appearances of the Nokia 770. But first to the silver N950 appearance which I somehow missed: A quick TMO "site:"-search reveals the obligatory thread for the N950-in-Transformers 3 appearance with a frame grab by ro25anav:

As for the 770, it starred in a Harold and Kumar movie, in a Fantastic Four movie and in a Die Hard movie, but you probably already knew that. The 770 appearances are well documented (with screencaps) over at starringthecomputer.com if you don't have the time to watch all three movies. Any other movies in which Maemo devices appear? What about the N800, N810 and N900? Googling doesn't really yield any useful results, with most hits being about "watching movies on device so and so".

Next Tuesday (2012-01-10): Hack-A-N9 Session at Metalab Vienna

2012-01-02T23:20:00.000+01:00

After a successful N9 Hackathon in October (where projects like Rodrigo's Forever Alone Hack were started), it's once again time for the local Maemo/MeeGo users to get together and do some hacking in person, so here's the official announcement so you can't say you didn't know ;)

Event: Hack-A-N9
Location: Metalab Vienna
Date/Time: 2012-01-10, 18:00

Among other things, we'll try to get some locally-relevant apps (like kelvan's gotoVienna) in shape for apps.formeego.org, see how far we get with open mode and Christian of Maemo 5 Community SSU fame will probably be hacking on some NFC stuff. If you have time, stop by and say hi :)

Argh Ovi Store and COBS (and stray .debs in Forums)! ..or: I want my Maemo Extras back

2011-12-27T20:53:00.000+01:00

Rant mode on (once again). The reason why gPodder 3.0.2, which has been released two weeks ago has not yet made it into Ovi Store is not because I was lazy (in fact, I uploaded the .deb on the same day as the release day, i.e. 2011-12-13) but because it took Ovi Store QA one whole week(!) to realize that the gPodder package isn't optified. Guess what? Optification isn't really needed by Harmattan anymore, and the Ovi Store has passed all previous gPodder releases which have been packaged exactly the same. Apparently they decided it's necessary this time.
Cool, so now I have to modify my packaging, and Marius' maemo-optify isn't in the Madde environment of the Qt SDK (and I'm not even sure if the package would be accepted then).

For some other reason, my gPodder 3.0.2 package hasn't yet been accepted in Apps For MeeGo even though I've submitted two requests already (and one should be enough?). Add to that that the Community OBS is not really easy to understand or use, but then maybe it's just my incompetence and other developers have no problem with it. It might also be overkill now that nobody cares about building against all these dead MeeGo UXes. The only thing I want to build my stuff against is the latest Harmattan release.

Contrast that to the simplicity, ease of use and clarity of Maemo Extras and its fabulous autobuilder. While it had its own problems, it was surely easier to use, and you knew where the packages came out, and the Maemo 5 Extras QA process has been fine-tuned for several months now. Can't we just have the same for Harmattan? :/

Oh, and by the way: I'd much rather trust an Extras repository (or even the OBS if need be) with a Community-driven QA and building on the server (with sources readily available for the interested!) than the Ovi QA - my Calenderr Hack, which modifies .desktop files of Nokia-provided built-in packages was uploaded by somebody else (I still haven't seen the full source of that package, and only found out that it has been uploaded by a post in the forum thread..) to Ovi Store, and it got accepted.

Bonus question: Which is the most comprehensive software directory for Harmattan? Answer: My-MeeGo.com's ad-infested Software Catalog, mixing Ovi Store links with deeplinks to .debs on some random web servers (and doing a very good job at it, they got most of my Ovi apps/games and random .debs listed). They even got lots of user comments that provide good feedback for developers, while apps.formeego.org looks nice and is ad-free, but contains a whopping 10 stable apps in its directory for the N9, with 14 more apps waiting for review. Because apparently it's hard to come up with something like Maemo.org Downloads for Harmattan.

Tedious fragmentation (maemo.org / meego.com)

2011-12-26T16:29:00.004+01:00

Rant mode on. It's really tedious to hunt down information about Harmattan. It's not really MeeGo (and MeeGo Is Dead(tm), anyways) and it's not branded as Maemo, even though it's Maemo. Yeah. It's not really Maemo, but it is. And it's not really MeeGo, but it is branded as such.

Wiki. The Wiki pages are split between maemo.org and meego.com. For example, there's the ARM/N950 page on meego.com and the Nokia N950 page on maemo.org. Oh, and if two Wikis are not enough, have a look at the MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan category on Nokia Developer's very own Wiki. Add to that the Qt Developer Network Wiki content for N950 and you have information spread onto 4 different Wikis. So, where are YOU going to add information?

Forums. Next up are the forums. You know the drill. It's called Handset on forum.meego.com and MeeGo/Harmattan on talk.maemo.org. And if you feel more like a Nokia fanboy, discuss on developer.nokia.com. Or troll(tech) your Qt love on Qt's own Mobile and Embedded Forum.

Repositories. Writing apps is supposedly easy. Publishing them is hard. What will it be? Nokia Store Publish to reach the masses? Or the not-so-well-known Apps for MeeGo? And independent of where you publish your packages, if it's an open source package it's hard for users to track down the sources of your package (which you really should make easily accessible).

Hosting. The good old Maemo Garage still provides good service, the MeeGo Garage never materialized, but is still advertised on meego.com. Nokia Developer obviously also has an offering for you: projects.developer.nokia.com allows you to host stuff (but apparently has been down for a few weeks recently). The rest of the projects is spread between private web pages and Gitorious/Github.

Yes, choice is good. But right now, everything is more complicated than it should be. In the Good Old N900 Times(tm), we gathered information on wiki.maemo.org, discussed on TMO (which was Internet Tablet Talk merged into the maemo.org domain - while not without resistance, this was IMHO a good move) and had the Maemo Garage and the awesome Maemo Extras for all our repository/packaging needs. Granted, the OBS might be better suited for building packages than the Extras Autobuilder, but i'm missing a package interface a'la packages.debian.org for Harmattan which is available for Maemo 5.

The other question is: How long will meego.com hosting be funded, and how long will maemo.org hosting be funded? Wouldn't it make sense to deprecate one of them for Harmattan content and try to move content from the deprecated one to the preferred one?

We (as the Harmattan Community, which I would see as the collective of N950 and N9 users and developers) are a small community, so we should focus our energy on one collaboration place/domain instead of splitting everything between maemo.org and meego.com. I don't want to announce new things on two different pages/forums, don't want to check two different places for new content and publish packages to two different repositories.

gPodder 3.0.2 for Harmattan

2011-12-13T23:51:00.003+01:00

A new version of gPodder (a free podcast, YouTube and Soundcloud downloader) has been released today. It has been uploaded to the Community OBS (Apps For MeeGo) and to Ovi Store, and is waiting in each QA queue for approval. Some new things to look out for:

Common Prefix Elimination: A very cool name for a very space-efficient feature. If all episodes in a podcast have the same prefix in their title, the prefix is stripped. This usually gives you more information about the episode on screen without wasting space with repeated information.
Audio Player Scrubbing: You probably know the seeking buttons in the media player. These buttons now show their meaning in a text popup when pressed and - and here comes the cool part - allow you to "scrub" through a podcast.

What scrubbing means is that you can touch-and-hold a button and then scrub on the screen up and down (or left and right - it doesn't really matter, just the distance counts) and the action of the button will be carried out multiple times. This lets you quickly navigate through long podcasts or mixes if you are searching for a certain passage.

Some bugs (like the YouTube episode sorting issue) have also been fixed, more on that in the release announcement. gPodder 3.0.2 "Agent 99" will be available in Ovi Store and Apps For Meego shortly.

This weekend's releases: Tap Tap N950, qw.py and the IP Address Widget

2011-12-04T22:34:00.006+01:00

Over the weekend, I've pushed out some code for your enjoyment: First up is the incomplete but maybe interesting QML source code of the Tap Tap N950 prototype. I probably won't find time to work on this, but it would be sad to let the small piece of code rot - maybe someone wants to pick up the development of it. I'll answer any questions related to the code in the thread :)

Next up is the open source release of the qw prototype "qw.py", which has been developed during the Super GameDev Weekend 2010 at the Metalab Vienna last December (the next one is at the upcoming weekend; stop by if you are in Vienna!) - nearly 1 year ago. This is not the same as qw The Game in Ovi Store, but it's an earlier version, which still contains multi-player support (4 players on one PC keyboard), and it's written in Python, so it should be easily hackable.

And last but maybe not least is the IP Address "Widget" for Harmattan. This small hack (which is inspired by the earlier Calenderr calendar icon hack) makes use of the fact that the Harmattan UX reloads the icon of an application whenever the .desktop file or the icon file itself changes. The details (and a .deb for easy installation) can be found on the website - basically it shows a way to have semi-interactive "widgets" on the app list on Harmattan. I'm sure that creative readers can come up with some cool ideas :)

Plonk (formerly known as Mong) for Harmattan

2011-11-21T15:31:00.004+01:00

Plonk (formerly known as Mong, but renamed since) is now available in Nokia Store for the N9 and N950 as free download:

http://store.ovi.com/content/220976

This is a multi-touch game for two persons, so go out into the big blue room and ask somebody to have a game of Plonk with you :) As you probably already know, this game has been developed at the MeeGo Conference in collaboration with Cornelius Hald and Tim Samoff - sounds have been recorded directly at the hacker lounge by Erik Stein, and Randall Arnold came up with the new name. A real collaborative project, and the source is available from Gitorious! One challenge with Harmattan was disabling Swipe, we solved that with a nifty little class called SwipeControl - it's open source if you want to use it in your game, too :)

Hack Tuesday: Tap Tap N950 and Calenderr

2011-11-15T23:50:00.007+01:00

The unexpected lack of lectures today (Tag des Landespatrons) left time for some one-off hacks, and here are two for you:

First up is Tap Tap N950, a very basic QML prototype of what could become a funny DDR/TTR clone - no code published yet, it still need some more polishing (and touch area support for multi-touch, plus scoring is also missing).

The other one is a simple hack to make the Calendar app icon always show today's date (day-of-month). The existence of calendar icons for each day (1-31) in the theme on the device lets me suspect that this feature was either planned and then abandoned or that it will come built-in in some future firmware. For now, you can grab this lame shell script and execute it (ideally with "nohup" - see the comment inside - also needs customizations if you changed your root password, and you definitely need developer mode for now) to have an auto-updating calendar icon until the next reboot. Watch the accompanying video for a quick demo. There's now also a forum thread for support and discussion. Sometimes I really wish cron was pre-installed on Harmattan..

Bonus exercise: Store your app's .desktop file in /home/user/.local/, generate the icon dynamically via code and update the .desktop file for some icon overlay action / new items notification ;)

Nokia Austria N9 Photoshooting Campaign

2011-11-15T23:24:00.001+01:00

As you know, Austria is one of the few lucky countries in which the N9 is officially available - I even spotted an ad in a local cinema last week (which made me very happy, and I'm usually not very happy about ads in the cinema ;). Now, Nokia Austria is running a campaign until November 27th where you can win a photo shooting and show off your N9 style. If you use the code RHWMZE on the contest website you can get extra points (and you'll find more codes on local bloggers' websites) :)

As you might have heard in the video above, you can go to http://nokia.at/n9style to find all the details about the contest. While you are at it, if you have a N9, try out my free apps in Nokia Store. Two more are currently waiting for QA: Tennix and Plonk - yep, that's right: our Pong-style game formerly known as Mong (developed in collaboration with Cornelius Hald and Tim Samoff) is coming to Harmattan - with swipe locking - you can grab the source already now from our Git repository. And your favourite 2D tennis game is also celebrating a comeback, so be prepared for more casual gaming quality time :)

Why I love the N9 and things I didn't know about WP7

2011-11-02T23:29:00.003+01:00

With last week's Nokia World and today's hands-on event in Vienna, I got a chance to try out the WP7 devices and ask questions about them. Here's some insights that I want to share with you, because they might not be obvious if you haven't tried WP7 before (I haven't until last week, and these things were not obvious to me). I'm comparing the Lumia 800 with the N9 here, because they look very similar from the outside.

As the outer shell is basically the same (or in other words: all hardware features that they fitted into the N9's form factor could just as well be fitted into the Lumia 800 form factor), these things are software limitations that are in WP7 right now (doesn't mean that these will stay in the future). Most basic things that the N9 can do (and the WP7 devices can't yet) can even be done by the N900 and Symbian devices. It's also written from a pure end user experience perspective - I've talked about SDK availability earlier.

The Lumia 800 has a camera hardware button - the N9 does not. I would really like the N9 to have a hardware camera button (what's the progress on getting one of the volume keys to act as shutter button?)
If you turn off the Lumia 800, wake-up alarms won't work - they do work on the N9, i.e. with an alarm set and the N9 turned off, the N9 will turn itself on and ring the alarm
If you receive a call from a number that's not on your phone book, you can't directly add it to your phone book - you have to copy the number, then go to the contacts, create a new contact and paste the number there - on the N9, there's a button for this - and it even allows you to "Add new" or "Merge"
The N9 has NFC - the Lumia 800 does not (WP7 does not support NFC at the moment)
The N9 has TV-out - the Lumia 800 does not (on the other hand, some Symbian devices have HDMI out in addition to TV-out - that would have been nice for the N9 as well ;)
The N9 can be used in USB Mass Storage Mode - the Lumia 800 can not
The N9 shows the time (+missed calls/new mails/SMS) on its low-power standby screen (like the N8 and E7) thanks to the AMOLED screen - the Lumia 800 has the same screen technology, but (due to WP7 not supporting it, as I've been told) there's no low-power standby screen (the lock screen when the device is reactivated does have more information, though)
You can send and receive files via Bluetooth on the N9 - I've been told that you can't do this with the Lumia 800 (Update: According to Allan, there is an app for transferring contacts from an old phone to the new one - no info about arbitrary files yet)
The N9's marvelous virtual keyboard (an open source project, by the way) has very good tactile feedback - on WP7, the only feedback you can get is an audible one (although a long-time WP7 user told me that the virtual keyboard there is very good, even without tactile feedback)
Swipe. It really makes a difference

What's the point you ask? These are the things that let the N9 really shine compared to its WP7 "successor" (I don't talk about openness, SSH-into-ability, QML, hackability, Python goodness and other things here - that's something that developers like and really, really care about) for end users (it obviously also ignores apps, services, "ecosystems", but I'd argue that the things that I personally need are available on the N9 as well).

It also shows that when a vendor controls both hardware and software, they might be able to put together a more interesting HW/SW mix compared to the situation where someone else controls the software. And it really lets me look forward to the Next Billion(tm) and QML there. But for now, let's enjoy the N9 and create some cool apps (and games) for it, like a FM Radio GUI for javispedro's fmrx app or gPodder 3 (coming soon) maybe?

Comparing Mobile OS SDK availability by platform

2011-10-29T13:28:00.001+02:00

Coming back from Nokia World in London earlier this week (thanks to Nokia Developer for inviting me), I've been thinking about the SDK availability for different mobile operating systems given a specific Desktop platform. While leaving out all the other criteria (openness, libreness, licensing, UX, device capabilities, programming languages, toolkits, data formats, annual costs for the SDK/developer account, store rules, target audience, revenue splitting, advertising/in-app purchase options, coolness, etc..) developers can choose their mobile OS by, I want to highlight a specific aspect: The availability of an SDK for a given Desktop operating system.

First up, I'm only talking about native apps here (with "native" being anything that's not just some HTML+JS zipped up or served via the web, i.e. native usually means you need to have some form of compiler, even if it targets a VM). If you are into "web apps", chances are that you don't need an SDK to get started (even though one might help). I'll look at iOS and Android (because these are the strong mainstream OSes today), Maemo/MeeGo (because it's my platform of choice right now), Symbian (because I'm targeting it too with Qt) and WP7 (because that's what MS and Nokia want to succeed). When I write "MeeGo" I mean MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan, which technically is more like a "Maemo 6". Think "the OS that the N9 runs". I have a bit of experience with Android development, no experience at all with iOS or WP7, some experience with Symbian (through Qt) and arguably lots of experience with Maemo/MeeGo (yay!).

Why is that important? First up, if you are a Linux or OS X user, chances are that you don't have a Windows installation, and installing Windows will cost you money (for the Windows license), time (because you have to set it up) and space (because you have to dedicate a partition/VM image for it). If you don't have Apple hardware, getting an OS X installation means purchasing Apple hardware (ignoring Hackintoshes here), which is again costly. At least you would need to purchase OS X and dedicate a partition/VM for it, plus the time it needs to set it up.

Why OS X and Windows? As far as I know, if you want to develop for iOS, you have to use XCode, and that is only available on Mac OS X. Similarly, if you want to develop for WP7, you have to use the Windows Phone SDK, which is only available on Windows (>= Vista according to the website, so your XP install might not help there).

Now, let's look at Android, MeeGo and Symbian. Android's SDK is available for Windows, Linux (x86 and amd64) and Mac OS X. You can compile your apps on all these platforms (using your system's javac + tooling provided by the SDK). For C/C++ Android apps, the NDK is also available for all three platforms. For Qt-based OSes (Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo), the Qt SDK itself is available for Windows, Linux (x86 and amd64) and Mac OS X (64-bit). Using the Remote Compiler (which uses compilers set up on a server farm at Nokia, and you need a Nokia Developer account to use it) you can compile Symbian binaries on OS X, Linux and Windows, although the locally-installable compilers for Symbian are only available on Windows (at least that was the case 6 months ago). For Maemo and MeeGo, cross-compilers exist natively for all supported platforms of the Qt SDK, so without using Remote Compiler, you can build and package your Qt apps for MeeGo on Windows, Linux (x86 and amd64) and OS X.

Now, people can argue that one can set up dual-boot or virtual machines to support all OSes, but that's not the point. The point is that if the SDK is available on all Desktop platforms (note that this is not the same as SDK targetting all mobile platforms), developers can retain their choice of Desktop OS on which they develop on, and are not forced to use OS X or Windows for development of apps for the corresponding mobile platform (I also understand the reason why these companies only provide the SDK for their own Desktop platform, but that is not a good reason from a developer's point of view).

I hope that the Qt SDK will continue to support Windows, Mac OS and Linux for any mobile target platforms that it supports - be it ones named after winds or not - so developers have a choice of development platform.

In other news, gPodder 2.950.15 has been uploaded to Nokia Store (still waiting in QA) which fixes video playback and streaming, so grab the update on your N950/N9 when it becomes available :)

Games (and their backstory) for your N9, N900 and N950

2011-10-20T16:07:00.000+02:00

I've recently been asked again about the games I wrote for mobile devices, so here it is: The post with an overview of the games, with some not-so-well-known backstories and information on where to get them for different devices. Plus a little teaser hidden somewhere.

Gaberln (N950, N9 (+Symbian): Ovi Store, N900: Maemo Talk)
This game is a simple soccer ball juggling game - developed using QML, in collaboration with Tim Samoff, who did the great artwork (and who also did the Mong artwork) - we still have to add some more features, and Tim has already done the graphics for a special hacky sack mode, let's hope we get around to finishing it at some point :)

qw The Game (N950, N9 (+Symbian): Ovi Store, N900: .deb on request, @qwgame)
This game is similar to Qix, but has its own style, and the enemies are a bit different from Qix - but it basically is an area filling game. The reason why the game is called "qw" is because it started out as a small Python hack (qw.py) during the Super Gamedev Weekend 2010, and qw were the first two letters on my keyboard. A nicer explanation is that it can be spelt (in German) like Cuvée and a reference to the different blend of different photos (flowers, places, animals) that you have to play through. The photos have been done by vogelvau, the menu structure is done using QML and the gameplay itself uses a QGraphicsView-based drawing engine.

That Rabbit Game (N950, N9, N900 (+Symbian): Ovi Store, @thatrabbitgame)
This is my first game to be published in Ovi Store; it's a "inverse duck hunt"-style game where you control the flying rabbit head, and have to get yourself shot by approaching the crosshairs and keeping steady. Flapping the wings is done by touching (the strength depends on the duration of the touch) and moving left and right is done using the accelerometer. The initial version of this game was developed in Java as an Android game for an OpenGL ES course at our University (PDF). The game for Maemo, MeeGo and Symbian is a complete rewrite in C++/Qt with the artwork taken from the original game, which I did myself in Inkscape. There is also a webOS port using OpenGL ES.

Tennix (N900, N8x0: Extras)
This one is quite old, and is actually based on a really, really old codebase of a school project from 2003. In 2007, I decided to port it to SDL for Desktop Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, and since SDL is available on Maemo as well, I then ported it to Maemo 4 in January 2008. A special "2009 Edition" was created for the N900, with updated controls and a Python-based AI enemy (using the CPython API / libpython). What about Harmattan you ask? Well..

Some of these games are just free and closed source for now. I do, however, definitely plan to release them as open source in the future. The problem is having used non-free artwork in the early prototyping stages (i.e. getting "something" visible in the engine) before replacing them with my own artwork, so I'll have to make sure to remove these things from the repository history before publishing the source. Also, code cleanups need to be done ;)

Download and enjoy the games - I'd be grateful if you could leave some feedback (either via Ovi Store, Maemo Talk, comments here or e-mail).

gPodder 2.20 for Maemo 4 and Maemo 5, 2.950.14 for Harmattan

2011-10-20T02:22:00.001+02:00

gPodder 2.20 has been released. New packages are already available for Maemo 4 (in Extras) and Maemo 5 (in Extras-Testing). If you are using gPodder on Maemo 5, please test the package and vote for it on the package page, so it can get promoted to Extras when it has been tested by the community.

For all N950/N9 users: The Harmattan build of the gPodder QML UI is available for free in Ovi Store. The version available in Ovi Store is a development snapshot of the "tres" branch, where we will have an official release soon. I'm using it on a daily basis, and it's very stable and usable - new features will be added as we go along, so check out the new gPodder! You can grab the source code from the harmattan branch in our Git repository.

gPodder Maemo 5 Remota Usability Test Videos

2011-09-29T18:32:00.001+02:00

Back in August, Jarkko Mikael Palonkangas has been looking for Maemo 5 users without any experience in using gPodder. His Master's thesis is about the Thinking Aloud usability testing method on mobile devices, and he chose gPodder as the example application. The application used for managing the test cases has been written by Jarkko for Maemo 5 and is called Remota - it takes care of displaying the tasks to the users, recording screenshots and audio and retrieving the logging output from gPodder.

Remota log viewer with UI action log at the bottom

If you are interested in seeing how this looks, or if you would like to help to comment on the usability issues and find improvement ideas, please feel free to click through the videos below, which have now been uploaded:

User 1: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, Task 5, Task 6, Task 7, Task 8, Task 9, Task 10, Task 11

User 2: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, Task 5, Task 6, Task 7, Task 8, Task 9, Task 10, Task 11

User 3: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, Task 5, Task 6, Task 7, Task 8 (1st try), Task 8 (2nd try), Task 9, Task 10, Task 11

User 4: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, Task 5, Task 6, Task 7 (1st try), Task 7 (2nd try), Task 8, Task 9, Task 10, Task 11

Unfortunately, user 4's logging output had problems, so you only have audio and video for these tasks - for users 1 through 3 we also have logging output about UI interactions, which was possible by patching the gPodder source to add additional handlers to buttons and other UI elements while the UI was created on application startup.

Please feel free to add comments to the videos - Jarkko is going to process them and include the finding in his final work, so that would be an easy way to contribute.

SwipEout - Python + OpenGL ES 2.0 on the N950 (and N900!)

2011-09-19T12:06:00.001+02:00

Last weekend I've been toying around with Open GL ES 2.0 on the N950 after finding a nice Xlib-based Python example on the web for the N900. I modified the code a bit, replaced the Xlib code with a QGLWidget from QtOpenGL (via PySide), which makes the setup a lot easier and (apart from API differences of GL ES 2.0 and Desktop GL) allows me to test the prototype on my normal computer as well.

After I got the hang of it, I decided to come up with some fancy 90s-style hover racing game (only texturing, no lighting), or at least parts of it - right now, the small hovercraft just runs around the track and you can shift it left and right via the touchscreen and switching between normal and bird's view by pressing any hardware key.

As for the GL ES bindings (this is the interesting/useful part to developers who want to access the GL ES 2.0 API from Python), I put together a naive header-to-ctypes binding generator for the GL ES 2.0 API which you can run on "gl2.h" from the Qt SDK's Madde sysroot (too lazy to search for a working binding generator that surely exists somewhere out there already) - or just grab the generated "gles2.py" from the SwipEout source tarball. The result? Video it yourself.

You can grab the source code and miscellaneous files from the SwipEout website. The code was tested on the N900 and N950, you only need Python, PIL (python-imaging), PySide and the Open GL ES 2.0 libraries (libGLESv2.so) installed. Removing the PIL dependency and replacing it with Qt-based texture loading is left as an exercise for the reader. Enjoy :)

qw The Game 1.5.1 is here - for MeeGo and Symbian

2011-09-01T21:21:00.000+02:00

Control the white ship to fill areas.

Last December, I started to work on a new game: qw ("cuvée"), an area filling game similar to Qix. Since the tech demo has been released, I've been working on a fancy QML menu, a balanced scoring system, nice rendering effects for enemies and the player's trail and obviously some more levels, which results in this new release, version 1.5.1, with 13 high-definition images that are waiting for you to get their colors back.

The game is now available from Ovi Store for N950 and N9 users, and also for Symbian devices - the advantage of the MeeGo version being that it has higher-resolution artwork (it fully utilizes the higher screen resolution) and sound effects (for some reason Qt Mobility's QML SoundEffect has its problems on Symbian). Both versions use the feedback motor of the device for feedback when you draw, fill or die.

Here's a gameplay video of the first 3 levels, so you can get a feeling of how the game plays:

N9 Hackathon in Vienna (Austria) on October 8th and 9th 2011

2011-08-29T13:54:00.004+02:00

For the launch of the N9 (yes, we are one of the countries in which the N9 will be officially available, and at least 3 of 4 operators will offer it with a contract), Nokia Austria is organizing a N9 Hackathon around the N9 on the second weekend of October (2011-10-08 + 2011-10-09) in Vienna. If you live in or around Austria, or wanted to have an excuse for coming to this nice place from abroad for some serious coding, this might be a good opportunity to meet some fellow Maemo/MeeGo community members and get some hacking done. We plan to have some hardware like NFC tags to develop cool stuff with the N9's hardware, so don't forget to bring your creativity as well as skills ;)

Accomodation and food/drinks at the Hackathon will be provided by Nokia Austria, but accomodation places are limited, so please get in touch if you are interested in coming, so I can make a list of people who plan to come, and can keep you up to date on the event. Bonus points if you want to demo and/or talk about one of your apps that you have already written (or are in the process of writing), but interested developers new to Maemo/MeeGo are also very welcome! :)

Introducing Gaberln, a soccer juggling minigame

2011-08-09T23:25:00.002+02:00

Tim Samoff and I have been working on a game - it's a soccer juggling game called "Gaberln" (and that's why). Here's a screenshot:

For now, you can watch the Gaberln video on YouTube. There's a forum thread for all your discussion needs with an experimental build - use at your own risk! :) More infos can be found on the Gaberln homepage.

Here's a small rant: It's a pity we don't have apps.meego.com now (and it's kind of sad to see the ad-laden my-meego.com downloads section being the closest that comes to an app catalog at the moment). Anyway, I'll try to get it into Ovi Store and AppUp, and hope that apps.meego.com will become a reality soon. A Maemo 5 release is also planned, and it should theoretically be runnable on Symbian^3 as well.

gPodder QML Mock-ups by wazd, part 2

2011-08-07T20:02:00.005+02:00

Here's the second part of our mock-up collection for gPodder's QML UI (part 1 here). Let's start off with two more recent designs: One for the bottom media player and the "tab" to pull it up (the tab would always be visible while something is playing) and the other for the episode actions, which is something that I though would be good to have in addition to the context menu - the episode actions will put the most important actions (download, delete, play, stream, shownotes) into view when an episode is selected from the list:

Next up are two more of these green-ish mock-ups, where one has a different style of playback control buttons for the audio player widget, and the other one is an example of how the settings view could look like in the new style (again, this was before any of the Harmattan UI style guidelines have been published, so the design is very unique and doesn't take into account the availability of Qt Components yet):

And finally, here is a mock-up of a possible "Summary" view, summarizing what's new and also suggesting some new podcasts that might be interesting for you, based on existing subscriptions. This is not implemented yet, but it could be added at some point with a more deeper integration with gpodder.net, which already provides podcast suggestions and a tag-based podcast directory:

Thanks for your interest, and stay tuned for some updates regarding gPodder itself (for N8x0 users, N900 users and N950/N9 users as well) in the next days!

gPodder QML Mock-ups by wazd, part 1

2011-08-03T23:51:00.005+02:00

Andrew Zhilin has been creating awesome mock-ups for the last few months for gPodder's new QML UI. Back in December 2010, Andrew started with the first mock-ups based on the screenshots from meego.com:

After that, we decided to go a step further and make it look even more futuristic (this was partly inspired by Metro - two months before #feb11). Most of the title bar and podcast list design have been kept (although evolved) in the current design. This is also the first time that Andrew integrated the playback feature into the mock-ups - a player "widget" that can be pulled down. In the current version, it's still a widget that can be brought in with a tab, but it's placed on the bottom:

And here are two more of these rare mock-ups - the first one was a suggestion for the main menu (something which we don't have at the moment - the "main view" in gPodder/QML currently is the podcast list, with buttons in the title bar for more actions). The second one is also a very unique design in my opinion - I especially like the vertical progress bars, and the slick black-and-gray color tones. The gray rectangle at the top of the second mock-up was just a placeholder for the window manager's title bar:

Stay tuned for more mock-ups by your favorite Russian designer in the second part. Also, the real implementation of gPodder/QML is progressing nicely. Expect some additional updates on this in the next days, too :)

Panucci 0.99.3 for Fremantle is here

2011-08-01T15:56:00.006+02:00

Jens has been working on the QML UI of Panucci (a resuming podcast and audiobook player for Maemo and MeeGo) to get it working on the N950 and he has recently fixed the Bluetooth headset support on the N950. While he does not have a N900 to test and build Panucci releases, I'm more than happy to jump in every once in a while and update the N900 build of Panucci for all Fremantle users. Today is such a "once in a while" day: Panucci 0.99.3 has been uploaded to the Extras repository and should be available in Extras-Testing soon. The default UI in this release is still the Gtk/Hildon UI, but you can opt to use the QWidget-based UI (panucci --qt) or the QML-based UI (panucci --qml) via command line switches:

We have not yet implemented a task switcher button in the Panucci QML UI, but that might come in the future, and then we might even change to using QML by default with Gtk/Hildon as an option. Jens has even written support for themeing the QML UI with colored themes:

The file selector and file details have also been (re-)written in pure QML for cross-platform compatibility:

Enjoy this new Panucci release, and thanks to Jens for keeping the application fresh and feature-rich. The Panucci bug tracker has now moved to bugs.gpodder.org, so if you find any problems with this release, please report it at bugs.gpodder.org in the Panucci product.

N900 camera protip: Get rid of flash reflections

2011-07-30T10:53:00.004+02:00

I think it was during MeeGo Conference 2010 when I was first told that I should cover the N900 camera cover's blue and silver bevel with a dark color to prevent them from reflecting the flash light and making the photos worse than they could be. If you don't use the N900 with flash at all, this "hack" doesn't apply to you. Otherwise read on. If you look at the N900's camera cover, you see that the camera hole is surrounded by a blue border on one side, and silver borders on the three other sides:

Now, when you take a photo with the flash, the flash light is reflected, which makes the taken photo to appear as if there was some smoke or fog in front of you. In reality it is the reflection of the bevel. So, take a black marker and take off the back cover of your N900 (you don't want to accidentally cover your camera lens with black color!):

Now carefully cover the silver parts around the camera hole (and the blue part too, ideally) with black color. The result should look like this:

You might get even better results if you take a marker with a finer tip or even use black spray paint or something. If you don't have a marker ready or do not want to paint on the back cover, you can also take off the back cover of your N900 (which has the same effect), but you will probably need a small magnet to trick the magnetic switch into reporting "camera cover opened" to the camera application.

New gPodder versions for your N8x0 and N9x0

2011-07-07T23:58:00.003+02:00

It's been over two months since I've released a new stable release of gPodder. Now it's time again to catch up with some of the fixes that have landed in the "master" branch of gPodder (while we are still adding cool stuff to the "tres" branch, where the QML UI and other improvements happen). Anyway, gPodder 2.16 "Over There" should be available in Maemo Extras for both Diablo and Fremantle soon, please test the package and (in case of Fremantle / Maemo 5) also vote for it, so it can land in Extras eventually.

For the Nokia N950 (and also for the N9), there's already a very early alpha build of the QML for you to try - please note that you might have to remove your database and downloads to be compatible with any changes when the final version is out. There's a thread on forum.meego.com with instructions on how to get it and a screenshot - please also use this forum thread for feedback and any questions that you may have.

In related Maemo/MeeGo news, That Rabbit Game has been packaged for MeeGo Tablet and should be available in AppUp already. There's also a pure OpenGL ES port for webOS, although it's missing some features of the Qt version. If you haven't been following gaming news, our multi-touch game Mong (which is going to have its new name "Plonk" soon) is available for MeeGo tablets and I'll have a Harmattan package for you to try really soon! There is also the Harmattan Event Feed Library for Python which should make posting data to the event feed awesome. And if you really want to port your PySide apps to Android, try PySide for Android, which has just been released today. Yes, lots of stuff happening - expect more in the coming days/weeks :)

On app stores, compliance, packaging and tooling

2011-06-06T12:33:00.005+02:00

I've been ranting about packaging requirements for app stores and the long roundtrip time and back-and-forth messaging that needs to take place until a package really gets published into an app store before. My experience here is with Nokia's Ovi Store and Intel's AppUp Center, and I'm obviously more interested in the Maemo and MeeGo-related parts (Ovi supports Symbian too, and AppUp supports Windows). First up, here are the documents that formalize the requirements:

Both documents basically describe how packaging should take place, and this diverts somewhat from what upstream distros' packaging guidelines say (i.e. Debian in case of Maemo and Fedora in case of MeeGo). You have to install things in /opt, your binaries have to have a namespace to avoid clashes, there are different requirements for .desktop files and don't get me started on icon installation locations and sizes. Most of these things are already defined by freedesktop.org, but stores tend to have their own, incompatible rules. This means that as an application developer, you basically have to "rewrite" your packaging for every store/target/device, which is tedious and error prone.

Also, in case of Qt applications using qmake as the build utility, can't we have some magic qmake commands/macros that would do the Right Thing in terms of packaging for a given store? All that would be required is a list of metadata (name, "namespace"/domain name, description, category, ...) and an application icon, and the rest can be figured out by the build system (I'm thinking of the MeeGo Factory video here - put a qmake-based Qt source tarball in at the one end, and get an AppUp-compliant RPM, Ovi-compliant DEB, etc.. out at the other end - without having to care about distro-, store- or even device-specific packaging differences).

Apart from the fact that one has to do much special-casing, the other problem is that the rules are not always clear, and can be interpreted in multiple ways - the only way to find out if you picked the right interpretation is to wait for a few days (AppUp in my experience has been faster than Ovi Store with that) until you get feedback from the QA teams.

I would really like to have an automated "package checking" tool (provided by an app store vendor, i.e. Nokia or Intel) that I can run locally before I upload my packages, so that packaging bugs can be removed very early on (i.e. assuming 3 iterations to get the package right, and an estimated 3 business days of QA response time, the "upload and wait for feedback" approach would be approximately two weeks, whereas the "check locally using automated validation tool" approach would take about 3 days, because I can do the three iterations locally in about an hour and then wait 3 days for the QA team to check the contents, etc..).

So, my wishlist for a good app store - developer relationship:

Provide automated tooling to check for packaging errors/compliance
Make sure to align as much as possible with freedesktop.org and other app stores
Provide example packaging, add positive and negative naming/config examples to the docs
Provide an easy way to check for and fix package dependencies
Allow developers to submit new versions from the command line / via scripts (requiring the developer to go to a website and using an upload tool is not developer friendy :/)
Allow developers to upload new versions while an old version is still in QA (AppUp, I'm looking at you)

I'm really starting to wonder if it wouldn't be better to integrate the app stores more with tools like OBS and other developer-friendly utilities, and looking forward to better developer experiences in Ovi and AppUp in the future. In the mean time, I'm really happy with the meego.com Community OBS :)

MeeGo Conference 2011: Exploratorium and Hacker Lounge video

2011-06-01T23:26:00.003+02:00

If you missed the MeeGo Conference last week or for whatever reason can't remember what went on at the party, here's a short video of San Francisco, the party at the Exploratorium and of course some Hacker Lounge activities:

Huge soap bubbles, a red bridge, mini-tornados, glass bottle ping pong, real-life Mong, losing at Lunar Lander (it was really, really very hard ;)) and Maemo community members dancing to Jessie's Girl performed live (and wondering who ordered that song..) - Enjoy :)

MeeGo Conference 2011 in San Francisco

2011-05-28T14:26:00.004+02:00

I've been lucky to be among the sponsored participants for the MeeGo Conference 2011 in San Francisco this week (thanks to the Linux Foundation). As with the last events, it's always nice to meet up with fellow Maemo community members whom I already knew from previous summits/conferences and also to finally meet some new community members in person for the first time.

Intel loaned out ExoPC hardware running MeeGo Tablet UX for MeeGo development during the AppUp Event on the Warm-Up weekend. Conny had the great idea to start a multi-touch Pong game that we now call "Mong" (Gitorious repo) and that we now collectively develop with some community members (sounds - recorded live from the Air Hockey tables at the Hacker Lounge! - by Erik, graphics by Tim, code by Conny and me):

More photos of the event: Conference and Party on Flickr. Don't forget to add your photos to the MeeGoConf2011 Flickr group. My Python + PySide talk went well, too bad that Matti (who helped prepare the presentation - thanks!) couldn't come. Slides are already available, and check out the MeeGo-Python tutorial if you want to get started. I'd be grateful for any feedback on the session and the tutorial - especially the things that weren't clear and could be improved.

About the keynote, I mostly agree with Jaffa's thoughts about how it could have been better, and that there should have been some announcements or commitments to release MeeGo-related end user products to give the project some much-needed(?) backing from vendors. I also agree with "MeeGo needs Harmattan a lot more than Harmattan needs MeeGo" - even though it isn't "real MeeGo", it's presumably the single polished MeeGo-related handset product that will (hopefully?) be available soon-ish.

But again, from a community perspective, MeeGoConf SF 2011 was great (thanks to LF for the sponsoring and to the organizers for choosing a great venue), San Francisco the city was awesome and - judging from the rumors on TMO - I'm pretty sure that we're looking forward to a great June that will allow us to finally port our apps to new MeeGo-related hardware.

Let's hope that we have an opportunity to meet up again in some future Maemo/MeeGo-related event :) Thanks for a great week!

gPodder on the N900 MeeGo 1.2 Developer Edition

2011-05-11T09:49:00.003+02:00

If you want to try the MeeGo N900 Developer Edition for the N900 but think that clicking through the Widgets Gallery gets boring after 45 minutes, why not try out the QML UI of gPodder on it? It's pretty easy. This post assumes that you are using the alpha release of the N900 Developer Edition from a microSD card and boot via USB.

Thankfully, Python 2.6 is already preinstalled, but you need recent PySide packages for gPodder to work (PySide exposes the Qt framework to the Python world), you can get them from PySide binaries for MeeGo. You don't need to upgrade Qt, simply installing the PySide packages is enough:

zypper addrepo http://download.meego.com/live/home:/renatofilho/Trunk/ pyside
zypper install python-pyside

What you need now is a recent Git checkout of gPodder's "tres" branch. I suggest you do that on your computer:

git clone git://repo.or.cz/gpodder.git
cd gpodder
git checkout tres

Now there are two pure Python dependencies for gPodder that you also need. As there are no packages for them in MeeGo yet, you also have to provide them manually. The first one is the Universal Feedparser. Grab a recent release from the downloads page and copy the file feedparser.py to the src/ folder in your gPodder checkout. The second dependency is mygpoclient, a client library for the gpodder.net web service. You can check out the latest version from Git:

git clone git://repo.or.cz/mygpoclient.git

In the checkout, you will find a folder called mygpoclient - copy this to src/ in your gPodder checkout. Now you have a complete, self-contained gPodder checkout on your computer. Use rsync or scp -r to copy it over to your N900 (you can use USB Networking for that).

Now that you have everything on your N900, you have to add some subscriptions manually (mostly because the QML doesn't yet have the UI required to subscribe to new feeds) - use bin/gpo to start the command-line utility, then do something like subscribe fb:linuxoutlaws to subscribe to an example podcast. Quit the command line application and start the QML UI using bin/gpodder --qml, which should - after some loading time - show gPodder/QML on your MeeGo 1.2 Developer Edition environment.

If you have made it this far, don't stop here - try out the examples from the PySide/QML Tutorial and familiarize yourself with Python development on MeeGo - it's easy and fun!

gPodder 2.15 available; QML UI plans and Diablo support

2011-05-04T10:20:00.004+02:00

A new version of the open source podcatcher gPodder is now available for Maemo 4 (Diablo, N800 and N810) and Maemo 5 (Fremantle, N900). For Diablo, the package is already promoted to the Extras repository, so it should appear as an update soon, and for Fremantle, it's in Extras-Testing waiting for some reviews and votes from you (yes, you!). Please test and vote for gPodder 2.15-1 in Extras-Testing. This is a bugfix release in the stable 2.x release series, and also includes some translation updates as well. For full details, see the official release announcement.

Because I've been asked about the QML UI several times now: It's still not day-to-day usable, and missing some features. It's also only included in the "tres" branch, and won't be included in the 2.x release series. Judging from the current performance of QML UIs on Maemo 5, I also think that the Hildon-based Gtk+ UI might be better suited for Maemo 5, especially since it has been polished for the last 1.5 years - that's why the current Maemo 5 UI will most likely still be the default, even when gPodder 3 comes out (with the QML UI as an option).

Support for Diablo will be dropped in "tres", but as there haven't been any new features for Diablo in the last several months, that's not really a problem (bug fixes will still be made to the 2.x branch of gPodder, even after "tres" is released - you just have to report them).

That said, the QML UI will be available (and the default) for environments like the MeeGo N900 DE and probably any other MeeGo UIs (tablet, handset, etc..) in the future, and it will come with some exciting new features and a streamlined user interface.

gPodder 2.14 and Panucci 0.99.1 in Extras-Testing

2011-04-11T10:47:00.004+02:00

If you are one of those N900 users who use their devices for listening to podcasts and audiobooks, please help getting the latest versions of gPodder and Panucci into Extras and provide feedback/bug reports. For Diablo (N800/N810) users, gPodder 2.14 is already available in Extras.

gPodder 2.14 is a bugfix release in the 2.x release series. It includes fixes for YouTube downloads (this fixes the HTTP 400 errors some users were reporting) and adds per-podcast "Keep episodes" settings (to avoid accidental removal of episodes that you want to archive/keep). This release also includes some fixes for feeds that don't include a valid guid element in their entries. Please test and vote for gPodder 2.14-1 in Extras-Testing.

Panucci 0.99.1 is the second experimental release of xerxes2's development branch of Panucci. As announced on t.m.o, this release includes persistence of settings between invocations and a Qt GUI that can be activated by running Panucci with the --qt command-line switch. Thanks to xerxes2 and Helmuth for collaborating on the improvements made to Panucci recently. Please test and vote for Panucci 0.99.1 in Extras-Testing.

gPodder/QML progress update

2011-04-02T16:43:00.004+02:00

While the 2.x branch of gPodder is still updated - a new release should be out soon - the awesome stuff happens in the "tres" branch, where the refactoring takes place and also where the QML UI is built. I've reserved some time this weekend to work a bit on the QML UI so that it is at least day-to-day usable for me, because it turns out if I don't force myself to use the QML UI, I'll just use the Maemo 5 UI and not work on the QML UI ;)

I've uploaded two new videos today: gPodder/QML on the N900 and gPodder/QML on a Desktop. This is exactly the same Python codebase (utilizing PySide), which is great for testing on the "big" computer. It's also truly cross-platform, as you can see it running on OS X in the Desktop video. Unfortunately, Qt Mobility 1.2's QML Video component is broken, so there's no video playback on the N900. Video playback great on the Desktop, though, and audio playback works fine on both the N900 and Desktop.

The UI is still in a rough state, but it's a great place for experimenting around with some ideas to see what works and what does not. I really like the integration of the playback feature into gPodder, as it provides a better integrated experience on handsets. It obviously also loads faster compared to loading a separate media player. The UI is scalable and should work well on tablets (which is especially useful for YouTube channels and video podcasts).

The new codebase still hast the Desktop GTK+ UI and the Maemo 5 GTK+/Hildon UI in there, they share the same backend code as the QML UI. The code is not ready for public consumption, but if you really want to try it out, you'll find the code in the "tres" branch in our Git repository. If that's too little information for you to get started, then you shouldn't yet use it :)

Improved tactile feedback with the Community SSU

2011-03-08T11:33:00.003+01:00

The latest version of hildon-desktop features experimental support for improved tactile feedback. What this means for you is that if you enable this feature, you will "feel" app menus and dialogs appearing and disappearing, just like on some Symbian^3 devices. It's disabled by default, but you could give it a try and see if it improves your experience.

First of all, you have to install the tactile helper from Extras-Devel (Git repository here). Then, you need to edit /usr/share/hildon-desktop/transitions.ini with a text editor as root and set the value of tactilepopups to 1 (i.e. change "tactilepopups = 0" to "tactilepopups = 1"). Save the file, and the changes should be applied instantly (if you have the latest version of the CSSU installed). Yes, I know that this forks a new process every time a feedback is played, but this keeps the architecture open for experimentation and prototyping of new ideas. It also didn't noticeably hurt my N900's battery life when used for a few days.

One further improvement would be to add support for "tactile" into Hildon, so that it vibrates when you press a button, but it doesn't vibrate if you touch a non-sensitive area of the UI (because right now, it vibrates on every touch when configured to do so, and that's not really tactile feedback of UI elements - you can "feel" the screen anyway, and it doesn't matter if the device registered your touch if the touch turned out to fall into a spot where no action will be carried out). I'm not sure if Qt Mobility's Feedback API already supports controlling the N900's vibra motor, but if not, there would be another great improvement opportunity.

The tactile helper can be easily integrated in other apps, the source should be trivial to understand, and easy to utilize in third party applications. It also comes with an example ('tactile-demo.py') that you can have a look at for a more elaborate example :)

The Return Of Panucci (0.99.0 for Fremantle)

2011-03-01T22:41:00.003+01:00

Since gPodder gained support for MAFW, and therefore resuming support for the built-in Maemo 5 Media Player, there was less of a reason for me to continue working on Panucci (though some users still prefer Panucci over the built-in Media player). Recently, Jens and Helmuth collaborated on bringing Bluetooth support back into the 0.9 branch in the Panucci thread on t.m.o.

Jens has also fixed some other issues and is now continuing development of Panucci, which is great :) I'll continue to package Panucci releases for Maemo 5, and review the commits and provide feedback, but won't be working on any features myself. Here's a teaser screenshot:

The new version, Panucci 0.99.0, has already been uploaded to Extras-Devel, and will be promoted to Extras-Testing soon. If you want to contribute, check out Panucci on GitHub - patches are gladly accepted!

gPodder 2.13 in Extras-Testing (and in Extras for Diablo)

2011-02-20T14:52:00.004+01:00

A new version of gPodder, a podcast downloader for Maemo 4 and Maemo 5 has been released. The new release is already available in Extras for Maemo 4 (i.e. N800 and N810), and is currently in Extras-Testing for Maemo 5 (please test and vote!). You can read the official announcement on the gPodder blog, or go directly to the detailed ChangeLog. This release fixes some issues reported by our users, improves the episode list on Maemo 5 and adds the often-requested "Download only when on Wi-Fi" feature:

This release does not yet contain the QML UI, as it is not ready and/or feature-complete yet, and the QML development happens on another branch ("tres" in the Git repo) that contains more under-the-hood changes that cleans up the gPodder codebase. The QML UI will be released "when it's done" :)

Community SSU features to look forward to

2011-02-16T00:34:00.003+01:00

I've been writing some patches for hildon-desktop (the window manager on Maemo 5). For some of the more useful ones, I've reworked them to be configurable via transitions.ini (and disabled by default), so they can be merged into the Community SSU. Most of these patches try to improve the user experience and look and feel of the Maemo 5 UI, but tastes differ, so you can choose which one to enable:

Blurless desaturation: With this feature enabled, the background of dialogs, menus, the launcher and the switcher won't get all blurry - instead, they keep their sharpness, but are darkened and desaturated. (thread with screenshots)
Bigger task switcher: I think this is one of my earliest patches, now cleaned up to be configurable with different settings. You can choose between the Maemo 5 default layout, the single-column "big" task switcher and the two-column task switcher. I've left the horizontal task switcher out of this, as it wasn't working that well in some situations. (thread with screenshots)
Rotation around the Z axis: This one makes the screen rotation look much more natural, just like on the MeeGo Handset UX. Instead of rotating around the X and Y axis, this makes the transitions from/to portrait mode rotate around the Z axis. (demo video)
Forced auto-rotation for all apps: By default, hildon-desktop obeys the preferences of application windows and whether or not they support portrait mode. With this option enabled, hildon-desktop ignores those preferences and instead assumes every application can be auto-rotated. There's no support for the home screen, launcher or switcher, as these things are more complicated to support in portrait mode. (demo video)

Assuming that MohammadAG will merge these patches into the Community SSU version of hildon-desktop (a few of these have already been merged), you will get to enjoy those features in a future update. Please note that all those features are disabled by default, and need to be enabled explicitly in transitions.ini. For some of these options, a restart (of the device or hildon-desktop) is required.

In other news, the Community SSU version of H-A-M (that's the Application Manager in Maemo 5) now supports portrait mode, and this might also be merged at some point (it already works with the "Forced auto-rotation" patch, there are just some graphical glitches in the main screen that are fixed by the patch). Anybody up for some HTML hacking to make Maps portrait-aware? Should be easy to do, but I won't work on that one. Contributions welcome :)

gPodder/QML status (with screenshot and video)

2011-02-04T20:07:00.005+01:00

Ohai February. The winter term is over; time for some gPodder QML hacking. This means that gPodder gets a new UI, and the structure of the application and the usual workflows also change a bit, based on the experiences with gPodder on Maemo 5. One of the most important changes will be that content will be played inside gPodder, as this provides even more control over playback and resuming than what the MAFW integration with the Maemo Media Player can provide.

Most of this has been done in the last two days. Thanks to Python, PySide and QML, I'm able to reuse the gPodder codebase (feed parsing, downloading, etc..) and just slap a lightweight QML UI on top of it.

Andrew Zhilin (aka wazd) has helped a lot with the design and the artwork, but see for yourself (this is a screenshot, not a mock-up):

And here is a video of the current performance on a N900:

Feedback, as always, welcome :)

Maemo App Development - One Year Ago

2011-01-25T20:53:00.005+01:00

I just realized that one year ago, I was giving a talk about Maemo Development at the Metalab here in Vienna. Back in January 2010, things were still very much different from today:

Scratchbox was the SDK - Linux only, VMs for everything else
No proper IDEs for Hildon development (there was Eclipse integration, but I never used it)
Qt still was "the new stuff that's coming up" for Maemo development
Mer was still something to look forward to
MeeGo didn't exist - Maemo 6 was the future ;)
MADDE was in Technology Preview state - not widely used
Direct UI (now MeeGo Touch) was thought to be the future toolkit
Qt 4.6 was just released in December - no QML in Qt yet

It turns out that we are in a much better position now, we've got a nice cross-platform IDE (Qt Creator), a proper SDK (Qt SDK) that works on Windows and OS X the same as on Linux and the "low-level" issues (optification, packaging, ...) are handled by Qt Creator mostly.

Today, the issues are different - I'm complaining about Qt Creator (from the Qt SDK 1.1 Preview) crashing a lot in QML design mode, I can deploy my apps to Symbian devices without much effort (didn't think I would ever do that) - even though there's no proper toolchain for Linux or OS X (Remote Compiler doesn't count). The Qt Quick Components are still not released, even though I'd love to create some great apps with them. And most people forget in the N9 rumor jungle that we have still got the best Linux-based mobile OS (with Linux userland) that exists in an actual product that you can buy right now (that's Maemo 5 on the N900 if you didn't get that hint..). Just like Duke Nukem Forever, a MeeGo handset will be announced and released eventually - give it some time.

Back to the "Qt Creator shouldn't crash when editing QML" developer story: We're not there yet, but comparing the current state with the state one year ago, that's some progress right there! Looking forward to those bits falling into place in the upcoming months.

Ovi Store Requirements vs. Extras Testing QA

2011-01-22T11:30:00.006+01:00

If you want to publish your applications on Ovi Store for Maemo 5, you have to fulfill certain criteria for the package to be accepted. The technical ones are listed in the document Maemo™ 5 Applications: Ovi Store Entry Requirements. Here are some problematic entries that were not clear to me in the beginning (coming from Extras QA and a Debian-based background):

The file must be named myapplication_1_0_1.deb (for an application that is called "myapplication"). Interesting factoid: The version number must include three digits (one can interpret that as "no less and no more"). That's different from the Debian standard naming of myapplication_X_armel.deb (where "X" can be any format version number, and "armel" specifies the target architecture). So if you have packaged your application, make sure to rename the file after upload.
The relation of the file size of /opt compared to the files in /usr must be greater than 1:80. Here's an example from That Rabbit Game: /usr contains two files: The icon (7kB) and the .desktop file (128b) and /opt contains one file: The binary (658kB). However, the difference between these two is not a factor of over 80 when compared with "du -sh" (depending on the filesystem settings).

With that said the structure of the testing criteria in that document is very clear and (apart from some problems with the detailed specs), everything is understandable, well thought-out and can be tested by following the instructions in the document. Some of these could be use to "formalize" the Extras-Testing QA checklist here on Maemo.org or at least provide an easy-to-follow guide for carrying out the basic tests.

New packages in Extras-Testing: gPodder 2.12, TV out control widget

2011-01-13T13:59:00.003+01:00

gPodder 2.12 "The Odyssey of Flight 33" has been released, which is purely a bugfix release for those of you who found an empty podcast list after skipping a gPodder version during upgrades (this release fixes both the initial problem and tries to recover databases for which migration has failed). The updated package is also available in Diablo Extras already for N8x0 users. Please test and vote for gPodder 2.12-1 in Extras-Testing!

A new desktop widget written by Ville Syrjäl has been packaged for Extras. TV out control lets you control advanced features of the N900's TV out such as aspect ratio and scaling - those settings are not accessible from the official control panel applet, which is closed source (vote for that bug if you'd like to see it open sourced and improved through the Community SSU). Please test and vote for the TV out control widget in Extras-Testing!

New tutorial: PySide/QML on MeeGo

2011-01-08T01:12:00.003+01:00

In addition to my old PySide tutorials, there is now a proper PDF guide for PySide development on MeeGo available. Except for packaging, all steps apply to Maemo as well, and this is the document that includes the first gPodder QML UI code example (the final gPodder QML UI will be totally different and "much cooler", though).

As part of the new year's cleanup, I also dug out the old MTF UI demo of gPodder and put its source online here - for third party applications, QML is now the preferred UI over MeeGo Touch, so this might not be of much use for you now, but maybe somebody can put it to good use.

qw 0.1 is now available for Maemo 5

2010-12-29T23:13:00.003+01:00

My second new game this year - qw - has been released for Maemo 5 today. Version 0.1 (a tech demo, not a proper final release) gives you a sneak peek on the gameplay with 9 different levels and four-player support (if you hook up an external USB keyboard or get together really close for some N900 keyboard multiplayer action). The gameplay is simple: You need to control your player cursor (either via touchscreen gestures or keyboard) and enclose areas of the game with lines in order to fill them with a colored image. Beware of the enemies, as they will destroy your lines and split your points in half. If you enclose one or more small enemies, your points are multiplied.

A .deb for Maemo 5 is available from the qw homepage and packages for Symbian are also available. Try it out and send some feedback :) Enjoy!

That Rabbit Game 1.2 is now available for Maemo 5

2010-12-22T14:30:00.005+01:00

I've blogged about it already, and even showed some code during an Interview at Nokia World, but there have not been any releases of That Rabbit Game so far, mostly due to Ovi Store QA not understanding what Optification means and requesting that the version number of the application appears somewhere in the app UI (after 15 days in QA). I've made the requested changes, added scoring and pushed new releases (of version 1.2) for both Symbian and Maemo 5 to Ovi QA.

Until the game gets published on Ovi, I decided to release packages on the website so you can download and enjoy the game right away - and maybe even provide some feedback. Please don't mirror/redistribute the packages, but link directly to the website. Download That Rabbit Game for Maemo 5!

Controls are via accelerometer (to tilt the rabbit head left/right) and via touchscreen (tap to flap your wings - the longer you tap, the harder the wings flap). The goal is to lose 10 coins in 90 seconds by getting shot 10 times. After that, the next goal is to lose the 10 coins in as little time as possible. Yes, you control the rabbit head, and not the crosshairs.

Updates and changes will be announced via @thatrabbitgame on Twitter, so follow it and tell your friends. Enjoy!

gPodder 2.11 in Extras-Testing fixes YouTube downloads

2010-12-19T23:37:00.003+01:00

A new version of gPodder is out. If you are having problems with YouTube downloads recently, this release is for you. There are also some other minor changes and fixes (detailed changelog for gPodder 2.11). No translation updates or major new features, though. Grab the new package from Extras-Testing. The usual disclaimers apply. If you can, please test and vote for gPodder 2.11-1 in Extras-Testing, so other users can enjoy the fixes as soon as possible.

As always, a new Diablo package has also been uploaded and should be available in Diablo Extras for all N8x0 users soon.

The Qt promise and what Maemo 5 needs

2010-12-15T11:54:00.004+01:00

(tl;dr: Nokia should provide updated Qt packages as official SSU for Maemo 5.) Before I start, here are some facts (correct me if I'm wrong):

The N900 runs the Maemo 5 operating system
Maemo 5 received some updates (the latest one being PR1.3)
We don't really expect PR1.4 to come out any time soon, if at all
The MeeGo Handset images from meego.com are inferior to Maemo 5 and not a replacement (and never will be)
The MeeGo operating system on the first Nokia MeeGo handset will have a proprietary UX and proprietary apps, and won't be available for the N900

In summary, it means: We are stuck with Maemo 5 on the N900. And that is a good thing! Lots of useful apps, a helpful community (if you subtract the trolls) and a polished OS. Sure, there's room for improvement, and lots of open bugs that should be fixed, but that's another issue (which will ideally be solved by open sourcing closed components with bugs that Nokia isn't interested in fixing anymore and by the Community SSU). This one is about Qt.

Two days ago, an e-mail was sent to maemo-community, proposing a "community service pack", which basically is a big pile of workarounds. Read my response for some initial thoughts.

When Qt arrived on Maemo 5, the promise was two-fold:

Write your apps in Qt and you're ready for MeeGo (apps written now will run on the platform released in the future)
Maemo 5 gets Qt support, so MeeGo apps will run on the N900 (apps written in the future will run on the platform released now)

It turns out that the first one will probably hold true (surely with QML, maybe even with QWidget), while the second one is doubtful, as Maemo 5 has only got Qt 4.7.0 through the official channels (PR1.3), with no real official update in sight. If you use QML, use QtQuickCompat as workaround ("Qt Qml plugin that reregisters all “Qt 4.7” types in the “QtQuick 1.0” namespace … useful if you’re forced to stay with 4.7.0 (e.g. on N900), but still want to use the new namespace.").

There is also a real bug (yes, a bug!) in Qt 4.7.0 on the N900, and the fix isn't released as update - it's a new package: libqt4-bearer-hotfix ("This is a hotfix for the broken ICD package in Qt 4.7.0. It can be removed once Qt mobility 1.1 is released."). Now, the proposed "Community service pack" would combine all these fixes into a single dependendable metapackage (yes, a new one). It becomes the "Unbreak my Qt" feature that every app developer has to depend on and specify in the packaging.

This is wrong! No developer targetting MeeGo who has not heard about Maemo 5 will go through all those ugly workarounds and spend a week fixing things up for Maemo 5 just so that the app works. Now imagine what would happen if the first MeeGo device also introduces such kludges once it falls out of its support life cycle. Or what if the problems on Symbian are similar, and developers have to special-case things there. Not only for Symbian^3, but also for S60v5? Fragmentation.

How to avoid fragmentation? Simple: Provide Qt as a "feature" with a quicker release cycle that can be updated every month if need be. Provide Qt updates also for operating systems that don't get updates for the OS anymore. Here's my proposal:

Provide SSU updates for Maemo 5 for Qt (and Qt Mobility) through official channels (that's the important part here!)
A new Qt (and Qt Mobility) release should be available on all platforms (Maemo 5, S60v5, Symbian^3, MeeGo) at the same time through official (end-user approved) channels
Apps targetting stores and repositories (Maemo Extras, Ovi Store, MeeGo Apps/Downloads) should be able to depend on the latest Qt (and Qt Mobility) version

Without that, you'll get fragmentation similar to Android: The 1.5, 1.6, 2.1 versions are similar to Qt 4.6, Qt 4.7.0 and Qt 4.7.1 (for example). Again, you don't need to update the OS, just update the framework - through official channels!

PySide/QML tutorials online, workshop next Sunday

2010-12-07T13:30:00.007+01:00

To get myself accustomed to PySide UI development using Qt Quick (aka QML) and to check out what works already and what does not, I've experimented with creating some common elements that I'd use in an application (i.e. a QML version of gPodder - a blingy demo already exists) and decided to share my experiences and results as tutorials.

Here are all the tutorials in their current state:

Screenshots are available on Flickr:

I'd like to get some feedback on whether or not the tutorials worked for you and were helpful and what else you would like to see. You can try out all the examples on your N900 today! Just install python-pyside and python-qtmobility (for the last example) from Extras-Devel and copy the examples from the Wiki. The usual disclaimers for software in Extras-Devel apply.

In related news, there will be a PySide/QML workshop at the December meeting of the Python User Group Austria, so if you happen to be in or around Vienna on Sunday, 2010-12-12, stop by at the Metalab and meet fellow Pythonistas.

Hildon UI elements in QML

2010-12-04T22:19:00.004+01:00

I've been playing with PySide and QML this week (more on that soon), but here's something that might be interesting to the Maemo community: Using the native Hildon look and feel of Maemo 5 in QML.

This QML demo uses the current theme graphics of Hildon and provides QML components that can be used just like their Hildon counterparts, but inside QML UIs. This is not a complete library, just a test of what could be possible in case anyone wants to step up and create and maintain a Hildon library of QML components. Here's a video:

The code for this demo is on Gitorious - you can try it out on your N900 using qmlviewer.

gPodder 2.10 for Maemo 4 and Maemo 5 released

2010-11-29T09:30:00.006+01:00

As promised last week, a new release of gPodder is out. The package for Maemo 5 is already in Extras-Testing, so test it and vote for it. The package for Maemo 4 has already been uploaded to the autobuilder and should be available shortly.

This new release brings yet another round of UI improvements, and it also incorporates the feedback that I got at the MeeGo Conference:

Expose "Pause subscription" in UI
Multi-delete in episode lists (Maemo bug 5182)
Setting for episode auto-delete on startup
Custom episode list model (faster loading)

You can find a detailed ChangeLog at gpodder.org/changelog/2.10.

If you are not yet a user of gPodder, why not take the opportunity to try it out? You could subscribe to the MeeGo Conference 2010 Video Podcast (Yahoo Pipe) and (re-)watch the sessions on your device. Of course, audio and video podcasts are supported as well, as are YouTube user channels and Soundcloud users.

Maemo 5 app UIs: {The,A} big picture

2010-11-26T17:50:00.005+01:00

Sooner or later it will be necessary to create a QML UI for gPodder if it is to integrate nicely with devices on which Qt is the "native" toolkit for third party apps. At the moment, the reusable UI elements that can be used with QML (Qt Components) have not yet been officially released (the Git repository is available on Gitorious, though), and there are no UI style guidelines for Harmattan out (yet?). I'm also not able to locate UI style guidelines for QML apps on Symbian^3, and there are only a few small sample QML apps out right now.

Let's look at what we have on Maemo 5 right now. Here's a simplified overview of the current Maemo 5 UI of gPodder:

You can also check out the full-size image (~ 3.5 MB).

The UI follows the Maemo 5 Style Guide where it makes sense and tries to come up with better solutions where the Style Guide does not have a definitive answer. I'd like to hear your opinion about the current UX of gPodder and how these concepts can be translated into a QML app that integrates nicely with "future" UIs (Harmattan, S^3). The new-style episode list that can be seen in this picture will be made available with the next release that will be out Really Soon Now™.

Please test: MaePad 1.9, MaePadWeb 2.1, Trophae 6

2010-11-25T19:35:00.003+01:00

Version 1.9 of MaePad is out, with a new translation into Catalan, updated Finnish (thanks to Marko Vertainen) and German translations, a "No items" indicator in empty checklists and full auto-rotation support (detailed changelog).

The File Transfers application seemingly does some weird things to "Open file" dialogs in other apps (not only MaePad, but reportedly also Xournal), so MaePad now conflicts with it until the problem is fixed (this means you can't have both "File Transfers" and "MaePad" installed at the same time). Test and vote for MaePad 1.9 in Extras-Testing!

Also new is MaePadWeb 2.1, which adds a missing dependency on python-simplejson. The app worked fine for me since the initial release, so I'm also promoting it to Testing now. Test and vote for MaePadWeb 2.1 in Extras-Testing!

And as a third release this week, I noticed that Trophae, the PS3 Trophy Viewer app, didn't get its newest release (6) uploaded to Fremantle Extras-Devel for two months, so I've re-uploaded it, and also put it up for testing. And even though the code is lame, it's now published in a Git repository if you want to hack on it. Test and vote for Trophae 6 in Extras-Testing!

A new release of your favourite podcatcher is coming in the next few days. There is still time to submit updated translations :)

MeeGoConf 2010: Fun, QML, gPodder, Python

2010-11-20T11:31:00.006+01:00

I've attended the MeeGo Conference 2010 in Dublin this week. Meeting people, playing werewolf or table tennis and discussing MeeGo Python are just some of the great things about this conference.

One of my burning questions for third-party app development ("QWidget? MeeGo Touch? QML? Which one of those?") was answered with "QML". I've played with QML before, and it's great, but right now, one has to work on a very low level (as in "design your own buttons") and without any UI style guidelines. Let's hope the Qt Components provide reusable UI parts there and that the style guidelines are published as soon as possible.

I've also got some gPodder feedback: Niels suggested subscription pausing and auto-deletion of episodes (both are already implemented and just need exposure as UI elements). Murray suggested a custom TreeModel implementation for the episode list, which I've started working on now. Mike suggested the often-requested multi-episode deletion feature, which is also something I plan for the next release.

On Wednesday, we had a Python BoF to discuss the state and future of MeeGo Python. I'm looking forward to using PySide for the QML UI of gPodder. A PySide/QML workshop is planned for the next PyUGAT meeting, so join in if you are in Vienna in early December.

Oh, and the IdeaPad that we got from Intel is great. Thanks a lot for that. Will come in handy for prototyping and testing Touch UI interfaces!

Hope to see you again in a future MeeGo event :)

MaePadWeb 2.0: Take your MaePad anywhere (even on a N8)

2010-11-02T13:07:00.005+01:00

The companion app to MaePad that has been announced some days ago is now available in Extras-Devel for your N900, with some nifty features:

Fully edit the checklists in your database
Native Maemo 5 look and feel in the browser (title bar, toolbar, lists, ...)
Dynamic themeing based on current Maemo theme
Per-session password for some security (inspired by MAD Developer)

This means that if you are using the NSeries theme, it looks like this, but if you are using Digital Nature, this is how it looks (and that should work for all themes). On your device, you will see a simple info window. Now, that's bringing the Maemo 5 UI to your Desktop computer's web browser. But does it work on mobile devices as well? Of course! Let me present you MaePadWeb running in the Symbian web browser on a N8-00:

If you think that this looks shopped, check out the video for further proof and to see the checklist editor view in action :)

This project brings together some great technologies: Python (for the backend) and HTML/CSS and JavaScript (using JQuery for convenience) for the frontend. Apart from the artwork, it does not depend on anything from Maemo 5/Hildon that isn't available in MeeGo already. In fact, Python with SQLite3 support is the only real dependency of this app on the backend side. With all the confusion on what to use for MeeGo Handset UIs (MeeGo Touch Framework, QWidget-based Qt, QWidget inside QGraphicsView, QML, Qt Components, ...), the HTML/CSS/JavaScript combo seems like a good cross-platform alternative (you still have to run the backend somewhere, but it can run on the same device, of course). All you need is a good browser/JS engine/rendering engine combo (Fennec/QtWebKit on MeeGo Handset, MicroB on Maemo). This also works on the N8x0 with MicroB :)

MaePadWeb - A Web UI for MaePad running on your N900

2010-10-28T00:21:00.004+02:00

One of the annoyances with task lists on mobile devices is that there is no easy way to view or edit your task list on your computer as well (there are some web services that allow for these things, but you have to trust your data to these services, and not all these services have a full-featured Maemo client app, and they mostly need to synchronize data between different clients).

So, what about having a simple HTTP server that you can start on your N900 and access from your computer's web browser to view and edit your MaePad checklists? Here's a short video of how it works at the moment:

Here's a screenshot of how the checklist view looks right now:

The MaePadWeb application will be available soon. On a related note, MaePad 1.8 is out now with live search support for the memo list - check it out and test it/vote for it!

SSH agent forwarding in Scratchbox

2010-10-25T23:05:00.004+02:00

I usually have the Maemo SDK running inside a VM - either completely remote or on the same machine (so I can have a 32-bit minimal Debian install containing Scratchbox independent of the host system). I can then SSH into the development VM from my working machine using public key authentication and the SSH agent. I also have agent forwarding set up, so that I can SSH from the SDK machine directly to the N900 (to deploy binaries and .debs) or to some server requiring SSH access (e.g. drop.maemo.org) without having to generate lots of keys and distributing the key to all kinds of different machines.

Using -A (or ForwardAgent yes in .ssh/config) when SSHing into the SDK machine makes it possible to connect to other machines from it, utilizing your SSH key. This sadly does not work when starting scratchbox, because it opens a new environment, and the $SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable is lost. To fix this, I simply write the contents of this variable into a file accessible from Scratchbox and then export this variable in the Scratchbox login script. I usually also have a symlink in $HOME pointing to the SDK $HOME:

ln -s /scratchbox/users/$USER/home/$USER ~/sdk

With this in place, I can now edit the "normal" user's login script by adding the following line at the end of .bashrc:

echo $SSH_AUTH_SOCK >~/sdk/.ssh_auth_sock

Scratchbox has its own login script (also called .bashrc, but sitting in the Scratchbox home folder), so we edit this and add the following line:

export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=`cat .ssh_auth_sock`

After this, logout of Scratchbox, logout of the SSH session and then connect again with SSH forwarding:

ssh user@maemosdk -A
scratchbox
ssh-add -l

The last command should display the fingerprint of your SSH key. You can now connect to remote hosts from within your Scratchbox session while your SSH key still resides only on your local machine, loaded into the SSH agent.

gPodder 2.9 for Maemo 5 in Testing

2010-10-11T11:45:00.007+02:00

A new release of gPodder is out. Test it and vote! It has got some fine-tuning of the UI for Maemo 5 users that you will discover one by one. I just want to highlight two UI changes that should enhance the user experience, and compare them to what the previous version had.

The episode list

gPodder 2.8 introduced MAFW integration, and with it came the ability to save position and duration information for each episode. This was displayed in the episode action dialog, but not in the episode list. We now display the position and duration in the episode list, which allows you to quickly scan for an episode depending on its duration (or check how far you have come for a given episode). In the "All Episodes" list, we also display the podcast name for each episode so that it is clearer from which podcast an episode is coming (the content of the episode "Mini Book Reviews" is much more predictable if you know that it comes from "Python411").

Updating feeds

Previous versions of gPodder changed the "Check for updates" button into a combined progress indicator and cancel button. It was not really obvious to first-time users that you can cancel the feed update, and if you accidentally tapped the button twice, the feed update would be cancelled and you might be confused. gPodder 2.9 introduces a fancy new progress bar that appears (and even slides in and out thanks to hildon.AnimationActor) during the update and has a more obvious red cancel button. With the gained screen space (the progress bar is much bigger), we can also show more information about the update process, like the name of the updated podcast.

A detailed changelog can be found at http://gpodder.org/changelog/2.9. Of course, the Maemo 4 (N800, N810) package has also been updated, and is available from Diablo Extras right now.

Modifying the Maemo 5 task switcher and launcher

2010-10-06T22:37:00.007+02:00

This will be the last post for this week, I promise ;) After playing around with the MeeGo Handset launcher and task switcher, I decided to have a look at how this could be implemented in Fremantle, because the big previews and the paginated launcher are easier to use in some cases (you can also checkout the contents of a window while scrolling by without having to activate it). hildon-desktop manages the task switcher and launcher, among other things. The results of two days of hacking are two patches:

What I'm missing right now and did not succeed in implementing straight away is the "snapping" of TidyFingerScroll to page boundaries, so that whenever a scroll operation is finished, it automatically scrolls to center the icon page (for the launcher) or a preview window (for the task switcher). Obligatory demo video (.debs and patches are linked from the threads above if you want to try it out yourself) here:

If you happen to have experience in Clutter, why not give it a try? I suppose you would just need to implement another scroll mode in TidyFingerScroll and then request this mode in hd-task-navigator.c and hd-launcher-page.c. Who's up for the challenge? :)

Random observation: Hidden in hd-task-navigator.c one can find a geeky gem:

  xthumb = ythumb = 0xB002E;

A new gPodder release should be ready next week. And now back to some Uni stuff :)

Fast MeeGo Handset UX on a N900 (Video)

2010-10-05T09:20:00.002+02:00

I've had the chance to play around a bit more with the MeeGo Handset UX on the N900 yesterday (1.1.80.0.20101001.1). Carsten provided experimental graphics drivers, which still crash at a few points, but for the first time provide acceptable performance in the UI. I also decided to build the gPodder MeeGo Touch Prototype UI against libmeegotouch. Unfortunately, there's no SDK yet, so I had to use zypper on the device (via SSH) to install libmeegotouch-devel, make and gcc-c++ and then take a long coffee break after entering qmake ; make. As it's using plain Qt, the TRG binary built from the Fremantle SDK worked fine on the device.

If you don't see the embedded video, click here: MeeGo Handset UX on a N900 (w/ TRG, gPodder UI test, HW-accelerated).

Qt: Write once, #ifdef everywhere?

2010-10-04T12:13:00.006+02:00

Despite what the title of this post might suggest, I really like Qt. But as a developer, I also know that "write once, run everywhere" isn't realistic without writing some special-cased platform-specific code. Qt does take care of many platform-specific things, and I think it's the closest you can get to "write once, run everywhere" right now.

This post should serve two purposes: To provide a real-world example of what needs to be done in the code for the app to work on both Maemo 5 and Symbian^3 (with example code), and to get suggestions on what parts I could rewrite in a more platform-agnostic manner with existing APIs (so please comment if you are in the know!).

Here's the story: In early September, I've rewritten my game "That Rabbit Game" to use QGraphicsView on the N900, and in the last weeks, I've ported it to Symbian^3. I use the macro Q_OS_SYMBIAN to check for Symbian and Q_WS_MAEMO_5 to check for Fremantle. Here's the current main menu on a N900 and N8 (different screen resolutions and aspect ratios):

Qt modules: In the qmake project file, I can use linux-g++-maemo5 to add Maemo-specific configuration, and symbian for Symbian-specific settings. I use D-Bus module on Maemo, but obviously not on Symbian, so my project file contains something like this:

linux-g++-maemo5 {
    QT += dbus
}

This is nice, because I only have to maintain one project file, and the block structure is very readable (and I can even use different Qt submodules for each platform).

Screen orientation: Symbian has auto-rotation for Qt apps by default, and Maemo 5 has landscape-only mode by default. For my game, portrait mode does not make sense, so I have to request landscape-only on Symbian (similarly, if I want auto-rotation everywhere, I have to request it on Maemo 5 and do nothing in Symbian). For this specific case, I need some libs in Symbian, so I add this to the project file:

symbian {
    LIBS += -lcone -leikcore -lavkon
}

I also need to add this to the top of my main source file:

#ifdef Q_OS_SYMBIAN
#include <AknAppUi.h>
#endif

And finally, I have to copy'n'paste a code block into my main() function before I create the first window:

#ifdef Q_OS_SYMBIAN
CAknAppUi* appUi = dynamic_cast<CAknAppUi*> (CEikonEnv::Static()->AppUi());
TRAPD(error,
if (appUi) {
    // Lock application orientation into landscape
    appUi->SetOrientationL(CAknAppUi::EAppUiOrientationLandscape);
}
);
#endif

It would be nice if Qt (or Qt Mobility?) has some generic API for this, where I just need to do something along the lines of QRotation::setMode(QRotation::LandscapeOnly); and let it take care of the platform-specific stuff.

Accelerated QGraphicsView: On Symbian^3, QGraphicsView is automatically accelerated via OpenVG (I think), but on Maemo 5, it can use OpenGL for this (but does not by default), so in the code where I create my QGraphicsView, I have to have this at the top:

#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
#   include <QGLWidget>
#endif

And then somewhere down that file where I create the QGraphicsView, this code goes there:

#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
    QGLWidget *glw = new QGLWidget(QGLFormat(QGL::DoubleBuffer));
    view->setViewport(glw);
#endif

It's not that difficult, and is already cross-platform (on platforms where OpenGL is available), but maybe QGraphicsView can be OpenGL-accelerated on Maemo 5 by default. Maybe there is some non-obvious side effect that using an OpenGL viewport has that I'm not aware of, and that's why one has to do it manually.

Accelerometer readings: This might actually be a bug in Qt Mobility. For my game, I have to read the accelerometer's Y axis on Symbian, and its X axis on Maemo to determine the rotation for the same holding position of the device, so there's another platform-specific #ifdef there. Again, this will hopefully be fixed in a future release of Qt Mobility, and will most likely be fixed for MeeGo as well.

Task switcher: It's customary on Maemo to have a task switcher button in the upper left corner. There's no platform-agnostic way of going to the task switcher, so I needed to special-case it for Maemo 5, and have not bothered implementing it on Symbian^3 (suggestions welcome!). First, I need to include D-Bus headers for this (I've already mentioned how to request the D-Bus module in the qmake project file above) :

#if defined(Q_WS_MAEMO_5)
#   include <QDBusConnection>
#   include <QDBusMessage>
#endif

When I'm in the handler code where I need to do the actual task switching, I can utilize it to activate Maemo 5's task switcher:

#if defined(Q_WS_MAEMO_5)
        QDBusConnection c = QDBusConnection::sessionBus();
        QDBusMessage m = QDBusMessage::createSignal("/", "com.nokia.hildon_desktop", "exit_app_view");
        c.send(m);
#endif

This is very much Maemo 5-specific, and will very likely not work on MeeGo Harmattan. Again, here it would be nice to have a cross-platform way of doing window management (in Qt or Qt Mobility?). I can imagine this being useful not only on handsets, but also on netbooks and tablets (from a MeeGo PoV). Again, trying to come up with pseudo-APIs here, QWindowManager::showTaskSwitcher(); could be a nice way to handle this in a cross-platform way, hiding platform-specific implementations. From what I've seen of MeeGo Touch, activating the task switcher there simply iconifies the window on the Desktop, so maybe if I would iconify my main window, it should activate the task switcher on Maemo 5 and Symbian. It does not work on Maemo 5 right now, though, and I haven't tested it on Symbian.

Screen resolution: This was (thanks to QGraphicsView) less of a problem than I thought it would be. Symbian^3 (or at least the N8) uses 640x360 as its resolution, and Maemo 5 uses 800x480. Maybe the MeeGo Harmattan device will use yet another resolution. I still configure my QGraphicsScene object manually via #ifdefs to get a good resolution, but the code could just measure the resolution and configure the scene as well. Here's what I use:

#if defined(Q_WS_MAEMO_5)
    setSceneRect(0, 0, 800, 480);
#elif defined(Q_OS_SYMBIAN)
    setSceneRect(0, 0, 640, 360);
#endif

I then use the sceneRect() of my scene to calculate a scale factor for all contents and call setScale() on all root items of the scene to scale the contents to the current screen size. You might have to take care of different aspect ratios on different devices, too - but it was unproblematic for my use case (the game) this time.

It's about time...

2010-09-28T16:16:00.004+02:00

...displayed inside gPodder. Not only the total time of a podcast episode, but (thanks to the MAFW integration that has been added in 2.8) also the position that you stopped listening to, so you know how much time is remaining. There are several possibilities how to display the progress: A circle sector image, a "position/total" text display and a "remaining" text display. Right now, I opted for the "position/total" display (with "total" in cases where you haven't started listening to an episode). Here's how it looks in the current development version of gPodder:

If I remember correctly, the idea for this came up during the Barcelona Long Weekend and was suggested by Tuomas while we were discussing gPodder's UX. Back then gPodder did not store any kind of time-based length information in its database - only the file size in bytes, which isn't that helpful for listening purposes. But since then the work on gpodder.net and the desire to synchronize episode status information between different devices has put everything in place that's needed to detect the duration of episodes (it's even provided as <itunes:duration> (spec) in some RSS feeds) and with the MAFW integration to detect the current playback position when playback is stopped.

If you are using gPodder 2.8 and the built-in Media Player, gPodder already collects this information, so when the next release comes out, you will immediately have some useful data there. This should also help you in deciding which episode to pick on your commute.

What do you think of this feature? Is the current representation the best one, or would something else be more useful to you?

Please test: Maemopad+ 0.37, MaePad 1.7 and Trophae 3

2010-09-20T13:57:00.005+02:00

It's time for another release round of some of my lesser-known apps. First up is something that will make all the proud N8x0 owners happy: Maemopad+ has seen its first new release in 7 months, fixing a crasher bug that happens when creating a new database. The new version, 0.37, is now available from the Extras repository. I also noticed that I forgot to promote the version from February to Extras (it was sitting in Extras-Devel all this time), so if you are running on Extras-only, you should now see the first Maemopad+ update since early October 2008 ;) In this case, you also get a new feature that you didn't have before: Full-text searching in the toolbar.

Next up is MaePad, Maemopad+'s Fremantle-ified descendant. Still fighting for its place in the Extras repository, MaePad has not entered Extras due to some unfortunate typo in the bugtracker link. Now that this one has been fixed, you will also get the aforementioned bugfix (from Maemopad+), an update to the Russian translation (by Serge Broslavsky) and two new translations: Simplified Chinese (by hyao) and Czech (by fri). If you are on Transifex, submit your translation for MaePad to be included in the next release! If you are into testing stuff, test MaePad 1.7 now!

Last but not least is Trophae (known in the app manager and app menu as "PS3 Trophy Viewer"), an app that simply shows your trophy progress for your PS3 games. There has been a change on the PS3 website recently, which broke the app, so this provided a nice opportunity to not only fix the bug, but also properly package it up for Extras-Testing - with a new icon, bugtracker link and all these things that lazy developers tend to forget in a hasty first release ;) Please also test Trophae in Extras-Testing if you have about 4 minutes to spare and a PSN ID to test.

Playing around with MeeGo Touch

2010-08-29T23:38:00.004+02:00

While the MeeGo Touch Python Bindings are still not packaged and released, I though I'd give the C++ library a try and have a look through the class hierarchy. After getting the basic "Hello World" app running, I decided to create an application that can load the list of subscriptions from gPodder's SQLite database:

This view uses MContentItem, which already provides an icon and two lines of text - correctly styled and ready to go. Menu and toolbar items are MAction objects that can either appear everywhere or only at specific places (e.g. only in the toolbar). The great thing is that this all works on your Desktop in a normal window, so testing applications on your computer will be much easier with MeeGo Touch than it is with Hildon (which does not really run without its own hildon-desktop session in Xephyr).

The screenshot above is from the prototype written in C++, and shows how a gPodder MeeGo UI could look like. The MeeGo Touch UI of gPodder will be implemented in Python once the bindings are ready - the framework seems to be fun to work with so far. If you would like to play around with it yourself: MeeGo Touch is available from the MeeGo PPA of Ville M. Vainio if you are on Ubuntu and don't want to build it yourself.

gPodder 2.8 for Maemo 5: Notifications and MAFW integration

2010-08-29T23:17:00.004+02:00

It's been some time since the last gPodder release, and I've been busy adding some nifty features to make the best use of the on-board facilities of Maemo 5. As already mentioned in a previous post, this new version comes with built-in notification support. After installation, you might have to re-start hildon-home (or your device) for the changes to become effective. That's what you will get when new episodes are found:

The other and more "invisible" change is that gPodder now listens to MAFW and also talks to it at times. MAFW is the backend of the Media Player application, and you profit in two ways from this integration:

The last playback position and duration of an episode are displayed in gPodder and synchronized to gpodder.net
Playback can be resumed even with the Media Player application

This means that users of the normal Media Player application will benefit from all the goodies that were previously only available in combination with Panucci. Combined with the new notifications, this makes for yet another great release with even better integration into the Maemo 5 environment.

gPodder 2.8 is now available from Extras-Testing, so please test, review and vote on the package.

gPodder running in the MeeGo Handset UX for N900

2010-08-20T11:30:00.003+02:00

Three days ago, a new MeeGo Handset UX image has been released for the N900. I wanted to try out gPodder on it to see how far I could come without any coding...

It was quite easy to get things going: Download the image, dd it to a MicroSD card, boot the kernel (detailed instructions) and set up USB networking. After that, I could ssh into the environment (the root password is meego) and have a look around.

Instead of using apt-cache and apt-get to search for and install packages, I utilized yum to search for and install PyGTK. Then, I used rsync to copy my Git checkout of gPodder to the device. There are two additional dependencies for gPodder that aren't yet available in the MeeGo repositories, namely feedparser and mygpoclient, so I just copied the Python modules from my Laptop into the src/ folder of the gPodder checkout. Then, just switch to the MeeGo user (su - meego), make sure that the DISPLAY variable is set (export DISPLAY=:0) and start gPodder from the source folder (with bin/gpodder - it automatically loads the modules from the right path) - gPodder says hello MeeGo.

The basic functions work, it's just that the Desktop UI isn't suited for mobile devices (the MeeGo compositor/decorator also has several problems, but that seems to be a more general problem). Python bindings for Hildon aren't (yet ?) available, so I could not test the Maemo 4 or Maemo 5 UIs, but I would like to do a proper Qt/MeeGo Touch-based UI for gPodder, anyway. Let's hope the PyMaemo or PySide teams are quick to release bindings and make them available in the MeeGo repositories, so Python developers can create usable UIs for MeeGo handsets :) Oh, and two MeeGo-Python facts: It comes pre-installed in the N900 image, and the version shipped is 2.6.

In short: Apart from the UI framework, everything is already in place (and working) for Python on MeeGo. With the recent release of Qt Mobility for PySide, let's hope that MeeGo Touch bindings are not that far away.

Desktop notification support in gPodder

2010-08-16T21:31:00.004+02:00

Three days ago, Maemo bug 11130 was filed: It complains about gPodder stealing focus when it has finished checking for new episodes in the background. This is true, and I've been bitten by this annoyance several times already, so I decided to finally have a look into the SMS/IM/Phone-style notifications (the "yellow" bubble that merges into your task switcher after some time). Thankfully, Daniel Would (of Witter fame) has published his research results some months ago already, so getting up and running was easy from that point. Here are the results so far:

One problem that I still have not figured out how to fix (even after digging in the hildon-home source tree) is how to attach such a notification to the a given window (or application) instead of having it appear as separate "window" in the task switcher (see the second screenshot). Can somebody in the know give me a hint? On the other hand, the callback for clicking on the notification works fine already and opens the new episodes dialog.

A related change that also prevents gPodder from stealing focus was to replace the progress indicator dialog with a HildonBanner - it might not look so good without a progress bar, but it makes gPodder less intrusive when the user interacts with other applications.

headphoned 1.9 for the N900 is now in Extras-Testing

2010-07-30T18:39:00.004+02:00

The beloved Headphone Daemon, who usually sleeps in the darker corners of your N900 and makes sure that you do not embarrass yourself in front of other passengers or pedestrians with whatever kind of experimental music you happen to listen to when the headphones are accidentally unplugged (also known as public transport situations) got a small facelift (also known as code change).

A few changes that have accumulated over the last few months have now been packed up into the shiny new 1.9 release:

Support for libplayback / whitelisting (by Faheem Pervez)
Support for pausing Martin Grimme's MediaBox
Detect headphoned disconnect during active calls and send pause command after the hangup

The last one in this list might be of special interest to some of you who have complained about headphoned not working when the headphones are unplugged during a call. This won't happen now, as headphoned now monitors the call status via D-Bus and keeps track of active calls. When the headphones are unplugged while a call is active, the pause signal will not only be sent right away, but also a second time when the call gets disconnected. This work for all types of voice calls, and should work for video calls as well (untested).

During the summer holidays, I have had less time to do more development and releases, but things are starting to move slowly again - expect new releases of packages like gPodder and MaePad in the upcoming weeks. I'd also love to port gPodder to Harmattan and add a fancy new MeeGo Touch UI on top of it (in March I said that Maemo 6/MeeGo is for later this year - which might be very soon now), so you can all enjoy your favourite podcatcher with the usual native UI support. Let's hope that the Harmattan SDK and/or Harmattan developer images get released for the N900 soon (and then the Python bindings soon afterwards - the PyMaemo team was very fast in previous release cycles), so the community developers have enough time preparing their apps for the next big release.

For now, please test and enjoy this new headphoned release, and don't forget to vote for and comment on the package once you have verified the new release from Extras-Testing.

Fine-grained playback status in gPodder and Panucci

2010-06-13T03:16:00.002+02:00

I've just uploaded Panucci 0.9-alpha0 to Maemo 5 Extras-Devel. This package is the first one based on the new codebase, which includes support for sending fine-grained playback status messages to gPodder and also receive metadata about episodes from gPodder. This makes listening to podcasts and managing your listening queue even more comfortable. The following screenshots are from development versions of gPodder, but you'll soon be able to enjoy these new features with the upcoming release. Until then: Please test Panucci 0.9-alpha0 in Extras-Devel (I won't be promoting this package to -Testing yet, but report bugs against it if you try it from -Devel), so we can fix any outstanding bugs until the first final release.

So, what's working so far? gPodder gained the display of the current position and total time in the episode actions dialog:

This position information is automatically sent from the newer Panucci version (so it depends on you using Panucci for playing podcasts). Another cool side-effect is that this information will be synchronized with gpodder.net if you are logged in and have enabled synchronization, so you can finally start playing back episodes on your computer, and then pick up where you left on your mobile phone on the go. You can also view a detailed overview of what parts of an episode are played on gpodder.net:

This is really an important feature milestone for gPodder (and Panucci), and it's nice to finally have playback status and episode duration information inside gPodder. Expect a new gPodder release soon, released together with the new version of Panucci (due to the branching history of Panucci, there are some feature regressions, like missing display orientation controls, but these will be re-added in the next few weeks as we move along).

Streaming video to the big screen

2010-06-01T21:43:00.002+02:00

This is a pretty obvious hack and nothing new at all, using plain command line tools that existed for ages. Still, it might come in handy, and maybe you did not even think about it yet:

Prerequisites are a computer with an installed SSH server and mplayer or a similar media player. On your N900 (this obviously works just as well for the N800 and N810), you just need the SSH client for the first variant, and Python for the second variant. No other tools or apps are necessary.

In my case, I downloaded a video onto my N900 using gPodder, but I didn't want to watch it on the small screen, and I don't have a TV to hook it up to. So I decided to just stream the video over the network to my computer (ideally initiating the stream from the N900).

What you need to do is find out the $DISPLAY variable in your X session on the computer (:0 usually works, but strangely I'm on :4.0 with Ubuntu 10.04 here). You can do this with echo $DISPLAY in a X Terminal on the computer. Remember that value. Now, let's go to the X Terminal on the N900, cd into the folder with the videos and note the file name. To stream the video fullscreen to the computer, use a command like this: ssh username@computerip 'DISPLAY=:4.0 mplayer -fs -' < filename.mp4.

If you don't have SSH access, an alternative is to use HTTP for streaming (e.g. with VLC, which is also available on Windows and Mac OS X). The easiest way to do is (if you have Python installed, which you most likely have) to cd into the directory that you want to share (the directory and all its subdirectories will be shared - be sure to have no sensitive data there!) and use the command python -m SimpleHTTPServer for some instant HTTP server goodness on port 8000. Use VLC or a web browser on your computer to access the share. You can use Ctrl+C to stop the server.

So, if you want to browse the downloaded podcasts of gPodder on your computer, use the following command sequence in X Terminal:

cd
cd MyDocs/Podcasts
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Now, use the web browser on your computer (connected to the same network) and access http://n900ipaddress:8000/ to get a directory listing of all downloaded content. Copy the URLs into VLC and start streaming over the air.

Usually the limiting factor here is the wireless bandwidth and the reading speed of the eMMC. Apart from that, no restrictions apply - you can easily stream HD content, as the decoding is done on your computer, and the N900 just reads the data and sends it unmodified over the network without much processing (that's why everything said here also applies to the N800 and N810 and should work just as well).

gPodder 2.6 for Maemo 5: A visual tour

2010-05-23T20:20:00.003+02:00

gPodder 2.6 (an app for Maemo that can subscribe to and download podcasts, YouTube videos and tracks from Soundcloud) has been released today. The package is in Extras-Testing, so please test it and vote for it! A package for Diablo (Maemo 4, N8x0) is also available already, and includes some Diablo-specific fixes (the "New episodes available" selection was broken, but works correctly now).

I've prepared some screenshots to compare the UI of gPodder 2.5 for Fremantle with the UI of gPodder 2.6. Here are a few examples:

The episode actions dialog now has a dedicated "Delete" button for downloaded episodes

The settings dialog has proper "Save" semantics now (close the dialog to discard changes, click on "Save" to apply changes) - this has been suggested during UX-Week 1

The progress bar for the episode list has rounded corners (useless, but looks better)

Another feature that isn't visible at first: If you get "New episodes available", and you can't decide from the title of an episode if it's worth downloading, just long-tap the episode and choose "Shownotes" from the context menu to display the complete shownotes in a window.

This release includes improved gpodder.net support (easier configuration, restoring of subscriptions now works on first run), and will feature more fine-grained episode playback status synchronization with the (yet-to-be-released) new version of Panucci.

U-Bahn, Keyboard Repeat Switcher and an updated RaeMote

2010-05-17T23:52:00.004+02:00

The last three days can be described as one of the more productive weekends - at least in terms of app count. Two new mini-apps have been uploaded to Maemo Extras: U-Bahn, a scrolling subway plan for Vienna and the Keyboard Repeat Switcher widget. While the former might only be of interest to Viennese locals and the occasional tourist, the latter is really useful when you do more serious work in X Terminal and want your hardware keys to have the "repeat" functionality in the yet-to-be-released PR1.2 firmware update. If you have PR1.2, please try them out and vote for these new packages.

And last but not least: a new version of RaeMote has been released, which adds missing dependencies to the packaging information and also changes the display name of the package to be shorter and searchable. RaeMote is still not in Extras, so your votes are again very welcome on this one.

Coming up: A new version of gPodder is already in the works, bringing you lots of bug fixes and UI refinements that we introduced during the last weeks. Some progress is also being made on getting the new version of Panucci ready, which will bring play position syncing when used in conjunction with gPodder and gpodder.net.

N810 + pyDance + USB Host Mode + Dance Mat

2010-05-04T01:54:00.006+02:00

Most of the cool hacks these days are done using the N900 for obvious reasons. For this little experiment, I needed the good old N810 with its USB Host Mode (as the N900 doesn't support USB Host Mode right now) to get things going. An alternative approach would be to use BlueMaemo running on a N8x0 (with a USB device attached) acting as Bluetooth HID device for the N900 and running pyDance from the N900 on the big screen with its TV-out.

Here's a walkthrough video on how it's done:

I hope to post the packages needed to get this going shortly. Attila was kind enough to package the joydev.ko kernel module for Diablo, so we're just missing pygame/SDL_mixer with OGG support in the repositories. It's not Stepmania, but it works just as well with only minimal code changes.

gPodder 2.5 "easter egg": Diablo UI on Fremantle

2010-04-29T13:07:00.004+02:00

As you probably already know, all gPodder versions (Linux Desktop, Maemo 4 and Maemo 5) use the same codebase, and as Python is an interpreted language, the choice of which UI to run can be made at run time (you could do this for compiled languages, too, but it's easier for interpreted ones). In current versions of gPodder, this happens by using command-line arguments. gpodder alone will start the Desktop version (which does not work on Maemo for obvious reasons - an "auto-detect" feature might be implemented in the future). On Maemo 5, you will usually want to use gpodder --fremantle, which will start the Maemo 5 UI as you know it (that's also the command that gets executed when gPodder is started from its application icon). On Maemo 4, the command is gpodder --maemo.

If you are a gPodder/Maemo old-timer, you might still remember the "good old days" of two-panel, stylus-based podcast goodness with multiple selections, the funky context menu and the thick toolbar on your N8x0. Ever wondered how that would feel on the N900? Try it out! Simply run gpodder --maemo in X Terminal and give your podcasts a little retro interaction (the database and downloads are the same in both versions and are therefore shared).

Try it out - it might come in handy if you are a stylus cowboy or have really small fingers (or a big N900 and normal-sized fingers...). Also, give the multiple-selection feature in the episode list a try. All you need is gPodder version 2.5, as it contains some compatibility fixes to make the Diablo version not be totally unusable on Fremantle.

New versions of gPodder and Brain Party out

2010-04-21T15:13:00.003+02:00

The news are a bit slow these days, because the summer term really took off after the easter holidays, and the free time for coding has decreased accordingly. Nevertheless: Some updates have hit Maemo Extras-Testing yesterday.

gPodder 2.5 "Knock knock knock Penny" was released and with it another Maemo 5 package rolls into the Extras repository (the Diablo package for Maemo 4 has also been uploaded and promoted to Extras already). Apart from some string changes ("Settings" instead of "Preferences", for example) that we found during the first UX-Week, this version fixes YouTube video downloads - the downloaded files now get a suitable extension (a bug that was introduced by YouTube changing their website a few weeks ago). Another nice feature for those of you with a fast Internet connection: YouTube video streaming. You can now chose to stream subscribed YouTube videos instead of downloading them if you prefer that. Review it and vote for gPodder 2.5-1 here

In gaming news, Paul Hudson (aka Hudzilla) has fixed some bugs in the code of his Brain Party game, and I've now uploaded a new version of the Maemo port for this game. The development repository of Brain Party has now also been opened over at Launchpad: Brain Party on Launchpad, and Paul promised to merge the Maemo patches upstream as soon as I send them to him, which I'll do today :) Review it and vote for Brain Party 0.5.91-1 here

One and a half week ago, we started the "UX Week" sprints in the Forums, focusing on one aspect of third-party applications for Maemo per week. This week, we're focusing on icons, so if you are an artist of want to help out as user or if you are a developer in need for some well-balanced icons, please get in touch in the forums and on the Wiki. And if you don't want to be productive at all, just stop by and look at the great artwork the artists have come up with so far already.

Brain Party ported to the N900

2010-04-03T17:28:00.004+02:00

Brain Party from Hudzilla Games has been released as open source for Linux some days ago. A thread on t.m.o suggested somebody port this over to Maemo. An afternoon of tinkering later (and with the help of Javispedro's SDL-GLES library), I've got the game to run on the N900 (see the patch for details on the changes - as you can see, the original source code is pretty clean, so porting was mostly straightforward after being told about SDL-GLES, fixing a parameter for glTexImage2D and doing some math to scale the game to the N900's screen and scale the input coordinates the same way). The package is currently in Extras-Devel, soon to be promoted to Extras-Testing. In the mean time, you can grab binary and source packages from this page (use apt-get -f install afterwards to satisfy dependencies).

Please test it and vote for it on the Maemo.org package page when it enters Extras-Testing (did you know that you can follow @maemoextras on Twitter to see packages entering Extras-Testing and Extras? Now you do..).

It's good to see developers porting their games to Linux and open sourcing them, which makes learning from their code and porting the games to other platforms very easy. If you like the game, please support the developers by purchasing Brain Party for the iPhone (you probably don't have an iPhone, so show the N900 game off to your freedom-hating friends and tell them that they should purchase the game for their iPhone/iPod touch on the App Store). The game is also available for Windows Mobile and Xbox 360.

App updates: gPodder 2.4 and MaePad 1.5

2010-03-29T20:16:00.003+02:00

This week, it's once again time to update two of the more prominent apps in my collection: gPodder 2.4 "The Pants Alternative" for both Diablo and Fremantle and MaePad 1.5 "Productive" for Fremantle.

With the installation of PR1.2 on the autobuilder, MaePad can once again be built on it, so I've resumed uploading of MaePad releases to Maemo.org.

So, what's in it for you? Let's start with gPodder:

Progress bar for loading episodes (and optimized episode list loading)
"All episodes" view is not grouped per-podcast anymore (all episodes are now sorted descending by date)
Faster download resuming on application start (with progress dialog)
Automatic clean-up of finished downloads
Simplified layout of progress indicator dialogs (e.g. deleting episodes, unsubscribing from podcasts)

And now for your favourite productivity tool, the MaePad:

"w" in the checklist/sketch view now saves the database
Fullscreen mode of checklists uses portrait mode (for shopping use, etc..)
Node type displayed in overview (there's a themeing issue here with the highlights and the secondary text color.. suggestions welcome)

Now it's your turn: Please test the new packages and then vote for the packages here: MaePad QA page and gPodder QA page. Any bugs that you will find should be reported here: new bug against gPodder and MæPad t.m.o thread.

The PR1.2 SDK on the autobuilder adds a dependency on a newer Hildon version that cannot be fulfilled in earlier firmware versions, so I'll build a package compatible with pre-PR1.2 firmware soon and publish the package on the MaePad homepage for manual installation during this transition period until PR1.2 becomes available for end users.

MaemoPad+ ported to Desktop Linux

2010-03-24T22:35:00.005+01:00

Some weeks ago, a user of MaemoPad+ asked me if it was possible to port MaemoPad+ to the Desktop, so users of Tablet PCs can make use of it. Apart from that, this can also be useful for users of MaePad to copy their "memos.db" file from the N900 to their PC and edit the file (or just view the contents) on the big screen. The file format used by both MaemoPad+ and MaePad is the same, so users of the mobile versions can share their database files with the Desktop version (and vice versa), which by the way looks like this at the moment:

Most of the Maemo 4 libraries are readily available in Debian (hildon, libosso, hildon-icons, etc..), so the initial port has not been too difficult, even though proper Desktop integration obviously needs more work, and there are some ugly crashers still hidden inside the code ;)

I wonder if it's possible to also package Maemo 5 libraries (Hildon 2.2, etc..) for Debian and upload them to the Debian repositories - this should make it easier to port Maemo 5 applications to the Linux Desktop without having to re-write the whole UI layer. Another cool thing would be to have Hildon 2.2 for Diablo, which would allow us to "backport" Maemo 5 apps to Maemo 4 - again, without the work of having to re-write the UI.

Packages for Ubuntu are available from the MaemoPad+ PPA, and the source is available via Git. Please send backtraces of crashes or (even better!) patches against the "desktop" branch in the Git repo.

Updated packages for Panucci, RæMote and headphoned

2010-03-23T10:44:00.003+01:00

Now that a preview of the PR1.2 SDK has been released, it's time to push the latest updates into the current Extras repository, so users that won't be upgrading to 1.2 as soon as it's out will get recent packages until they decide to upgrade to the new release. Over the last days, I've updated some of my packages with minor updates and long-requested features:

Panucci: FM transmitter in menu, HTTP streaming (ideal for podcasts). The "rotate to landscape mode when the keyboard is open" fix has been merged from gPodder.
QA page for Panucci 0.3.9-5
RæMote: Updated bugtracker URL and fixed the UI glitch where button "highlights" get stuck. It has only been out for two weeks, and therefore it has not entered Extras yet, so your votes are extra important here.
QA page for RæMote 1.2
headphoned: Support for pausing FM radio has been added - this is useful when you listen to FM radio using a Bluetooth headset. Please read the info comment about FM radio support on the QA page.
QA page for headphoned 1.8

If you can spare some minutes, please help test these applications on your device and vote for them afterwards on the QA pages that are linked above.

More updates to other apps are queued for this week, stay tuned.

SketchyAetch, gPodder/Qt and living in the present

2010-03-07T23:13:00.009+01:00

After the very interesting Nokia Mobile Developers Forum in Hagenberg on Friday and Saturday (Petri Niemi did several interesting Qt introductory talks), I decided to play a bit with QGraphicsView again and this time try to come up with an app that actually does something: SketchyAetch!

Having not done much with C++ for several months, the GCC error messages (at least for C++) are still kind of cryptic. The fact that code gets pre-processed by moc does not help here, as the error messages might appear in a different location than where the real error/typo is. It should not be too difficult to get around these issues after some practice, and from that point on, getting things done (in C++) with the Qt libraries should be nice.

Already-drawn lines will fade away when you shake your device just like you would expect. The package is available in Extras-Devel.

Now something for the Qt fanboys out there: If you're running gPodder 2.3 on your device, you can try

   python -m gpodder.qtui

for a PoC "yes we could use Qt for the UI layer". This is not something that we will be working on in the near future (after all, the Hildon-based Maemo 5 UI is perfectly fine and "native" and it will get some more fine-tuning with the next release), but it shows that it won't be too difficult to do a DirectUI GUI for gPodder on top of the existing podcast client for M6/MG. We probably get around to implementing a DirectUI GUI for gPodder later this year when it's time to think about "Maemo 6" support.

Looking back how strange the gPodder Fremantle UI looked back in June 2009 (and how much changed in both the Framework and gPodder until the first Fremantle version was released), there's no rush in switching to Qt or DirectUI (at least for existing applications). I just hope that good Python bindings will be available for DirectUI/Qt when it's time to support the new UI, but I'm sure the PyMaemo team will do a great job just as they did with Hildon/Fremantle.

Maemo 5 is very polished these days, and I expect it to be even more mature when PR1.2 is out. It's also nice to see the Qt bits fall in place, DirectUI widget demos being made available, and MADDE becoming integrated with QtCreator, so the tooling support is ready when it's time to write M6/MeeGo apps. Maemo 6/MeeGo is for later this year, now it's time to enjoy Maemo 5, the N900 and all the great open source apps :)

Video of my talk from January; coming up: Nokia App Forum Alps

2010-03-01T15:16:00.004+01:00

Back in January, I've given a talk about Maemo Development at the Metalab Vienna. It's been up for some weeks now (the talk is in German, but at least I was using the N900 during the whole presentation. BTW: Is it possible to disable auto-rotate in the image viewer?): (direct link)

Maemo 5 "Getting Started" from metalab on Vimeo.

This upcoming weekend, the Nokia Mobile Developers Conference is taking place in Hagenberg, Austria, and if you happen to have time on March 5th and 6th, register for free (free shuttle busses are available from Vienna to Hagenberg and back). I'll be giving a talk about Open Source Applications on Maemo 5. Say hi if you happen to be there! :)

Utilize the hardware keyboard with MaePad 1.3 and Vim keybindings

2010-02-23T01:00:00.005+01:00

Yesterday, MaePad 1.3 was released. Apart from updates to the Finnish translation and a new Hungarian translation, this release adds Vim-like keybindings to the UI, which allows you to be very productive when managing lots of checklists.

The enabler here is the hardware keyboard that allows for indirect multi-touch interaction with good, tactile, haptic feedback (something that no touchscreen to date can provide - you can't type "blindly" on any touchscreen).

Watch the demo video here:

The package is available as binary .deb from the MaePad homepage and the source is available in the Git repository (no package in Extras until Bug 9070 is fixed). Leave feedback in the forum thread, including ideas for additional shortcuts.

Maemopad+ 0.36 for Diablo and some Extras-Testing QA requests

2010-02-20T23:38:00.006+01:00

I've written enough about MaePad in the last few weeks, so today I'm announcing something for all the Maemo 4 fans out there: Maemopad+ 0.36 has been released, and with it comes a nice search function (the code for which has been written in 2008) and updated translations. We also added a Git repository and the updated website to the mix.

Here's a request for all the Maemo 5 lovers: Please don't forget to give some Extras-Testing QA love to the following packages: gPodder 2.2-2, Panucci 0.3.9-2 and headphoned 1.7. These packages already have passed their 10-day quarantine (or will do so during the coming days), and are just waiting for enough votes to be allowed to go into the Extras repository, so all end users can profit from the updates. Thanks for you help!

Want MæPad 1.2? Vote for bug 9070!

2010-02-19T15:37:00.005+01:00

MæPad 1.2 is out now, and includes (apart from bugfixes and usability fixes) some cool new features such as word wrapping, mass-removal of all checked items and the often requested "share your sketches" feature that allows you to upload sketches to Flickr or send via E-Mail or Bluetooth.

Sadly, the "share your sketches" feature makes MæPad build-depend on the "sharing-dialog-dev" package, which is not available in the auto-builder. Anyway, with MæPad 1.2 you can upload useful or even pointless sketches directly to hosting services:

If you want to get MæPad 1.2 into Maemo Extras, please vote for bug 9070. Alternatively, you can grab the armel .deb for MæPad 1.2 from the MæPad website.

In other news, the MæPad Git repository and MæPad on Transifex are now online, so if you want to contribute code or translations, please feel encouraged do so (send me your Transifex username, so I can add you to the MæPad project there to allow uploads).

MeeGo wishlist

2010-02-16T13:25:00.003+01:00

Because all the cool kids blog about it these days..

Follow the FHS (get rid of workarounds such as Optification)
Remove Maemoisms and Scratchboxisms
Follow freedesktop.org specifications (at least bugs 657, 1303, 3817, 3818, 3828, 3822, 3913, and 4766 according to this wiki page)
Allow many different UI toolkits and languages (it's OK if you decide to provide official support for only a few of them)
Make sure other UI toolkits integrate nicely (mostly covered by following wm-spec, icon-naming-spec and systemtray-spec and not inventing "MeeGo"-specific technologies and non-standard implementations)
Make sure notifications work from other toolkits (libnotify-based vs. Qt-only notification widgets)
In general, follow the ideas from the Mainstream Linux Aligment wiki page (the page is broken atm, but you'll be able to see the bug IDs)

If any of these specifications/standards do not meet the requirements, please work with freedesktop.org or other related institutions to get your extensions discussed, fixed and then integrated into the relevant specifications.

People will still develop mobile UIs specifically for whatever device will come along in the future, but porting from/to "mainstream" Desktop Linux should be as easy as possible.

There's a lot of awesome open source Linux/UNIX (GUI) software out there, it just needs some UI love to be usable on mobile devices. Don't make it harder than it should be.

(And with that I mean that it's easier to relayout a GTK+, FLTK, wxWidgets, Swing or Tk UI than to port everything to "the one true toolkit".)

This is especially true since open source developers usually develop in their free time, and porting an app to a new toolkit/environment is something that can't be done in two afternoons. Relayouting UIs can be done in that time.

Adding paradigm-shifting cool new UIs will still work without breaking backwards-compatibility and without restricting developers to one language/toolkit.

Oh, and Mer solves most of these issues by basing itself on a "standard" Desktop distro and only changing stuff that's really necessary.

MaePad 1.1 and gPodder 2.2 hit Extras-Testing

2010-02-08T17:40:00.003+01:00

After a week of initial testing of MaePad 1.0 in Extras-Devel and some very helpful feedback from users, MaePad 1.1 "The Large Hadron Collision" hits the street (or more precisely, Extras-Testing). You can read the list of changes or go straight to the package page to test it.

In other news, gPodder 2.2 "LA X" (release notes on gPodder.org) was uploaded to Extras-Devel at the end of last week. This new release includes the promised UI changes and some other under-the-hood changes, but there have been some minor regressions (broken streaming for example) which have since been fixed in the development repository. Please test gPodder 2.2 (on the package page) and report bugs against it in the bug tracker, so that any issues can be fixed before the next package version.

Again, please report any bugs you find to the bug tracker, and don't go whining in the forums - it's a hassle to search and hunt for bug reports on the web, and your "bug report" forum post might never be seen by any of the developers of any given app.

gPodder 2.2 is of course also available for Maemo 4, and has been pushed into the Diablo Extras repository already. Starting from this version, no Chinook builds will be provided for gPodder anymore, but due to the interpreted nature of Python code, you can install the gPodder package from the Diablo repositories should you really need to run gPodder under Chinook. If you are reporting bugs against gPodder for Maemo 4, be sure to mention "Maemo 4", "Diablo" or "N8x0" in the bug report.

Ready to go into Maemo Extras during this week: Panucci 0.3.9-1 and headphoned 1.6 (thanks to all the testers for taking the time to test, review and rate these packages).

Bluetooth support for headphoned and Panucci

2010-02-02T21:39:00.004+01:00

The hack week continues with some goodness for your ears (and the undisturbedness of people sharing the subway or bus with you): headphoned 1.6 adds support for Bluetooth headsets, so when you disconnect your Bluetooth headset, playback of music will automatically pause, which seems to be a much-requested feature. Thanks to Alan and Faheem for making this possible. Again, now that the package is ready, it's your turn to test and vote the package into the Extras repository.

Now that headphoned supports Bluetooth headsets, the only problem is that you still need to get your device out of your pocket to start playback. That's why I quickly hacked some automatic playback start goodness into Panucci (which is of course optional). The (due to space constraints irritatingly named) "Auto-play on headset" option will automatically start playback in Panucci when your Bluetooth headset or your wired headset with microphone is connected:

(Yes, I'm a big fan of the Marina Theme...)

I'm not promoting the new Panucci version yet, as I want the previous release (0.3.9-1) to go through Extras-Testing first. The version with headset support (0.3.9-2) is already in Extras-Devel, and I'll promote it to -Testing after the first one got through (thanks to all of you who have reviewed and rated the package in -Testing).

In short, this means that you will be able to keep your N900 in your pocket and simply connect/disconnect your Bluetooth headset to control playback, which I think is quite nice... (no support for BT headset buttons in Panucci so far, as I can't really test this myself - send patches and/or D-Bus logs)

Announcing MaePad for Maemo 5

2010-02-02T01:52:00.005+01:00

Last Thursday, Claes Norin asked me if there's going to be an app like Maemopad+ for Fremantle. "Neat idea", I thought, and started hacking, overhauling the whole UI, refactoring some ugly parts of the code and making it generally shine and be usable as every day productivity companion on the N900. Claes was kind enough to provide me with valuable feedback and the necessary artwork. Now, let me introduce you to... MaePad!

Due to the big changes in the UI and source code, MaePad is only available for Fremantle at the moment, but I hope to be able to provide it for Mer as well when it becomes available for the N800 and N810.

If you are feeling adventurous, please try out MaePad 1.0, which is available from Maemo Extras-Devel now.

Panucci 0.3.9: Silent mode and landscape mode by default

2010-01-31T01:53:00.005+01:00

Now that the winter term has finally ended, and February is in sight, it's time to do some overdue fixes, releases and other random stuff. After headphoned 1.5 has found its way into Maemo Extras (thanks to the testers), it's Panucci's turn. Here is a list of user-visible changes in Panucci 0.3.9:

Playback in "Silent" profile (thanks to Martin Grimme et al in bug 6694)
Default is forced-landscape mode, the menu has automatic rotation and forced-portrait mode
Volume controls removed (Maemo 5 already handles volume control for us)

If you are a Panucci user, please take the time to review and rate it: Maemo.org package page for Panucci

You can expect at least two apps/releases in the next few days: MaePad (Maemopad+ re-born for Maemo 5) and of course a new version of gPodder with my.gpodder.org sync and the re-designed UI.

headphoned, Metalab Talk, App Forum and gPodder updates

2010-01-14T12:07:00.003+01:00

Due to popular demand, the Headphone Daemon is now available for Fremantle and the N900, too. A package is in Extras-Devel and should be available for QA testing in Extras-Testing soon. There is also a discussion thread on t.m.o and the packages page for QA.

In other news, I'll be giving a talk about Maemo.org and Maemo development at the Metalab Vienna on the 22nd of January. This is in preparation of the Hackathon that's happening on the weekend after the talk (a good opportunity to hack on CLI Sharing, maybe..).

In general, it seems like the N900 seems to get up to speed here in Austria now: The Nokia App Forum Alps is organizing a competition for mobile applications, so hopefully we see some new apps coming out of this. And if you happen to be around Hagenberg in early March, do join the Mobile Developers Conference.

A new gPodder version will be out "very soon now" - just one bug and one feature (my.gpodder.org API) left to do. I hope I'll be able to do it this weekend, so you can all enjoy the #maebar UI updates and new features such as Flickr support.

gPodder "after 2.1" Maemo 5 UI Changes (#maebar)

2009-12-23T14:27:00.005+01:00

Quick note about the stable version: Thanks to the hard-working testers, gPodder 2.1 has received its necessary karma points in Extras-Testing before the quarantime time is up, so we are just waiting for some more days to pass before gPodder 2.1 will finally enter the Extras repository.

In the mean time, there have been some important developments in the Git repository, mostly based on ideas from the Barcelona Long Weekend - thanks to all the people who provided valuable input, especially Tuomas (tigert) for all the hard work. I have created a new set on Flickr with some screenshots of the current development version:

The new UI is not set in stone, and still has some rough edges, so I'd like to receive some feedback on what can be improved.

If you want to test the development version interactively, use Git to checkout git://repo.or.cz/gpodder.git on your device, and then run bin/gpodder --fremantle --verbose inside the checkout to start the development version in debugging mode. Make sure to have the current version of gPodder installed to drag in the required dependencies (alternatively, install the dependencies by hand). As with all development versions, if it breaks (or messes with your downloads/subscriptions), you got to keep the pieces.

Thanks in advance for the feedback :)

Charging a BL-5J (N900) battery in the N810

2009-12-08T21:55:00.004+01:00

There are several reasons why you would like to charge your N900 battery in a N810. Maybe you have a spare battery that you want to charge while using the other battery in your N900, or maybe your N900 refuses to charge the battery by itself. Please note that even though it works for me, the standard disclaimer applies - it's all your fault if this destroys your devices and/or batteries :)

Now, let's have a look at the pinouts and connectors of both batteries:

So, the connectors seem to have the same size, even though the batteries do not. Trying to put the N900 battery into the N810 is not straightforward, as there is a white piece of plastic that prevents the battery from getting close to the connectors. The solution is to simply use the N810 stylus as a lever to push the battery towards the connectors:

After the stylus and battery are fixed, simply connect the N810 to the power adapter, and it should start charging. Thanks to Quim for this helpful hint :)

Experimental Maemo 5 UI: Alternative Portrait Mode

2009-11-28T01:22:00.003+01:00

The usual way to do rotation to portrait mode in Maemo 5 is to set special flags on a window and let the window manager rotate our window and relayout after the switch. It's not as fast as it could be, and task switching (even between two portrait mode apps) is only possible by switching to landscape mode. Apart from that, things like the system menu don't work in portrait mode.

For some applications, an alternative could be to stay in landscape mode and simply rotate widgets without the window manager even knowing...

It's probably best described in a short demo video of how a simple media player could look like (sorry for the sloppy video, forgot my digital camera, so the webcam had to act as a replacement) - have a look, and tell me what you think. (For comparison, have a look at the older Panucci rotation video that uses the "normal" way of going into and leaving portrait mode.)

Experimental Maemo 5 UI: gPodder Episode Actions

2009-11-24T22:18:00.005+01:00

With the Long Weekend just a little more than one week away, I though about doing some experiments with gPodder's UI. Some users want a quicker way to play/download/delete episodes instead of opening the shownotes window and using its application menu. Here's one approach I tried out today (I know the icons are pixellated and ugly - please consider them as placeholders):

The idea is that you click on an episode, and instead of opening the shownotes view, you get this selection screen where you can choose to play/download/delete the episode or view the shownotes. Of course there have to be some fancy animations, because that's what all the cool kids do today. Just watch the video on YouTube and tell me what you think in the comments here (especially in terms of non-standard UI and annying animations - seriously ;).

In unrelated news, headphoned 1.4 for N800/N810 has been released and pushed to Maemo Extras with support for Panucci and MPlayer for all your "public transport situation" avoidance needs.

Search-as-you-type in gPodder and a tag cloud

2009-11-13T15:52:00.008+01:00

The uni semester is in full swing again, so development has slowed down a bit again compared to September. At least we are able to work on the my.gpodder.org webservice as a project in one of the courses (so expect some new development there soon). Anyway, here are some thing I've been working on recently:

gPodder has gained search-as-you-type filtering for both the podcast list and the episodes list. This allows you to make good use of the hardware keyboard, and text searches temporarily override the current view mode (e.g. only podcasts with unplayed epiosdes or hide deleted episodes), so you will always find the podcast or episode you are searching for (independent of the current view mode). This will obviously also be available for Maemo 4:

In non-gPodder news, I have been working on a tag cloud widget. It will allow developers to provide a set of tags and a weight for each one, and the tag cloud will display something like this:

The tags displayed act as buttons and can be used as an alternative to long lists of items (depending on the kind of data that is to be displayed and selected). This tag cloud might come in handy in a future project..

Panucci - Portrait mode Media Player for the N900

2009-10-21T17:48:00.005+02:00

You probably know Panucci from your N8x0 where it allows you to playback, resume and bookmark audiobooks and podcasts. Some users seem to use it as a normal audio media player, too, although the primary design goal is to support resuming for long audio tracks.

Just today I asked on maemo-developers how to get GStreamer's playbin to work on Maemo 5 when several people (thanks, guys!) pointed out that playbin2 should be used.

After that, a new package was only some UI fixing and merging of the rotation code from gPodder away. While you are eagerly waiting for the autobuilder to put Panucci into Extras-Devel, here's a short video of it in action:

Please test Panucci when it finally appears in Extras-Testing and give some feedback! And thank you to all of you who were kind enough to take the time to review the new gPodder version - it has made its way into Extras today! :) Guess the next version should allow Panucci to be selected as audio player in the preferences dialog, then.. ;)

Important: Due to the way optification works, upgrading from older versions of might break the package (application does not load). To fix this, simply uninstall and re-install the package. Both Panucci and gPodder are affected by this if you have installed an older version.

New gPodder version with automatic downloading

2009-10-14T08:37:00.003+02:00

Thanks for all your comments on talk.m.o, Flickr and bugs.m.o and directly at the Summit. The result is a shiny new release with improved UX and automatic feed updating/downloading.

The new version is currently in Extras-Devel (promoted to -Testing, waiting for someone to confirm the promotion). Please take the time to review the new release and rate/comment it on gPodder's maemo.org/packages page.

One thing that did not make it into this release: Direct play/download/delete buttons in the episode shownotes window. I'm thinking of just popping up a list of actions when a episode is clicked and make "display shownotes" one of these actions. What do you think?

Please report bugs, discuss and rate the package. See the complete set of screenshots on Flickr.

RSS Feed Handler 2.0

2009-10-03T22:57:00.005+02:00

We have been talking about browser integration for all RSS-based apps before, and the initial standalone adaption of Canola's feedhandler (in canola-tuning) was nice, but it was written in Python and therefore startup time was not as fast as it could get (startup time is important for the feed handler, which usually only runs for some seconds, and to the user does not look as if it is a separate application, but rather a "feature" of the browser).

If you need the performance of applications written in C combined with the comfort of higher-level languages, use Vala :) That's what I have done, and feedparser 2.0 is the feedparser re-implemented in Vala.

Done so far: Reported a Vala D-Bus bug (thanks to Jürg Billeter for fixing this very quickly), registered a garage project, committed some source code, created a package (in Extras-Devel) and created a product page on Maemo.org Downloads.

As you can see, the UI still needs much love, but at least the infrastructure and feed handling is there for Diablo and Fremantle already, and some initial links to applications are there, too (shameless plug for gPodder, which has arrived in Fremantle Extras this week - yay!).

Plans for the next release:

Add a mechanism to register and display other RSS-based apps (the current list is hardcoded)
Contact authors of RSS readers and ask them to add feedhandler support to their apps
Add more web-based services (tell me the ones you would like to see)
Wait for Fremantle Widgets support in Vala (Philipp Zabel is working on this)
Fremantleize and Diabloize the UI
Integration with other browsers (Tear?)

Feel free to try out the "Feed Handler" from Extras-Devel and send some feedback.

gPodder 2.0 for Maemo 5 is here

2009-09-23T00:26:00.003+02:00

This release brings the Fremantle version up to the current upstream release (and all Fremantle-specific tweaks are now integrated upstream). gPodder 2.0 has been released last week, and the new package version includes all changes necessary to make gPodder look good on Maemo 5. Based on your feedback, the next version of gPodder will support Maemo 5 at the same day at the release for other environments (Linux, Maemo 4 and Windows).

Don't forget to send some feedback after you've tried it out:

Bugs should be filed here
Rate/review gPodder in Extras-Testing (when it's been promoted)
Discuss the new release on t.m.o

Go get it from Extras-Devel and (hopefully soon) Extras-Testing! Be sure to read the upgrade instructions if you have used an earlier version of gPodder for Maemo 5 before, so you don't run into problems.

Some highlights of the new release compared to the old releases:

Automatic screen rotation (Portrait mode)
YouTube user channels (try for example NokiaConversations or Rocketboom)
Filters in the AppMenu (podcast/episode list)
Visiting URLs (should open in web browser)
Opening audio and video files (should open in media player)

gPodder 2.0 for Diablo is here + Fremantle progress

2009-09-18T00:35:00.004+02:00

A new version of gPodder (2.0; "Day of the Tentacle") was released a few days ago, and it has already landed in Extras for both Chinook and Diablo. I wrote about the Maemo 4 UI changes some weeks ago, and you can enjoy them all on your tablets right now.

Tuomas Kuosmanen (tigert) has suggested some UI improvements for the Fremantle version of gPodder, and I'm currently working on implementing those ideas. First of all, there's an all-new front page:

The podcast directory (which allows you to discover new podcasts) which looked ugly previously has also been "Fremantleized", and is very usable now:

I'm still thinking about the best way to implement indicators for new, downloaded and listened episodes, but at least the GtkPaned-based split view is gone now:

The episode list is also quite unspectacular, but you can use the AppMenu to unsubscribe from the podcast (splitting up the UI in so many views automatically makes the AppMenus not so filled - good move!).

You can find some more screenshots depicting the current status of the UI in this Flickr photoset, and expect a new release next week or so.

gPodder on Maemo 4 gets a facelift

2009-09-09T01:26:00.003+02:00

I finally got around to redesign parts of the dialogs in gPodder for Maemo 4, because some dialogs were still not really finger-friendly and usable. It's still a work-in-progress, but it looks really slick already and the whole UI is completely finger-friendly.

Let me show you some highlights (gPodder 0.17.0 is the current version available in Maemo Extras and "some old version" is from April 2008):

Pretty icons and slicker UI for the main window (compared to the same window in gPodder 0.17.0 and some old version).

The updated podcast directory dialog allows easy discovery of new content (compared to the same dialog in gPodder 0.17.0 and some old version).

The new episodes dialog shows more text and has finger-friendly rows (compared to the same dialog in gPodder 0.17.0 and some old version).

You will be able to filter the episode view and only show downloaded or unplayed episodes (a new feature!).

The complete set of screenshots can be found on Flickr.