Quim Gil interviewed on FLOSS Weekly

For all of you who are subscribed to FLOSS Weekly with gPodder, you might have already noticed it: On Saturday, the long-awaited interview with Quim Gil from Nokia has been published. You can grab it from here as MP3 file directly or (even better ;) download gPodder from Maemo Extras and subscribe to FLOSS Weekly.

Optimizing the code of a SDL game

Maybe you have tried it already: Tennix has been available for Maemo for quite some time now. The current version still has room for improvement (performance-wise), and the gameplay part runs a bit slow. That's why our team uses it as an optimization target for a course at the uni until the end of January.

Two benefits: You get a playable, fast tennis game for your tablets, and we get a bit more proficient in writing more efficient code and making better use of the current hardware. This will obviously also benefit the Desktop version of Tennix, as both use the same codebase.

I hope to be able to draw some conclusions and give you an overview of what we were able to do in a few weeks. Until now, try out Tennix and get used to its (relatively slow) speed, so that you feel the improvements when the optimized release is out :)

libmokoui2 (+Python bindings) in Diablo Extras

For the next version of gPodder, I plan to have a better suited user interface for the tablets. For this, I needed a finger-scrolling replacement of GTK+'s ScrolledWindow. libmokoui2 provides just that, and it's now available in Diablo Extras.

The package is based on Ubuntu's libmokoui2 source package, but I have removed the doc package and the Vala bindings, because you can read the docs on your computer or online, and I didn't want to mess with Vala (yet).

It also did not build on Chinook, maybe someone can have a look at the build logs? It's working fine on Diablo, though. Example code in Python is also available.

Remote-control Vagalume via a web server

I am using Vagalume to listen to last.fm on my N800 that is hooked up to the stereo. During that time, I'm sitting at my lappy doing random things. When a song I don't like comes up, I have to get up and hit the "skip" button. Not anymore! Enter "vagalumisierung.py"...

This little Python script sets up a little HTTP server on port 8242 (that's "VAGA" if you type it on your mobile phone), receives song changes from Vagalume and can carry out basic operations like play, skip, ban, love, etc..

How to use? Copy it to your tablet, install python2.5 and python2.5-dbus and start it in background (with "python2.5 vagalumisierung.py &"). Then, point your browser to http://yourtabletshostname:8242/ (a good time to set up Avahi correctly, so you can use "tabletname.local"). You can now see the currently-playing song and remote-control Vagalume via HTTP over your Wifi-Style connection!

Oh, and here's the link to download the script: vagalumisierung.py

If people love this, I could enhance this a bit and put a GUI around it and create a Maemo package.

gPodder 0.14.0 in Maemo Extras

Just released gPodder 0.14.0 today, packaged it for Maemo and promoted it to Maemo Extras. Highlights: Improved the responsiveness of the UI, so gPodder does not freeze so often. Also: The "Never download" button in the new episodes dialog might come in handy. Please report all bugs you encounter, so we have a chance of fixing them! Waiting for your feedback. -- Thomas

gPodder, Where Are Thou?

People have started asking when the new gPodder version for Maemo will appear. Installing Scratchbox is tedious, and I've re-installed a few weeks ago. A new release should be out soon, and I'll be rolling a new Maemo package then. And we have fixed some annoyances in the new version...

First, you complained about us having hardcoded the download folder to /media/mmc2/. Well, gPodder still uses this as the default download folder, but you can now simply move this folder from the SD card to your the external card (mmc1), to your home folder (/home/user) or even to an attached USB key (you can do this with a special USB female adapter). So, when you want to download podcasts to the exchangeable SD card on your N810 (or the external card on your N800), you can do so now :)

Another problem that people did not like was the fact that gPodder stored its settings and subscriptions on the SD card. This means that the Nokia Backup application didn't backup these things. So, the new version stores its settings in the user's home folder. This means that Nokia Backup and Restore should take care of you gPodder settings and subscriptions :)

All this awesomeness (or rather "less uglyness than before") will get to you with the release of 0.14.0, which should hopefully be out this coming week.

You won't get the sexy, human-readable folder names just yet. We have to work out some issues with the patches, but we are currently working on it. In the mean time (this also works with the current version!), you can set the "experimental_file_naming" advanced configuration option to "True" in order to get at least good file names (good for episodes that do not have ID3 tags).

Also, please don't hesistate to report any bugs and feature requests for gPodder to http://bugs.gpodder.org/, so we can help you and you have a better podcasting experience on your Tablet.

Another plug: Try Panucci with your podcasts if you have not already done so.

Maemopad+ with search function

It has gotten quiet around Maemopad+ lately, but there are some nice features in SVN that should be released with the next release, most notably: a search entry in the toolbar that will highlight matching memos.

This will come in handy for users that use the checklist feature for all kinds of lists (Someday/Maybe, Ideas, TODOs, shopping lists, etc.). Obviously the search feature won't work on the contents of sketch notes, but text memos and checklists work fine.

What are you missing in Maemopad+ that would make you much more productive with it?