gPodder 3.1.2 for MeeGo Harmattan

It's another month, and (given the monthly release schedule of the app) it's not really a surprise that a new version of gPodder has been released. This is mostly a bugfix release, but brings one very useful feature to gPodder: The ability to hide downloaded podcasts from the Music app. While this is nothing new to command-line fans who edit tracker-miner-fs.cfg by hand, there has not been an end-user friendly way to do it. Now there is: You can just flip a switch in the gPodder Settings and hide the podcasts from the Music app (which does nothing more than adding or removing the gPodder directory to tracker-miner-fs.cfg's IgnoredDirectories list), which is especially useful in a situation where your downloaded podcast accumulate (this happens to me right now - less time to listen to podcasts) and you play your music in "Shuffle all" mode.

Other improvements include a small fix for the episode list filter button for locales where the text sometimes became longer than the button:

As you can see, in the left screenshot (gPodder 3.1.1) the "Hide deleted" text (in German: "Gelöschte verstecken") goes over the toolbar button. To "fix" this, the toolbar button has been made wider (right screenshot, gPodder 3.1.2), which (in my opinion) also looks a bit nicer.

The rest of the improvements include some fixes to the CLI, updated and added translations, and some minor build system fixes - read the full changelog if you want the gory details :)

The MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan package for gPodder 3.1.2 has been uploaded to Apps For MeeGo and Nokia Store already, it should hit Apps For MeeGo Staging in a few hours (please do the QA procedure for it then, so it can land in Apps For MeeGo proper) and it should hit Nokia Store in a few days when QA has finished.

Billboard now available in Nokia Store

At the last Hack-A-N9 meetup, I've been working on a test app to show the currently-playing song. This has then been extended to a fully-fledged app that is easily configurable for the user, so that non-developers could use it (after all, hacks and scripts existed before that did the same thing).

The app is called "Billboard", and its goal is to provide useful information on the low-power-mode screen of the N9 in a way that "normal" users can use it. It also tries to be very lightweight on resources, and smart about updates so that updates are only made when needed, which saves battery power.

Billboard website: http://thp.io/2012/billboard/
Nokia Store link: http://store.ovi.com/content/279408

The currently-released version on Nokia Store is version 1.0.0, and an update (version 1.0.1) with some fixes to allow co-operation with MeeCast, fLPMC and other applications has been uploaded today and is currently waiting in the Ovi QA queue.

There's also a support thread on TMO in case you need help or have suggestions.

Tizen Conference 2012 Review

The Linux Foundation sponsored my trip to the Tizen Conference 2012 in San Francisco last week, and I'm supposed to blog about it. Also, I think it's good to share what I've seen with fellow Maemo/MeeGo community members, even if Tizen is something different. You can find my photos of the event on Flickr.

As with last year's MeeGo Conference 2011, the Tizen Conference took place in the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, the same hotel that's also featured in Mel Brooks' High Anxiety from 1977. I arrived on Sunday evening, but in contrast to last year's event, there were no weekend activities (the Hacker Lounge was already open, though), and the event itself only really began on Tuesday, with Monday afternoon and evening used for registration and a keynote by Jim Zemlin.

Tuesday started with a proper keynote that showed actual Tizen demos, which was nice (it was the Tizen Conference, after all). Throughout the day, the demo sessions were open where companies like ProFUSION showed off demos like a fridge interface and experimental JavaScript bindings to use EFL (not as nice as QML, but better than using EFL from the C API).

On Wednesday morning, the Linux Foundation was giving Tizen developer devices to attendees, with a remote shell accessible via the "sdb" tool from the Tizen SDK (similar to "adb" in the Android world). Oh, and basic X11 tools like "xeyes" and "xclock" were pre-installed, allowing for quickly checking how normal X applications would work in the window manager. Also on Wednesday was my talk about gPodder on mobile devices and the gpodder.net web service - I'll post the slides soon.

On Wednesday evening, Quim Gil and the local Qt chapter Silicon Valley organized the Qt Overlapping event for Qt developers being in town for either the Tizen Conference or the Ubuntu Developer Summit. After coming back, the Hacker Lounge was still open, so we played a round of ping pong until the early hours. I left on Thursday evening and had some time for sightseeing in the afternoon - check out the photos if you are interested.

After coming back from the conference, my first goal was to get Python and some GUI running. That's done now: You can run Python and PyGame on Tizen. Similar to this, PySide should also be possible once one takes the time to get it to compile it using the Scratchbox2-based SDK. I've also got Qt 4.8.1 running on the device, but of course it needs some more polishing and integration.

Still, Tizen has a long and challenging road ahead until it will become useful (from what we see now), but maybe they will get something good going. As for now, there's still Harmattan and all the great things about it (and compared to the supposed-to-have-a-future Tizen, the supposed-to-be-dead Harmattan looks very, very good today and works really great, no question about that!).

It was good to meet again some people that I knew since the beginning of Maemo events in 2008 and new people that have been involved in MeeGo recently. Looking forward to doing some more hacks on Harmattan, and maybe also looking forward to that wind-named future OS from that company that already brought you wind-named OSes a few years ago. Thanks for the great time so far :)