My N9 apps and games now self-hosted and on openrepos.net

As the versions of my apps on Nokia Store grow more and more outdated, I've decided to remove the apps from there and instead self-host them on my web page and/or put them on OpenRepos.net instead. A handful of apps stay on Nokia Store; those are mostly S40 apps or apps for which a Symbian version also exists.

Here's a list of my N9 apps that you can now get for free ("deb download" is as of posting this, for new versions visit the webpage or openrepos.net):

• Billboard Standby Screen (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)
• Volume+ As Camera Button (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)
• Headset Camera Button (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)
• Personal Web Server (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)
• Mustr (web page, deb download, openrepos.net) 
• gPodder (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)

And here's a list of my N9 games that you can now get for free (again, "deb download" is as of posting this; new versions on the webpage or openrepos.net):

• qw The Game (web page, openrepos.net)
• Tennix! Redux Demo (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)
• Petals (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)
• Brain Party (web page, openrepos.net)
• Numpty Physics (web page, openrepos.net)
• Plonk (web page, openrepos.net)
• chro.mono (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)

Of these, the "greatest hits" and most useful apps/most fun games are (in my opinion): Billboard, Volume+ As Camera Button and chro.mono, but also give qw The Game and Petals a try :)

A list of all my apps on OpenRepos.net is also available.

Please note that unless otherwise noted, do not copy the .deb files and distribute them yourself, please always link to the project webpage (the page, not the file) or the openrepos.net page - this makes sure users can always download the latest version and from a known-good source (always be careful when downloading and installing .debs from random webpages). For end users who want to stay up to date and install the packages comfortably, the Warehouse client for OpenRepos.net is recommended.

For some of these apps (not games) that are not open source yet, I plan to clean up and publish the source at some point in the future, so interested developers can have a look, add features and/or port it to new platforms.

Numpty Physics 0.3.3 for Harmattan is here

Another project that has been on the back burner for a while is the new NumptyPhysics port to Harmattan ("new" because Aapo has ported it once before). One of the most important bug fixes (avoiding the multi-touch drawing error) has been committed a month ago, and

So, this weekend, Numpty Physics 0.3.3 has been released. This version includes some basic Harmattan integration work (single-instance, swipe lock integration, pause-in-background, squircle-style icon by flopjoke, ...) that will - hopefully - allow the application to also go into Nokia Store as free app (as Apps For MeeGo is still down).

NumptyPhysics is available as download on Github, or you can wait until it gets approved by Nokia Store QA and install it via the client. It's yet another project that used the shared "harmattan" organization on Github: https://github.com/harmattan/numptyphysics - feel free to improve the code and send pull requests :) Also, please report any integration issues or minor things that could be improved for Harmattan integration on the bug tracker.

Emulating multi-touch using two tablets

Kaj Grönholm's post about multi-touch motivated me to implement my previous idea of using two tablets to emulate multi-touch input (which should allow for 2 "real" multi-touch cursors). So, I quickly hacked together a modified version of the SimpleSimulator from TUIO_CPP and loaded it on a N800 and a N810. The result works quite well: (link to the video)

Again, the multitouch version of NumptyPhysics uses two cursors for dragging and three cursors for deleting, which works nicely on a multitouch table. Oh, and if you crank up the volume on that video, you will hear the sounds that we have added to NumptyPhysics recently in order to give some audible feedback about the user actions. Stay tuned for more in a few days.

Multiplayer NumptyPhysics (on a MT table)

(Again, not really tablet-related, but multiplayer could be ported to tablets eventually. Feel free to skip :)

The multi-touch table version of Tim Edmonds' NumptyPhysics gained support for multi-player modes and multi-touch drawing, dragging and deleting in the last few weeks. You can watch the evaluation video here or below.

New features and play modes include:

• Multi-player cooperative (single token and goal)
• Multi-token single-goal versus game
• Multi-token multi-goal versus game
• Draw multiple strokes at the same time
• Move drawn items with two-finger-drag
• Delete drawn items with three-finger-tap

Lesson learned: You need to get the level design right.

Word count for "multi" in this post: 10.

NumptyPhysics on a multi-touch table

(Not really tablet-related, but related to NumptyPhysics, which has been initially written for the tablets. Feel free to skip :)

The summer semester is in full swing, and we have been working on our HCI multi-touch seminar work for the last few weeks. We plan on extending Tim Edmonds' NumptyPhysics to work on multi-touch tables and adopt the UI accordingly to take advantage of multiple input cursors. We did a trial run on a real table last week:

The cude currently only emulates mouse events, but will allow real multi-touch input soon. We will release the code as soon as some bugs have been fixed and the code design got a bit more stable.