The Embedded Linux Conference 2009 is over. Small but technical conference in nice San Francisco Japantown. I will be there also participationg in Linux Foundation Collaborations summit listening to presentations.

In Tuesday evening we had a demo session where I was running maemo on Beagleboad. It looks like Beagleboard is going to be popular hacker toy. I wrote in my Hotel room small demo how to use Qt for animation to make picture carousel, it just took couple of hours and few dozens of lines of code. I run code in both Scratchbox and Beagleboard but it was possible to demonstrate actual compositing window manager feture only in Beagleboard. 

The Animated UI technologies in maeemo 5 Fremantle can be found here animated_ui_elc_2009.pdf OpenGL-ES2.0 looks like being the thing that raises more and more questons among the developers. Even if OpenGL is not new any more, many developers are still using OpenGL 1.0 style API's and now that the OpenGL-ES2.0 forces to use programable shaders, it is big change. Writing animated UI looks also being an area where a lot of new technology development happens. Now is the time for new ideas and lot of paralel development happens at the same area. Then later comes time for convergence .

The Maemo 5 Fremantle presentation is here fremantle_elc_2009.pdf.

Modified 9.4.2009 After demo someones asked source of the simple Qt animation demo i had running in beaglboard. There is source gt4.tgz, feel free to look and try it.  

The Embedded Linux Conference 2009 is over. Small but technical conference in nice San Francisco Japantown. I will be there also participationg in Linux Foundation Collaborations summit listening to presentations.

In Tuesday evening we had a demo session where I was running maemo on Beagleboad. It looks like Beagleboard is going to be popular hacker toy. I wrote in my Hotel room small demo how to use Qt for animation to make picture carousel, it just took couple of hours and few dozens of lines of code. I run code in both Scratchbox and Beagleboard but it was possible to demonstrate actual compositing window manager feture only in Beagleboard. 

The Animated UI technologies in maeemo 5 Fremantle can be found here animated_ui_elc_2009.pdf OpenGL-ES2.0 looks like being the thing that raises more and more questons among the developers. Even if OpenGL is not new any more, many developers are still using OpenGL 1.0 style API's and now that the OpenGL-ES2.0 forces to use programable shaders, it is big change. Writing animated UI looks also being an area where a lot of new technology development happens. Now is the time for new ideas and lot of paralel development happens at the same area. Then later comes time for convergence .

The Maemo 5 Fremantle presentation is here fremantle_elc_2009.pdf.

Modified 9.4.2009 After demo someones asked source of the simple Qt animation demo i had running in beaglboard. There is source gt4.tgz, feel free to look and try it.  

I have two maemo related presentations in Embedded Linux Conference in San Francisco . Monday 11:00 i have "Animated UI technologies in maemo 5" where i tell more about new UI enabling technologies like OpenGL-ES2.0, Clutter and Qt .Tuesday 2:30 pm i have "Maemo 5 mobileLinux environment with cellular connectivity" where I tell more about what is Maemo 5 .

There is in Tuesday evening demo session. I demonstrate  Beagleboard running maemo Fremantle alpha.

ELC is arranged co-operation with Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in same location  . ELC is April 6..8 and Collaboration Summit April 8..10 . I will be there around all of the week. There is some well known persons from Maemo community having presentation in Collaboration summit .

If there is maemo developers around and like to talk, feel free and come to talk. May be we can arrange some informal maemo meeting there also .

I will be in San Francisco area untill April 27, i will kep there couple of weeks my vacation .

We announce together with Maemo 5 fremantle SDK alpha Qt4.5 for Fremantle. Qt release is based on Qt4.5 release candidate 1. In this version we have all major functionality of Qt including OpenGL-ES2, Webkit with and Mysql support.We have maemo Hildon compatibility including Hildon menus, Hildon style support, Hildon input menu support. The release includes support for both Arm and x86 targets. The release is still alpha level and wish all comments, suggestions and bug reports welcome.

You can read more from maemo Qt 4 pages  . At this moment, the debian packages are in temporary repository that you get in  use including following line In your /etc/apt/sources.list. It will be in maemo extras-devel as soon than maemo.org is getting repository up.

deb http://qt4.garage.maemo.org/ fremantle extras 

The picture is Arora browser running under scratchbox x86 target. Arora browser is Qt application using Webkit engine and it is build with our Qt release but it is not part of the Qt package. In my other blog entry you can see Qt OpenGL-ES2.0 application in Beagleboard. To run OpenGL-ES2.0 applications you need to have Imagination OpenGL-ES2.0 emulation library installed.

Happy hacking with maemo Qt

I was couple of weeks ago in Gnome Asia conference and there was interesting presentation  about Google Gadgets for Linux  by James Su from Google . The google gadgets are javascript widgets that are loaded to your desktop and then they can run offline. At the moment there is least hundreds or even more Google gadgets that you can download. The Google Gadgets for Linux has GTK+, Qt and browser plugin hosts. I just decides to try how much work is needed to get them running in Internet Tablet. Little work was needed to hack autoconf files because it did not have microb-engine as alternative and then some hacks because maemo has g++ 3.4.4 when Ubuntu has 4.2.3 . After these fixes both Qt and GTK+ host compiled and run in N810 or scratchbox x86 mode.

For some reason GTK hosts did not interoperate correctly with matchbox window manager and made matchbox somehow grazy. The Qt version did not have any of these problems. Current Google gadgets is still somehow mouse centric and needs some modifications to work with touchscreen and stylus, least i have not yet found rught button from my stylus ;)  Little fixes to Qt host to work with stylus and packing stuff in a maemo .deb package and i got my alpha port working.

 It is still early alpha, basic funktionality and maemo install package is there but still lot of work is needed.

I did not yet had time to look GTK+ host more and Gadget add window in Qt also needs to be adapted to tablet display geometry.

I will contribute my patches back to Google Gadgets project and i hope that they could least integrate some non platform-specific fixes like adding microb-engine to confugure scripts to mainstream. I set up google gadgets garage.maemo.org project for maemo port. If is there community interest to participate, please join the project.

Maemo summit 2008 was great success, good "hacker spirit" conference in plce that exactly fits to this, c-base in Berlin. Karoliina made exellent video composition about maemo spirit 2008.

If you like to see video in better quality, check following Vimeo link Maemo Summit 2008 from Karoliina Salminen on Vimeo.

I think that Nokia announced there two most wanted new features to next generation maemo Fremantle, the Cellular HSPA support and OpenGL-ES 2.0 support.

For animated GUI Fremantle will have Clutter toolkit, http://www.clutter-project.org .
Clutter may be best mobile optimized graphics animation toolkit at the moment. Clutter has been designed from beginning to work in mobile devices without need for fast floating point and utilize OpenGL-ES . You can find many nice video examples about clutter from project web site. Clutter is Glib based but it has bindings to many languages including Python, C++ and Vala.

The clutter is not either user interface toolkit or just drawing canvas. Clutter itself does not provide any widgets for UI construction but it has small widget library called Tidy (which is not fully featured toolkit, but rather an example implementation about how to make your own toolkit based on Clutter). Clutter differs from ordinary drawing canvas that it is based on dynamically behaving objects, stage and actors. Actors are display objects that are shown in stage. Actors can be transformed, moved, rotated, scaled or opacity changed. All actor transformations can be controlled by dynamic timelines, paths and they can react to events. For example actor can move via predefined path with speed profile when it receives mouse click event. Actors can contain texture, as example image or even a gstreamer video as a texture. Using these features, it is relativelly easy to make really cool looking animated GUI. 

There was also announced that we will have Qt port for Fremantle in SDK beta release in May-June 2008. Our intention is to have Qt 4.5 version ported for it. Qt graphicsview provides lot of similar functionality than Clutter. Graphicswiew has similar objects, QGraphicScene and QGraphicsItem and QGraphicsItemAnimation and QTimeline for dynamic animation.  Qt software is doing a lot of optimization for Qt 4.5, let's see how it performs in Fremantle. You can read some related stories from

http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/09/22/sorry-guys/
and http://akademy.kde.org/conference/slides/aKademy2008-HowGraphicsViewWorks.odp

I had a presentation at Maemo Summit about maemo heldon Qt port Qt-Hildon-MaemoSummit08.pdf with Antonio Aloisio and maemo tutorial  "Introduction to maemo hacking". The tutorial material will be here soon.