This is just a quick blog reply to requests to show the code of the Calculator of my previous blog post. I would gladly share the source in a nice zip as well, but maemo.org wiki doesn't allow zip uploads (DOH!), so you'll have to accept badly commented wiki page.

Here be the WIKI.

Some thoughts about QML

QML reminds me a lot of Adobe Flex on Flash - my personal favourite tool for creating anything. Only difference is that QML is more suited for application development, as it allows full access to all system components - and is easily extensible with pretty much any normal qt components.

Read more on the snapshot:
http://qt.nokia.com/doc/qml-snapshot/
and from Kenneths excellent blog on the subject:
http://kenneth.christiansen.googlepages.com/DUI.html

Anyway, intro aside, I have also started doing a bit of coding now on QML and I really love it. It has nice separation of the declarative part (QML) and the logic part (either qt components or javascript). You can easily embed javascript to the qml code, but the clever guys at qt labs have made sure that you can only have tiny snipplets there. A welcome separation.

What has also been fun is that I have done ALL the coding on the pygtkeditor, so no coding on the mac, and all the coding on n900. Well, I did work on some button gfx a bit on mac, but that's it. Painting is not coding ;)

Anyway, take a look at the result of less than 400 lines of code. And the code is clean, sweet and easy to extend. Check out those transitions! They are 10 lines of code for the advanced, and about the same to get the fancy glow effect done to the buttons.



What I am really eagerly waiting for is a chance to see a proper flash-like editor for qml.

Now theme maker is on the Beta level. You can actually consider creating themes with this one and give those to your friends and not only to your enemies.

What really was improved:
1. Optification - Theme maker theme deb files are optified so they don't eat any root
2. Icons are also optified
3. Fonts work again (and are stored in user home, which is as good as optification)
4. Theme selection works now without need for device reboot


What is missing:
1. build-deb needs to be added - not a biggie
2. Icons need user to restart the device - it's a bug in the launcher code, that is being fixed by Nokia tam .
3. Application manager new icons are not yet themable - doh! - I cannot release features that haven't officially been released. Damn!
4. Theme based transition tuning is not yet part of theme maker - see above

I guess the bottom line is that I'll be releasing a new version soonish, but you'll at least now know what is going to be in there. I'll probably make a 1.2.6 version that fixes at least the part 3. by having a copy of the icons from the base theme.

Download here: Garage

Have a test with nuvofre in the same location.

I'll upload some shots later on. Carry on!


EDIT: You Must delete your old theme folder for theme maker to be able to optify the content. So extract that zip to a new folder and start there from scratch. Never re-use old theme maker folders.

Everybody who has seen the n900 with english/generic keyboard thinks all keyboards will have arrow keys. Well, they don't. And this sucks big time for any gaming applications, as they cannot assume that keyboard has specific direction keys that would actually work. In most of the keyboards, there are only left and right keys. While up and down are behind fn+left/right.

Only thing we can really do to fix this 'great kb layout design' is in my opinion:
Forget that we ever even had the arrow keys and start using the usual WASD combo for the default direction controls. And to balance the AB,XY buttons, we should probably use the I,O,K,L buttons. All of these buttons are the same in all kb layouts that I know. This is a pretty balanced layout, but again, not so easy to discover. Grr.. I hate the kb layout mistake that we made. Sane solution would have been to move the extra letters behind fn key.

Otoh, I have finnish kb on the device, but I have switched to english layout so that I can have a sane d keys on the device. But it feels confusing.

On a whole different note, I just read an interesing articles on DUI, the UI frameworks of Harmattan written by Zchydem:

Part one:
http://zchydem.enume.net/?p=128
Part two:
http://zchydem.enume.net/?p=149

I'm eagerly waiting for part three.

We are also preparing for a small update for the N900 owners to come really soon, which is going to keep me busy next week in preparation of it. Let's see when we can deliver it to you guys. After we have released that, I'll start blogging a bit more on what is up for the end of the year update and what is brewing for the other near future updates.

A new version of theme maker contains a few more icons, fixes bg issue with media player bg, add new bgs for clock, call-ui and app manager, has better example files, now also PSD files are included, of which an example above, showing the cut layers and the example layers for the backgrounds template.

What else. Linux version now is also able to create debs, but seems to need a bit more mem that the shell script gives, so first build your theme, then close theme maker, reopen it, and the click on make debian button. I'll check if I can sort the memory issues at some point on linux as well.

There is a short suggestion text document included on how windows users can develop until I get the debian creation working on windows again.

Oh, link: Garage downloads section

[Edit] Always rebase your theme template, icon and background files on top of the new ones. I have again changed the resolution of the bg template.

Thanks to the great developers of nrnoksnes, we have now snes running on n900 fullscreen. Wiimote supported, as well as tv out.

take a look at the video:



[Edit] I ported wiicontrol on the weekend just to get this awesomness up and running. While it's great that you can play games on the go and to be able to continue later from your couch with wiimote, you can also just bring your wiimote with you and use that to play games. It's just perfect.

And kids, don't pirate games.

N900 is now out and we all want to make it even cooler. Even more My device than it already is. To the majority of the world that probably moot point as you don't yet have one, but you will. Soon. And then you want to make it more You. Enter Theme Maker N900.

I have updated Theme Maker (from now on, TM) to fully support N900 Theming. Not only can you convert the buttons, toolbars, all the widgets, but TM themes also convert the fonts, the icons and bacground images.

Wwhat is so different from before. Base theme template is larger than before. It's mostly legacy support stuff and you only really need to touch the right third of the template if you are lazy. In addition you will have two new templates: icons and backgrounds.

Lemme show these to you:



The icon template contains all the apps you have by default in the launcher and also for different mime types, devices and some control panel items. I'll be adding a few more later on. Ideas for good candidates are welcome. The reason these are not Nokia icons is that we need to have a CC basis for the icons so that you can work on top of them. Nokia Icons are of course strictly copyright Nokia, so I just used these beautiful Oxygen icons to set a good example for you.


Backgrounds contains on the top part a full 4 screens wide image (3200x480), so you can easily put an image that pans nicely on the device. Under it there are / will be some bgs for some additional apps.

So, even if you don't have N900 yet, I urge you to download theme maker and the example tempaltes and start hackign for a new theme, because you will surely be able to install it on your beautiful N900 very soon.

Theme Maker comes with two default templates, one for dark themes and another for light themes. This should set up the basis nicely for your new theme.

Link to download:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=36

[Edit: Forgot to mention that theme maker requires bigger java heap on linux than by default. OSX app handles it nicely, just doubleclick to open, but on linux you need to start with -Xmx1024M parameter. I'll add a .sh script to next release to easen the pain of linux users. Windows version will follow soonish. You can edit the theme template anyway already and that's the most important thing. ]

It's out!
http://maemo.nokia.com

I'm so proud of what we have achieved in maemo team.

Most of the media players need album art. So, ever application does the handling of the art by themselves (just like getting the metadata). For the metadata, we have tracker to get the metadata - one less headache. For the album art, we have tracker, hildon-thumbnailer and a standard to help alleviate another headache.

I haven't been blogging much about Fremantle yet. But, yesterday there was a question on the maemo developers mailinglist about what files are indexed to the trackers metadata database, so I though to clear out that issue and also to tell a bit about how your app can use tracker.