fast post to announce that siggy 0.4.2 has finished its testing quarantine and it’s now available on the extras repository
Planet maemo: category "feed:d0c3f0a69ab06ec734210164b425ef2b"
It’s been a bit since my last post about siggy. But don’t worry. That only means that I’ve been working hard on it
As you know, PR1.2 is there, so I’ve retaken siggy to have it ready to use.
Finally all the Qt 4.6 dependency problems have gone and the promotion to extras-testing became available. But I was missing a little detail, as I had no bugtracker link in my debian/control file. So I’ve released a new minor version (0.4.1) containing that link, uploaded all the stuff as usual (gitorious, garage), and promoted it to extras-devel.
So, help me a bit with the testing and I hope it will be soon available at the extras repository!!
It took me longer than expected, but at last I’ve been able to release the version 0.4 of siggy. As usual, you can find the source code at gitorious, and together with the armel package at Maemo garage, and I’ve also uploaded the package to extras-devel.
For those who haven’t realized, due to the upcoming PR1.2, the Maemo 5 sdk has been updated, so developers can perform the appropriate changes to their apps in order to have them ready for it. To the Qt developers this means that the brand new Qt 4.6 has replaced the old 4.5 version, so we don’t need to keep using the previous testing packages anymore. I’ve modified the application to use the new libs and everything seems to be fine… despite I haven’t been able to promote it to extras-testing yet… it seems that there is a dependency problem somewhere that I need to check. I also need to ask for a bugzilla component at the Maemo bugzilla. But don’t panic ;), I’ll work on it
… suspicious of carrying illegal dependencies XD
You may know form my last post, that I’ve released the 0.2 version of siggy. During these days I’ve been performing all the paperwork to put available to the world: creating the project at garage.maemo, creating the packages so you could download them, and also uploading them to the extras-devel repository.
After doing so, I was happily going to promote the package to extras-testing, when the border guard came and stopped me: the piggy may not go beyond here, son, he said. What does this mean? Easy: siggy depends on the 4.6 Qt libraries (to be ble to use the Maemo5 widgets). These libraries are been developed and available from extras-devel, but with different package names than the 4.5 ones (libqt4-maemo5-* instead of libqt4-*), and different installation path. This was done so the users could test the new version on the libraries without mixing them with the system 4.5 ones. But at some point, these packages will be removed from extras-devel and they will replace the 4.5 ones (this is planned for the next major update AFAIK). So, as siggy depends on those about to dissapear libqt4-maemo5-* libraries, once the next update was released, it would stop working.
I must say that I was already aware about this, and I had planned creating a new release with the new libraries as soon as the update was available, but I guess the policy of non promoting the applications to extras-testing makes sense as well
As I commented in my last post, during my investigation about the state of Qt in Maemo, I decided to start implementing an idea I’ve had in my mind since I got my N900.
I guess I should start explaining that I’m a complete disaster managing my money. I don’t really know what I do with it, or where I spend it. And living in this global-crisis time, this is serious guys! I need a way to fix it.
So I thought: wouldn’t it be great if I could store all my expenses in my brand new N900, so I could not only know where I spend my money, but also be able to know my current state compared to the month budget???? Even more!!! once I have all that information stored, I could perform every kind of weird queries over it, like how much money I spend in coffee, food, beer (mmm… not sure if I want to know about this one
During last years, I’ve been collaborating in the development of the 5th version of Maemo. As you already know, almost everything in this version has been created using GNOME technologies, so these were my tools to help with the development.
But some time ago, Nokia announced that they have changed their mind, and that the new upcoming Maemo6 will be Qt powered. And a bit after that, this new Meego initiative was announced, as the fusion of Maemo and Moblin to create the “ultimate mobile technology that will rule them all”. Well, I must say that these movements attracted my curiosity, so I decided to rescue my Qt knowledge and give a look to what’s really being done in/with Qt inside Maemo. Of course, having some knowledge about the Maemo5 environment and being the proud owner of a N900 made me start with the “what can be done with Qt in Maemo5?” question.
You may (or may not) know that Qt4 is already in your N900 if you have installed the Nokia released updates. It’s the 4.5 version. Nothing new under the sun. But the most interesting stuff is not there, but in the beta 4.6 version that lives in the extras-devel repository (how to enable it?). A lot of work has been and is being doing there to (among other things) ease the development of Qt applications and to be able to use the Maemo5 Hildon widgets from it. You can find more information about it here and here.
So, what’s the cool stuff? For the lazy ones, who don’t want to read all the documentation, these are the main ones regarding app development:
- The Maemo5 style has been implemented so, by default, all the QWidgets you use will look maemized
- Panning support for almost every QAbstractScrollArea
- Qt based desktop widgets
- App windows can be told to behave as HildonStackableWindows
- Window’s QMenuBar is automatically shown as a HildonAppMenu
- Basic Maemo5 Hildon widgets or equivalences are available to use:
- … and much more stuff I’m not mentioning here