The first official day of the MeeGo Spring conference started with a two-hour keynote by Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. While MeeGo is a Linux Foundation project, nobody from the Linux Foundation is formally involved on a day-to-day basis in the management and leadership of the project, which is being left to Intel (and, previously, Nokia). Because of this, Mr. Zemlin stands in as the Linux Foundation's public face for MeeGo.

I've gone beyond the playing with QML stage and now want to port my first Maemo 5 application, Attitude, to Qt Quick; with the aim of having it run on Maemo, Symbian, MeeGo and Android.

Development environment

I'm using the Qt SDK 1.1 beta on Ubuntu 10.10. I'll deal with developing with this in another post (Eclipse keybindings, the combination of graphical and source editing (and the limitations therein), issues to bear in mind). Here I want to deal with deployment. Qt Creator offers a number of targets:

• Desktop (not relevant to this app)
• Maemo
• Simulator
• Remote compiler

I chose the last three. On Linux, there is no native support for deploying or compiling for Symbian. Compiling can be dealt with by the "remote compiler", but what about deploying?

I can, now, to the following; all from within Qt Creator:

• Compile Qt applications and get a signed SIS file for installation
• Install the SIS file on to a USB-connected N8
• Start the application and get its console output back in the IDE.

Configuring the remote compiler

1. Get a Forum Nokia account, if you do not have one.


2. Install runonphone.


3. Download this script: runonphone.wrap, and put it on your PATH (make sure it's executable).



4. In Qt Creator, select Tools > Options... > Projects > Remote compiler and authenticate with your Forum Nokia details:

   



5. Open your project, and select Projects > Remote Compiler > Build. Ensure Signed is checked.

   



6. Switch to the Run tab and create a new deployment and run configuration.

   • Command: runonphone.wrap
   • Working directory: $BUILDDIR
   • Arguments: either install (for deploy) or run.
   

Configuring the device

1. Go to <QT_SDK>/Symbian/sis/Symbian^3.


2. Send the SIS files under Qt/4.7.2, QtMobility/1.1.0 and TRK to your phone (e.g. via Bluetooth) and install via launching them.


3. Go to the main launcher menu and launch RnD Tools > TRK.


4. Under Options > Settings ensure USB is set as the connection method.


5. Connect your Symbian phone via a USB cable.


6. Select Options > Connect.

Then, when you deploy and run in Qt Creator the SIS file should be sent over the usbserial connection and launched on the device.

Unfortunately, if there's a problem you can sometimes end up in a state where you need to kill -9 the processes blocking the port. It also doesn't seem to like working on /dev/ttyUSB1, only /dev/ttyUSB0 - but these could all be interrelated problems. Improvements to the script very welcome!

Please forgive the cheesy title :-) As everyone wrapping up the conference has said, it was a great place; well organised and a fantastic atmosphere. Here are some of my bullet point thoughts:

At the MeeGo Conference in Dublin? Want to come and see how MWKN is put together every Sunday evening?

Come along to the D4 Ballsbridge, following signs for "MeeGo Conference 2010 Early Bird Event" and we're in the bar next to the ballroom.

You might want to bring a beer from the Dubliner, as the bar here's not (yet?) open.

As Ryan and I - editors of MWKN - will be at the MeeGo Conference on Sunday evening, we'll try and find some space to get together to put together the issue. We'd love to have some help!

What's MWKN?

M* Weekly News is a weekly news digest from the MeeGo/Maemo worlds; inspired by LWN and Wine Weekly News.

Throughout the week, contributors ping over links and short titles to the @mwkn account on Twitter. These then get expanded with quotes, de-duplicated etc. on a Sunday evening for the issue to be published on Monday morning.

The idea is that the community is far too large for any one person to know everything going on, so we can crowdsource the interesting bits which are happening on IRC, the mailing lists, the fora, elsewhere on the Internet etc.

Want to get involved?

Getting involved as a contributor, or an editor (to help with putting the issue together), couldn't be easier; and we'd love to have more people involved.

Please feel free to get involved ahead of time or - if you're going to be around in Dublin on Sunday evening - let me know, and you can either come along and help edit the issue; give us moral support or just get a flavour of what it is we do.

Today I was at a Qt for N8 Training/Introduction here in Amsterdam. It was a small setup with people from Nokia Benelux.

The training covered Qt for Mobile platforms.
http://events.forum.nokia.com/invitation/qtforn8amsterdam/agenda

The Qt Mobile platform

There are great differences between Symbian and Maemo in terms of platform architecture but Nokia managed to create a single API that make most differences vanish. Credits go to the Qt toolkit. This single API might the key to the success this platform needs. It will also allow Nokia to focus on a single platform for developers. With The SDK I used today it is already possible to target the different platforms Nokia currently has without much effort. So What does that mean? It means that Nokia can offer one single attractive SDK (on windows,Linux and Mac) with different developers in mind (c++ and the HTML/js people) and this sounds like quite a good offering to me.

It must have been quite a huge effort already and we are not there yet. Linux users can't yet develop
for Symbian (as I discovered during the day) and windows user are pushed to use remote services to do the hardcore maemo debian packaging.

As I already did some Qt before I decided to focus a little QML and create a mock for the Linux OutLaws CrapAlert app (something like http://crapalert.org/). I managed to get a "UI" working very fast. After that things went down my n900 is dead and I unsuccessfully tried to install the application on the N8 from Linux.

I played with the N8 but things did not work as I expected. I even surprised myself by thinking "what are all these buttons for, do I really need to learn what they do" while I usually like lots of buttons. Overall the N900 is way better (as expected).

Still when going home I had the feeling to have learned about a useful platform with enough devices "in the wild" to make it very interesting.

Some notes I made during the day(I might be wrong here):
-I think the Qt Mobility API should not end up in Qt. it clutters the very nice Qt API's with non relevant stuff for a cross platform UI. (Effectively they are creating a cross platform platform...)
-Qt Lacks serious IPC/RPC functionality
-Bonus points for "forum Nokia", During the day I filed a bug in their JIRA database and did get an answer within 20 minutes. Now that is fanatical support!.

Get started here:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/Library/Tools_and_downloads/

Nokia's N8, a Symbian^3 device, comes with a service called Here and Now. This reads the cell tower information you're currently connected to and opens a web page detailing the current events (cinema listings and weather, for example) near you. I've done a quick port to Maemo 5 and the N900.

Once installed, you can launch it like any other application:

Without using a GPS, it sends your approximate position to Nokia's servers and shows you what's currently going on:

Voting has now opened for the next Maemo Community Council and, once again, I'm standing.

Last year I won, and the council chose me as their chair (hence the quietness of this blog compared with the Council blog, or even MWKN).

Please vote, the Council this next term will be very important in setting the tone of maemo.org, and the way the Maemo community can work with (and, where desired, transition to) the MeeGo community.

You can read my declaration, my response to EIPI's set of questions covering numerous topics. Then, don't forget to vote. Contact Dave Neary if you have not received your voting token.

The election period has started for the next Maemo Community Council election and we have a number of excellent candidates, including - even if I do say so myself - me ;-)

In a brief break from Hermes-related Maemo work, I was inspired by Manfred Weiss' MyMenu to create an auto-organising menu application for the N900:

Catorise organises the application menu to have top-levels corresponding to the sections in Application Manager. Features:

• Uses the section icons from the current theme, falling back to the default theme if none available.
• Determines an application's section from the same information the packager used when uploading it to Extras.
• Keeps track of application installs/uninstalls.
• Entirely non-destructive: remove the package and everything goes back to how it was before.
• "All" and "Other" sections, just as in the App Manager, to provide additional access routes.

So, with Catorise the section you find an application's icon is the same you used to install it!

It is currently in Extras-devel. This should, therefore, only be tested by people who are willing to suffer potential data loss, hair loss and the eating of babies.

It's largely feature complete, however there are some known problems/future developments:

• Applications installed from Ovi will go into the "Other" section, due to the way Ovi on Maemo has been designed. I've some thoughts on how to work around this, though.
• Changing the theme will only update the icons on the next application install/removal.
• A quick GUI editor could be created to manipulate /opt/catorise/menu which is a simple text file cache to speed-up rebuilding. This would allow the user to shuffle the apps to best suit their use cases.