The summer is slowly coming to an end and so is Google Summer of Code. I have been patching up Transifex-Mobile for final release and it seems to be quite usable at the moment. Now I need your help with promotion to Maemo Extras repository.

Since I couldn’t get screencast applet working properly, here goes a bunch of screenshots and some notes. The main screen mimics Transfex‘s dashboard view. The user can see her locks there, browse projects etc. Left-top button shows user’s first and last name plus e-mail address. Verify that those are correct before pushing any files back to server. PO-file metadata is updated based on this information. In current release editing local PO-files is also enabled, just tap on “Open local file” in the menu.

Browsing projects is rather straightforward, to search tap on “Search” in the menu.

Each component in a project contains files, or translations to be more abstract. File list view shows progress for each file.

Each file contains a set of strings. In the left-bottom corner there are some buttons for filtering. A string can have three statuses – green means translated string, red means not translated and blue is used mark fuzzy strings, this means that the string is basically translated but might need to be checked one more time.

String editor view provides all the things you need to translate one string. With the buttons on the bottom user can navigate through strings in the current stringset, revert back to the original one, copy source string, use Google Translate to automatically translate the string and finally set the string status either to translated, fuzzy or untranslated.

That’s it folks!

Transifex-mobile first public release is available for download! Enable maemo extras-devel repository on your N900 and install package transifex-mobile. Icon should pop up in the menu afterwards. Current version supports logging in to Transifex.net, pulling PO-files, editing them and pushing them back to server.

I am very much interested in your feedback, dear translator! The package installs files under /opt/transifex-mobile and if for some reason the app doesn’t want to start, fire up terminal and run /opt/transifex-mobile/main.py.

You can track my GSoC 2010 project status on a wiki page with more detailed information here. Screencast will follow up in a day or so. Stay tuned!

Friday afternoon me and Estobuntu guys started driving from Tallinn towards Tampere. Unfortunately we didn’t have amphibious vehicle at our disposal so we had to take a boat to cross Gulf of Finland. We arrived here around 9pm – luckily there was some free beer left!

Now the first day of Akademy 2010 conference is slowly coming to an end. There has been dozens interesting and useful lectures. Several Free Software projects are represented – KDE, Maemo, MeeGo, Qt and so on. Salmon for lunch was great, altough it could have been free!

Flickr photo stream has great pictures of the event. In the evening there is going to be a party – hopefully with free beer!

UPDATE:

On monday I took a test and I passed it – I am now Nokia Certified Qt Developer. All the conference attendees could have it for free.

My GSoC project is progressing step-by-step and now I got to this point where I had to add some installation scripts to make it easier to install the application. For Python applications there used to be Distutils which has been gradually replaced by Setuptools. Setting up Setuptools is rather confusing in the beginning.

For example if you’re shipping random data files with your application and accessing those files by reading them as regular files, you have to mark the package as not zip-safe. There are some options to read those files from the zip file altough I am not sure if this is possible with Qt4, more specifically QIcon. There is more discussion about packaging your Python application and reading packaged files here.

Getting icons, modules and other files properly included took some time. For arbitrary files I used “data_files” parameter. For Python modules inside a directory “packages”. For modules in single file form “py_modules”. To automagically generate /usr/bin/transifex-mobile I used “console_script” inside “entry_point”. The resulting setup.py is accessible here, hopefully this saves some time who’s doing exactly the same thing.

So the application pretty much handles PO files, you can open them, edit strings, filter, search them and save the file. On N900 I am having some issues with QFileDialog, it seems to be extremely slow and sluggish. You can try out the application on your PC by:

git clone git://gitorious.org/transifex-mobile/transifex-mobile.git
cd transifex-mobile
python main.py


Setuptools should handle installation from source like this:

sudo python setup.py install

Afterwards you should be able to start application easily, since init script is added to /usr/bin:

transifex-mobile


I added some custom commands to setup.py, for example cleaning script to remove temporary files from the source tree:

python setup.py clean


I also made an attempt to add support for Debian package generation. Unfortunately the file/directory paths are messed up in the resulting Debian package:

python setup.py dch # Rotate changelog
python setup.py dpkg_buildpackage # Generate *.deb


I would be thankful to anyone who could help out with testing. Any comments about the path mess in Debian package are also welcome.

Git tip: I had some commits in my Git repository with incorrect e-mail address. I found cure for this here:

git filter-branch -f --env-filter "export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME='Lauri Võsandi'; export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL='lauri.vosandi@gmail.com'" HEAD

So I’ve been digging around to get back on the track with development on Maemo. Appearenty much of Maemo specific stuff is not available in PyQt4 at the moment. This includes features like auto-orientation of windows and so forth. The guys at #maemo suggested using PySide. PySide is basically Nokia funded rewrite of PyQt4. Main reason for rewrite was PyQt4′s license which is rather restrictive for Nokian use. Additionally it packs some extra bells and whistles for N900 development.

Fair enough – I am convinced that I need to switch from PyQt4 to PySide. Appearently there is currently a big mess with Qt packages. The Qt4 C++ libraries are based on 4.5.x branch but PySide packages depend on 4.6.x. I ended up reflashing my N900 and installing Qt 4.6 packages from fremantle SDK repository by following instructions here.

Afterwards I installed PySide from here.

I have set up Git repository at gitorious.org, hopefully somebody will add it to maemo.gitorious.org also. Currently repostiory is empty. I am working on some bits to make it work with beta.transifex.net. That’s where Transifex guys are trying out new version of Transifex which incorporates API and other cool stuff! Until I get Transifex client for Maemo working you can check out the new online translation editor there.

Now getting to my second point – I need Your input, suggestions and ideas to make Transifex client for Maemo a killer-app for N900. You are very much welcome to comment this blog post or drop me an e-mail with your thoughts.

You can start watching my repository here