Yesterday, sitting on a beach in New Jersey, I wrote the final chapter of the first draft of the book on MeeGo on which I’ve been working since a little before Christmas.

There’s still a fair amount of redrafting to do, but it’s mostly in the bag now.

I’m sorry that patch review has suffered during this time. I will be starting to tackle the backlog now.

My editor tells me that we need reviewers. The book is about Qt on Python under MeeGo. If you know about this and would like to review, please let me know (thomas at thurman.org.uk). Apparently reviewers don’t get paid but do get their names in the book.

I shall let you know when the book gets published.

If I’ve seemed rather busy recently, it’s because I’ve been working on a book for Packt. It will be a “cookbook” of ways to solve problems on MeeGo using Python and Qt. It started out as an N900-specific book, but it’s grown in the telling.

How to place a phone call

(Of course, until a version of MeeGo with a GUI goes public, I’m testing everything on the N900.)

I’m enjoying writing it immensely. It should be out sometime around the autumn.

I released maemo robotfindskitten 1.41 to extras-testing last night.

What’s new:

• portrait mode
• tapping on the screen works more like the iphone port (thanks to Will Thompson for suggesting this)
• the screen has markings to show where to tap
• the demo button
• the help is in-process rather than spawning the browser.

Go!  Find kitten!

For a while I’ve wanted to take notes in the Shavian alphabet on my N900.  The other night I finally got around to putting in Shavian support. It was a whole lot easier than I’d imagined: about ten minutes’ work, and as so often I’m rather impressed at how flexible Maemo is. This post was enormously helpful.

You can switch alphabets using the system menu; excuse the dreadful antialiasing on the icon I whipped up in a few seconds. When you’re typing in Shavian, the Fn (bluearrow) key will let you type in the Latin alphabet briefly.

And the notes application (and Conboy) don’t have any problem with the non-BMP codepoints needed.

I would package this, but I’m not sure it would be useful to anyone but me. On the other hand, it might be helpful for other people who wanted to know how to do something similar.

In unrelated news, last night I packaged the Maemo port of Beebem which I’ve been talking about for a while.  So if you want to play around with the BBC Micro, go and have a look. Be warned that it’s very, very flaky.

I’d rather like feedback on whether and how well it works for you, and suggestions on how to fix any of the points raised in that post.

I was having a discussion earlier on IRC about the role of the N900’s App Manager. The question I’m raising is: is it legitimate to package non-programs which can be already downloaded in another way?

Here’s an example.  A film which is DFSG-free such as Sita Sings the Blues could be packaged as an app.  The package would install the .mp4 of the film, which would then appear in Media Player, but perhaps would also have an icon in the launcher.  (Of course people can already find Sita on the web and watch or download it there, giving the same effect, but then they might be more likely to find it in the app launcher.)

Far-fetched?  Not really; there are already iPhone apps which contain only a book, and there are existing Debian packages which only install free HTML and text content.

Since films are essentially documents which can be opened by Media Player, the question can be generalised: Should documents be packaged, or only apps? When someone ports Frotz to the N900, should it have its own separate download manager for Z-machine games inside it as the iPhone port does, or should each game become available in the App Manager as a separate package as used to be done on Debian?

And then there are radio stations such as Soma FM which have iPhone apps to let you listen to them.  Now of course you can already do this in the N900’s media player, so would it be worthwhile for them to package a specific N900 app which connected to their streams?  Or to make a package which only populated the media player with a list of them?

But just because people do something with the iPhone it’s not necessarily a good idea:

• media packages should probably install into /home/user/MyDocs or /media/mmc*, but the conventional place for large files in app packages is /opt, which would fill up quite quickly with a few Sita-sized films
• each package gets to run scripts as root, and this may have more security considerations than people are comfortable with just to watch a film
• people expect app stores to contain apps (don’t they?)

I think an alternative route would be to have one standard application which could maintain a browsable list of Free content, and which could download it for you as appropriate.  Maybe it could be extensible to act as a download manager for Free content for the emulators and so on, as well as just films and text.  What do you think of all this?

Photo © Caro’s Lines, cc-by-nc-sa.

I have a Maemo application called Belltower in testing, which lists towers hung for English full-circle change ringing (rather than any tower in the world which happens to contain bells). Here is a screencast of the app in use. The data comes from Dove’s Guide. It allows you to

• find all towers nearby, using the GPS
• find a tower by name
• find a tower by geographical area (country, then county, then alphabetically)
• bookmark towers and come back to them later

Here are two questions about Belltower on which I’d like your feedback.

1. The front screen currently looks like this:

But I’m wondering whether it would be more Maemo-ish to give it an interface like the app manager and the media player. Something like this (excuse the quick mockup):

What do you think?

2. Generalising Belltower. An application to find belltowers is useful for ringers, but the same code could come in useful in other ways for other people. Eiffel on t.m.o suggested that there should be a wiki which lists sets of geographical points within a particular category, such as

• belltowers
• Tube stations
• public toilets
• perhaps a chainstore might want a set of points for its own stores
• stone circles
• UFO sightings…

which could be fed automatically by sites such as Dove and openstreetmap, or just by people editing the wiki itself. Each point would have

• a name
• a short block of HTML giving facts about the point (such as, for a Tube station, which lines it was on)
• possibly a picture
• possibly a URL to follow for more information
• and always a latitude and longitude pair.

Then son-of-Belltower should be able to pull from this wiki with a custom API; the user could select which overlay they were interested in.

I think this idea has a lot of merit. I may do it. I’d like to hear your ideas about it as well.

There is a contents page for all these posts.