As I already said the other day in Twitter, I became Qt Ambassador because of Aura. The only problem is that is a project-person program, meaning that it is granted to a person because of having worked on a project. Aura was a project developed by three Igalians, who were Miguel, Víctor and me and I consider a bit unfair that it was granted only to me because they deserve it as much as I do.

The procedure I followed was:

• Applying with Aura
• When that was accepted, I submitted Aura project page.
• After the publication I was told that I was going to receive the Qt Ambassador Merchansise

Does anybody know if more people can become ambassadors for the same project and how?

Overview

Recently I’ve spent a little time getting the Ogre3D engine into a state where it’ll work on the Nokia N9 and N950 MeeGo phones.

To test the port out a bit more extensively I decided it’d be a good idea to try porting an existing game, at which point rzr suggested Those Funny Funguloids. So after a fair amount of hacking to make it compatible with my version of Ogre and to make the controls work reasonably on a touch screen device I have a playable version.

The aim of the game is to collect mushrooms (…IN SPACE), and bring them back to your base without running into any asteroids. Only mushrooms of the same colour as your base are added to your score and your base changes colour each level (but you can hang on to mushrooms between levels and score them later). The controls are fairly simple, touch the left side of the screen to turn left, the right side to turn right and the middle to start moving.

When I have a bit more time I’ll see about writing a little tutorial on making use of my modified version of Ogre3D to create 3D applications and games in a way that’s easy to distribute.

Screenshots

Video

Video of gameplay

Download

funguloids_1.0.6-4_armel.deb

Source

Modified version of Funguloids 1.06
Modified version of Ogre 1.7.4

In the last few weeks, as part of my work here at Igalia, I’ve been playing a bit with the concept of hybrid applications. In this case, I’ve created a basic prototype of a mail application, with its user interface completely written using JQuery Mobile, and with backend code in C and GObject. The result is iwkmail.

Screencast of iwkmail in action

Though it’s a simple experiment, I’ve added some mail basic functionality, so I could try to catch as much as possible of real requirements for how  we could improve the developers WebKit+GNOME experience creating hybrid applications.

My first conclusion is that it’s surprisingly easy and fast to develop such applications. Second, I could reuse tons of source code and modules from my old projects. This approach surely provides a way to create cool GNOME applications, using the most fashionable web client technologies.

So, you’ll get:

• Browsing messages
• Read/unread flags
• Deleting messages
• Creating and deleting mail accounts.
• Storage protocols supported: IMAP and POP.
• For sending mails, we support SMTP. There’s support for an outbox holding the messages to be sent.
• A plain text composer, allowing to add attachments.

The UI is completely written in Javascript + HTML, using JQuery Mobile.

The backend side is done using Camel library inside Evolution Data Server, so we rely on a library well tested for more than 10 years.  All the code related to this is implemented in C+GObject, and I reused a good set of code from Modest, the default mail client for Nokia N810 and N900. I’ve got involved on its development for 3 years, so that’s a bunch of code I know well enough.

For communication, I use the AJAX-like JSONP protocol, and custom SoupRequest URI scheme handlers. Basically I expose some methods as iwk:addAcccount, iwk:getMessage, etc, and arguments are passed as usual in a web request. The result I obtain from this calls is a JSON object with the results of the call. Simple, and works very well.

I’ve pushed the work on github: https://github.com/jdapena/iwkmail. Feel free to try it!

Oh, I guess it’s very obvious that I did not spend too much time thinking on the project name… So, anyone proposing something that matches the IM acronym (I don’t want to rewrite the class names!) would deserve a beer.

Last, lots of thanks to Igalia for giving me the opportunity to do this experiment. As usual, fun stuff to work with.

The number of available phone applications is growing at top speed. I am trying to learn new languages and love traveling, so a good grasp of several languages is what I really need.



Recently I came across a superb course of English language history and begin to understand better grammar rules and language phenomena.

Hopefully there will be more other applications for language learning and I will review them with great pleasure.

Front Page

Delays in getting Maemo Community Council election started

An administrative mix-up seems to be to blame for delaying the start of the Maemo Community Council election, which was scheduled to start on May 6. There has been lots of back-and-forth on the forum thread about whose responsibility it was to start the voting process and who should be initiating communication to get it started now. After a bit of a rough start it seems the wheels are moving on the process, thanks in part to the level-headed Quim Gil stepping in. It remains to be seen when the voting will actually begin, but hopefully there will at least be an announcement made soon with an updated timeframe.

Read more (talk.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Delays in getting Maemo Community Council election started
2. Applications
   • Plonk running on BlackBerry Playbook
   • Update on reverse engineered WhatsApp port to N9
3. Development
   • Qt Creator 2.5.0 released
   • Why bundling apps which can be installed via Extras is a bad idea for Maemo CSSU
   • Why "shell apps" and HTML5 apps are a bad idea
   • Sending emails in Harmattan with Qt/QML
4. In the Wild
   • First Tizen Conference gets mixed reviews
   • Nokia N9 removed from Nokia's Finnish website
   • N9 increasingly available direct from US retailers
5. Announcements
   • Late - real-time public transit info for North America
   • Mobile check-in app for SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) now available to download for N9
   • KhtSimpleText editor available for N9
   • last.fm client under development for Harmattan
   • USbS - Useful Standby Screen - gives configurable N9 sleep info

The Linux Foundation sponsored my trip to the Tizen Conference 2012 in San Francisco last week, and I'm supposed to blog about it. Also, I think it's good to share what I've seen with fellow Maemo/MeeGo community members, even if Tizen is something different. You can find my photos of the event on Flickr.

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-05-07 through 2012-05-13

In the context of a personal ad-hoc app (I will come to that later) that I wrote for my Nokia N9, I needed to send an email to a specific person with an attachment. After the first research at Harmattan APIs you come to QMessageService.

The first thing I did was writing Mixed QML/Qt object that I could instantiate from the QML code so that I could do something like:

Message {
    id: message
    from: "my@Address"
    to: [ "destination@Address" ]
    subject: "This is not Spam for sure!"
    body: "Trolled! Enlarge...!"
    attachments: [ "/a/path/to/an/attachment" ]
}

Button {
    onClicked: message.compose()
//    onClicked: message.send()
}

There we have an object with two send and compose methods, three string properties representing the from, subject and body and two string list properties representing the to and attachments (we leave the CC and BCC as an exercise

Turns out I’ll get to spend the next two weeks in Tokyo, starting next Sunday. It will be third time I visit this weird and fascinating place, but I’m still excited to be there again.

Some time ago, in another trip, I proposed anyone who might be reading me to meet up and talk about all things GNOME or WebKit. Turns out I met some interesting people that way (hi everyone from Caixa Mágica!), so let’s try again: if you are reading this, are in Tokyo, and would like me to talk to your friends/colleagues/whatever about GNOME or WebKit I’d be happy to do so. We can also improvise a hackfest or anything else we can come up with. In exchange I only ask of you to show me around (always better with a local) and an unwavering commitment to freedom and justice.

Drop me a line at xan AT gnome DOT org, or leave a comment in this space.