A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-11-07 through 2011-11-13

From the release notes: "Miniature now supports different languages thanks to a determined community of translators. Thank you for your effort! This is why we are dedicating this release to the first international chess tournament, celebrated in London on 1851.

Miniature 0.5 is being released for MeeGo Harmattan (Nokia N9 & N950) and Maemo (Nokia N900). Thanks to everybody involved in the initial Maemo attempts and the experimental version that was made available after the Miniature 0.4 release."

We also improved usability, compared to the previous release, but there's still a ton of work left.

I started working on Miniature – a chess client for freechess.org – in November 2009, after reading the Call for Contributors. Even though we had a pretty cool P2P feature (based on Telepathy and developed mostly by Dariusz Mikulski), it never quite reached the original goal: playing chess online. Back then I was learning how to create UI's with Qt Graphics View, which was all the rage at the time. Well, we now know that writing real UI's with that technology is a major PITA, but for my pet project, it was just too much. I got lost in the struggle.

For the next 18 months, Miniature was basically dead. Another failed project that started so promising. Quim did not want to give up though. After the N9 announcement, he launched a second Call for Contributors.

Perhaps I responded to his mail because I was embarrased at the idea of people wasting time trying to salvage the working parts of Miniature; there simply wasn't much to salvage! So I started again, this time with a very clear goal: online chess, and online chess only. Let others create the actual UI and whatnot. Focusing on one prominent feature and not having to worry about the UI worked well for me, even though I had to iterate over some architecture ideas until I felt comfortable. Quim in the meantime started to prototype the UI with QML. It was impressive to see his results, a level of polish I could have never achieved with my Qt Graphics View approach. At some point the backend was good enough to be sewn together with the frontend and suddenly we had achieved where I failed before: A touch enabled chess client for the N9 that can play chess online.

Having my own useful application available on the N9, published through OVI store, means a lot to me. I hope others will enjoy Miniature as much as we enjoyed re-creating it the second time around.

Usually AEGIS, the N9's security framework, protects system packages from being replaced. As such, files belonging to a system package can't be overwritten. And that's definitely a good thing, because otherwise each download from OVI store would put the user at a considerable risk.

Maliit is such a system package, but its flexible architecture allows for a creative way to replace the MeeGo Keyboard with a more recent version. This can be useful if you want to testdrive new features and to … nah whom am I kidding, it's purely for fun!

Be warned though, the following hack requires you to enable developer mode on your N9. Don't ever activate it unless you're absolutely sure what you're doing to your N9. It would be unforgivable to brick this beauty because of some misguided hack the planet attitude.

First we need to find a MeeGo Keyboard tag that will be compatible with the installed Maliit framework version on your device. Check that the output of

$ apt-cache showpkg meego-keyboard

matches the dependencies mentioned in the tag's Debian control file and the packages installed in your scratchbox ARMEL target.

Apply the community patch on top of the chosen tag. It renames the package to meego-keyboard-community and only installs the plug-in's .so file, together with a renamed CSS file (libmeegotouch requires that CSS file names match with library names).

This mean that we won't uninstall the regular package, as we still depend on most the other files that meego-keyboard installs.

Now build the Debian package. Copy it over and login to the device, then gain root access via devel-su. It's recommended to make a backup of /usr/lib/meego-im-plugins before installing the package.

After installing libmeego-keyboard-community, remove libmeego-keyboard.so from /usr/lib/meego-im-plugins, to avoid in-fights between the two plug-ins. Use

$ gconftool-2 -s /meegotouch/inputmethods/onscreen/enabled -t list --list-type string [libmeego-keyboard-community.so, en_gb.xml]
$ gconftool-2 -s /meegotouch/inputmethods/onscreen/active -t list --list-type string [libmeego-keyboard-community.so, en_gb.xml]

to activate the community plug-in. The language settings applets will most likely get confused, so be prepared that enabling new language layouts might only work directly via GConf from now on.

Gain user access and kill meego-im-uiserver. It should now load the new community plug-in. If you want to get the original MeeGo Keyboard back, uninstall the community package and copy the .so back from your backup. Alternately, you can try to reinstall it:

$ apt-get install --reinstall meego-keyboard

Have fun!

source: conversations.nokia.com

I am writing a series about best practices in using Qt Quick. It will be published on the official N9 Developer blog. The introduction and first article have already appeared. Your feedback on that series is very much welcomed.

If you are using PR 1.1 then you can simply enable zoom during video recording.

Just create a file /etc/camera.conf and add the following lines:

restart camera, enjoy and send postcards to the Harmattan camera team :)

I hope someone will create an Ovi store app for that ;)

read more

In the past few weeks I’ve been preparing the Debian packages of FileTea and its companion EventDance. They’re finally available.

FileTea is a free, web-based file sharing system that just works. It only requires a browser, and no user registration is needed. If you want to know more about it, you can read my previous blog post. For a more detailed description, read Nathan Willis’s excellent article on LWN.net. There have been a few changes since that article (HTTPS support in particular) but it’s still the best one you can find on the net.

Igalia still provides a FileTea server at http://filetea.me/, that you can use to share your files and see how it works. We plan to keep offering this service, but you don’t need to trust it/depend on it anymore: now you can apt-get install filetea and have your own.

So far, using Maliit's virtual keyboard in GTK+ applications required fetching and compiling a GTK+ input method brigde yourself. Not any more. With the latest release, GTK+ applications should just work out of the box, thanks to Jon's integration efforts. Right at the same time, Łukasz was looking into using Maliit together with GTK+ applications on his Ubuntu desktop. He did a great job testing Jon's improvement and also contributed patches to properly update GTK+'s input method module cache. When compared to the Qt support, the gap in terms of supported features is quite large. We would like to further improve the GTK+ support and contributions are certainly welcome.

Swype is something I absolutely love, so I was pretty disappointed when it didn’t ship with the N9, specially when we’d seen early demos of it working on the N9. But better late than never, the PR 1.1 firmware started rolling out for the N9 today and with it Swype makes a debut on the N9, and its worth the wait.

It isn’t activated out of the box, so you need to goto Settings> Time and Language> Text Input and enable it first. Then you can swipe away the default N9 keyboard and switch to swype (all of this is demoed in the video below).

As you can see, the keys are nicely spaced out furthering Swype’s goal to be both a ‘Swype’ keyboard and a good thumb type board at the same it. There’s inbuilt auto correction, word prediction and a bunch of other options. We go through everything in the video below.

(Available in HD)