Developers have blessed the Nokia N9 with a bunch of very good internet radio apps in the past, but there’s nothing like getting an Internet Radio app directly from Nokia. So if you head over to the Nokia Store on the N9 and search for ‘Internet Radio’ (direct store link) you’ll be presented with the free download, which to no surprise of ours is an excellent iteration.

Once installed, curiously the app is called ‘IP Radio’. The UI is similar to the default music player with album art being replaced by cover art for the featured radio stations. This is followed by a ‘Hot Picks’ tab, Locations, Language and Genre. Needless to say, you sort a ton of pre-loaded stations by region, language or genre, and this makes discovery a real breeze.

If you like a station you’ve listened to, you can favourite it for quick retrieval. You can also search for more stations and finally tapping that man in the bottom right corner takes you to your history, neat. I’ve been playing with the app for a little while and it feels very polished.  I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending that you download it, just watch your data connection!

In case you have any problems downloading, you can use this method to download the .deb to your desktop and try side loading the app.

Nokia 3D World Gaze is a pretty cool app built with the premise that the Earth is a giant sphere and we are always on top of it. What follows is that far-away continents and cities are in reality somewhere below you and not linear, like we usually think of them.

So how it works is that you simply point your phone in a direction and it lets you see through the surface (and insides) of the planet all the way to the other side. You can use it to explore your immediate surroundings or fly to any part of the world. In addition to geographical features such as continents in their real physical locations, Nokia 3D World Gaze allows you to see geotagged media, day and night regions, current location of the Sun, and other content from locations around the world.

So while looking at an area of the world, you can tap the pictures button to see pictures from that region or the latest news. The N9 version even features Wikitravel searches based on city name. Have a look at the demo to see how it actually works.

The application has just become available for the Nokia N9 on Nokia’s Beta Labs and has been available for Symbian devices for a sort while now. Try it here.

Front Page

Qt Mobility 1.2 packages for Qt Maemo apps

Attila Csipa, a former member of the Maemo Community Council, and currently in the employ of Nokia Developer has started updating the Qt Mobility packages in Maemo Extras. He's taken "a completely differently packaged libqtm-12 as the previous one, so I fully expect some breakage. On the flip side, the way I'm doing things should make it possible for applications depending on it not to trip over each other and avoid promotion deadlocks. This release will also be the migration path for apps depending on libqtm-11, which I will kill with fire in the not so distant future as it crossed the point of no return unmaintainability-wise (is that a word?)."

Your editor recently tried to publish a QML application, which used Qt Mobility, but it refused to work on a freshly installed PR1.3 on his N900. Unfortunately, v1.1 was broken in Extras and v1.2 was an experimental version which had not been intended to be published as far as it did. Hopefully, Attila's efforts will soon bear fruit, as having these libraries up to date makes it easier for application developers targetting the N9 to also publish their app for the N900.

Read more (talk.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Qt Mobility 1.2 packages for Qt Maemo apps
2. Applications
   • VoiceToGoog - Google-backed speech recognition for Nokia N9
   • Promoting Woodchuck apps to Maemo Extras
   • Capture screencasts directly from N9 and N950 screen
   • eBuddy demoed on the Nokia N9
3. Development
   • tablet-browser-view-test source now available, for embedding Maemo 5 browser in apps
   • Open source Maemo 5 browserd
   • Testing IPv6 networks with Nokia N9
4. In the Wild
   • Nokia N9 runaway sales success in October for Finland's biggest operator
5. Announcements
   • Football Live Scores for N9
   • ProfileMatic - automatic N9 profile changing
   • Open Video Player (same codecs, new UI) for N9 and N950
   • SportsTracker now available, for free, for Nokia N9

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-10-31 through 2011-11-06

I was recently hunting down a slightly annoying usability bug in Khweeteur, a Twitter / identi.ca client: Khweeteur can notify the user when there are new status updates, however, it wasn't overlaying the notification window on the application window, like the email client does. I spent some time investigating the problem: the fix is easy, but non-obvious, so I'm recording it here.

A notification window overlays the window whose WM_CLASS property matches the specified desktop entry (and is correctly configured in /etc/hildon-desktop/notification-groups.conf). Khweeteur was doing the following:

import dbus

bus = dbus.SystemBus()
notify = bus.get_object('org.freedesktop.Notifications',
                        '/org/freedesktop/Notifications')
iface = dbus.Interface(notify, 'org.freedesktop.Notifications')

id = 0
msg = 'New tweets'
count = 1
amount = 1
id = iface.Notify(
    'khweeteur',
    id,
    'khweeteur',
    msg,
    msg,
    ['default', 'call'],
    {
        'category': 'khweeteur-new-tweets',
        'desktop-entry': 'khweeteur',
        'dbus-callback-default'
            : 'net.khertan.khweeteur /net/khertan/khweeteur net.khertan.khweeteur show_now',
        'count': count,
        'amount': count,
        },
    -1,
    )

This means that the notification will overlay the window whose WM_CLASS property is khweeteur. The next step was to figure out whether Khweeteur's WM_CLASS property was indeed set to khweeteur:

$ xwininfo -root -all | grep Khweeteur
        0x3e0000d "Khweeteur: Home": ("__init__.py" "__init__.py")  800x424+0+56  +0+56
        ^ Window id                   ^ WM_CLASS (class, instance)
$ xprop -id 0x3e0000d | grep WM_CLASS
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "__init__.py", "__init__.py"

Ouch! It appears that a program's WM_CLASS is set to the name of its "binary". In this case, /usr/bin/khweeteur was just a dispatcher that executes the right command depending on the arguments. When starting the frontend, it was running a Python interpreter. Adjusting the dispatcher to not exec fixed the problem:

$ xwininfo -root -all | grep Khweeteur
     0x3e00014 "khweeteur": ("khweeteur" "Khweeteur")  400x192+0+0  +0+0
        0x3e0000d "Khweeteur: Home": ("khweeteur" "Khweeteur")  800x424+0+56  +0+56

Half year ago at UDS-O in Budapest Michael Opdenacker interviewed some people from Linaro. I remember that at the end of event Kiko asked him did he talked with me cause he thought that it could be interesting for someone.

Then we had another Linaro Connect (in Cambourne) and nothing happened. But in previous week I got an email that there will be interview with me in Orlando and that I should choose time slot for it. So I did and here is the result:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajNSrQfFcPA

What we were talking about? Check it yourself. And please comment did you enjoyed.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
I got interviewed during Linaro Connect was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. Remote Linaro Connect
2. Linaro Connect Asia 2013 was fun
3. 2011 timeline

Hey guys!

Last week I’ve attended to GStreamerConf and LinuxConf conferences in Prague, and Siraj and I had the honor of having our current project for Collabora exposed on Collabora’s booth. It shared space with two others amazing Collabora‘s demos:

1. Media Explorer running a Telepathy plug-in, which adds IM and Audio/Video capabilities to the system.
2. HTML 5 client of a video editor, using GStreamer Editing Services on top of GtkWebkit.

A little bit about Telepathy Webkit Client

During the last few weeks I’ve been working on a Telepathy client, a very special one, written almost only with HTML 5 and Javascript, on top of GTK WebKit and Seed.
The goal of this project was writing a Telepathy based IM client, to run on top of WebKit, and it should be able do make and receive audio and video calls.

GObject introspection magic

The first question to be answered was “How access the Telepathy methods from Javascript?”

And the answer was: GIR and Seed.

As all Gnome developers know, GObject introspection (GIR) allows us to access a GObject written in C  from a scriptable language, such as Javascript. So that’s part of the answer.

And Seed binds those introspected objects on WebKit JavascriptCore, which is pretty much what we wanted to do.

Following a few screen-shots

Contact List

Our first goal was to show the Telepathy’s roaster list on a HTML5 window. For the widgets, we choose to use joApp, which is a quite nice and stable UI library for HTML 5 applications.

 

Chat Window

What’s a IM client without a Chat window, right?!

The “tpwebkit” application with an opened text channel between two users.

Receiving a call

Telepathy WebKit application acting as a Telepathy approver for audio and video calls

That’s me, from the point of view of my test machine…

The real thing running

If you want to see the real thing running, you can watch this video showing the application during the early development state.

Conclusions and future work

As we can see from now, Telepathy is ready to be use on native and HTML applications.
I really would like to see the current implementation integrated with the bleeding edge RTC API, which some guys are pushing to WebKit. That would be something really awesome.

If you want to try it, you can get the code here and play with it. You’re also going to need a few special changes on Seed package. Check the linuxconf branch here.
Or, if you use Ubuntu, you can add Xavier’s PPA and install the tpwebkit package.

With last week's Nokia World and today's hands-on event in Vienna, I got a chance to try out the WP7 devices and ask questions about them. Here's some insights that I want to share with you, because they might not be obvious if you haven't tried WP7 before (I haven't until last week, and these things were not obvious to me). I'm comparing the Lumia 800 with the N9 here, because they look very similar from the outside.

If you care about the readability more than you care about the eye candy then that's for you ;-)

1) You need to enable developer mode and ssh to the N9.

2) # mkdir -p /usr/share/themes/blanco/meegotouch/libmessagingwidgets0/style/

3) # vi /usr/share/themes/blanco/meegotouch/libmessagingwidgets0/style/libmessagingwidgets0.css

4) Insert the following lines:

BubbleItem MLabelStyle#BubbleItemMessageIncoming {
font: $FONT_FAMILY 32px;
}

BubbleItem MLabelStyle#BubbleItemMessageOutgoing {
font: $FONT_FAMILY 32px;
}

BubbleItem MLabelStyle#BubbleTimeStampLabelOutgoing {
font: $FONT_FAMILY light 32px;
}

BubbleItem MLabelStyle#BubbleTimeStampLabelIncoming {
font: $FONT_FAMILY light 32px;
}

5) # su - user
6) $ killall -KILL messaging-ui
7) Enjoy :-)

read more

Nick Larsson (aka frals) has posted an article on adding a small (120x120px) logo to your N9 lock screen.

The N9 has a PenTile AMOLED screen, but is configured to avoid the colour fringing problems that affected the Android-based Nexus One. However, when the lock screen is displayed, certain bit patterns produce colours:

John Hutchison's Generating false colour images on the Nexus One using only grayscale pixels contains source code and examples.

The above photo was created by taking a 120x120px cut from the example rainbow image and setting it as the logo:

The same section, viewed on a Nexus One looks like:

As you can see, the colour mapping isn't the same (meaning new reference images need to be generated). However, you'll see it is possible to have colour logos on the lockscreen. Hopefully someone will take it forward, perhaps Nick can update his tool to do colour mapping; or someone can post the reference images so that the Java source code from Luke Hutchison can work.