Yup, after some months, here is a new version of SeriesFinale.

This new version doesn’t have many new features but brings an important one related to my previous blog post: the context menu.
When long-pressing a show or a season, a dialog will be shown with some actions. On the show’s context menu (or context dialog?), the user can update it, delete it, view its info or, more importantly, mark the next episode to watch as watched. On the season’s context menu, it can be deleted or, as many users have requested, mark all episodes.

Here are a couple of screenshots:

Of course that by only seeing the screenshots you don’t get the same feeling has when you quickly open the dialog and mark the next episode to watch so give it a try.
It it already in Extras Testing and if it works well for you, please vote for it to get into Extras.

The Future

This summer I bought myself an Android phone. That’s right, because of pure curiosity and with the help of Nokia’s decisions regarding MeeGo, I bought a Samsung Galaxy S.
I’ve been using it ever since as my main phone but I didn’t want to leave SF unattended yet. There are a couple of things more that I want to do and I’ll keep an eye on the download statistics to try to guess how many people is still interested in this app.

I haven’t yet found a full replacement for it on Android. I’ve installed a few apps that either don’t work well, require login or are bloated with features making it harder to use so I don’t know if I’ll end up contributing to some FOSS one or developing an official port of SF. Do you think that developing an official version for Android makes sense?
Also, people have asked me for a Symbian and Blackberry versions of it but I just don’t own any phone with these systems.

As for SF on the N9/N950, a release could be out there soon so stay tuned.

Yesterday was a holiday so I got some time to hack a bit in SeriesFinale.
One of the things I wanted to do was to have a context menu for shows and seasons. Something to apply individual actions like deleting, updating, viewing information, etc when there is a long press on a tree view’s item.

Last weekend I attended the N9 Hackathon in Vienna. Nokia kindly sponsored all food and accommodation costs and, at the very end, surprised me with an entirely unexpected gift of a N9 phone.

Last weekend I attended the N9 Hackathon in Vienna. Nokia kindly sponsored all food and accommodation costs and, at the very end, surprised me with an entirely unexpected gift of a N9 phone.

Nokia’s Ideas Project is looking for your feedback on the N9 user interface and is offering 10 Nokia N9 smartphones in return. They are looking for ideas to improve some of the key features shown off in this video and other innovative ideas for the next generation of mobile touch screen devices.

So if the N9 isn’t launching in your country and you were looking forward to one, here’s your chance. Head over to the Ideas Project and start brainstorming. The ideas will be reviewed by Nokia’s interface designers and 10 winners will get a N9 each.

Timeline:

• Begins: October 12, 2011 at 09.00am EET (GMT+2)
• Ends: November 15, 2011 at 5pm EET (GMT+2)

Panel of judges:

• Nikki Barton, Vice President, Smart Devices UX Design, Nokia
• Peter Skillman, Vice President, Services ＆ MeeGo Design, Nokia
• Anton Fahlgren, Senior Design Manager, Nokia

Challenge hosts:

• Ronan MacLaverty, Developer Advocate, MeeGo
• Heli Haapkylä, Manager, Crowdsourcing, Nokia

Good luck!

More of an observation than a rant (though see below), but the rise and rise of the REAL camera phone puts quite a bit of pressure on us geeks, whatever mobile OS we currently favour. You see, the theory is that "the best camera is the one you have with you" but in practice all smartphones aren't created equal in the camera department and that has unforeseen social repercussions....

When trying to invoke a MeeGoTouch application's MSheet from a QML app, I was getting the following error:

There is no instance of MDeviceProfile. Please create MComponentData first.

Using MApplication instead of QApplication would solve that, but still a MApplicationWindow would be needed to make the MSheet appear.

After searching on Google for a while (see after the snippet for the sources) and talking to gri in #harmattan, I've come up with the following solution:

#include <MApplication>
#include <MApplicationWindow>
#include <MApplicationPage>
#include <QDeclarativeEngine>
#include <QGraphicsObject>
#include <QDeclarativeComponent>
#include <QDeclarativeContext>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    MApplication app(argc, argv);
    QDeclarativeEngine engine;

    // The context is unused in this example
//    QDeclarativeContext *context = engine.rootContext();

    MApplicationWindow window;
    window.showFullScreen();

    MApplicationPage page;
    page.setPannable(false);
    page.appear(MApplication::instance()->activeWindow());

    QDeclarativeComponent component(&engine, QUrl("qrc:/qml/main.qml"));
    QGraphicsObject *content = qobject_cast<QGraphicsObject*>(component.create());
    MWidget *centralWidget = new MWidget;
    content->setParentItem(centralWidget);
    page.setCentralWidget(centralWidget);

    int result = app.exec();

    delete centralWidget;

    return result;
}

From QML support in Meego touch Framework I learnt that I had to load the QML into a MeeGoTouch widget, so I followed Loading QML components from C++ to replace the loadQmlComponent non-existing method with the QDeclarativeComponent::create approach.

Also, note that I use MApplicationWindow::showFullScreen instead of MApplicationWindow::show and MWidget::setMinimumSize


Smartphone loudspeakers are a mixed bunch, many are good enough while some make us wonder why manufacturers bothered to fit them in the first place. If you like to use your phone as a boombox, external speakers are definitely the way to go. However, some of them are so bulky or elaborate that they rather defeat the object of using a converged device. The XMI X-Mini II mini speakers might just offer a compromise of compactness versus quality and power. Read on for our review and photos.