While working on the Woodchuck support in gPodder, I decided to profile the code. Reading the Python manual, I thought it would be as easy as:

    import cProfile
    cProfile.run('foo()')

On both Debian and Maemo, this results in an import error:

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    File "/usr/lib/python2.6/cProfile.py", line 36, in run
      result = prof.print_stats(sort)
    File "/usr/lib/python2.6/cProfile.py", line 80, in print_stats
      import pstats
    ImportError: No module named pstats

To my eyes, this looks like I need to install some package. This is indeed the case: the python-profiler package provides the pstats module. Unfortunately, python-profiler is not free. There's a depressing back story involving ancient code and missing rights holders.

If you're on Debian, you can just install the python-profiler package. Alas, the package does not appear to be compiled for Maemo.

Happily, kernprof works around this and is easy to use:

    # wget http://packages.python.org/line_profiler/kernprof.py
    # python -m kernprof /usr/bin/gpodder

Kernprof saves the statistics in the file program.prof in the current directory (in this case, it saves the data in gpodder.prof).

To analyize the data, you'll need to copy the file to a system that has python-profiler installed. Then run:

    # python -m pstats gpodder.prof
    Welcome to the profile statistics browser.
    % sort time
    % stats 10
    Tue Nov  1 13:09:54 2011    gpodder.prof

             105542 function calls (101494 primitive calls) in 117.449 CPU seconds

       Ordered by: internal time
       List reduced from 1138 to 10 due to restriction <10>

       ncalls  tottime  percall  cumtime  percall filename:lineno(function)
            1   57.458   57.458   69.012   69.012 {exec_}
            1   16.052   16.052   26.417   26.417 /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gpodder/qmlui/__init__.py:405(__init__)
            1    8.591    8.591   13.790   13.790 /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gpodder/qmlui/__init__.py:24(<module>)
           60    7.041    0.117    7.041    0.117 {method 'send_message_with_reply_and_block' of '_dbus_bindings.Connection' objects}
            3    6.357    2.119    7.469    2.490 {method 'reset' of 'PySide.QtCore.QAbstractItemModel' objects}
           36    2.636    0.073    2.636    0.073 {method 'execute' of 'sqlite3.Cursor' objects}
            1    2.283    2.283    2.284    2.284 {method 'setSource' of 'PySide.QtDeclarative.QDeclarativeView' objects}
            1    1.848    1.848    1.848    1.848 /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/PySide/private.py:1(<module>)
            2    1.789    0.895    1.789    0.895 {posix.listdir}
            1    0.765    0.765    4.234    4.234 /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gpodder/__init__.py:20(<module>)

The statistics browser is relatively easy to use (at least for the simple things I've wanted to see so far). Help is available online using its help command.

The Nokia N9 has been a somewhat difficult subject for Nokia, one that they are, and should be, immensely proud of. But one that has raised more questions than answers. When the February announcement with Microsoft came, everyone wondered what was happening to Nokia’s upcoming MeeGo phone. Nokia was quick to point out that they would indeed release a MeeGo based device. Then word started coming out that the original MeeGo device, which we now know as the developer only N950, had been canned, and replaced by a beautiful new touch only flagship.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

A few weeks ago, Nokia Connects held a media contest to award tickets, travel and accomodation for some lucky blogger to express why he or she was excited about Nokia World 2011.  I already had all that covered, but gave it a shot just in case my wife or a friend could use the prize.  Worth a try, right?

A major update has just been rolled out for the Nokia N9 in the form of version 20.2011.40-4. The update is 218.6 MB in size and can be installed over the air. It brings music controls to the lockscreen, improved multitasking and NFC Tag reading amongst other things. Another major reason to update is the presence of Swype, which you can enable it by going into Settings> Time and Language> Text Input.

Along with the update, a bunch of pre-loaded applications including Twitter, Facebook, Store, Ovi Music, Galaxy on Fire 2, Nokia Drive, Angry Birds, AccuWeather, NFS Shift, Real Golf 2011 and the User Guide have also been updated.

It is possible that the update isn’t available for all product codes just yet. But if your device hasn’t informed you of the updated already, you can go to Settings>Applications>Manage Applications>Updates and check for updates manually.

The updated Twitter application should bring the ability to Twitpic images, something we have missed since the start. The Facebook client gets a few bug fixes too.

Once downloaded, the update seems to take a while to install so make sure you have enough free time before you begin the update.

[Update: Find the Swype for N9 hand-on video here].

The official changelog:

• NFC tag reading to instantly interact with NFC tags
• Music controls on lock screen
• Photo and video shooting with color filters: black & white, sepia, vivid, negative, solarize
• More powerful multitasking with improved memory handling
• Swype for fast typing
• Faster MfE synch, synchronizing only active folders
• Noice cancellation reduces background noise so that your friends hear you better
• Close apps easily with swiping down, this now on by default
• New indicators for standby screen like charging and calendar
• Pre-loaded apps including: Twitter, Nokia Store, Facebook, Real Golf, Ovi Music, Galaxy on Fire 2, Nokia Drive, Angry Birds NFC, AccuWTwitter, Nokia Maps and the User Guide have also been updated.

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)

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.

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.

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:

[debug]
recording-zoom = true

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

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

read more

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.

source: conversations.nokia.com

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!

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.

A bit of history

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.

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

Front Page

Nokia 3D World Gaze now available for Nokia N9

Nokia Beta Labs have released an application called "Nokia 3D World Gaze" that gives the user an augmented reality view of the world. It "gives you a new kind of viewpoint to the world, allowing you to see through the surface (and insides) of the planet all the way to the other side. Just point your phone to some direction and you will see reality in a way you have never seen before. 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." Your editor has made no secret of his desire to have an augmented reality application and this seems like a good one. Compass calibration can be tedious but seems to be effective, although it seems to have stopped picking up the compass earlier today. It is nice to have the early preview from Beta Labs, but don't expect it to be completely free of bugs.

Read more (betalabs.nokia.com)

Harmattan target for Qt SDK updated, no longer "experimental"

With the release of Qt SDK 1.1.4 the Harmattan targets have been updated and don't have to be enabled through the experimental section of the updater. "The other very visible change is the evolution to a single unified sysroot. From now on there is no tools-level distinction between the Platform API and its more productized subset. Now there's just a single target (with debug and release flavours of the build)." Apparently the SDK does not currently work in Ubuntu 11.10, so don't be surprised if you have trouble in the latest Ubuntu release.

Read more (developer.nokia.com)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Nokia 3D World Gaze now available for Nokia N9
   • Harmattan target for Qt SDK updated, no longer "experimental"
2. Applications
   • eBuddy XMS (like WhatsApp) beta for N9 launching soon
   • Nokia Internet Radio for N9
   • New maintainer wanted for Maemo versions of Conboy
3. Development
   • Best practices for Qt Quick: property bindings
   • Best practices for region-specific functionality, e.g. disabling YouTube features in China
4. Announcements
   • eCards for Harmattan
   • New stuff for creating/editing virtual keyboards on N900
   • First alpha version of Conboy for Harmattan

Some like to make a joke of OpenOffice.org coming with around 8 different string-implementations and comparing that with what we are having in Calligra with QString. But when we worked back then in OASIS to form what later became the ISO OpenDocument standard we left such implementation details out.

Some personal news: I’m joining the Qt team to help making the Qt Project rock. A small change of floor at the Nokia offices in Sunnyvale (California) and barely a change to be noticed by my relatives and non-geek friends. Still, for me it is a big change, the end of a phase and the beginning of something fresh.

As you know, Austria is one of the few lucky countries in which the N9 is officially available - I even spotted an ad in a local cinema last week (which made me very happy, and I'm usually not very happy about ads in the cinema ;). Now, Nokia Austria is running a campaign until November 27th where you can win a photo shooting and show off your N9 style. If you use the code RHWMZE on the contest website you can get extra points (and you'll find more codes on local bloggers' websites) :)


As you might have heard in the video above, you can go to http://nokia.at/n9style to find all the details about the contest. While you are at it, if you have a N9, try out my free apps in Nokia Store. Two more are currently waiting for QA: Tennix and Plonk - yep, that's right: our Pong-style game formerly known as Mong (developed in collaboration with Cornelius Hald and Tim Samoff) is coming to Harmattan - with swipe locking - you can grab the source already now from our Git repository. And your favourite 2D tennis game is also celebrating a comeback, so be prepared for more casual gaming quality time :)

The unexpected lack of lectures today (Tag des Landespatrons) left time for some one-off hacks, and here are two for you:

First up is Tap Tap N950, a very basic QML prototype of what could become a funny DDR/TTR clone - no code published yet, it still need some more polishing (and touch area support for multi-touch, plus scoring is also missing).

The other one is a simple hack to make the Calendar app icon always show today's date (day-of-month). The existence of calendar icons for each day (1-31) in the theme on the device lets me suspect that this feature was either planned and then abandoned or that it will come built-in in some future firmware. For now, you can grab this lame shell script and execute it (ideally with "nohup" - see the comment inside - also needs customizations if you changed your root password, and you definitely need developer mode for now) to have an auto-updating calendar icon until the next reboot. Watch the accompanying video for a quick demo. There's now also a forum thread for support and discussion. Sometimes I really wish cron was pre-installed on Harmattan..

Bonus exercise: Store your app's .desktop file in /home/user/.local/, generate the icon dynamically via code and update the .desktop file for some icon overlay action / new items notification ;)

I recently pushed the Maliit team here at Openismus to tidy up the website, to make the current status clearer. Here is a summary:

Nokia N9 is very weird kind of beast. It is running MeeGo Harmattan OS and has been released after so-called elopocalypse when Nokia's new CEO Stephen Elop has announced quite sudden and controversial turn towards Windows Phone platform, ditching both homegrown smartphone platforms - Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo - into gloom. Nonetheless, Nokia N9 has received positive reviews from mobile technology blogosphere around the world, which posed the question whether pivotal turn in Nokia's strategy was actually right move? As a former user and fan of Maemo-powered devices, including the latest N900, and also being quite sceptical about Microsoft partnership, I was particularly interested to see N9 myself. Once again, thanks to Nokia Connects I've had a chance to use N9 for past couple of weeks and see how it performs in real life.

Read more »

As promised before, here is the first release of SeriesFinale for MeeGo Harmattan.

Firefox for Mobile Blog moved - http://blog.mozilla.com/blassey... November 17, 2011 from Brad's Blog - Comment - Like

The MeeGo Harmattan running Nokia N9 may be the last of its kind, but there seems to be no death of quality apps that are coming out for the device. It already has apps for Facebook, Twitter and a few games like Angry Birds and Need For Speed built in, but there are a few key apps which are missing.

Firefox for Mobile Firefox for Android: Native Android UI - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... November 17, 2011 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

The next article in the series about Qt Quick best practices has been published (but don't miss out the other one about property bindings). This time, I talked about Components, and how they can help to keep your QML code clean and maintainable. The team behind the N9 Developer blog has been a great help to me, especially Ville Lavonious and Matti Airas. I am also thankful for the additional input (and proof reading!) from Jon Nordby and Sauli Kauppi. Thanks guys!

Firefox for Mobile Firefox Android: Add-ons in a Native World - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... November 20, 2011 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-11-14 through 2011-11-20

Front Page

New MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan bug tracker for Nokia N9 and N950

Nokia has, with efforts reaching back to Summer 2010, put together a bug tracker for Harmattan: "We have now prepared a new Bugzilla instance for any Nokia N9 or N950 related bugs at harmattan-bugs.nokia.com. This will help the N9 team ineract with the community and further improve the N9 software quality. We have cloned all open N9 bugs from the old Nokia Developer Bugzilla to the new Bugzilla. If you want to follow a currently open bug, add yourself in the CC field of the bug." As Neil MacLeod points out, there are a number of problems those of us familiar with the maemo.org tracker will remember fondly, like self-signed certificates, default voting limits, and strange component selection. This new tracker is indicative of positive progress, though.

Read more (forum.meego.com)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • New MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan bug tracker for Nokia N9 and N950
2. Applications
   • Is anyone maintaining Firefox for Maemo 5?
3. Development
   • Review of operator-name-cbs-widget for Maemo 5 CSSU inclusion
   • Qt Quick best practices: using components
4. Devices
   • Nokia N9 default font metrics to change in future update
5. Announcements
   • Calenderr: daily updated Calendar app icon on Harmattan
   • DateEvent - shows your calendar entries on event screen

Plonk (formerly known as Mong, but renamed since) is now available in Nokia Store for the N9 and N950 as free download:

• http://store.ovi.com/content/220976

This is a multi-touch game for two persons, so go out into the big blue room and ask somebody to have a game of Plonk with you :) As you probably already know, this game has been developed at the MeeGo Conference in collaboration with Cornelius Hald and Tim Samoff - sounds have been recorded directly at the hacker lounge by Erik Stein, and Randall Arnold came up with the new name. A real collaborative project, and the source is available from Gitorious! One challenge with Harmattan was disabling Swipe, we solved that with a nifty little class called SwipeControl - it's open source if you want to use it in your game, too :)

I am back from my honeymoon and I’m starting to organize my life again!

Meanwhile, we finally released a game that I’m really proud that is called “Incredible Circus”. It’s the kind of game that is really addictive :). In three weeks we achieved 200k downloads on Nokia Store and today is available for the N9. It’s also a really good showcase for Qt. If you have a Symbian^3 or MeeGo device, just follow the link to try the game.

You can also check it out on the video below.

Apart from that, I’m updating my machine and as soon as I have a developer environment again I’ll start hacking on Plasma again. Probably fixing some bugs, right Aaron?

Firefox for Mobile Firefox for Android: Using the Android Emulator - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... November 22, 2011 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Firefox for Android: Nightly Channel Switches to Native UI Builds - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... November 23, 2011 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

The Openismus employees who worked on the N9′s Harmattan project received their free Nokia N9 phones from the company yesterday. It was expensive but its the right thing to do.

Firefox for Mobile There's something different about you... - http://madhava.com/egotism... November 23, 2011 from Planet Mozilla: Madhava Enros - Comment - Like

For device manufacturers, and those targeting device manufacturers like us in the Mer¹ and Nemo Mobile².communities, we need a performant base, and Qt's default configuration on Linux is ..not really that performant. It uses what is known as the 'native' graphics system, which uses X (and XRender) to do a lot of the grunt work. Unfortunately, XRender isn't exactly what you'd call speedy in many cases, and making loads of round trips to ask X to draw things probably doesn't help either.

It's very common when writing QML applications to write a small stub, something like the following:


int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    QApplication application(argc, argv);
    QDeclarativeView view;
    view.setSource(QUrl("qrc:/qml/main.qml"));
    view.showFullScreen();
    return a.exec();
}

What's wrong with this? It's a very subtle problem. I'll give you a moment to think about it, and a video to see if you notice the problem. Make sure you don't cheat.
(demonstrating removal of flicker in QML)
Back already? Have you figured it out? That's right, it flickers. Horrifically.
So what causes this? By default, QWidgets are drawn parent first, with parents drawing children. When a widget is drawn, first, it draws its background, then it draws the actual content. That background proves to be a problem, in this case.
If we add the following lines to the above example, the flicker goes away, and my eyes no longer want to bleed:    view.setAttribute(Qt::WA_OpaquePaintEvent);
    view.setAttribute(Qt::WA_NoSystemBackground);
    view.viewport()->setAttribute(Qt::WA_OpaquePaintEvent);
    view.viewport()->setAttribute(Qt::WA_NoSystemBackground);

NB: I'm not completely sure that adding it to both the view, and the viewport is completely necessary, but it can't harm at least. Make sure to re-set it if you change viewports.
For completeness, here's the full, fixed example:
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    QApplication application(argc, argv);
    QDeclarativeView view;
    view.setSource(QUrl("qrc:/qml/main.qml"));
    view.setAttribute(Qt::WA_OpaquePaintEvent);

    view.setAttribute(Qt::WA_NoSystemBackground);
    view.viewport()->setAttribute(Qt::WA_OpaquePaintEvent);
    view.viewport()->setAttribute(Qt::WA_NoSystemBackground);
    view.showFullScreen();
    return a.exec();
}

(If you're curious, Qt::WA_OpaquePaintEvent basically implies that you'll repaint everything as necessary yourself (which QML is well behaved with), and Qt::WA_NoSystemBackground tells Qt to nicely not paint the background.)

NB: on Harmattan (and Nemo Mobile) at least, make sure you always use QWidget::showFullScreen(). The compositor in use there unredirects fullscreen windows (meaning no compositor in the way), so you get faster drawing performance, and every frame counts.

(obligatory thanks to Daniel Stone of X and Collabora fame, for telling me to stop blaming X, and start blaming the crappy toolkits ☺)

We kicked off the new 0.81 release series together with a nice announcement: We have our own bugtracker now!

…as predicted. But this is what happens when cracks get fewer, far between and a bit tight :

Ah, the moon’s too bright
The chain’s too tight
The beast won’t go to sleep
I’ve been running through these promises to you
That I made and I could not keep
(Leonard Cohen)

 

*Disclaimer: I am not a developer, hacker, or programmer*

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-11-21 through 2011-11-27

Front Page

Stable release of Community SSU OS updates for Maemo 5 and N900

Christian Ratzenhofer has announced that the stable branch of the Community SSU for Maemo 5 has been created. He says the stable CSSU had been "mentioned on the forums about 3 weeks ago, and I'm happy to announce that it's finally here! [...] We're trying to achieve an as close to stock Maemo experience as possible in terms of stability. The stable CSSU contains those packages from testing version 16.8 which were deemed stable. Basically nearly everything but modest/tinymail and the camera-ui replacement."

This is a big day for Maemo 5, where end users can now be encouraged to install a community-maintained version of Maemo. The "testing" branch will continue, and braver users can help everyone by using that and helping report bugs and assess packages' stability.

Read more (talk.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Stable release of Community SSU OS updates for Maemo 5 and N900
2. Applications
   • Nokia N9 gets copy and paste support in Terminal
3. Development
   • Wiki for Python on MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan moves to maemo.org
4. Devices
   • Android Ice Cream Sandwich running on Nokia N900
5. Announcements
   • ContactLaunch allows adding contacts to N9 application grid
   • Incredible Circus game for Nokia N9