I was fooling around a bit with the screen rotation support for Maemo this morning on my N800 (didn’t want to risk mucking with the N810 yet). I would put up some screenshots, but for some reason the screenshot applet is messing up in my version and trying to still take a landscape image. Not sure how those screenshots on the sse2 page were taken, looks like they’re running the same load applet with integrated screenshot that I am. The instructions on that page worked great for me, booted the kernel without flashing, install the xomap package and use the installer for the rotate applet.

There’s still a bunch of funkiness for me: onscreen keyboard on the N800 works, but is really smushed, orientation of the dpad doesn’t change so you have to take that into account, can’t really use the home menu rotated cause it goes straight off the screen. Some of this stuff could be hacked around if the base packages of the OS2008 user environment were also open source. Hint. Hint.

Generally though the rotation itself works fantastic. I installed the Firefox release to muck around with that, but forgot that it doesn’t have an onscreen keyboard. Have to dig out the bluetooth keyboard to poke at it. IUI applications look much slicker on the rotated browser for example, with the screen format being much closer to the expected.

I was mulling some of the geo hacks for the N810 that are out there now. Maemo Mapper is a great open source mapping application, there’s a little app that geocodes photos as well. Then there’s Maemo WordPy for posting to Wordpress, and I was wondering if that allowed for geocoding posts. And I was pondering the user of the N810 as a geocontent production device. As well as wondering if the geoaware primitives we could use in mobile browsers would at all be helped by the evolving state of mobile Firefox.

All the little hacks on the N810 could really be solved more easily on the web if there were a way to hook the stuff together. What I started thinking about was hacking around with the new firefox release and see if I could get it to shove geoinfo into the outgoing headers. But then I realized most of the stuff I wanted to fool around with wouldn’t take the headers in anyway. So for now instead I made just a simple little python launcher app that pulls your current location from the GPS and launches a browser with Google Maps pointed at your current location. Very simple, but I imagine with some basic URL crafting you can use it to create geocoded Wordpress posts or geotag images uploaded to flickr. Maybe I can make it a little homescreen applet to display your location and launch one of a number of sites with your location fed in.

Thinking about the way the web facing geographic services have worked out, passing a URL with the location filled in seems to make more sense right now. There was a geo-headers ietf draft floating around at one point.. but I can’t find that as an official version. Are there services out there that use it? Or something else that’s common across services?

Inspired by some screenshots that came through my feed reader the other day, I updated the firmware on my N810 and installed a few new bits of hackery:

Those are transparent homescreen apps, and more important than looking slick (if that’s possible) they’re written in python! Homescreen hackery here I come!

Getting the packages installed is a bit of a pain. They don’t one click install unless you install two packages by hand. I had to download python-hildondesktop and hildon-desktop-python loader from this site in order to be able to install and use them. And yes, download and install manually, the app installer doesn’t like them. Download them to your tablet somewhere, become root (I do that with an ssh to localhost myself), and run dpkg -i for both of them. Then you’ll be able to install the actual applets and enable them. w00t!

I was somewhat curious how the new Wordpress 2.5 admin interface would play with the browser on the N810 so I spent a little time poking around. Even though the new interface seems to be a lot more squishy than the previous version, it actually seems to work a bit smoother on the device. I like Maemo Wordpy as well, but it’s nice to be able to go in and do stuff like make sure a sudden spam surge hasn’t completely overrun my comments when I’m on the go.

While I was in a testing mood I poked around with some of the Google apps as well. The search, calendar, maps, and mail apps (as well as a few others) have bookmarks loaded into the browser by default. But I wanted to play around with the reader and the iGoogle homepage. The reader worked pretty much as I expected it to. The fact that it worked at all was great, but it was a bit slow and some screen elements overlapped each other. The kind of thing that might benefit from a bit of Greasemonkey hackery.

What I was relatively surprised by however was the iGoogle version of the homepage. All the controls worked well, even dragging around modules to change the layout. The layout is dense and efficient, I can add calendar and gmail apps in there. I added a weather app in there and then was about to pull it back out cause I already have OMWeather on the desktop of the device. But then I realized iGoogle is actually a better homescreen for the N810 than the device native applet based homescreen is.

When using the RSS reader applet on the N810 the only option is to put a blended list of every item from all feeds I’m subscribed to. No way to pick and choose and select just individual feeds or a single feed to display. The font is ridiculously large and the only options for reading are punching out to either web or RSS app, no expand in place. The same goes for the email app built into the device, just overly simplistic and at the same time fragile when compared to the other apps like Claws mail (but AFAIK Claws doesn’t have an applet to go along with it). Compare that to iGoogle configured similarly. The information density is much higher, configuration options a lot richer and more flexible, and there are just more options there for existing widgets. It’s an excellent example of rising browser capability allowing online applications to displace native apps, even when those native apps have direct operating system level support on a mobile device.

After getting an initial version of mobile Firefox (currently called minefield) compiled and running on the Maemo SDK, I compiled a version for ARM and put it on my n810:

I got networking going in my scratchbox install and was able to build my own minefield 1.9 Mozilla and get it talking to the intarwebs:

Pimp, I know, you’re jealous. Turns out Brad is way more pimp, and actually had debs packaged that I could play with and all.

I actually found his stuff before I did this, but I wanted to figure out how to build my own so that I could hack on it a bit. Unfortunately the extension developers extension didn’t install cause it doesn’t “provide secure updates”.. whatever that means. But Greasemonkey did:

I know, it’s hard to comprehend. I’ll give you a bit of time to catch your breath, I’m getting all excited myself.

I started out trying to install the rtcomm update that gives all kinds of new protocol support to the built in messaging app. I was having install problems even with red pill mode on. Then when poking around in the app manager I saw an entry for gcc. gcc? Oh my dear, how pimp would that be? Hell yea:

There’s gcc, g++, and dev header installs for all kinds of stuff. Why was I not informed of this earlier?

I saw the post on Maemo Apps about the WordPy update. I just installed it and used it to upload an image to Flickr, now I’m posting from it. The image I uploaded is my Serial Experiments Lain inspired N810 background:

In the comments to my previous post about remapping keys on the keyboard of my N810 there was a mention of editing the X server keyboard mapping file at /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-44, which I assumed was a pretty nasty hack. But Daniel Stone, who does the X server development for Maemo, said that it wasn’t a hack at all. xmodmap is the hack.

Yesterday I was starting to get annoyed at having to manually load the mapping at every reboot (cause I have to reboot frequently to get GPS working again, groan), so I swapped techniques. The format of the file is pretty easy to understand, use “bar” where you want to put the pipe symbol and “Tab” where you want to put tab. And while I was in there digging at it I changed my mappings to, I made Fn-space the tab key instead of using semicolon. Just seems like a more intuitive setup.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for OS2008 software that I was using on my N800, and last night I just saw that Subversion is now available. That’s a killer bit of software for me. I use my own svn repository to sync up the stuff I’m working on, keep notes and little scripts, etc. The N810 (now with hardware keyboard) I expected to be killer for little bits of hackery here and there. And it has been, just getting the stuff onto and off the device hasn’t been as braindead as I had hoped. Now it is. Can world domination be far behind? I expect not.

I haven’t quite made it to the point of keeping everything in Subversion. But enough stuff is creeping in that direction that I’m thinking it might not be a bad idea to give it another try.