Thanks to Mathias, Miniature is now suitable for debian packaging. He also uploaded a first test balloon which at least allows you to move pieces around. Feedback is of course more than welcome.
Personally I wish the board's cell size could have been made bigger, but 60x60 pixels is already the upper limit. It is now up to us - the Miniature team - to come up with clever techniques to make the board handling as finger-friendly as possible.
Today at work, David King kindly informed me that there was some new Qt package in extras-devel. This could only mean one thing - I immediately fired up my scratchbox environment and installed the packages, trying to confirm that this new version would run with Qlom. And in fact, it was surprisingly painless. Thanks to autotroll, a simple QT_PATH env variable did all the magic, hooray!
Both of us were impressed with the UI improvements. It's certainly a big step forward regarding the Hildonisation of Qt on Maemo5. The application menues look correct now. Button sizes, colors, animations, etc - it all comes together nicely, finally.
There are still some widgets that need more work, but for a tech preview this is a pleasant surprise.
On another note, the timing for the Miniature project could not have been much better. We immediately switched to Qt 4.6, and it even runs on the N900. It feels good to know that we can stop using hacks and that we can start to do (most) things properly, staying as cross-platform as possible. Needless to say, Quim was happy, too.
Today at work, David King kindly informed me that there was some new Qt package in extras-devel. This could only mean one thing - I immediately fired up my scratchbox environment and installed the packages, trying to confirm that this new version would run with Qlom. And in fact, it was surprisingly painless. Thanks to autotroll, a simple QT_PATH env variable did all the magic, hooray!
Both of us were impressed with the UI improvements. It's certainly a big step forward regarding the Hildonisation of Qt on Maemo5. The application menues look correct now. Button sizes, colors, animations, etc - it all comes together nicely, finally.
There are still some widgets that need more work, but for a tech preview this is a pleasant surprise.
On another note, the timing for the Miniature project could not have been much better. We immediately switched to Qt 4.6, and it even runs on the N900. It feels good to know that we can stop using hacks and that we can start to do (most) things properly, staying as cross-platform as possible. Needless to say, Quim was happy, too.
How it begun
When I read Quim's thread about the idea for a better Maemo chess app I knew I wanted to join the project. To me, it's all about the device and the sparkling Hildon UX. I really want a good chess app, for myself! I want to play chess online, everywhere! And I want to analyze games as (OK, maybe after =p) they happen. No more "I'll check this position later" (we all know this rarely happens).
So I finally started last friday. At this point, Quim and Andreas had already created a beautiful, content-rich wiki page. It took a while for me to digest it all, and I added information where appropiate.
Kick-starting the developmentAndreas had registered a garage project, but we eventually decided to use gitorious for our repository. Gitorious' UI definitely improved over the recent months, and the possibility to have teams working on a single project - also known as not-so-extreme-dvcs-development - makes gitorious a better choice than github, at the moment.
Saturday night (what better things to do than coding some Qt - my soul will be forever lost) I had a first running example (see screenshot). Currently, Miniature can move between positions, using next/prev menu navigation (we don't need this functionality per se, but it's perhaps a good demonstration that the simple approach I took works).
So no matter the toolkit, no matter the outdated packages or the endless confusion I had with the various Qt repos at gitorious - this project is really fun! Hopefully we get to make a 0.1 release soon.
When I read Quim's thread about the idea for a better Maemo chess app I knew I wanted to join the project. To me, it's all about the device and the sparkling Hildon UX. I really want a good chess app, for myself! I want to play chess online, everywhere! And I want to analyze games as (OK, maybe after =p) they happen. No more "I'll check this position later" (we all know this rarely happens).
So I finally started last friday. At this point, Quim and Andreas had already created a beautiful, content-rich wiki page. It took a while for me to digest it all, and I added information where appropiate.
Kick-starting the developmentAndreas had registered a garage project, but we eventually decided to use gitorious for our repository. Gitorious' UI definitely improved over the recent months, and the possibility to have teams working on a single project - also known as not-so-extreme-dvcs-development - makes gitorious a better choice than github, at the moment.
Saturday night (what better things to do than coding some Qt - my soul will be forever lost) I had a first running example (see screenshot). Currently, Miniature can move between positions, using next/prev menu navigation (we don't need this functionality per se, but it's perhaps a good demonstration that the simple approach I took works).
So no matter the toolkit, no matter the outdated packages or the endless confusion I had with the various Qt repos at gitorious - this project is really fun! Hopefully we get to make a 0.1 release soon.
To me the empty home screen* of the N900 looked like an invitation, so I tried to fill it up with useless stuff as quickly as possible. The home screen configuration menu offers app launchers (shortcuts), bookmarks, widgets and contacts. Let's go through all four options in detail:
Shortcuts: I almost always have some tasks running in the background so launching an application would usually take three to four finger touches. Therefore the app launchers are extremely helpful to me.
Bookmarks: The idea is neat but not essential. The browser starts with a list of bookmarks anyway (how convenient).
Desktop widgets: I never believed in them, but the calendar widget might easily change this! It shows the current day and up to five upcoming events. It's a great addition to the fantastic calendar app.
Contact shortcuts: On this device, everything focuses on integrated contact management. For once, keeping your contacts up-to-date is actually useful and not just a time sink, simply because you can use them from almost everywhere. The logical conclusion follows: you can also add shortcuts to contacts on your home screen! It will show online status, avatar and nick of the chosen contact. Nice!
So what's on my current home screen?
I know - it looks as if this was a Symbian smartphone (that is, ugly and horribly crowded). But I like it this way, at least for now =)
So what's on your current home screen?
*: I still think dashboard is a better name.
To me the empty home screen* of the N900 looked like an invitation, so I tried to fill it up with useless stuff as quickly as possible. The home screen configuration menu offers app launchers (shortcuts), bookmarks, widgets and contacts. Let's go through all four options in detail:
Shortcuts: I almost always have some tasks running in the background so launching an application would usually take three to four finger touches. Therefore the app launchers are extremely helpful to me.
Bookmarks: The idea is neat but not essential. The browser starts with a list of bookmarks anyway (how convenient).
Desktop widgets: I never believed in them, but the calendar widget might easily change this! It shows the current day and up to five upcoming events. It's a great addition to the fantastic calendar app.
Contact shortcuts: On this device, everything focuses on integrated contact management. For once, keeping your contacts up-to-date is actually useful and not just a time sink, simply because you can use them from almost everywhere. The logical conclusion follows: you can also add shortcuts to contacts on your home screen! It will show online status, avatar and nick of the chosen contact. Nice!
So what's on my current home screen?
I know - it looks as if this was a Symbian smartphone (that is, ugly and horribly crowded). But I like it this way, at least for now =)
So what's on your current home screen?
*: I still think dashboard is a better name.
Years ago, when I was thoroughly fascinated by chess, I always wanted a portable chess computer. When I finally got one (a Novag Piccolo, for the odd chance someone else had the same device) I'd take it with me whenever possible. It got worn out quickly, moving the small plastic figures required more and more pressure to make the computer acknowledge my moves. For each move you first had to "touch" the figure you wanted to move. The computer would beep and show 2 LEDs (one for each row and line), for a lack of better feedback. Then you'd put the figure to its target location and "touch" it again, with the same feedback procedure for a valid move. If the move wasn't valid the error LED was lit. Perhaps this wasn't the best user interface in the world (I yearned for a self-moving Mephisto Phantom which actually was a Fidelity Phantom), but it worked for me and I was happy.
During the Maemo Summit there were several talks about the upcoming Maemo 6 platform and also about the transition from GTK+/Hildon to Qt. One of them - the "(Introduction to the) Harmattan UI framework" also mentioned where to get the code for the Maemo 6 UI Framework from. So I went there and cloned the two available repos (tech preview of the framework, tech preview of the homescreen) together with the most recent Qt version that is also on that site.
But sadly, compiling the code wasn't possible for me. Apparantly because some header files were missing. The talk didn't mention a specific resource for feedback so I tried Maemo's Bugzilla. An e-mail to the git repo maintainer didn't yield any response (yet), either.
I reckon that my bug report on the Maemo bugtracker was filed against the wrong module (Qt on Fremantle), but where else should I post problems like that? Even if at this stage the above mentioned repos are probably not much more than a widget gallery it seems like a wasted opportunity to collect feedback, no?
