Back in March I've been working on Brain Party for the N950/N9, and since then, I've uploaded it to Apps For MeeGo in May. With Apps For MeeGo being down more often recently, I thought it might be a good idea to upload it to Nokia Store, so more people can discover this nice game.

Before uploading to Nokia Store, some things have to be fixed - a big icon and screenshots have to be made/taken, single-instance launching and being a good multitasking citizen (pausing gameplay when put into background) is a precondition for QA to not fail, so these things have now been implemented.

In order to properly maintain Brain Party for the N950/N9 in the future, and to track changes, I've set up a Git repository in the Collaborative Harmattan Repository on Github (which gets used a lot - as of today, we have 35 repositories and 16 organization members, and you can get yourself added easily).

The Git repository of Brain Party starts off with an initial commit that is just a copy of the 0.5.91-2 source package contents from Fremantle (sans the artwork/music, which got added in a separate commit later), and then has (in a single commit) all Harmattan customizations that I did back in March, May and today. The repository content is quite big, as the images, sounds and music are all included now, but that shouldn't stop you from cloning it and hacking the code ;)

As written in the announcement on TMO, you can get your .deb from the downloads page or wait until it surfaces on Nokia Store as free app. As with most repositories on Github, we have an issue tracker where you can file pull requests, bugs and other things that you notice while using Brain Party :)

gPodder 3.2.0 "The Great Radish Famine" has been released this week, and some users (not including me, otherwise I would have caught the bug earlier) had problems with the upgrade (see bug 1627 for details), so that's why gPodder 3.2.1 is already on its way to AFM and Nokia Store today. Expect the bug fix to appear as an update in the next few days.

Highlights of 3.2.0 are an improved UI (e.g. cover art in the "All episodes" list) and Flattr integration, so you can now support podcast authors via micropayments (you'll find the Flattr button below the shownotes for podcasts that publish a Flattr URL).

The gory details about what went wrong with packaging this time can be found in the 3.2.1 blog post, and bug 1627 contains - special thanks to Reiner for providing the necessary debugging info needed to get this sorted out (again, I was not experiencing this bug myself).

If your 3.2.0 update worked out fine (the bug didn't affect all users), this is not for you - just enjoy 3.2.0, and install 3.2.1 when it comes out :)

I was visiting Berlin this week for the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour, as a few other Maemo folks were also going, and I saw it as a good opportunity to meet up with some good old community members, and visit Berlin once again (my last visit to Berlin was in 2008 for the Maemo Summit 2008). Cosimo organized a meet-up at the c-base (same location as for the Maemo Summit 2008) the night before the Blackberry Jam. Before I get too much into details, you can have a look at all my photos from Berlin.

I decided it's time to port qw The Game to Android, as a way to see how the publisher story works on Google Play compared to Ovi Publish and also to see how mature the Qt port to Android is.

It's another month, and (given the monthly release schedule of the app) it's not really a surprise that a new version of gPodder has been released. This is mostly a bugfix release, but brings one very useful feature to gPodder: The ability to hide downloaded podcasts from the Music app. While this is nothing new to command-line fans who edit tracker-miner-fs.cfg by hand, there has not been an end-user friendly way to do it. Now there is: You can just flip a switch in the gPodder Settings and hide the podcasts from the Music app (which does nothing more than adding or removing the gPodder directory to tracker-miner-fs.cfg's IgnoredDirectories list), which is especially useful in a situation where your downloaded podcast accumulate (this happens to me right now - less time to listen to podcasts) and you play your music in "Shuffle all" mode.

Other improvements include a small fix for the episode list filter button for locales where the text sometimes became longer than the button:


As you can see, in the left screenshot (gPodder 3.1.1) the "Hide deleted" text (in German: "Gelöschte verstecken") goes over the toolbar button. To "fix" this, the toolbar button has been made wider (right screenshot, gPodder 3.1.2), which (in my opinion) also looks a bit nicer.

The rest of the improvements include some fixes to the CLI, updated and added translations, and some minor build system fixes - read the full changelog if you want the gory details :)

The MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan package for gPodder 3.1.2 has been uploaded to Apps For MeeGo and Nokia Store already, it should hit Apps For MeeGo Staging in a few hours (please do the QA procedure for it then, so it can land in Apps For MeeGo proper) and it should hit Nokia Store in a few days when QA has finished.

At the last Hack-A-N9 meetup, I've been working on a test app to show the currently-playing song. This has then been extended to a fully-fledged app that is easily configurable for the user, so that non-developers could use it (after all, hacks and scripts existed before that did the same thing).

The app is called "Billboard", and its goal is to provide useful information on the low-power-mode screen of the N9 in a way that "normal" users can use it. It also tries to be very lightweight on resources, and smart about updates so that updates are only made when needed, which saves battery power.



Billboard website: http://thp.io/2012/billboard/
Nokia Store link: http://store.ovi.com/content/279408

The currently-released version on Nokia Store is version 1.0.0, and an update (version 1.0.1) with some fixes to allow co-operation with MeeCast, fLPMC and other applications has been uploaded today and is currently waiting in the Ovi QA queue.

There's also a support thread on TMO in case you need help or have suggestions.

The Linux Foundation sponsored my trip to the Tizen Conference 2012 in San Francisco last week, and I'm supposed to blog about it. Also, I think it's good to share what I've seen with fellow Maemo/MeeGo community members, even if Tizen is something different. You can find my photos of the event on Flickr.

A new version of gPodder, the podcast manager, has been released, and with it (as always) come some new features for the Harmattan (N950 and N9) version. The most visible on (apart from bugfixes) is the new multi-episode selection sheet, which allows users to select multiple episodes at once to either download, playback or delete. Options for "Select all", "Select downloaded", "Select none" and "Invert selection" are provided by the longpress context menu in that list and will modify the selection accordingly.

And yes (as some people are still surprised to learn that): With gPodder, you can also subscribe to YouTube and Vimeo channels (users) and download the videos to your device for easy offline viewing and archiving. Combined with the N9 Media Pushing plug-in by Georg Jens, you can then even play back your YouTube or Vimeo videos on DLNA devices on your home network. Of course, this also works for the RSS "video podcasts" that gPodder also supports in addition to YouTube and Vimeo.

gPodder 3.1.1 "The Preachification of Convincing John" has been uploaded to the Community OBS (Apps For MeeGo) and to Ovi Publish (Nokia Store), and should be available to users in the upcoming days. As always, enjoy this new release and report any bugs or feature requests at bugs.gpodder.org :)

I've been in Copenhagen in January (creating a 20-controller PS Move installation game with friends) and more recently in Evora, Portugal for the Science and Technology Week, talking about the history of gPodder. With some sightseeing squeezed into each trip, and no compact camera around, the N9 did a great job making some nice photos that work great as wallpapers of the standby screen.

Just in case you're looking for a way to spice up your standby screen, have a look at the wallpaper photo set for all wallpapers or click on one of the preview images below.

Copenhagen

 
Evora
 
Find all images in the photo set on Flickr. In related news, a small update for gPodder should be ready soon that fixes some minor bugs since the last release in March.

A new version of gPodder has been released, and the package is already available from Nokia Store here, and waiting for your QA feedback in Apps For MeeGo here. This works for both N950 and N9 users. To get access to Apps For MeeGo, go to http://apps.formeego.org/ on your device, and install the Client from there.

The new gPodder version comes with some improvements for Harmattan users:

• Redesigned artwork for the main window and episode list
• Better arrangement of podcast list and cover artwork there
• New preferences menu, containing gpodder.net and orientation settings
• New empty state UI for first-time users
• Various other changes to be more in line with the UX Guidelines
• Context menu item to delete episodes without downloading them

I hope you enjoy this new release - please report any issues you find or ideas you have at http://bugs.gpodder.org/ - and don't forget to QA the package in Apps For MeeGo.