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 ;)

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 :)

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.

Coming back from Nokia World in London earlier this week (thanks to Nokia Developer for inviting me), I've been thinking about the SDK availability for different mobile operating systems given a specific Desktop platform. While leaving out all the other criteria (openness, libreness, licensing, UX, device capabilities, programming languages, toolkits, data formats, annual costs for the SDK/developer account, store rules, target audience, revenue splitting, advertising/in-app purchase options, coolness, etc..) developers can choose their mobile OS by, I want to highlight a specific aspect: The availability of an SDK for a given Desktop operating system.

I've recently been asked again about the games I wrote for mobile devices, so here it is: The post with an overview of the games, with some not-so-well-known backstories and information on where to get them for different devices. Plus a little teaser hidden somewhere.

gPodder 2.20 has been released. New packages are already available for Maemo 4 (in Extras) and Maemo 5 (in Extras-Testing). If you are using gPodder on Maemo 5, please test the package and vote for it on the package page, so it can get promoted to Extras when it has been tested by the community.

For all N950/N9 users: The Harmattan build of the gPodder QML UI is available for free in Ovi Store. The version available in Ovi Store is a development snapshot of the "tres" branch, where we will have an official release soon. I'm using it on a daily basis, and it's very stable and usable - new features will be added as we go along, so check out the new gPodder! You can grab the source code from the harmattan branch in our Git repository.

Back in August, Jarkko Mikael Palonkangas has been looking for Maemo 5 users without any experience in using gPodder. His Master's thesis is about the Thinking Aloud usability testing method on mobile devices, and he chose gPodder as the example application. The application used for managing the test cases has been written by Jarkko for Maemo 5 and is called Remota - it takes care of displaying the tasks to the users, recording screenshots and audio and retrieving the logging output from gPodder.

Remota log viewer with UI action log at the bottom
If you are interested in seeing how this looks, or if you would like to help to comment on the usability issues and find improvement ideas, please feel free to click through the videos below, which have now been uploaded:
User 1: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, Task 5, Task 6, Task 7, Task 8, Task 9, Task 10, Task 11User 2: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, Task 5, Task 6, Task 7, Task 8, Task 9, Task 10, Task 11User 3: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, Task 5, Task 6, Task 7, Task 8 (1st try), Task 8 (2nd try), Task 9, Task 10, Task 11User 4: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, Task 5, Task 6, Task 7 (1st try), Task 7 (2nd try), Task 8, Task 9, Task 10, Task 11
Unfortunately, user 4's logging output had problems, so you only have audio and video for these tasks - for users 1 through 3 we also have logging output about UI interactions, which was possible by patching the gPodder source to add additional handlers to buttons and other UI elements while the UI was created on application startup.
Please feel free to add comments to the videos - Jarkko is going to process them and include the finding in his final work, so that would be an easy way to contribute.

Last weekend I've been toying around with Open GL ES 2.0 on the N950 after finding a nice Xlib-based Python example on the web for the N900. I modified the code a bit, replaced the Xlib code with a QGLWidget from QtOpenGL (via PySide), which makes the setup a lot easier and (apart from API differences of GL ES 2.0 and Desktop GL) allows me to test the prototype on my normal computer as well.

After I got the hang of it, I decided to come up with some fancy 90s-style hover racing game (only texturing, no lighting), or at least parts of it - right now, the small hovercraft just runs around the track and you can shift it left and right via the touchscreen and switching between normal and bird's view by pressing any hardware key.

As for the GL ES bindings (this is the interesting/useful part to developers who want to access the GL ES 2.0 API from Python), I put together a naive header-to-ctypes binding generator for the GL ES 2.0 API which you can run on "gl2.h" from the Qt SDK's Madde sysroot (too lazy to search for a working binding generator that surely exists somewhere out there already) - or just grab the generated "gles2.py" from the SwipEout source tarball. The result? Video it yourself.


You can grab the source code and miscellaneous files from the SwipEout website. The code was tested on the N900 and N950, you only need Python, PIL (python-imaging), PySide and the Open GL ES 2.0 libraries (libGLESv2.so) installed. Removing the PIL dependency and replacing it with Qt-based texture loading is left as an exercise for the reader. Enjoy :)

Control the white ship to fill areas.Last December, I started to work on a new game: qw ("cuvée"), an area filling game similar to Qix. Since the tech demo has been released, I've been working on a fancy QML menu, a balanced scoring system, nice rendering effects for enemies and the player's trail and obviously some more levels, which results in this new release, version 1.5.1, with 13 high-definition images that are waiting for you to get their colors back.

The game is now available from Ovi Store for N950 and N9 users, and also for Symbian devices - the advantage of the MeeGo version being that it has higher-resolution artwork (it fully utilizes the higher screen resolution) and sound effects (for some reason Qt Mobility's QML SoundEffect has its problems on Symbian). Both versions use the feedback motor of the device for feedback when you draw, fill or die.

Here's a gameplay video of the first 3 levels, so you can get a feeling of how the game plays:

For the launch of the N9 (yes, we are one of the countries in which the N9 will be officially available, and at least 3 of 4 operators will offer it with a contract), Nokia Austria is organizing a N9 Hackathon around the N9 on the second weekend of October (2011-10-08 + 2011-10-09) in Vienna. If you live in or around Austria, or wanted to have an excuse for coming to this nice place from abroad for some serious coding, this might be a good opportunity to meet some fellow Maemo/MeeGo community members and get some hacking done. We plan to have some hardware like NFC tags to develop cool stuff with the N9's hardware, so don't forget to bring your creativity as well as skills ;)


Accomodation and food/drinks at the Hackathon will be provided by Nokia Austria, but accomodation places are limited, so please get in touch if you are interested in coming, so I can make a list of people who plan to come, and can keep you up to date on the event. Bonus points if you want to demo and/or talk about one of your apps that you have already written (or are in the process of writing), but interested developers new to Maemo/MeeGo are also very welcome! :)