After a very pleasant experience in Finland (Tampere), I’ve finally come back to Italy. I had the opportunity to work for three months in Nokia as “Qt Expert” in “Nokia Developer Forum” and it’s been an amazing job!

To be more precise I left Finland on August 31th, but I didn’t have much time to blog about this. Finally I can use my desktop PC again and I’m not anymore limited to my small netbook. Trust me… spending 3 months with a 11” netbook and pretending to work normally is really frustrating.

Now I have more spare time (too much :\ ) to contribute to Ubuntu and to play with some new technologies: I’m working on a project that uses Arduino, Android and some “robotic” parts, with people of Pistoia Linux User Group and it’s really an amazing learning experience!

Talking about Ubuntu, if you have never contributed to it and you would like to start with something easy, I suggest you this interesting initiative https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/BugFixingInitiative

In the mean time I’m also looking for new opportunities and challenges (aka = looking for a new job), so if you think you may be interested in me, take a couple of minutes to give a look to my LinkedIn profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/andreagrandi

I will attend next UDS in Copenaghen (99% sure) and I already have a couple of topics I would like to work with, but I will talk about these later, first I want to properly create a blueprint in Launchpad so we will have a starting point.

Social Connect is a library written in Qt that allows applications to easily connect to services like Facebook and Twitter. Recently I had the opportunity to work on this library improving it and adding support for Instagram (work is still in progress but it’s almost finished).

The main features of this library are:

• Out-of-the-box support for Facebook and Twitter
• Integrated authentication implementation
• Simplified common interface for all supported services
• Provides interfaces for native API calls
• Design enabling easy addition of new services e.g. LinkedIn

If you are writing an application that needs to access these services, this could be the library for you. It can be extended to support even other services like LinkedIn, Flickr etc… and I would like to invite people to contribute to the code. The library has been tested with Qt 4.8.1 on Ubuntu Linux 12.04 but it should be compatible with any other versions/platforms.

For more informations about getting started with the library, I suggest you to give a look at this page https://projects.developer.nokia.com/socialconnect/wiki/GettingStarted

CuteSoma (Soma.fm client for Nokia N9) has been available for 4 months now and it’s the right time to publish some interesting statistics about downloads. First of all I didn’t expect so much interest and I wasn’t sure to have so many downloads, due to the fact that Nokia never advertised this device properly. But luckly lot of people don’t care about advertising and buy a product anyway if they know it’s one of the best available on the smartphone market.

I’m really happy to notice that the number of downloads is growing each month, this motivates me to continue with development (well… when my N950 comes back from Nokia, since I had to send it because it was broken).

I want to thank all the 3658 people that downloaded CuteSoma until now and all the people that are sending me their feedback, ideas and patches (yes Cornelius Hald, I’m talking about you

CuteSoma is a client of Soma.Fm streaming radio that I wrote using Qt/QML for Nokia N9 and Nokia N950. Previously it was available as a .deb only, now you can install it directly from the OVI Store. It’s only a 0.1 version and even if it’s quite stable it may contains some bugs: please report me any bug so I can try to fix them as soon as possible.

CuteSoma is opensource and released under the GPL v.3 license. You can find the complete source code here: https://github.com/andreagrandi/CuteSoma

There is a poll available to let the final users choose the new icon for this application, you can find it here: http://forum.meego.com/showthread.php?t=4619
I asked for help to design a new icon and I received two, so I’m letting the final users choose which one they like most.

To get this application you need to search “cutesoma” on OVI Store client or visit this link http://store.ovi.com/content/205737

Please remember that CuteSoma is free, but if you want you can make me a donation or offer me a beer using the “Donazione” button on the right column.

Introduction

It would be nice to organize a weekend like the Barcelona Long Weekend we (the Maemo Community) organized on October 2009. These two days should be completly organized by the community and for the community. No formal conferences or talks, but interactive activities and hacking sessions where you, the participant, are the main actor.

What about the content of these two days? We could have (for example) programming tutorials, Qt tutorials, hacking sessions on a specific task, round tables where a developer explains his difficoulties implementing a feature and the others help him, ecc…

The first thing to do is spreading this and asking people (users, developers ecc…) what they would like to find during these two days. Once we’ve gathered some nice ideas we can organize them better.

When and Where

The basic idea is to organize these two days on November 13th, 14th. About the location that will host us we still have no idea. Probably it will be possible to use the same hotel used for the MeeGo Conference, but this must be confirmed yet.

Ideas for the program structure

• Active participation in the event – less talk, more code. No powerpoints – just you, the editor and the compiler. Be productive!
• A two-day Hackathon: Start putting your ideas into fresh code, or finish a project that has been on the back burner for some time
• Participants are encouraged to share their progress at the end of each day – what they accomplished, where they need further help, etc.
• A short but intensive indroduction to Qt/C++ (something like 3-4 hours course, offered by some expert developer)
• Round tables to discuss about UI improvements or features implementation: a developer could have found some difficoult implementing the UI for his application or to provide a particular feature. Other expert developers could try to help him with his problem.
• A workshop for x86 developers on getting started with MeeGo development for ARM – end goal: By the end of the session, everyone has a sample application running in an emulator on their laptop
• Developer tools training – a half day on using git, valgrind, oprofile

Discussion resources

The official place where I would like to take this discussion forward is the MeeGo Forum. The official thread is available here: http://forum.meego.com/showthread.php?t=1342
We also have started a discussion on Maemo Forum and you can find it here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=61708

The official page with all informations available is on MeeGo Wiki: http://wiki.meego.com/MeeGo_Conference_2010/Early_Bird_Events

I’ve decided to candidate myself again (yes, I wasn’t elected last time) for the Maemo Council elections. During these months I’ve tried to help more the Maemo Community and I’ve started working to two Qt/C++ projects. Here you can find something more about me.

Name: Andrea Grandi
maemo.org profile: Andy80 – http://maemo.org/profile/view/andy80/
Corporate affiliation: none

Introduction: My name is Andrea Grandi, I live in Italy and I’m a Computer Science student. I’ve worked for some years as a software developer, then I started university. I’m part of the Maemo Community since 2007. Since then I like to help new users, organizing events, developing applications for Maemo. During this year I’ve started developing applications using Qt/C++ for N900, to be ready when MeeGo for handled devices will be out. I really like to collaborate with other community members to build together the best product ever.

My life in the Community:

– May 2008: PyMaemo: Python for Nokia Internet Tablet @ PyCon Italia 2 – http://www.pycon.it/conference/talks/pymaemo-python-i-nokia-internet-tablet

– September 2008: ESBox and Pluthon Eclipse plugins: how to use Eclipse to develop Maemo applications @ Maemo Summit 2008 – http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2008

– Summer 2009: I worked to python-mafw bindings, during a stage in Igalia.

– October 2009: python-mafw: MAFW framework for Python developers @ Maemo Summit 2009 – http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2009

– May 2010: PySide: Python Bindings for the Qt Framework @ PyCon Italia 4 – http://www.pycon.it/conference/talks/qt-mobile-pyside-bindings

Current Activities: I’m currently working to two Maemo/MeeGo projects. The first one is mSoma, a Soma.Fm client that I’m developing with Lorenzo Bettini. The other one is LastGo, a Last.fm client. Both applications are written in Qt/C++ and are using QtMobility as multimedia libraries.

mSoma: http://gitorious.org/msoma – http://maemo.org/packages/view/msoma
LastGo: http://gitorious.org/lastgo – http://maemo.org/packages/view/lastgo

Motivations: I really would like to be able to do more for the community and one of the best way could be to be part of the council, to help both users/developers to explain their requests to Nokia and Nokia to understand the requests from the community. There are a lot of fantastic ideas coming from the community that could improve what we are doing: the key is to organize them and giving them more attention. This is what I’ve always looked for: working together to build something great! This will be probably the last Maemo Council, since now we (Maemo) and them (Moblin) are all part of the same community: MeeGo, and I’d like to help Maemo people to feel the most comfortable possible in our new Community.

What is Maemo Coding Competition?

This competition has been organized by Maemo Community for the Maemo Community. Developer can work to an application and submit it for one of the six categories available: Desktop, System & Utilities, Games, Graphics & Multimedia, Location & Navigation, Other. Another category is available too, and it’s for beginner developers. The competition entry has now ended, but voting is open. You can find more information about the competition, in the official wiki page: http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Coding_Competition_1

How can I vote?

Voting is available using a forum’s poll for each category. Every t.m.o. user can give one vote for each category. Here’s the complete list of polls:

• Desktop: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=760304
• System & Utilities: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=764039
• Games: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=58990
• Graphics & Multimedia: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=763679
• Location & Navigation: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=58964
• Other: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=59038
• Beginners: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=59074

p.s: I partecipate in the Graphics & Multimedia category with two applications: LastGo and mSoma. Please at least test them and let me know what do you think about!

While I’m still working to mSoma with Lorenzo Bettini, I decided to start writing another application. I needed to write something from scratch to learn better how to use C++ and Qt libraries, so I decided to write a client for Last.fm service. The application is still in full development, but you can already taste it if you have extras-devel repository enabled on your N900. At the moment it only supports basic radio features: tuning user’s radio, playing a song, skipping a song and displaying song informations.

Other basic Last.fm features like scrobbling, marking a song as loved or banned ecc.. are not supported yet, but of course they’re planned for the stable release. Please not that the application is still a bit unstable even if it works for normal tasks.

If you are a Last.fm subscriber and you want to test it, please install it from extras-devel repository and send me your feedback.

Note: since it’s not allowed to use Last.fm API from a mobile phone (due to API license restrictions) I cannot distribute a valid api key with the application. I’m writing this software mainly to learn C++ and Qt and for the future tablets and netbooks that will be based on MeeGo. If you feel to assume the responsability, you can download the api key file and import it using “Import Api Key” that you can find in the application menu.

SomaFM is a streaming radio with near 16 different channels, available for free. Even if it’s possible to copy-paste their streaming URLs to N900 Media Player, we (me and Lorenzo Bettini) decided to create a custom application, to make channels switching easier for the end user and to be able to add more features. We decided to take advantage of the new Nokia SDK and write the application in Qt/C++. Source code is available on Gitorious and it’s always updated with latest version we’re working on. If someone want to test the application, it’s available in extras-devel repository  (“msoma” under Multimedia section) of N900.

mSoma

The UI is still in development as you can see. The application is already usable, but of course we have to work hard on the user interface. Feel free to test/use it and send us any feedback. If you want to contribute to our project (coders are welcome) please send us a patch with your code or ask us to be added to mSoma development team in Gitorious.

Introduction

My name's Andrea Grandi, I'm italian and I'm a Maemo user/lover/contributor since the Nokia 770. I love Python as development language and few months ago I also gave some contributions to the PyMaemo project.

In these days I had the idea to start writing a Twitter client for Maemo with a precise direction in my mind. I'll try to explain all my reasons here. First of all I've to thank the author of Mauku client. I use it since its first version and I'm quite happy with it. Then, why do I want to write another one?

1. Maemo (MeeGo) is moving to Qt and for this reason I'm going to use Qt, while Mauku uses Gtk.
2. I'm learning Qt and what is better than writing a complete (but not too complex) application to learn better?
3. Mauku is not free as lot of people could think. Reading the source codeyou find this "You are NOT allowed to modify or redistribute the source code.", while I want to write a client and release it under GPL2 or GPL3 license.
4. Mauku is not updated since some months and we have no news about it.
5. I love Python and I like to write free software in this language.
6. I want to give to Maemo a stronger contribute.

My request for help

Before lot of people start writing their own client resulting in 4-5 twitter clients for Maemo, why don't we join our strength and work to a common project? I'm not a Python expert nor a Qt one, but I've some experience as project/team leader and since this is not a complex project, I would be glad to lead it. So, I'm looking for Python developers, Qt developers, UI designers and whoever want to contribute to this project. I still have to find a good name and logo for this application.

Who want to help me?