In a few hours I’ll be flying to Amsterdam in order to attend the Maemo Summit 2009.

I’m also giving a talk about Porting GNOME Applications to Maemo Fremantle where I’ll talk about some common practices and decisions regarding the adaptation to Fremantle of applications that were designed to be used in the GNOME desktop. For these, I’ll use the experience of porting EOG and OCRFeeder to Fremantle.
I hope that it will help developers who are thinking on porting they’re favorite desktop applications.

If you want to discuss matters like “how do I adapt this behavior to Fremantle”, OCR, EOG or OCRFeeder for Maemo, just let me know and I’ll be glad to talk about these topics.

Hope to see you there!

It’s been a while since I wrote my last post but I guess this one will compensate.

The wait is over, today, N900 was announced. It is the first Maemo powered cellphone and represents a long way since the first version of Maemo came out.

Now I don’t wanna be bugging you around with another post explaining how much I like what was announced but I’d leave a lacuna in my blog if I didn’t write anything at all.

So, I’d just like to say I’m proud and happy to be part of such a great team that, along with others, contributed to bring in this great piece of technology that represents another step in the history of GNU/Linux in mobile phones.

Viva o Maemo!

During my hackfest time in Igalia I thought it’d be interesting to see how much it’d take to make OCRFeeder run in Fremantle just like Stefan Kost did for Jokosher and Pitivi talked about during GCDS.

At the beginning, I thought it’d be a little difficult (I thought I’d need a lot of stuff)
So I installed libgoocanvas-dev, checked out pygoocanvas and compiled it (I also needed to manually copy the generated egg from Python 2.3’s site-packages to Python 2.5’s). After that, no OCR engines available so I installed OCRAD which was pretty easy. I also decided to give a shot at installing Tesseract which went wrong supposedly due to a broken make file or something but this week that problem was fixed and now Tesseract works like a charm!

I’m not thinking of porting OCRFeeder to Maemo (it is an office application that wouldn’t be very easy to use on a device nor it makes sense to want to do that kind of office task in a mobile device) but it was indeed nice to see how easy it is to make a GNOME application written in Python to work on it.

OCR can have many interesting applications in a mobile device and I got a few ideas stashed in a corner of my memory so, if the time allows, I’ll try to put some to practice in the future.

Here are some screenshots of OCRFeeder and the result ODT document (yes, the ODFPy modules worked fine as well):

So, for me and some other Igalians, today was the last day at GCDS.

I also gave an introduction to Hildon 2.2. On this introduction, I talked about how to use the new widgets introduced on Hildon 2.2 as well as ways of accomplishing the same functionalities when porting an application to Maemo Fremantle. To better illustrate this, I compared the EOG for Maemo with the desktop version.

The presentation slides are below:

And that’s it, I must say I really liked my first GUADEC and I’m willing to go for the next one!
Maybe I’ll be able to write some post-event posts to compensate the lack of blogging during these days.

I mean Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, an event joining GUADEC and aKademy!

Tomorrow I’ll fly to Gran Canaria to attend this great event and I got lots of good expectations since it’s gonna be my first GUADEC.
I hope to attend many conferences and hang out with fellow Igalians and friends.

A lot of important names in our world of Open Source and particularly, Open Desktop will be there so it can only be great!

I’ll give two talks in there. A lightning talk about my OCR project — OCRFeeder — and another one that gives a practical view on the new Hildon (or “The Fremantle Way”).
By the way, I used ReStructured Text to do my presentation (using the rst2odp script) and save time from using Open Office. You should try it too.

So, thanks to my dear girlfriend everything is packed already (I always think my socks time-traveled to Narnia), the camera battery is charged, presentations are finished and I’m ready to go — I don’t mention my laptop because we’re “symbiotically” connected and where I go “he” goes.

Hope to see you there!

Since a while ago, and during my work at Igalia, I’ve been porting EOG to Maemo using the new and great Fremantle widgets!

The project is still in an *early stage* but I couldn’t wait more to let everyone know about it so today I’ve published the git repository.

The project is being done as a branch of the original EOG. You can get the source by doing:

$ git clone http://git.igalia.com/eog.git
$ git checkout –track -b mobile origin/mobile

And then, you know, inside scratchbox:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
$ run-standalone.sh eog

Thank you to the people who helped me porting EOG, mainly Claudio and Berto.

And here you have a screencast and some nice screenshots, hope you like it:

EOG for Maemo from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.