Unlike the other versions, I was not involved in the development of this one. It was developed by Micke Prag, who also started the Meego/N9 port back in the day.
I developed the first version of SeriesFinale in 2009 for the defunct Maemo system and released also a version for the N9/Meego in 2011 (there was also a version for GNOME but I never finished it…). It is very good to see that it continues its life even if I am not involved this time.

I don’t own a BlackBerry so I am not able to try it but judging from this video, it definitely looks good so if you’re a BB user, check it out!

Judging from the success that a clone for Android and a similar online service have, it seems like I could have started a whole business out of it…

0 0

import dbus

class MediaButtonsHandler(QtCore.QObject):
    def __init__(self):
        QtCore.QObject.__init__(self)
        headset_path = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer_logicaldev_input_0'
        headset_path2 = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer_logicaldev_input'

        system_bus = dbus.SystemBus()
        system_bus.add_signal_receiver(self.handle_button, 'Condition',
                'org.freedesktop.Hal.Device', None, headset_path)
        system_bus.add_signal_receiver(self.handle_button, 'Condition',
                'org.freedesktop.Hal.Device', None, headset_path2)
 
    def handle_button(self, signal, button):
        if signal == 'ButtonPressed':
            if button in ('play-cd', 'phone'):
                self.playPressed.emit()
            elif button == 'pause-cd':
                self.pausePressed.emit()
            elif button == 'previous-song':
                self.previousPressed.emit()
            elif button == 'next-song':
                self.nextPressed.emit()

    playPressed = QtCore.Signal()
    pausePressed = QtCore.Signal()
    previousPressed = QtCore.Signal()
    nextPressed = QtCore.Signal()

1 0

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • New Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council elected
   • Logs from the Maemo Community Council handover meeting available
2. Community
   • Hildon Foundation Board meeting minutes from April 19, 2013 posted

1 0

Abstract

Over the past decade, l1 regularization has emerged as a powerful way to learn classifiers with implicit feature selection. More recently, mixed-norm (e.g., l1/l2) regularization has been utilized as a way to select entire groups of features. In this paper, we propose a novel direct multiclass formulation specifically designed for large-scale and high-dimensional problems such as document classification. Based on a multiclass extension of the squared hinge loss, our formulation employs l1/l2 regularization so as to force weights corresponding to the same features to be zero across all classes, resulting in compact and fast-to-evaluate multiclass models. For optimization, we employ two globally-convergent variants of block coordinate descent, one with line search (Tseng and Yun, 2009) and the other without (Richtárik and Takáč, 2012). We present the two variants in a unified manner and develop the core components needed to efficiently solve our formulation. The end result is a couple of block coordinate descent algorithms specifically tailored to our multiclass formulation. Experimentally, we show that block coordinate descent performs favorably to other solvers such as FOBOS, FISTA and SpaRSA. Furthermore, we show that our formulation obtains very compact multiclass models and outperforms l1/l2- regularized multiclass logistic regression in terms of training speed, while achieving comparable test accuracy.

Code

The code of the proposed multiclass method is available in my Python/Cython machine learning library, lightning. Below is an example of how to use it on the News20 dataset.

from sklearn.datasets import fetch_20newsgroups_vectorized
from lightning.primal_cd import CDClassifier
 
bunch = fetch_20newsgroups_vectorized(subset="all")
X = bunch.data
y = bunch.target
 
clf = CDClassifier(penalty="l1/l2",
                   loss="squared_hinge",
                   multiclass=True,
                   max_iter=20,
                   alpha=1e-4,
                   C=1.0 / X.shape[0],
                   tol=1e-3)
clf.fit(X, y)
# accuracy
print clf.score(X, y) 
# percentage of selected features
print clf.n_nonzero(percentage=True)

To use the variant without line search (as presented in the paper), add the max_steps=0 option to CDClassifier.

Data

I also released the Amazon7 dataset used in the paper. It contains 1,362,109 reviews of Amazon products. Each review may belong to one of 7 categories (apparel, book, dvd, electronics, kitchen & housewares, music, video) and is represented as a 262,144-dimensional vector. It is, to my knowledge, one of the largest publically available multiclass classification dataset.

[*] The final publication is available here.

1 0

Petals: A puzzle game written in pure JavaScript and QML

• Change "import QtQuick 1.1" to "import QtQuick 2.0" (sed(1) helps here)
• Instead of assigning a JavaScript function to a property to create a dynamic property binding (item.someprop = function() { return otheritem.otherprop * 3.0; }), this function has to be wrapped in a call to Qt.binding() in Qt 5 (see "Creating Property Bindings from JavaScript" in the Qt 5 docs)
• Instead of using SQL Local Storage directly as in QtQuick 1.1, use QtQuick.LocalStorage 2.0, which you can still do in your .js files - use ".import" as described in this blog post
• In your C++ launcher (in case you need one), QApplication becomes QGuiApplication, and QDeclarativeView becomes QQuickView
• Use "QT += quick qml" instead of "QT += declarative" in your qmake project file

1 0

• Craig Woodard / Woody14619 (audio only)
• Rob Bauer / SD69 (audio only)
• Jim Jagielski / Jimjag (audio only)

Personnel and Organization

• Motion by Craig Woodard to appoint Xes as co-sysop for maemo.org, with physical access to server if needed. Passed unanimously.
• Motion by Robert Bauer to appoint Jacekowski as co-sysop for maemo.org, with physical access to server if needed, under supervision of other co-sysops and subject to their continuing consent. Passed unanimously.
• Resignation of Cosimo Kroll as Treasurer was noted and circumstances of bank account discussed. Volunteers to be requested for Treasurer and appointed at next Board meeting.
• Discussion of Secretary and Chair positions. Robert Bauer will continue as Secretary and Craig Woodard will be Chair.
• Discussion of Board Meeting Schedule. Board members will communicate via email to determine schedule.
• Discussion of roles of Hildon Foundation Council and Maemo Community Council. Colloquoy between Craig Woodard and Robert Bauer on background of the councils. Jim Jagielski recommends to continue the process of initiating a Hildon Foundation Council election process. Further colloquoy on the councils during which Jim Jagielski leaves meeting. Joint motion by Craig Woodard and Robert Bauer to continue with elections for Hildon Foundation Council at the same time as election for Maemo Community Council. Jim Jagielski not present and does not vote on motion.
• Discussion of suggestion of special election for Board of Directors. Robert Bauer noted that special election of the current Board can be prompted by resignation of a Director and one of the remaining two Directors refusing to appoint a replacement for the resigning Director within 7 days.

Infrastructure Issues

• Motion by Jim Jagielski to purchase SSL certificates for maemo.org immediately upon transfer of domain from Nokia. Passed unanimously.
• Motion by Craig Woodard to reimburse Joerg Reisenweber up to $300 for purchase of hard drives subject to documentation. Passed unanimously.
• Discussion of IPHH annual contract for server hosting and payment by Treasurer. Motion by Craig Woodard to sign contract. Passed unanimously.
• Discussion of offering Hildon Foundation server to act as mirror for Qt project. Suggested by Craig Woodard to request Falk to discuss the matter with IPHH.

1 0

• Fixed MeeCast icon (in 1.0.8, you can already use <<{meecast-icon-src}>>)
• New formatter that allows you to nest {} expressions used for adding dynamic content
• Optional image dithering (using # after the filename) for better colors in low power mode

1 0

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Nominations over for Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council
   • Voting for Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council begins on 2013-04-30 at 23:59 UTC
2. Community
   • Voting on the Maemo Community Council election rules refendum closes

2 0

• BusyIndicator and ProgressIndicator are separate components instead of just one component with e.g. "indeterminate" property. This allows using a more light-weight (only one texture, animating only vertex shader, less properties etc.) BusyIndicator component with indeterminate use-cases. Lesson to learn is to avoid making too general/bloat QML components.
• There are four different sizes for indicators, from small (64x64px) to huge (512x512px). These sizes were selected because power-of-two texture sizes are more optimal for GPU. SourceSize property is used to scale and cache exactly the correct sized textures.
• BusyIndicator animation is achieved purely on vertex shader. As vertex shader is run once for every vertex instead of once for every fragment (pixel), it can be much more GPU-friendly. In case of an 256x256px indicator, our vertex shader is executed over 650(!) times less than fragment shader.
• To keep the amount of vertices as small as possible while making sure animation looks still smooth, the mesh size is allocated based on indicator size. GridMesh resolution for 256x256 indicator is 10x10 while 64x64 indicator manages with a 4x4 mesh.
• When using items&images as sources for ShaderEffect and not needing the original one, remember to set its visibility to false to prevent it from rendering.
• ProgressIndicator can show percentages in the center and applies vertex animation also for it, which requires that the whole Item is used as a source for ShaderEffect. Initialize of Item as a ShaderEffect source is slightly slower than initialize of Image. This is because Items (with their child Items) need to be rendered into FBO first while Image textures are instantly available. When percentages are disabled (showPercentages: false), Image is used directly and stress test of 162 ProgressIndicators starts pretty instantly. So if you need instantly appearing ProgressIndicators, don't show percentages on them.
• Minimize the amount of property changes. Property bindings in QML are so easy to make that without paying attention you may forget to disable those when not needed. As an example, ProgressIndicator percentages Text element visibility was set to false when disabled and it wasn't even used as part of the shader source. But because of an oversight, its text property was still updated whenever ProgressIndicator value changed. That's bad, fixed now to update text only when showPercentages is true. Qt Creator QML Profiler is the tool to use to analyze your code.

0 0

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Nominations over for Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council
   • Voting for Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council begins on 2013-04-30 at 23:59 UTC
2. Community
   • Voting on the Maemo Community Council election rules refendum closes

1 0

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • This week in Maemo Community politics
   • Rob Bauer's take on the Maemo Community Council/Hildon Foundation Council distinction
2. Community
   • Summary of the Hildon Foundation Board meeting
   • Summary of the Maemo Community Council meeting
   • kerio (kerio) running for Maemo Community Council
   • karmaflux (khm/karmaflux) running for Hildon Foundation Board of Directors
   • S. Howard running for Hildon Foundation Council

2 0

• The design language should be relatively neutral. Indicators like these may be used in many places, in applications and games, so they should not be too characteristic. And circles are pretty universal, so circles it is. The amount of circles in BusyIndicator is 11, by design. Reason behind this is that ProgressIndicator has one missing from top to mark start/end position, meaning 10 circles. This is optimal for percentages math e.g. when user sees 4 circles highlighted she can count that progress is at 40%. For smaller indicators, less & bigger circles might look better but decision was not to differentiate on these.

• Different use-cases call for different kind of indicators. When indicator is only visible briefly and progress can't be tracked, BusyIndicator is the one to use. Some events may take more time and then ProgressIndicator can be used to keep users better informed of how long they still need to wait. With longer taking tasks you could show percentages and make indicator even more dynamic to make it less boring for user to watch. Watching interesting animation makes 5 seconds to feel like 2... So from brief (left) to longer (right) waiting times, indicator to choose from our set would be:

• Indicators should fit and be clearly visible on top of any background. Users may wish to place them on white, black or colorful areas and expects indicator to fit there. To achieve this, our indicators use neutral black&white as their base colors and contain inverted version which works better on light backgrounds. It's also possible to define alternative highlight color when the default yellowish isn't suitable. Here are few examples of ProgressIndicators on top of different backgrounds:

• Show/hide animations are also important. Too often animated items like these appear and disappear suddenly, breaking the illusion of a fluid component. In our component showing/hiding animations are combination of opacity, scale and vertex position skewing. Strips below show what the animation looks like. This could be made smoother but for performance reasons we use only vertex shader with a minimal mesh size. Fastly animated it anyway looks better than these still images.

• Sometimes indicators like these should attract user attention. When the application is blocked until loading is ready, it's good that user eyes focus on the indicator. Darkening (and blurring, Qt5 graphical effects make that easy) the rest of the UI is a good way to achieve this. But sometimes just the opposite is desired, directing user focus to real content and keeping indicators relatively obscure. Example of this is our Picture Wall demo, users attention is on loaded images instead of the ones still loading. With our indicators this can be achieved by decreasing opacity. (Developer note: When making your own ShaderEffect which rewrites the default fragmentShader, remember to multiply gl_FragColor with qt_Opacity to keep QML opacity property behaving correctly!). Here's how Picture Wall demo fades indicators into background:

• Circular zooming animation doesn't progress linearly, but instead follows a custom bezier curve. This change in speed makes animation feel more lively and natural as it would be affected by slight gravity, gaining speed when moving down and slowing down while reaching the top. Designs are often filled with small details like this, final touches.

0 0

Overview

Erudite makes it possible to use Amazon’s Cloud Reader on various mobile platforms which aren’t officially supported by Amazon. You can either read books online, or download them for reading offline. Your progress in a book is then also kept synchronised between your phone and other Kindle devices.

Symbian Belle support

Until recently Erudite only supported MeeGo Harmattan and Mer based phones (such as the Nokia N9), but now it’s also available for Symbian Belle phones as well. I’ll try and put together a build for Symbian Anna phones in the near future.

There’s a fairly comprehensive review of Erudite for Symbian over on All About Symbian: Erudite review.

Upcoming features

In the next release for both Symbian and MeeGo I’ll be focusing on orientation switching support, so users can optionally view their books in landscape mode, as well as investigating some apparent issues with very large books.

Download

• Symbian Belle version — Nokia 701, Nokia C6-01, Nokia C7-00, Nokia N8-00, Nokia X7-00, Nokia E6-00, Nokia 808 Pureview, Nokia 603, Nokia Oro, Nokia E7-00, and Nokia 700
• MeeGo Harmattan version — Nokia N9, Nokia N950

1 0