Planet maemo
In this blog series, I am presenting a solution that I've developed that enables the use of Wayland on top of Android hardware adaptations, specifically the GPU drivers, but without actually requiring the OS to be Bionic based.
Turns out I haven't posted here for two months, so here we go again: Billboard, your favorite low-power mode standby screen will soon receive a new update - version 1.0.9 has been uploaded to Nokia Store QA two days ago, and should hopefully pass QA and be available as an update in the next few days. This release brings a few major under-the-hood improvements and small bugfixes:
If you are looking for additional ways to tweak and enhance your Billboard-on-N9 experience, have a look at billboard-scripts, a growing collection of Shell and Python scripts that provide even more ways of customizing your standby screen.
If you haven't purchased Billboard from Nokia Store yet, you can get the current version now for your N9, and get the upgrade to 1.0.9 as soon as it's available. If you are already a happy user, watch your application updates in the next few days, and get the new version.
- 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
If you are looking for additional ways to tweak and enhance your Billboard-on-N9 experience, have a look at billboard-scripts, a growing collection of Shell and Python scripts that provide even more ways of customizing your standby screen.
If you haven't purchased Billboard from Nokia Store yet, you can get the current version now for your N9, and get the upgrade to 1.0.9 as soon as it's available. If you are already a happy user, watch your application updates in the next few days, and get the new version.
Libferris has been gaining some KDE love in recent times. There is now a KIO slave to allow you to see libferris from KDE, also the ability to get at libferris from plasma.
I've been meaning to update the mounting of some Web services like vimeo for quite some time. I'd also like to expand to allow mounting google+ as a filesystem and add other new Web services.
In order to manage time so that this can happen quicker, I thought I'd try the waters with a pledgie. I've left this open ended rather than sticking an exact "bounty" on things. I had the idea of trying a pledgie with my recent investigation into the libferris indexing plugins on a small form factor ARM machine. I'd like to be able to spend more time on libferris, and also pay the rent while doing that, so I thought I'd throw the idea out into the public.
If you've enjoyed the old tricks of mounting XML, Berkeley DB, SQLite, PostgreSQL and other relational databases, flickr, google docs, identica, and others and want to see more then please support the pledgie to speed up continued development. Enjoy libferris!
I've been meaning to update the mounting of some Web services like vimeo for quite some time. I'd also like to expand to allow mounting google+ as a filesystem and add other new Web services.
In order to manage time so that this can happen quicker, I thought I'd try the waters with a pledgie. I've left this open ended rather than sticking an exact "bounty" on things. I had the idea of trying a pledgie with my recent investigation into the libferris indexing plugins on a small form factor ARM machine. I'd like to be able to spend more time on libferris, and also pay the rent while doing that, so I thought I'd throw the idea out into the public.
If you've enjoyed the old tricks of mounting XML, Berkeley DB, SQLite, PostgreSQL and other relational databases, flickr, google docs, identica, and others and want to see more then please support the pledgie to speed up continued development. Enjoy libferris!
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
Few months ago I wrote a normal mapping series with part I and part II. That was a good experience, so series it is again! This time about implementing dynamic QML components, with an example case being busy&progress indicators. We'll call these specific ones QUItIndicators.
Let's start with obligatory video which demonstrates these components, BusyIndicator and ProgressIndicator, with few examples:
Traditionally indicators like these would be implemented as an animated GIF or a sprite. Cons of that approach are zero customization and memory consumption: 2s animation of 256x256px 32-bit color indicator at 60fps would mean 2*60*256*256*4 = 31.5Mb memory consumption. That's quite a bit for just one indicator, so usually frames are animated slower than 60fps which makes animation less smooth.
Alternative way to implement animated indicator would be using imperative drawing API (QPainter, Cairo, Skia etc.). Drawing freely to a canvas gives a lot of possibilities, but can easily lead to non-optimal performance. Many of these APIs have OpenGL backends which sounds good in theory, but the reality is that they can't take full gains out of modern GPUs. Like wise Tro^H^H^HDigians have said, combining QPainter with OpenGL backend doesn't make a perfect harmony.
So as you probably guessed, our indicators use Qt5+QML+GLSL instead. The pros of this approach compared to sprites or imperative drawing are rendering performance, low memory consumption and customization possibilities. There is also at least one con: Indicator needs to be designed so that required animations can be achieved with vertex & fragment shaders.
Next blog post goes through design thoughts behind these indicators. In the meantime, you can get the sources from here and try yourself!
Let's start with obligatory video which demonstrates these components, BusyIndicator and ProgressIndicator, with few examples:
Traditionally indicators like these would be implemented as an animated GIF or a sprite. Cons of that approach are zero customization and memory consumption: 2s animation of 256x256px 32-bit color indicator at 60fps would mean 2*60*256*256*4 = 31.5Mb memory consumption. That's quite a bit for just one indicator, so usually frames are animated slower than 60fps which makes animation less smooth.
Alternative way to implement animated indicator would be using imperative drawing API (QPainter, Cairo, Skia etc.). Drawing freely to a canvas gives a lot of possibilities, but can easily lead to non-optimal performance. Many of these APIs have OpenGL backends which sounds good in theory, but the reality is that they can't take full gains out of modern GPUs. Like wise Tro^H^H^HDigians have said, combining QPainter with OpenGL backend doesn't make a perfect harmony.
So as you probably guessed, our indicators use Qt5+QML+GLSL instead. The pros of this approach compared to sprites or imperative drawing are rendering performance, low memory consumption and customization possibilities. There is also at least one con: Indicator needs to be designed so that required animations can be achieved with vertex & fragment shaders.
Next blog post goes through design thoughts behind these indicators. In the meantime, you can get the sources from here and try yourself!
I recently added initial support for real time collaboration in fontforge. This was followed by the wonderful fortune of presenting the work at the Libre Graphics Meeting last week. Having collab in fontforge allows you to create and edit glyphs and have other fontforge instances in the collab session see your changes in (near) real time. There is also support for python scripting, so you can have one fontforge instance be a headless scripted one which continually creates new ttf files as you edit a font. Using collab with scripts like this allows for possibilities which didn't exist. For example, the ttf generation can take time, and doing it each time an edit is made in the fontforge process that is editing a glyph would be too slow. Even saving the font to SFD/UFO each edit so you can fork() and create the ttf would be too slow. The Collab support is needed to allow the user experience of editing glyphs not to bog down.
I'm now working out what I'll be hacking on next. If you are looking for a C/C++ programmer with a Bachelors, Masters, and PhD on computer science to do some hacking feel free to contact me. I own the gmail and sf.net email addresses associated with this blog.
I've hacked on Abiword, Calligra, some fringe EFL stuff, fontforge (as one already knows from the top of this post), and many other contributions here and there. My main for fun project is libferris, a metadata handling virtual filesystem with index and search capabilities.
I'm now working out what I'll be hacking on next. If you are looking for a C/C++ programmer with a Bachelors, Masters, and PhD on computer science to do some hacking feel free to contact me. I own the gmail and sf.net email addresses associated with this blog.
I've hacked on Abiword, Calligra, some fringe EFL stuff, fontforge (as one already knows from the top of this post), and many other contributions here and there. My main for fun project is libferris, a metadata handling virtual filesystem with index and search capabilities.
There will be a Board meeting at 14:00 UTC on Friday, April 19. The meeting will be a public conference (video/audio/chat) held on www.concert-oh.com (registration required).
I've been working full time on my Android workstation for over a month now, and it is time to write an update about it. How has it worked out?
There have been some unfortunate rumors and efforts going on with respect to the Hildon Foundation Council. This post will hopefully clarify the current official status of Hildon Foundation Council and Maemo Community Council.
