Ville Vainio's Blog

Symbian style Qt Components on N900

vivainio — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 10:09:16 +0200

It may not be obvious to everyone, but the current shape of Symbian components on Qt Components gitorious repository is pretty good. Just for kicks, I compiled it in N900 scratchbox and took a screenshot:

No special steps were needed to build the repository, just

git clone git://gitorious.org/qt-components/qt-components.git

cd qt-components

./configure -config symbian3

make

make install

And then run examples/symbian/qmlgallery. Earlier, we packaged "meego" style components for N900, but as the public version still relies on MeeGo Touch libraries, the Symbian set of components could turn out to be a lighter solution. If there is interest, we will package a snapshot of this version as well.

Image loading fix for N900 & QML

vivainio — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 13:54:38 +0200

Now that Qt SDK 1.1 is finally out (in form of Tech Preview), people are rightfully hacking with QML. There is, however, a snag with QML on N900: Image elements with remote URL don't load. So, if you are doing a QML application, remember to install "mcsp" on your device (sudo gainroot; apt-get install mcsp), and add it as a dependency on your debian package. (mcsp is short for "Maemo Community Service Pack", which is our way of delivering community hotfixes).

The package has been added as dependency for mad-developer, so new developers are likely to not see the problem. It is still important to add the dependency to your app's packaging metadata (debian/control), so that the program will work for end users as well.

Your debian/control will probably end up looking like this:

...

Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 5), libqt4-dev

...

Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}, mcsp

...

Thank you, Qt Creator

vivainio — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 03:09:07 +0300

C++ gets occasional flak because of memory management issues and language complexity. While those issues are mostly obsoleted by Qt (regardless of the objections presented by the ever decreasing segment of developers still keeping the faith with managed runtimes ;-), a real problem is the fact that you need to manually duplicate function signature in header and cpp file.

Not anymore (thanks, Qt Creator guys!). Looking forward to ever increasing amount of refactoring features you can throw at us (here, less is not more). Blog post for Qt Creator 2.1 beta announcement here.

Python bindings for MeeGo Touch

vivainio — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:03:49 +0300

Wondered what MeeGo Touch code will look like in Python? Check out the python-meegotouch on gitorious.

Here's the album example.

And here's the familiar widgetsgallery.

Coming up - gPodder for MeeGo, with native MeeGo Touch UI

vivainio — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:15:11 +0300

Clearly, I'm jumping the gun by pre-announcing gPodder on behalf of Thomas Perl, esp. since what he has now is just a C++ UI prototype. gPodder is one of the must-have programs for Maemo, and I'm glad to see it's not going to be held back by the existing Gtk+/Hildon codebase. Once PySide bindings for MeeGo Touch (MTF) are in place, I'm optimistic about getting a proper version for testing soon enough.

If you (too) are interested in kicking the tires of MeeGo Touch (with the eye on porting over an existing app, or beginning a new one), the easiest way is to run it on Ubuntu Lucid from my PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:villemvainio/meego

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install meegotouch-demos-widgetsgallery libmeegotouch-dev

(Caveat: this version is a few months old, as it's the last version of MTF that is compatible with Qt 4.6. New version using Qt 4.7 will be made available at a later date).

Now, you can run "widgetsgallery" (possibly familiar from N900 extras-devel) on your Ubuntu desktop.

You'll probably need some examples to get started - grab them by

git clone git://gitorious.org/meegotouch/libmeegotouch.git

Look at the examples/ directory, start opening the .pro files in Qt Creator, stepping through the code in debugger, or whatever strikes your fancy.

Protip: press ctrl + shift + R to rotate the screen in a MTF desktop application, to ensure that your application looks nice in both portrait and landscape.

Protip2: You can find more real life MeeGo Touch code in MeeGo Handset UX repos:

http://meego.gitorious.org/meego-handset-ux

MeeGo Touch documentation on the web, finally

vivainio — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 08:04:40 +0300

While enterprising souls have been able to generate the documentation for MeeGo Touch Framework (MTF) from gitorious, you may not have bothered to if you are merely curious about what it might have to offer.

In the likely case that this has evaded you, you may be happy to learn that you can browse the documentation online now (well, it has been possible for a few weeks already).

The documentation is here:

http://apidocs.meego.com/mtf/

Or, you can jump straight to tutorial about writing your first MTF application:

http://apidocs.meego.com/mtf/tutorial.html

I think I'll proceed with porting my qtdone & qreddit applications to MTF one of these days - MTF works in N900 as well, so the effort would not be "wasted" despite most people not having access to the next_device yet. MTF also makes it possible to avoid using device (or scratchbox) for testing, because on desktop MTF looks just like on device (whereas plain Qt doesn't, due to how the Fremantle style is implemented). This might peel out some idle seconds from the development flow.

20+ million N900 application downloads from extras

vivainio — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:46:17 +0300

It seems extras is on fire. I tried to check extras download count regularly for the last few days, to catch when it hits 20 million, and now it suddenly jumped to

20 899 827

downloads.

You can stare at the statistics at maemo.org download page.

This is also a reminder that you should really move your application to proper extras, instead of letting it gather dust at extras-devel. You might be surprised how quickly you can score downloads by having the application in extras; it appears quite a few Maemo users actually follow the recommendation not to enable extras-devel unless they know what they are doing.

Opera Mobile 10 for Maemo

vivainio — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:10:48 +0300

Opera Mobile 10 preview build for Maemo now available.

What makes this particularly cool is that Opera went all the way to release an N800/N810 version as well. It's not a second rate build either; it scrolls around smoothly, has nice animated transitions and seems quite reliable on a quick trial.

If you can score a cheap second hand N810 somewhere, you may want to buy it just because of this release.

TweeGo: Qt Graphics View-based twitter app

vivainio — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 09:45:02 +0200

TweeGo is a new Twitter application for N900. What makes it interesting that it's not a mere dumb frontend to the twitter protocol, but a nice showcase application for Qt Graphics View and Qt Animation Framework. If you've been wondering what you could do with graphics view (and how you should go about it), the codebase of TweeGo, available on gitorious, is a good place to get started!

While the app is intended for N900, there doesn't seem to be anything N900-specific about it. I was able to compile it for desktop Ubuntu just fine, though it does need Qt 4.6 or newer (the default Qt on karmic won't cut it).

Note that this kind of application is exactly where QML will shine, once it's widely deployed.

Qt Creator 2.0 alpha released

vivainio — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:25:00 +0200

With moderate fanfare, the trolls have released a new preview of the grand, upcoming Qt Creator 2.0.

This is not a "bugfix release" - rather, it introduces integration with MADDE (of interest to Maemo developers - even seasoned scratchbox veterans will appreciate the seamless hardware debugging), and the ability to do Symbian development (which I didn't try).

What I did try, on the other hand, is the QML (now called "Qt Quick") subsystem. It has improved quite a bit from the previous "raw" Bauhaus preview. The QML designer ("Bauhaus") behaves much better, and the QML code completion actually works (in the sense that it provides completions that make sense).

Now might be a good time to start looking at QML (apart from merely watching the impressive demos). It may mean you have to flex your mind from the deep-burned imperative programming instincts, but you'll be better off for it.

And yeah, you'll need to learn Javascript. With the rate the world is turning, there is no way around the fact that you'll need to learn it in any case. Console yourself with the fact that Javascript is not the same copy-paste language it was 10 years ago, and read a good book.