QML photoviewer demo on n900 with data from on-device webserver and tracker

Title says almost all.

I've been toying a bit with idea of adding a very lightweight http server to n900 to serve the primary data of the device so that development of the UI can be done nicely on PC while still accessing the real data. One might argue that just pulling the data to PC would solve this and using the existing APIs. Well, yeah, but that's also laborious if you are not linux developer, whereas this approach works beautifully for any web runtime developers as well as developers of qt quick apps.

Doing this on web paradigm allows reuse of many learnings from my past life and creates a very flexible middle layer between the data itself and the UI.

As the first thing to serve as the proof of concept, I created an ATOM image http service on the device. It follows directly the format of flickr, so any code written to show flickr images can be converted to showing n900 images - either on the pc or on the device itself. Data is retrieved from tracker and thumbnails are also trackers pre-generated thumbs.

And here's the beef of course. Once the UI code is working nice and all, it can be just copied to the device and it'll just work. As a demo, here's vanila n900 (no overclocking) running both the server and qt quick application without any noticeable lag. Of course the devices thumsbs suck, as they don't have an aspect-ratio retained version available.

Web server also works as a very nice access control layer between a runtime that can be now very sandboxed. Not that I care.

NuvoFre 1.0.8

A quick peek at the next nuvofre is out in case you want to try it out.

I'll fix an issue in calendar coloring before I will put the next version of theme maker out.

Theme is using the nice bundled tahoma font, icons are oxygen icons from kde (kudos guys), transitions have been tuned to feel more flowy.

Download: NuvoFre_1.08

As said, grave issues with calendar, otherwise it should rock.


A few shots:

Retrospective on 101

The first maintenance release is out. What you can see as the biggest news items is that application manager looks quite a bit different, and Ovi store is out. These two things go hand in hand. The work on application manager is on improving the user experience for installing applications from Ovi store. In addition to that, it's on improving the user experience of installing content from the community and nokia applications catalogues. Application manager is now fast enough to use - if only maemo.org would be updated soon, then so would the community catalogues.

Ovi store content is not visible in the application manager installable applications. This is intentional, as we want the official Ovi store front-end to be the only place to browse for the great applications, backgrounds, ringtones and wallpapers. For this reason, the red pill mode was removed as well.

Here's a look at the application manager categories list (In finnish - it's time you all learned it ;) )
.
Great work from Vilja on the icons. Kudos! And for Gabriel for turning it to reality.

What you don't see immediately on the outside, is the work on preparation for the next big update. We have been working hard in making sure the OS update really works cleanly over the air and that it can be done with as little free space avaiable as possible. The end result is something to be proud of. I would like to thank especially Lokesh, Victor, Mario and David for the hard work, long days and tiresome weekends that resulted in the flawless update experience you guys are about to embark on. Without these guys raising to occasion when the going got tough, we would probably be pretty shaky about how the big updates will work. Now I'm content it will work great for all of you out there.

So, this is the step 1 only, you should be able to enjoy it and the Ovi store applications while waiting for the big update coming your way soon.

Hildon icon cache has been removed and update-icon-cache is now a no-op. Reason is that it was consuming vast amounts of space on rootfs and it was too slow to use on opt. Dropping has no human detectable differences in anything, so I'm sure it won't be missed by anyone. Computer measurable startup difference was within some percents give or take for most of the apps, but media player is 30 % faster without the cache, while maps is about 20% slower. Anyway, a good trade off.

Another thing that was removed is the red pill mode, as we didn't see any particular need for it anymore.

A word of warning: The next big update will require 45 megs of free space on the rootfs. This is pretty difficult for an end user to understand, so I'm calling all you developers who might have wasted end users rootfs space: please do what you can to optfy end users devices for every byte you can spare.

Read more detailed comments on the application manager work from here:
http://blogs.igalia.com/vjaquez/2009/12/14/shinning-new-ham/

Enhanced Calculator demo code

This is just a quick blog reply to requests to show the code of the Calculator of my previous blog post. I would gladly share the source in a nice zip as well, but maemo.org wiki doesn't allow zip uploads (DOH!), so you'll have to accept badly commented wiki page.

Here be the WIKI.

QML Hello World (or calculate world)

Some thoughts about QML

QML reminds me a lot of Adobe Flex on Flash - my personal favourite tool for creating anything. Only difference is that QML is more suited for application development, as it allows full access to all system components - and is easily extensible with pretty much any normal qt components.

Read more on the snapshot:
http://qt.nokia.com/doc/qml-snapshot/
and from Kenneths excellent blog on the subject:
http://kenneth.christiansen.googlepages.com/DUI.html

Anyway, intro aside, I have also started doing a bit of coding now on QML and I really love it. It has nice separation of the declarative part (QML) and the logic part (either qt components or javascript). You can easily embed javascript to the qml code, but the clever guys at qt labs have made sure that you can only have tiny snipplets there. A welcome separation.

What has also been fun is that I have done ALL the coding on the pygtkeditor, so no coding on the mac, and all the coding on n900. Well, I did work on some button gfx a bit on mac, but that's it. Painting is not coding ;)

Anyway, take a look at the result of less than 400 lines of code. And the code is clean, sweet and easy to extend. Check out those transitions! They are 10 lines of code for the advanced, and about the same to get the fancy glow effect done to the buttons.



What I am really eagerly waiting for is a chance to see a proper flash-like editor for qml.

On gaming on n900 and the newly found lack of arrow keys

Everybody who has seen the n900 with english/generic keyboard thinks all keyboards will have arrow keys. Well, they don't. And this sucks big time for any gaming applications, as they cannot assume that keyboard has specific direction keys that would actually work. In most of the keyboards, there are only left and right keys. While up and down are behind fn+left/right.

Only thing we can really do to fix this 'great kb layout design' is in my opinion:
Forget that we ever even had the arrow keys and start using the usual WASD combo for the default direction controls. And to balance the AB,XY buttons, we should probably use the I,O,K,L buttons. All of these buttons are the same in all kb layouts that I know. This is a pretty balanced layout, but again, not so easy to discover. Grr.. I hate the kb layout mistake that we made. Sane solution would have been to move the extra letters behind fn key.

Otoh, I have finnish kb on the device, but I have switched to english layout so that I can have a sane d keys on the device. But it feels confusing.

On a whole different note, I just read an interesing articles on DUI, the UI frameworks of Harmattan written by Zchydem:

Part one:
http://zchydem.enume.net/?p=128
Part two:
http://zchydem.enume.net/?p=149

I'm eagerly waiting for part three.

We are also preparing for a small update for the N900 owners to come really soon, which is going to keep me busy next week in preparation of it. Let's see when we can deliver it to you guys. After we have released that, I'll start blogging a bit more on what is up for the end of the year update and what is brewing for the other near future updates.

Snes on n900

Thanks to the great developers of nrnoksnes, we have now snes running on n900 fullscreen. Wiimote supported, as well as tv out.

take a look at the video:



[Edit] I ported wiicontrol on the weekend just to get this awesomness up and running. While it's great that you can play games on the go and to be able to continue later from your couch with wiimote, you can also just bring your wiimote with you and use that to play games. It's just perfect.

And kids, don't pirate games.