Andrea Grandi

What is Maemo Coding Competition?

This competition has been organized by Maemo Community for the Maemo Community. Developer can work to an application and submit it for one of the six categories available: Desktop, System & Utilities, Games, Graphics & Multimedia, Location & Navigation, Other. Another category is available too, and it's for beginner developers. The competition entry has now ended, but voting is open. You can find more information about the competition, in the official wiki page: http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Coding_Competition_1

How can I vote?

Voting is available using a forum's poll for each category. Every t.m.o. user can give one vote for each category. Here's the complete list of polls:

• Desktop: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=760304
• System & Utilities: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=764039
• Games: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=58990
• Graphics & Multimedia: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=763679
• Location & Navigation: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=58964
• Other: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=59038
• Beginners: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=59074

p.s: I partecipate in the Graphics & Multimedia category with two applications: LastGo and mSoma. Please at least test them and let me know what do you think about!

While I'm still working to mSoma with Lorenzo Bettini, I decided to start writing another application. I needed to write something from scratch to learn better how to use C++ and Qt libraries, so I decided to write a client for Last.fm service. The application is still in full development, but you can already taste it if you have extras-devel repository enabled on your N900. At the moment it only supports basic radio features: tuning user's radio, playing a song, skipping a song and displaying song informations.

Other basic Last.fm features like scrobbling, marking a song as loved or banned ecc.. are not supported yet, but of course they're planned for the stable release. Please not that the application is still a bit unstable even if it works for normal tasks.

If you are a Last.fm subscriber and you want to test it, please install it from extras-devel repository and send me your feedback.

Note: since it's not allowed to use Last.fm API from a mobile phone (due to API license restrictions) I cannot distribute a valid api key with the application. I'm writing this software mainly to learn C++ and Qt and for the future tablets and netbooks that will be based on MeeGo. If you feel to assume the responsability, you can download the api key file and import it using "Import Api Key" that you can find in the application menu.

SomaFM is a streaming radio with near 16 different channels, available for free. Even if it's possible to copy-paste their streaming URLs to N900 Media Player, we (me and Lorenzo Bettini) decided to create a custom application, to make channels switching easier for the end user and to be able to add more features. We decided to take advantage of the new Nokia SDK and write the application in Qt/C++. Source code is available on Gitorious and it's always updated with latest version we're working on. If someone want to test the application, it's available in extras-devel repository  ("msoma" under Multimedia section) of N900.

mSoma

The UI is still in development as you can see. The application is already usable, but of course we have to work hard on the user interface. Feel free to test/use it and send us any feedback. If you want to contribute to our project (coders are welcome) please send us a patch with your code or ask us to be added to mSoma development team in Gitorious.

Introduction

My name's Andrea Grandi, I'm italian and I'm a Maemo user/lover/contributor since the Nokia 770. I love Python as development language and few months ago I also gave some contributions to the PyMaemo project.

In these days I had the idea to start writing a Twitter client for Maemo with a precise direction in my mind. I'll try to explain all my reasons here. First of all I've to thank the author of Mauku client. I use it since its first version and I'm quite happy with it. Then, why do I want to write another one?

1. Maemo (MeeGo) is moving to Qt and for this reason I'm going to use Qt, while Mauku uses Gtk.
2. I'm learning Qt and what is better than writing a complete (but not too complex) application to learn better?
3. Mauku is not free as lot of people could think. Reading the source codeyou find this "You are NOT allowed to modify or redistribute the source code.", while I want to write a client and release it under GPL2 or GPL3 license.
4. Mauku is not updated since some months and we have no news about it.
5. I love Python and I like to write free software in this language.
6. I want to give to Maemo a stronger contribute.

My request for help

Before lot of people start writing their own client resulting in 4-5 twitter clients for Maemo, why don't we join our strength and work to a common project? I'm not a Python expert nor a Qt one, but I've some experience as project/team leader and since this is not a complex project, I would be glad to lead it. So, I'm looking for Python developers, Qt developers, UI designers and whoever want to contribute to this project. I still have to find a good name and logo for this application.

Who want to help me?

Few days ago I published some notes about my personal experience with PR 1.1.1 firmware upgrade in Nokia N900. In particular my device got an infinite reboot loop after upgrading the firmware and I had to flash the firmware image from scratch to fix the problem. Today I was kindly contacted by Max Waterman (I suppose he works for Nokia) and he explained me what was the problem. It was caused by a little bug in Harmattan UI demo and they fixed it (the fix is already available in extras-devel).

No surprise for me: extras-devel contains unstable packages and if user enables it, he does at his own risk. The most important thing is the fact that the official firmware without any unstable application doesn't suffer of this problem at all. The thing that really impressed me so much (in a positive sense) it's that I was contacted privately by a Nokia developer apologizing for the bug (no problem man, it's part of the game if someone want to test extras-devel software) and explaining that they already fixed it.

This is what I like of Maemo (or should I already call it MeeGo?), I really feel to be a part of it!

I don't know if it's just a case or if I'm the only one who had these problems, but I'll report them anyway, maybe somebody had my same problem and we could try to prepare a proper bug report to make the Maemo team fix them.

Infinite boot loop after upgrade

First of all I have to say that before upgrading to PR 1.1.1 I checked if I had enough space on the rootfs. I only had 27 Mb and so I decided to remove some unused applications, deleted some *.deb in /var/cache/apt/archives and disabled extras repositories. Of course I also did a backup of all my configuration. After the cleaning operation I had near 60 Mb free on rootfs, enough to install the upgrade.

I closed all running applications, started the application manager and began the upgrade. After the upgrade was completed, the device did a reboot... then another one, then again, again.... until I had to remove the battery to stop it.

Conclusion: I had to re-flash the device with the latest image to make it work again.

mafw-dbus-wrapper taking all the CPU

I was watching a video (using subtitles) and after some minutes the whole UI became unresponsive. Strange because I already did this before without having any problem. I tried to check the problem using "top" utility from terminal and I saw that there was a mafw process (mafw-dbus-wrapper) that was taking 80-90% of CPU. My fault is that normally there are at least 3-4 , mafw-dbus-wrapper processes and I didn't check which one was causing the problem. Anyway I made a screenshot, just in case it can help.

I hope this short report can be useful to help Maemo team to fix or at least investigate what happened. Just leave a comment or contact me if you need more informations.

Nokia has published a demo application for N900, available in extras-devel repository, that shows a preview of Maemo 6 (Harmattan) user interface. Here there are some screenshots of the demo:

Demo application main window

Question dialog

Text entry dialog

Progress indicator

Information banner

Event banner

You can find more pictures in my Flickr album. Please note that installing this demo will also install Qt 4.6.2 on the N900 and about 52 Mb are required.

Introduction

As many of you already know, Fon is a spanish company that some years ago had the interesting idea of creating a wifi community to share the Internet connection. The idea is quite simple: each "fonero" buy a Fonera (the router sold by Fon), register it on the Fon system and get a username/password. If the fonero travels around the world he's able to connect to wifi signal of other foneras and browse the web for free.

When I bought my first fonera few years ago, I was one of the first people in my city. I bought it because I was really beliving in this project. During these years Fon produced new models of fonera and I bought each of them (the WRT54 router, Fonera, Fonera+, Fonera 2.0g, Fonera 2.0n ecc....). Since first year, the Fon community has grown a lot and now there are a lot of foneros around the world.

Actual situation

Few months ago Fon launched a very interesting product: Fonera 2.0g. Thats's not only a router. Fonera 2 is capable of managing torrents, rapidshare downloads, uploading photo on Facebook and Flickr, and much more. Whats's wrong with this product? It's very unstable! There are a lot of users that bought this router when it was anounced and they're still waiting for a lot of bugs to be fixed by Fon developers team (composed by only ONE person!). Why users had to wait so long?

Simple! They were working to Fonera 2.0n! Wow! Faster router, more RAM, 4 ethernet port, wonderful! But... another very unstable router! And with unstable I mean: it disconnects/reboots often, connection is unstable, applications don't work ecc.... I'm talking about a 79€ router, not about something that users had as preview product. Me and other users were still waiting for an uograde when... Fon announced a new product! Yes, another one!

Fon priority is not to fix a product that thousand of users have already bought. Fon priority is to produce and sell a new product!

Conclusion

It could be only my opinion, but I don't trust you anymore Fon! I'm really disappointed about your behaviour you had with your customers. I've already spent (wasted) a lot of money with your not-working products and I'm not going to buy your products anymore! I'm tired of being illuded by your promises: how long are you going to play tricks on users?

Quim Gil just confirmed the UX hackfest in Barcelona for 4, 5, 6 december: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=33719

What is UX hackfest?
It's a three days meeting for Maemo developers, UX experts and people who want to learn about designing good user interfaces.

When?
On 4, 5, 6 december 2009

Where?
Barcelona, Spain. The exact location has still to be confirmed, but it should be http://citilab.eu

How many people invited?
About 50 people invited (Maemo developers, UX experts, ecc....)

If you are a Maemo developer and you have good user interface designer skills, this is the place for you.

If you are a Maemo developer and you are not a UX expert, this IS anyway the place for you: you'll have the possibility to talk with experts and improve your knowledge about UI design.

Anyone interested, please join the discussion here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=33719

Update 3/11/2009 - 16:00: a wiki page with all information has been created here: http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo-Barcelona_Long_Weekend
please add your name/data to the page if you requested to join the UX hackfest.

In the last post of this series, we saw how to write a simple binding and we finished to build and install it manually. This is of course not a good way to manage the building/installation procedure.

In Python we can use a library called distutils that let us to automatize the building and installing process. I'll use the foo source code to create the package, so it will be easier to understand.

Using distutils

All we have to do is to write a setup.py file similar to this one:

from distutils.core import setup, Extension

foomodule = Extension('foo', sources = ['foo.c'])

setup (name = 'Foo',
       version = '1.0',
       description = 'This is a package for Foo',
       ext_modules = [foomodule])

As you can see, we have to first import needed modules with: from distutils.core import setup, Extension
then we create an entry for each module we have (in this case just one, "foomodule"). We then call the setup() method passing it all the parameters and our setup.py is complete.

Building and installing

To test it we can try to build the package in this way:

python2.5 setup.py build

if we want to install the module in our system:

python2.5 setup.py install

References

• Official Python documentation: http://docs.python.org/extending/building.html