Andrea Grandi

During these Christmas holidays I've ported the N9 version of CuteSoma to BlackBerry10 platform, thanks to the BB10 Alpha device that RIM gave to me and thanks in particular to my friend Cornelius Hald that helped me with porting.

The porting itself was quite easy after all: if you have a Qt application that uses MeeGo Qt components, you have to switch to Symbian components (they're more portable and support higher resolutions) and to do it I suggest you follow the informations on this blog post http://www.johanpaul.com/blog/2011/12/porting-meego-qt-components-apps-to-symbian/

If you need more detailed informations about Symbian Qt Components, you can also read this nice blog post from Cornelius Hald http://kodira.de/2012/12/qt-components-on-blackberry-10/

So, what's the result of my porting? Well, first of all a couple of screenshots

      

And finally the source code: https://github.com/andreagrandi/CuteSoma/tree/bb10
The application will be published soon in the BlackBerry App World and you will have it available in time for the BlackBerry 10 launch!

It's a pleasure for me to announce the first public release of CuteSoma for Windows Phone (WP7 and WP8). CuteSoma is a mobile client for the amazing Soma.fm radio a listener-supported, commercial-free, underground, alternative radio broadcasting over 20 unique channels from San Francisco. This is my first application for WP platform, and unlike the N9 version that was completly free of charge, I've decided to release this version in two ways: a free trial version with just 3 (and other 3 coming with the next imminent upgrade) radio channels available and a full version with all Soma.fm channels for just 0.99 €. I don't think it's too expensive, right? Consider all the time I've spent coding it and if you like the trial version, please support the development of this application and purchase the full one.

Install CuteSoma

1) Press Search button on your Nokia Lumia (or any other Windows Phone) and tap vision button

2) Scan the following QrCode

3) Tap on the link when it appears on the screen

4) Install the application from the Windows Phone Store

5) Enjoy!

Please consider also donating to Soma.fm if you like their music: Soma.fm is donation supported and they need your "love" to pay their bills

After a very pleasant experience in Finland (Tampere), I've finally come back to Italy. I had the opportunity to work for three months in Nokia as "Qt Expert" in "Nokia Developer Forum" and it's been an amazing job!

To be more precise I left Finland on August 31th, but I didn't have much time to blog about this. Finally I can use my desktop PC again and I'm not anymore limited to my small netbook. Trust me... spending 3 months with a 11'' netbook and pretending to work normally is really frustrating.

Now I have more spare time (too much :\ ) to contribute to Ubuntu and to play with some new technologies: I'm working on a project that uses Arduino, Android and some "robotic" parts, with people of Pistoia Linux User Group and it's really an amazing learning experience!

Talking about Ubuntu, if you have never contributed to it and you would like to start with something easy, I suggest you this interesting initiative https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/BugFixingInitiative

In the mean time I'm also looking for new opportunities and challenges (aka = looking for a new job), so if you think you may be interested in me, take a couple of minutes to give a look to my LinkedIn profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/andreagrandi

I will attend next UDS in Copenaghen (99% sure) and I already have a couple of topics I would like to work with, but I will talk about these later, first I want to properly create a blueprint in Launchpad so we will have a starting point.

During the last UDS party, I had an idea to improve Ubuntu development, but I didn't know if it could be a good idea or a stupid one, so I talked to Daniel Holbach and David Planella about it and they were happy to hear about it and Daniel told me to talk about this directly to Mark (and I did it).

Let's explain the basic idea.

From an UDS and the next one, it would be useful to have a development sprint where people can talk about assigned UDS blueprints, at which point they are on their tasks, if they have any problems and if they will finish them within the next UDS.

Of course Canonical cannot organize another meeting, it would be very expensive, so the idea is: why don't we use Google Hangout to organize the sprint? I has a limit of 10 people, I know, but we could select (for example) 5 from the community and 5 from Canonical. There would be parallel meeting and tracks, we would use the same blueprints used during the last UDS and we would add further notes. The attendees would be able to listen and watch the stream and make questions through the available chat.

I've also created a wiki page with more informations and you can find it here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuReleaseSprint

What do you think about? I know that Canonical is already organizing sprints and this could be a way to involve more the Ubuntu Community. Maybe we should schedule a session at next UDS to talk about this?

I hope to get some feedback from you.

Social Connect is a library written in Qt that allows applications to easily connect to services like Facebook and Twitter. Recently I had the opportunity to work on this library improving it and adding support for Instagram (work is still in progress but it's almost finished).

The main features of this library are:

• Out-of-the-box support for Facebook and Twitter
• Integrated authentication implementation
• Simplified common interface for all supported services
• Provides interfaces for native API calls
• Design enabling easy addition of new services e.g. LinkedIn

If you are writing an application that needs to access these services, this could be the library for you. It can be extended to support even other services like LinkedIn, Flickr etc... and I would like to invite people to contribute to the code. The library has been tested with Qt 4.8.1 on Ubuntu Linux 12.04 but it should be compatible with any other versions/platforms.