Announcing LastGo: Maemo/MeeGo client for Last.fm

Posted on Fri 16 July 2010 in Linux, Maemo (EN), MeeGo, Programmazione, Qt • Tagged with client, last.fm, music, N900, nokia

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.

lastgo

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.


Making Maemo email client usable with GMail

Posted on Sat 08 August 2009 in HowTo, Igalia, Linux, Maemo (EN) • Tagged with client, email, gmail, maemo, modest, recent

I must admit, I wasn't using Maemo email client, because I did find it was simply unusable, at least with my GMail account.

I tried both POP3 and IMAP, but having about 25.000+ messages in my account, downloading just the headers was a job that the client simply couldn't manage.

Yesterday I knew about "recent mode" support in POP3, a functionality that GMail supports too. This mode allow you to download only last 30 days messages (in my case, no more than 1000)  so the client can manage them without any problem.

All you have to do to enable this mode is put the "recent:" string before the username. For example: if your username is "[email protected]" you have to write "recent:[email protected]". Important: this mode only works with POP3, not with IMAP.

To conclude, let me say thank you to the kind guy who let me discover this mode. Thank you Sergio! Now there is another thing I can do with my tablet!