Latest Postings by Michael
The infrastructure of the Maliit project
It took us a while to transform the Maliit project into a real opensource project. At first there was only public code, later some wiki pages @ meego.com together with constantly changing components in the official MeeGo bugtracker, then a public mailing list.
After that we tried to become independent of MeeGo ...
How we enable others to write 3rd party plugins with Maliit
We finally published a video about Maliit - an input method framework including a virtual keyboard - and 3rd party plugins. Kudos goes to Jon for making time for that.
This video highlights one of Maliit's key features: pluggable input methods which come with their very own user interfaces. The Chinese input methods show how Maliit offers support for composed characters. The video is proof that 3rd party development for Maliit (open-source and proprietary) is ...
Into the Wild
We kicked off the new 0.81 release series together with a nice announcement: We have our own bugtracker now!
This means that Maliit has a near complete project infrastructure, all available under *.maliit.org, and all that thanks to Karsten, the always professional and very experienced hostmaster here at Openismus.
There is one more thing that we need (as demonstrated by me when I made my first broken release), and that's a ...
Qt Quick best practices: Using Components
The next article in the series about Qt Quick best practices has been published (but don't miss out the other one about property bindings). This time, I talked about Components, and how they can help to keep your QML code clean and maintainable. The team behind the N9 Developer blog has been a great help to me, especially Ville Lavonious ...
Miniature 0.5 'London 1851' released
From the release notes: "Miniature now supports different languages thanks to a determined community of translators. Thank you for your effort! This is why we are dedicating this release to the first international chess tournament, celebrated in London on 1851.
Miniature 0.5 is being released for MeeGo Harmattan (Nokia N9 & N950) and Maemo (Nokia N900). Thanks to everybody involved in the initial Maemo attempts and the experimental version that was made ...
Using MeeGo Keyboard from git on your Nokia N9
Usually AEGIS, the N9's security framework, protects system packages from being replaced. As such, files belonging to a system package can't be overwritten. And that's definitely a good thing, because otherwise each download from OVI store would put the user at a considerable risk.
Maliit is such a system package, but its flexible architecture allows for a creative way to replace the MeeGo Keyboard with a more recent version. This can be
useful if you want to testdrive new features and to … nah whom am ...
Best practices in using Qt Quick
I am writing a series about best practices in using Qt Quick. It will be published on the official N9 Developer blog. The introduction and first article have already appeared. Your feedback on that series is very much welcomed.
Better GTK+ support in Maliit
So far, using Maliit's virtual keyboard in GTK+ applications required fetching and compiling a GTK+ input method brigde yourself. Not any more. With the latest release, GTK+ applications should just work out of the box, thanks to Jon's integration efforts. Right at the same time, Łukasz was looking into using Maliit together with GTK+ applications on his Ubuntu desktop. He ...
Better key override support for Maliit
Krzesimir Nowak joined Openismus in the beginning of August this year. Not only is he a very talented developer (or, as I once said, the first one to actually fill the gap Daniel left), but he's also fun to work with.
Just before I went on my vacations ...
Real users, real feedback
We released Maliit 0.80.7 on Friday. Over these last days, I am doubly proud about our project. Not only did the N9's virtual keyboard get astonishing reviews across the board, but what's even better: We managed to keep this software open-source. In our communities, there will always be those who focus too ...
Fantasy Film Fest 2011: A lonely place to die
This movie was nerve-wracking. A group of friends who share a passion for mountaineering meet for a trip into the wilderness. Things quickly go downhill from here (ha!), but compared to your traditional slasher movie (to be fair, this didn't feel like a slasher movie at all), our survivalists try to act intelligently. Hell, the whole story actually made sense!
But ...
Using C++ enums in QML
When mapping Qt/C++ API's to QML, or, to put it more precisely, making a Qt/C++ API available to QML, road bumps are to be expected. One such bump is the mapping of C++ enums.
If you happen to create enums inside a QObject, then it will be exported to QML via the Q_ENUMS helper:
SomeEnumsWrapper
: public QObject
{
Q_OBJECT
Q_ENUMS(SomeState)
public:
...
So there are people who say that Nokia's N9 isn't MeeGo ...
... and those people are right, if we followed the MeeGo Compliance Spec to the letter.
But at the same time, Nokia's N9 is one of those devices that the MeeGo community has always been waiting for.
If "This is not MeeGo!" is the only thing that comes to your ...
Brave New World
Today, we managed to get out the first release of Maliit as an independent project. As far as possible without API break, we started to use our own Maliit naming convention for installation paths, library names, etc.
During that cleanup, Jan Arne did a tremendous job improving our build infrastructure. Instead of Qt's .prf files, Maliit now uses pkg-config everywhere. Plugin developers don't have to think about install paths ...
Input methods and Wayland in Qt5
I was attending the Qt Contributors' Summit 2011. During the key note, it was promised that everything is up for discussion so I took my chance to discuss about improving input methods support for Qt5.
After some initial discussions with Kristian Høgsberg (Wayland, of course) and Jørgen Lind (who works on Qt Lighhouse), ...
