Postings tagged with Maemo
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 ...
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 ...
Qt Contributors Summit is over
Really enjoyed the Qt Contributors Summit. Nice, open minded people. Café Moskau turned out as awesome location for technical orientated meetings.
Even held my own little session about my griefs with QObject life-cycle. We found some few chances for improvement, but we also sadly had to conclude that proper two-phase construction and destruction isn't possible in C++, unless you forbid stack allocation and ...
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), ...
Decent examples, at last!
Jon spent a lot of time in the last weeks improving our documentation for Maliit. However, while documentation is good (and necessary), Jon thinks that examples are better. I can only agree with that.
I am planning to use Jon's example material for an input method workshop at one of the upcoming MeeGo Freedays (German only) here in Berlin, just to see how useful it ...
Maliit Session at MeeGo Spring Conference 2011
I was attending the MeeGo Spring Conference as an invited speaker, talking about Maliit - the MeeGo Input Methods - and how to develop custom input method plugins for it.
We had more people going to the talk in Dublin than to this one, but at least [the ...
Questions for MeeGo
The MeeGo Spring Conference in San Francisco was nice, perhaps not so much for the press folks (uninspiring key note, no product announcements). As a speaker, I was fortunate enough to receive sponsorship from the Linux Foundation (special thanks to Brian Warner for the unbureaucratic approach to this). I got to meet a lot of people face-to-face and the hallway track spawned interesting discussions, circling around questions such as:
- Why would ...
Writing QML-based input methods for Maliit
This week I pushed a simple QML-based virtual keyboard to our MeeGo Keyboard repository. It's functional, but don't expect too much. This functionality will most likely never arrive in MeeGo 1.2, sorry folks.
Getting Started
Let's continue with the good parts instead: The required C++ code was kept to an absolute minimum and in fact it's only needed to wrap the QML resources into a Qt/C++ plugin that can be loaded by our framework. If you want to write your own QML-based input method plugin for Maliit, then this is the required interface:
class MyQmlBasedInputMethodPlugin
: public QObject, public MInputMethodQuickPlugin
{
...
Qt Contributors' Summit
.
A bit odd for something with my background? Does that mean I am leaving the GNOME universe?
No. It just happens in Berlin, and I've just spent lots of time on letting QtContacts use some awesome GNOME technology (tracker). On the summit I'll try to convince some Qt core guys, that maybe UTF-8 ...
Painting Strategy in MeeGo's Virtual Keyboard
I've never been happy with the conclusion in the influential blog post "Qt Graphics and Performance — The Cost of Convenience" by Gunnar Sletta: If you want performance, downgrade QGraphicsView to a mere canvas with a single QGraphicsItem. It defeats the whole purpose of decomposing the problem into many small QGraphicsItems and is therefore entirely counter-intuitive. One might be quick to ask what Qt Graphics View is good for (and one might find the answer here), but instead I would like to present an alternate solution to Gunnar's which reaches the same performance but embraces the ...
Is MeeGo Keyboard conquering GNOME3?
You'd probably like me more if I had spend my time testing the upcoming release of MeeGo Tablet UX on this shiny new WeTab (I ♥ Openismus), but Jon couldn't resist to test-drive GNOME3 first. Well, and since we like our virtual keyboard so much, [we just had to make it ...
New features in MeeGo Keyboard
This week we published new features for the MeeGo Keyboard, including accent popups (activated through long-press on certain keys) and support for Chinese Input Methods. The latter still requires an IM engine that supports Cangjie for example to be really useful (not provided by MeeGo Input Methods).
Ubuntu users can easily test it out, as I updated the packages in the [MeeGo ...
Customizing the MeeGo Keyboard
The look & feel of the MeeGo Keyboard (comes with the MeeGo Input Methods) can be easily adjusted to your needs. In the last post I already gave a brief example on how to modify the graphical assets. In fact, you will find that the look is mostly defined by the graphics contained in that one SVG file. The elements' id's are referenced from the keyboard's CSS file, so it is a good idea to just ...
Updated MeeGo Input Methods packages
I published new versions of the MeeGo Input Methods (framework and keyboard plugin) on the project's Launchpad PPA. It contains the API/ABI break that was announced in the beginning of this month.
At first I thought I would do this packaging only for others but I have to admit that I start to enjoy using my host system for input method development - it's really ...
MeeGo Input Methods for your desktop
I've been working on the MeeGo Input Methods project (codename "Maliit") for nearly a year now. The project provides a pluggable framework for input methods. It comes with a reference plug-in for a multi-touch-capable virtual keyboard.
It had bothered me that, even though our source code was available at gitorious.org, there were nearly no ...
Operator Overloading
Just wondered right now why Qt doesn't provide a greater-than operator for QSize.
Well, indeed: How would you define this operator? Maybe like this?
inline bool
operator >(const QSize &a, const QSize &b)
{
return a.width() * a.height() > b.width() * b.height();
}
Or is this the proper definition?
...
Miniature goes Telepathy
Thanks to the work of Dariusz and Alban we now have P2P via Telepathy for Miniature.
Maybe it's worth to notice that we use Maemo's contact chooser here, and that it blends perfectly with our Qt application (we still have some crashes on our side though). Nice job ...
About missing flights
Frequent fliers will know this, but to everyone else: If you ever should be that stupid to miss a flight, call the airline where you booked that missed flight as soon as possible. Otherwise they will cancel your inbound flight and bet on charging you an incredible amout of money for your previously reserved seat. For me they lost their ...
Using DBus as lock-daemon
Recently I found this comment in the source code I am working with:
// what if both processes read in the same time and write at the same time, no increment
Please! Don't do such things! Don't just leave such comments in hope someone else will come around and will fix later. Please take the time to apply a locking mechanism.
Obvious choice when dealing with files would be to create a lock file. Unfortunately creating a ...
GCC 4.5 - Awesome Release!
GCC 4.5 just was has been released yesterday. It's a really awesome release according to its summary of changes. My favorites:
- The -Wc++-compat option is significantly improved.
- Compilation time for code that uses templates should now scale linearly with the number of instantiations rather than quadratically, as template instantiations are now looked up using hash tables.
- Improved ...
QML Hype
So yesterday I've skipped the chance to watch some "exciting" QML demos in Helsinki. This was quite surprising to some of my KDE rooted team mates. They didn't understand how I could not show the slightest sign of excitement.
Well, but actually I wonder for months: What's actually the fancy and awesome, the brilliant new, the exciting part of QML? It ...
Logging facility for Miniature
On Maemo 5, log output from your app isn't always accessible to the user. This has created problems for Miniature bug reports (see bug #8124). To solve this, I created a "Game Log" screen which allows to filter the messages (by a given log level, I might want to allow combinations, too). It ...
Testdriving the UI Extensions for Mobile on Maemo 5
Reading about Nokia's UI Extensions for Mobile (sources available) I wanted to quickly try it myself. So I looked at the provided examples, and this video is the result of what I came up with (well, of course it is FOSDEM-induced). The provided API allowed me to easily apply my previous ...
First Miniature .debs sighted!
Thanks to Mathias, Miniature is now suitable for debian packaging. He also uploaded a first test balloon which at least allows you to move pieces around. Feedback is of course more than welcome.
Personally I wish the board's cell size could have been made bigger, but 60x60 pixels is already the upper limit. It is now up to us ...
Qt 4.6 for Maemo: It works!
Today at work, David King kindly informed me that there was some new Qt package in extras-devel. This could only mean one thing - I immediately fired up my scratchbox environment and installed the packages, trying to confirm that this new version would run with Qlom. And in fact, it was surprisingly painless. Thanks to autotroll, a simple QT_PATH env variable did all the magic, hooray! ...
Miniature - it moves!
How it begun
When I read Quim's thread about the idea for a better Maemo chess app I knew I wanted to join the project. To me, it's all about the device and the sparkling Hildon UX. I really want a good chess app, for myself! I want to play chess online, everywhere! And I want to analyze ...
Show me your home screen!
To me the empty home screen* of the N900 looked like an invitation, so I tried to fill it up with useless stuff as quickly as possible. The home screen configuration menu offers app launchers (shortcuts), bookmarks, widgets and contacts. Let's go through all four options in detail:
- Shortcuts: I almost always have some tasks running in the background so launching an application would usually take three to four finger touches. Therefore the app launchers are extremely helpful to ...
Computer chess and the N900
My first chess computer
Years ago, when I was thoroughly fascinated by chess, I always wanted a portable chess computer. When I finally got one (a Novag Piccolo, for the odd chance someone else had the same device) I'd take it with me whenever possible. It got worn out quickly, moving the small plastic figures required more and more pressure to make the computer acknowledge my moves. For each move you first had to "touch" the figure you wanted to move. The computer would beep ...
Who wants my feedback for the Maemo6-Qt tech preview?
During the Maemo Summit there were several talks about the upcoming Maemo 6 platform and also about the transition from GTK+/Hildon to Qt. One of them - the "(Introduction to the) Harmattan UI framework" also mentioned where to get the code for the Maemo 6 UI Framework from. So I went there and cloned the two available repos (tech preview of the framework ...
Back from Maemo Summit 2009
So I am back from Maemo Summit 2009. Great people. Great show. Great talks. Great venue: Enjoyed it quite much to walk arround in the Westerpark, Marc-André loved the petting zoo.
Hotest topic, of course: The N900. Thank you Nokia for lending those devices: Feels so good to finally have one for personal use! Finally got ideas for some private N900 hacking when reflecting ...
Application Theming Tricks
From time to time applications need custom theming rules. Especially when the project has professional UI designers involved. So how to achieve this with GTK+?
Trivial Theming
Most easy and very wrong:
if (gdk_color_parse ("pink", &color))
gtk_widget_modify_bg (widget, GTK_STATE_NORMAL, &color);
This will break and look childish as soon as your users use a custom color scheme.
Better:
static void
style_set_cb (GtkWidget *widget,
GtkStyle *old_style)
{
GtkStyle *style = gtk_widget_get_style (widget);
if (gtk_style_lookup_color (style, "SecondaryTextColor", &color))
...
Well, and it is a phone!
So after months of denial it turns out, that the/we Maemo folks really built a phone!
GTK+ Hackfest is over
So the GTK+ Hackfest really ended yesterday. I absolutely enjoyed having all you guys arround me. I am absolutely confident, that all the ideas collected and exchanged here will lead to some great GTK+ 3.0 release. It cannot be said often enough, but even in our highly connected world face-to-face meetings are invaluable for our work. This can be understand as invitation to order your tickets ...
Linking to library.gnome.org
Recently the brave gtk-doc guys introduced a tool called gtkdoc-rebase, which updates external links in your API docs to point on the GNOME Library. The gtk-doc.make script has been updated to run gtkdoc-rebase on make dist. Unfortunatly all this pretty stuff doesn't work out of the box on Gutsy, as two premise have to be fulfilled to make this voodoo work:
- The
index.sgmlfiles in the gtk-doc ...
Canvas Review
As announced by Murray already I am working for Openismus now. First task I got assigned was providing patches for some binding glitches in GooCanvas. Seems I complained too much about GooCanvas' code during that task. So Murray asked me to review GooCanvas, HippoCanvas and libccc to figure out which canvas would fit best for diagrams and reports in Glom.
As we have that nice canvas overview on the GNOME Wiki already, I added additional information to that wiki page. Thank you Emmanuele for updating the clutter records, btw. ...
