Animus Me – 2010-03-10
March 11st, 2010 by gamaral

Today on the even later gamaral show: Me and Gabriel Saldana from KDE Mexico kick butt and take names. (all in under 15 21 minutes)

Please send in your comments and ideas to: g@maral.me.

Animus Me – 2010-03-10 (MP3)
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The Mobile Concept
February 28th, 2010 by MoRpHeUz

Reading this post you were able to watch a video about Plasma Mobile (actually, Plasma on all kind of devices) and see some screenshots. But if you don’t know the ideas and concepts behind that, you are just going to bash it as it’s just the bootstrap of the project and a lot needs to be done.

And if for some reason you are wondering about the future of the netbook project, don’t worry Plasma Netbook and Plasma Mobile, besides being oriented for smaller form factors than a regular Desktop / Notebook, have different concepts as they’re serving for different purposes. Marco (notmart) and all the Plasma team will still keep working on the netbook shell and if you read this post you can see the netbook shell running on Intel’s Jax10 devices. This was done to give us an idea about how the netbook interface would behave on touchscreen devices and helped Marco to do a lot of bug fixing and improvements.

Back to the mobile shell, this interface presented here was created for the same Jax10 device but the architecture was designed to support different “Views” (as in MVC) for even smaller devices (N900 anyone?) , while still sharing the same concepts though. Even if the interface was not designed for the N900 for example, we were able to run it with great performance and the usability was very good. What means that we’ll just need to slightly tweak the view to make it perfect for the N900. And all of this can be done by designers as the View is 100% done in QML

So our first step was to brainstorm about launching menus (and how regular grid views seems to be so boring) and how different contexts affects the way you use your mobile. I mean, we are making desktops aware of contexts more and more and it’s silly to think that you don’t use this concept on your other devices.

We thought about having regular activities so the user would be able to have different set of plasmoids for each context that he’s working on. However it still needs to be very easy to do some stuff like:

Going to your dialer if it’s a phone;
Change between activities (later we can make the shell location aware so it’s possible to auto switch);
Launch applications easily and context aware (presenting the applications related to that context);

In order to achieve these goals we came with this idea: having a regular containment and a kind of panel that auto hides itself after some seconds. Important to say that right now this panel is 100% QML and is not like the desktop’s panel (that is a containment in another view). This makes the shell use less memory and be faster as it’s just playing with pixmaps in the end. After hiding, it shows a collapsed representation of the panel at the bottom that the user can either click on it or drag it up to show back the panel. This makes it really easy to change between one activity to another one while keeping the user interface clean enough so the user can play with his applets

First Mockup by Nuno

The panel while in it's collapsed mode

But then you ask me: “I want to launch applications ? How can I do that ?”. One solution is to add an application launcher as one of the main activities and the other one is to enable context aware application launchers. So, looking at the pictures above think that you are at the “Internet Activity” and you want to launch your applications. You can always launch the application related to one plasmoid from it so if you have an RSS Feed plasmoid you are able to launch your feeds reader using this plasmoid. But if the applications doesn’t have a related applet, in our concept you can just flip horizontally the current activity and you’ll find on it’s backside a context aware launcher that have shortcut icons for your applications and it’s size is proportional to the times that you launched the application and how much related to that activity the application is. This way it’s easy to find the most important applications for that activity.

Activity flipping to show…

…the context aware application launcher that right now is just a gradient

It’s not there right now but the idea is that at the top we will have this small bar (that will be a containment) to show the status related widgets like battery, signals strength and other stuff very plasma, like clocks! It’s not there yet, but it will be!

Regarding the transitions from one activity to another we thought about sliding the activities up and down so there is the idea that we are throwing the current activity somewhere else and bringing the new one.

Throwing away the current activity….

…bringing the new one and fading out the panel….

…and the switch is done!

\Basically this is the concept behind the Plasma Mobile shell and after this it was just a matter of thinking about nice animations that would make sense, tweaking it’s timers and polishing icons It’s clear to us that during the development we’ll find flaws in this ideas and we will need to fix them, as well as that the implementation right now is a little bit dirty due to time constraints (Tokamak doesn’t last forever unfortunately). Next steps ? Fix all the ugly code, finish implementing the launch menu, polishing and bug fixing…what means that we just bootstrapped!

Ah, if you are wondering: the Plasma Netbook project still keeps up to speed and is not sharing this backend (besides sharing a lot from libplasma). The deal is that the Netbook really needs it’s own concept and implementation while Plasma Mobile is really meant to be used on smaller devices than netbooks

Plasma Mobile before deploying

Plasma Mobile on Jax10

I would like to thanks all tokamakers for providing great ideas and also INdT’s designers that gave me great ideas along the last years that I could apply for this concept.

YATP: Yet Another Tokamak Post
February 24th, 2010 by MoRpHeUz

So, I just prepared a nice post about the job we have been doing during Tokamak 4 and what happened this days but I really don’t want to spoil cool stuff before we can at least give you some screenshots and videos Keep reading this blog as the next two posts will explain all of this and give some pretty and nice screenshots and videos!

First of all I would like to thank Will Stephenson, openSUSE and KDE e.V. (and of course everybody who supports the KDE e.V.) for hosting this developer sprint. It was awesome to put together people from three different teams that develop stuff that have a huge overlap area (Plasma + KWin + Oxygen). Really, thank you very much. I’m proud that you’re part of the KDE community!

Weather has been good (compared to Oslo and Finland where I was spending the last weeks) and the office is really good to work on. We have a lot of different devices to hack on (big computers with touchscreens, small devices from Intel and Nokia and the regular notebooks and netbooks) and we were able to expose a little bit more of our work to the local community (as well as see some old pictures of a sprint that happened at this same place in 2002).

From my side I was planning to bump the Pastebin applet with some new ideas and work on Plasmate and shell mobile but it seems that in the end I was able to just stick with one of these three targets. Anyway I hope that I can finish at least one more of then until the release of KDE SC 4.5.

Here is everybody that joined our developer sprint and keep watching this blog because tomorrow I’ll have some cool stuff to show everybody! Again: thanks to our hosts and to the Plasma, KWin and Oxygen teams for being so great!

Tokamak Group Photo: Plasma, KWin and Oxygen teams

PySide for Maemo 5 rebuilt for Qt 4.6.2 final release
February 19th, 2010 by lizardo

Qt 4.6.2 for Maemo 5 was released this week. Due to some changes prior to the final Qt release, PySide users might have seen this error when trying to use QtQui:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "<string>", line 1, in <module> ImportError: /usr/lib/pymodules/python2.5/PySide/QtGui.so: undefined symbol: _ZNK24QAbstractKineticScroller10metaObjectEv

To fix this, we rebuilt the PySide 0.2.3 packages against the Qt 4.6.2 release, and now it should be working again. So make sure you are using the latest PySide packages on Maemo 5 (0.2.3-1maemo3) and enjoy!

Installing Qt for Symbian SDK 4.6.2 on Linux
February 18th, 2010 by lizardo

Qt 4.6.2 was released last Monday, so I took some time to update the GnuPoc and Qt installer scripts I previously released for 4.6.1.

Besides the upgrade to Qt 4.6.2, there are other minor changes:

Both installers now check MD5 signatures of the necessary files, to make sure they are not corrupted.
The GnuPoc installer now supports the 3.1 SDK (see updated instructions below).
Added “unset QMAKESPEC” command to setup instructions (at least Gentoo sets it globally, which affects qmake).

The instructions are basically the same as the previous ones, but I will post the full instructions here for completeness.

Preparation

Download all required files to a single directory (e.g. “~/downloads”):

S60_5th_Edition_SDK_v1_0_en.zip (623MB) or S60-SDK-200634-3.1-Cpp-f.1090b.zip (355MB): S60 SDK for Symbian OS (be sure to click on the “Download all-in-one S60 SDKs” button for 5th edition, or “Download S60 SDKs for C++” for 3rd edition, FP1)
s60_open_c_cpp_plug_in_v1_6_en.zip (35MB): Open C/C++ Plug-in
qt-symbian-opensource-4.6.2.exe (201MB): Qt for Open Source C++ development on Symbian
gnu-csl-arm-2005Q1C-arm-none-symbianelf-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.bz2 (11MB): CodeSourcery’s ARM toolchain for Symbian
gnupoc-package-1.15.tar.gz (6.2MB): tools and patches to run Symbian SDK on Linux
gnupoc_1.15_installer_v2.sh: Unofficial GnuPoc installer (supports 3.1 and 5.0 SDKs)
qt_for_symbian_4.6.2_linux_installer_v3.sh: Unofficial Qt for Symbian installer for Linux

For building the native tools from gnupoc, you will need:

the GCC C/C++ compilers
development files for zlib
development files for openssl

On Ubuntu, you can install these using the following command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev

Installation

First, install GnuPoc + S60 SDK + the Open C/C++ plugin:

./gnupoc_1.15_installer_v2.sh \ <download-dir> \ <gnupoc-dir>\ <x.y>

Replace <download-dir> with the location of all files downloaded in previous section (e.g. “~/downloads”), <gnupoc-dir> with the destination directory for GnuPoc and the SDK files (e.g. “~/gnupoc”) and <x.y> with the SDK version you want to install (e.g. “3.1″ or “5.0″). Note that both directories must have absolute paths.

If installation was successful, you should see an output like:

Installation has finished. Before using the GnuPoc SDK, run these commands on the console: export PATH=<gnupoc-dir>/bin:$PATH export EPOCROOT=<gnupoc-dir>/symbian-sdks/5.0/ # trailing "/" is required! (These commands must be run again every time a new console is opened.)

Run the commands as instructed on the message. Next, install Qt for Symbian:

./qt_for_symbian_4.6.2_linux_installer_v3.sh \ <download-dir> \ <qt-s60-dir>

Replace <download-dir> with the location of all files downloaded in previous section (e.g. “~/downloads”), and <qt-s60-dir> with the destination directory for the Qt files (e.g. “~/gnupoc/qt-4.6.2″). Note that both directories must have absolute paths.

If installation was successful, you should see an output like:
Installation has finished. Before using the Qt for Symbian SDK, run this command on the console: export PATH=<qt-s60-dir>/bin:$PATH unset QMAKESPEC # make sure there is no QMAKESPEC variable set (This command must be run again every time a new console is opened.)

Before using Qt for Symbian, you should run the command as instructed on the message above.

Usage example

To test the installation, I will describe how to build the “colliding mice” example.

cd into the example source:

cd <qt-s60-dir>/examples/graphicsview/collidingmice/

Now build the example and generate the SIS file

qmake make debug-gcce make sis

A few notes:

Make sure Qt is installed on the device before installing Qt applications. The easiest way to install it is to copy the “qt_installer.sis” package found under <qt-s60-dir> over bluetooth and open the received message to begin the installation.
Only the “debug-gcce” (if you are using the GCCE toolchain AKA “CodeSourcery toolchain”) or “debug-armv5″ (if you are using RVCT) will work, because the current Qt releases only ship debug versions of the libraries

Status update: Shiboken QtCore done, QtGui almost there
February 11st, 2010 by mairas

I’ve been making PySide status updates on the mailing list but have managed to somewhat neglect the website. Here are links to a couple of previous recent status updates:

And here’s about last sprint’s results and the immediate future plans:

Last sprint’s main goal was to finish Shiboken QtCore and QtGui module bindings. QtCore got done just fine but work on QtGui unearthed some bugs and minor missing features in the Shiboken generator itself and this delayed QtGui completion to the current sprint. Some related work was also done such as fixing the Shiboken PySide compilation issues with Python 2.5.

As was discussed on the list already, Carlos Gonçalves has contributed the Shiboken QtNetwork implementation! Also, Didier “OdyX” Raboud got boost-PySide to Debian unstable and has already begun working on the Shiboken packages. Kudos for them!

This sprint, lasting from today (Feb 11) until Feb 24, the core dev team’s main goal still is to get QtGui implementation done. Most of it is already finished so this shouldn’t be a biggie, despite most of the core dev team getting wasted, robbed, maimed, and killed during the Brazilian Carnaval early next week.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Carnival#Pernambuco_style

Some further verification will be done on QtNetwork and if there’s time left, we’ll start working on QtXml.

That’s about it.

Matti Airas

…not so long after all
February 3rd, 2010 by MoRpHeUz

After all the stuff that happened in my professional and personal life last month we can extract some technical bits

First of all, during Camp KDE it was awesome to talk to people like Jos, Celeste, Alexandra, Till, Leo and Jeff (and many others). It’s good to share your thoughts with many people that you just don’t have this big bandwith for chat that you have when you’re physically together

Our awesome dragons

I spent last month studying and working with QML, trying to get the most of it and I think that I (and the team that I work with of course) reached a very good level of knowledge regarding the new Qt’s declarative language. We have some expertise with declarative languages for some time now (started with Edje three years ago) and went through QEdje and now we have a proper Qt solution for this that will probably be released with Qt 4.7.

QML is awesome. Big tip: just try to avoid “leaking” code from your c++ controllers and models and you’ll get any interface that your designers want for free . We achieved very good results working with this architecture for software and I really recommend it for everybody (I’m not talking about this right now as it can be a whole paper – hmm, maybe a paper for next Akademy ? ).

Alexis showing QML mobile shell on N900

Ok, so after studying QML and talking a lot with Alexis and others (like Helio) we had great ideas to try out on mobile devices (read N900 here). Let’s see what we can do during tokamak 4. Good to read Aaron’s post about it and to know that he’s excited with this possibility too. I talked about this during my talk at Latinoware conference and right now we can expand and make “my dreams” come true. We have really good use cases for this and we should really focus on this at first. We need help from designers (Nuno and oxygen team?) and usability experts (Celeste, here I am again – I know you should hate me every time I say your name under this circumstances hehe ). The design of this kind of product should be the first step after studying technologies.

Talking about KDE: for KDE 4.5 I’m really going to change the pastebin applet. Feature-wise it’s really in good shape but it’s not very healthy code-wise and we can really improve it and it’s data engines to something more user friendly and also that can be easily improved with the use of plugins (anybody thinking about service providers and GHNS ?). First of all, it’s not user friendly to call it “pastebin”. My mom have no clue what pastebin is. For sure she knows what “Share it” means and we can make use of KIPI plugins to allow it to export things to Flickr and other services too. So, for 4.5 expect some big improvements on the developer side of pastebin. From a user’s perspective it should just have a better config dialog, interface and will have support for much more services (at least I hope so).

Just upgraded to trunk (KDE SC 4.5) and it already looks awesome: from the KDE theme to the new notification messages that Marco is working on. Amarok (as always) had (good) surprises for me and this “Photo” widget is awesome. It ties together the awesome experience of one of your senses (audition) to another sense (vision) and it’s awesome. Great pictures from my favorite artists and songs. Amarok++.

Amarok and new Photo Widget

Right now, I want to work on so many cool stuff and I just don’t have the time. Probably work is going to consume most of my time for the next 2 months but I’ll make it work and will help KDE to get even better and to start working on Maemo for example. Konquer the world!

Ah, as a simple tip: if you own an N900 just install the “Angry birds” game, it’s awesome hehe

going-to-tokamak4

A long time ago…
February 3rd, 2010 by MoRpHeUz

Well, it has been a long time since my last post and a lot of stuff happened during that, specially regarding work and that explains a little bit why I was so “offline” last days (month).

It all started when I received my N900 from Maemo’s developer program that is just awesome as it gives the opportunity for developer to have access to the platform and keep developing for it. Comparing to other options: for some fruit company’s platform you have to pay to develop for a closed platform and for other you receive devices to develop to an open platform. Big kudos to Nokia for everything it’s doing with Maemo.

Regarding Maemo, I used my N900 in the last month on all business trips that I did and the vision of having contacts instead of accounts really made a difference. It was so easy to use Skype or my SIP provider (Inphonex) while I was out of the country that my mobile phone just worked as it should always work: as a personal extension of my home phone. Perfect.

So, the trips began with Camp KDE and I went to Los Angeles one week before the conference itself as I had some days to take as vacations. It was really great, from watching a live record of one of my favourite TV shows (Two and a Half men) to watching all the amazing talks during Camp KDE it was all great. I would like to also send some kudos to Camp KDE organizers. I know how hard it is to actually make an event like that happen.

The gate where the show was recorded

After Camp KDE I just had three days at home and then went to Oslo/Tampere for Qt work and it was really great to actually see snow for the second time. First time I’ve ever seen it snowing actually (the first time I needed to go up to a mountain last Tokamak hehe – thanks Marius for the chance!! it was awesome).

During this trips I had some ideas regarding mobile platforms and discussed a little bit of it during my talk at Camp KDE and also with Alexis Menard (former Troll). I think that for Tokamak 4 we’re going to have some nice ideas to work on for mobile platforms. It’s important to say that this is all at “pre-pre-pre-pre beginning stage” and that we have a lot of work to be done on the Netbook effort for example that Marco is taking care in an awesome way

Back to reality I have some work to be done and we are already setting things up for Bossa Conference. So I have Carnival, Tokamak 4 and Bossa Conference in a row. And still job to be done…well, I think I can handle that

Bossa Conference

So, this is all that happened last month (trust me, a lot happened) and next post will be a little more technical or at least more KDE related and for sure I’ll have some more Maemo related posts in the (very) near future (specially after Tokamak 4).

going-to-tokamak4

Python tutorial: Accessing APIs without Python bindings
February 2nd, 2010 by lizardo

The PyMaemo team has prepared a short tutorial with an actual example on how to access APIs for which there are no Python bindings yet. libosso-abook was used as an example, but in practice, you can access any C libraries using the same approach. This technique can be used while we do not finish implementing the full Maemo API.

Enjoy.

Installing Qt for Symbian SDK 4.6.1 on Linux
January 21st, 2010 by lizardo

***For Qt 4.6.2 and S60 3.1 SDK support, be sure to read the updated post***

Update (2010-01-27): New version of Qt installer (v2).

Qt 4.6.1 was released last Tuesday, so I took some time to update my Linux support patches for Qt (which are now merged in qt-s60 tree and hopefully will be in main Qt tree at some point) and GnuPoc (which, thanks to Martin, are now integrated into the latest release).

I had a couple of previous posts detailing instructions on how to install the SDK on Linux, but after some time, it became too boring to run those commands manually, and some people asked for a script. So, from now on, I will provide two installers to make the process much more automated and simple: one installer for GnuPoc + Open C/C++ plugin, and another for the Qt for Symbian SDK.

Note that currently the GnuPoc installer handles only the S60 5.0 SDK. If someone is interested on a 3.1 SDK installer let me know so I can add support for it too.

Preparation

Download all required files to a single directory (e.g. “~/downloads”):

S60_5th_Edition_SDK_v1_0_en.zip (623MB): S60 5th Edition SDK for Symbian OS (be sure to click on the “Download all-in-one SDKs” button on that page)
s60_open_c_cpp_plug_in_v1_6_en.zip (35MB): Open C/C++ Plug-in
qt-symbian-opensource-4.6.1.exe (209MB): Qt for Open Source C++ development on Symbian
gnu-csl-arm-2005Q1C-arm-none-symbianelf-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.bz2 (11MB): CodeSourcery’s ARM toolchain for Symbian
gnupoc-package-1.15.tar.gz (6.2MB): tools and patches to run Symbian SDK on Linux
gnupoc_1.15_S60_5.0_installer_v1.sh: Unofficial GnuPoc installer (currently supports only 5.0 SDK)
qt_for_symbian_4.6.1_linux_installer_v2.sh: Unofficial Qt 4.6.1 for Symbian installer for Linux

For building the native tools from gnupoc, you will need:

the GCC C/C++ compilers
development files for zlib
development files for openssl

On Ubuntu, you can install these using the following command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev

Installation

First, install GnuPoc + S60 5.0 SDK + the Open C/C++ plugin:

./gnupoc_1.15_S60_5.0_installer_v1.sh \ <download-dir> \ <gnupoc-dir>

Replace <download-dir> with the location of all files downloaded in previous section (e.g. “~/downloads”), and <gnupoc-dir> with the destination directory for GnuPoc and the SDK files (e.g. “~/gnupoc”). Note that both directories must have absolute paths.

If installation was successful, you should see an output like:

Run the commands as instructed on the message. Next, install Qt for Symbian:

./qt_for_symbian_4.6.1_linux_installer_v2.sh \ <download-dir> \ <qt-s60-dir>

Replace <download-dir> with the location of all files downloaded in previous section (e.g. “~/downloads”), and <qt-s60-dir> with the destination directory for the Qt files (e.g. “~/gnupoc/qt-4.6.1″). Note that both directories must have absolute paths.

If installation was successful, you should see an output like:
Installation has finished. Before using the Qt for Symbian SDK, run this command on the console: export PATH=<qt-s60-dir>/bin:$PATH (This command must be run again every time a new console is opened.)