Contacts on Ovi Released (Also for Maemo)

I've just read on the Nokia Betalabs blog that the formerly known Nokia Chat application has been renamed to Contacts on Ovi. What really surprised me is to know that there is a version available for the Internet Tablets since last October. I have not been able to test it yet, but it seems that it is simply a plugin for the Accounts program which enables the user to register his Ovi account and start chatting.

In the FAQ page it is also noticeable that you can register your Ovi account as a standard Jabber/XMPP account in other instant messaging clients such as Pidgin and Adium.

To download the package, just point the browser of your tablet to this address or download it directly form here.

Show me the code!

As part of my job at INdT, I was responsible for providing a unified solution for hosting the source code for our open source projects, such as QEdje, Carman and the yet to become free, Canola, amongst others.

There was only one major requirement: Git as our VCS. Of course we could simply provide a server with access for writing restricted for a few selected users and running gitweb for anyone interested in following the development of the projects.

We had already tried this approach with our projects internally, but it had proven to become visually a mess as the number of projects and users grow along time. Also, the amount of time spent with the server administration was really bothering many of us.

Enter Gitorious

Back in September, when some of our colleagues came back from a trip to Oslo, Norway, where they worked for a couple in collaboration with Qt Software guys, they brought with them lots of fresh and great ideas on how to improve our own processes.

One of these ideas was to make use of Gitorious as a tool for managing our git repositories. I had already used gitorious before, during the 2008 edition of Google Summer of Code, when I co-mentored a student in the implementation of bluez-python. One thing I didn't know though is that Gitorious itself is a Free Software project and its source code is available in the very own website.

Artur and Caio worked hard to setup an instance of Gitorious running on our internal server. We started using it for a few selected projects experimentally, and in a couple of months all of them had been moved to the brand new host. In time, this is just one the countless advantages of Git (and maybe others DVCS) over a centralized VCS. It was just a matter of adding a new remote and pushing the repository to it.

With Gitorious I was able to have contact with a completely new world in the Computer Science universe (at least for me): Web development. It is written in Ruby over the Rails Framework. At a first glance, everything looked awfully weird, from the language syntax to the Rails ways of doing things. It took me considerable time to get used to them, but I could successfully adapt the code to our needs.

You can see the final result in http://code.openbossa.org. As it can be easily noticed, we have created just a few projects there, but the idea, as already stated, is to move all of our Free and Open Source Software projects to this new server as soon as possible. Notice that the site is not meant for openBossa/INdT employees exclusively. If you want to contribute to one of the existing projects over there, it is just a matter of getting in contact with the owner of the project and try to convince him you deserve an account. Even better, if you have a developed something related to one of our own projects, such as a Canola plugin, we are more than happy to host it. :)

Ogg Support on Canola2

With Canola2 beta9 finally out, people have asked about the ogg support for Canola. Well, let me first try to clarify things a bit: ogg support actually has not much to do with Canola itself, but more with lightmediascanner.

In our architecture, the component responsible for scanning the media, amongst other things, is canola deamon (canolad for short). Canola daemon is Free software, released under the GPL license since its very first version. You can get the source with a simple apt-get source command.

When the user marks a folder as "scannable" on the "Media Folder" section in canola settings, it will call canola daemon to add that folder to the list of folders it will have to scan. Canolad then invokes ligthmediascanner (lms for short) which will scan for media on those folders.

LMS makes use of a very clever plugin architecture implementation, where each plugin is responsible for gathering metadata from that specific type of file it was developed for. So far there are implementations for asf, flac, id3, jpeg, m3u, mp4, ogg, pls, png and rm files. Dummy implementations for audio and video files will index files of given file extensions.

The ogg plugin was making use of libvorbis, which provides the reference implementation for the standard, but it was not being installed by Tuomas' packages. At this moment I sent him an email asking if it would be possible to have the package installed on the device. He then said it was perfectly feasible, but not advisable, as the implementation makes heavily use of floating point operations. Everybody knows how floating point operations perform on our target platform. And it doesn't really fit our purposes.

Tuomas suggested that LMS ogg plugin should make use of libvorbisidec, also known as Tremor, which was specially implemented taking into account those performance problems of floating point operations on embedded devices. It provides a fixed-point implementation for the Vorbis decoder.

At first glance, I thought it would be a really trivial task. With a few modifications in the configure.ac file, the ogg plugin would link against libvorbisidec and everything should just work! And of course I was so very wrong... I first spotted some severe bugs in the lms ogg plugin which were causing segfaults. Having those fixed was the easiest part.

The most difficult thing was to find out after some time digging that libvorbis and libvorbisidec implementations are not compatible at all. Only after that I could be able to end up with the final solution for the problem. You can now build lightmediascanner with ogg support using either the regular vorbis or tremor implementations.

With LMS now being able to scan and index ogg files, I came back to Tuomas and provided the patch that creates ogg-support-lightmediascanner meta package, which will install both ogg-support and lms ogg plugin as dependencies.

No change in the canola side was needed, since the whole work of decoding and playing ogg files was already being done by ogg-support packages provided by Tuomas. Big kudos to Tuomas and his hard work and as well to Gustavo for reviewing and pushing my patches for LMS to mainstream.


Install it now and enjoy!

Canola2 Youtube Plugin Updated

Yesterday I uploaded a new version of the Canola2 Youtube plugin to maemo extras repository. Youtube has changed the way it references the .flv file, breaking the way we were dealing with it. Kudos to Adriano who's been doing an excelent job maintaining the plugin.

As usual, the source code is available in the Canola2 website and in the Maemo extras repository as well.

Please update your installation by clicking on "Check for updates" button in the Application manager. Big thanks to everyone who reported the issue on our tracker.

Android Running on N810

Really exciting news!! This wiki page on eLinux.org describes with details the instructions for running Google's Android on OMAP based platforms, such as the Nokia Internet Tablets. There are also threads on Android Internals and Linux OMAP mailing lists.

Some pictures taken from the wiki page:

Long time no post

It's been quite a long time with not even a update in my blog. Shame on me!!! Since last December, lots of things happened and if I tried to tell everything, you would be surely bored to death. So here goes some highlights of the last 3 1/2 months:

• Canola2
  
  We're now on the version 7 of the beta series and we're working really hard to release the final version, which should come really soon. Besides the name "beta" it is pretty much stable and in each new version released it becomes better and better. Many thanks to the users who provided useful feedback (specially on ITT forums) and to Marcelo, who is being patient enough to provide the answers to almost all users questions.
  
  I have been maintaining the packages for both Canola2 and the Maemo port of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries for each and every one of the Nokia Internet Tabled devices and ITOS releases, not including ITOS2005 here. It has been a very time consuming task and I have not been able to code much since then.
  
  We've opened the gates for 3rd part plugins releasing the youtube plugin for Canola2. It's only in its very first version and users seems to like it a lot. The source code is availabe under the GPLv3 and can be used as base for development on new plugins. The next one in the line is the last.fm plugin.
  
  New themes were released and the source code for them are going to be released as well.


• Toys
  
  Found a 1GB iPod shuffle *inside* an ice cream. Literally.
  
  
  
  
  
  Sold my old car, a Fiat Palio (1998 year) and bough a Peugeot 307 (2002 year), previously owned by Renato Filho. All I can say is it was a great acquisition. I'm very happy with it. By the way, Renato bought a newer Fiat Palio (2004 year) but I'm not pretty sure if Renato can tell the same though. :)
  
  Got a Nokia N95 phone and gave my N73 to my girlfirend. Another huge improvement here. How could I live until now with a phone without WiFi and GPS integrated?
  
  Bought my Nokia N810 with the discount code I got back in November. Many thanks to Hallyson and Tapani who brought me the device from Finland straight to Brazil.


• Bossa Conference '08
  
  It was a really great conference this year. If last year was good, this one was even better! We had some high level talks and lots of free time to meet and talk to the guys about problems of using new technologies in mobile devices and possible solutions for them. I really enjoyed Clutter, Webkit and PulseAudio talks among others. Congratulations to the organization crew who worked hard to make it happen.
  
  I took some pictures with my N95 and uploaded them to my flickr account. The photos are basically from the after hours parties and can be seen on this set.


• Google Summer of Code 2008
  
  I'm willing to help the BlueZ and Enlightenment guys by mentoring projects in this edition of GSoC. More details on this subject later.
  

Geeks!

56 geeks poster complete
Originally uploaded by ExtraLife

View the complete set.

Packaging Madness

We're running against the clock to get the Canola 2 release ready by the 12th. It has been a week since I'm working on providing the proper debian packages for all the dependencies, so the installation process can be as smooth as possible. After having coded a monster script that automatically builds and signs the Maemo-EFL packages (including sources) for Gregale, Bora and Chinook on both x86 and armel targets, I started to upload the packages to the extras-devel repository.

If you follow the maemo-efl-devel mailing list, you may have noticed an unusual traffic on the past few days. If you don't follow that list, I strongly discourage you to do it. Things will only get worse until Wednesday, when the final packages will be uploaded to the extras repository.



But it is not just building the packages. We also need to test them to ensure they're working on the devices. As you can see in the picture above, packages for Bora and Chinook are OK, but the Gregale ones aren't. Time to go back to work and figure out what I'm doing wrong...

Canola 2.0 running on Nokia 770

A while ago we were curious about how would be the performance of the new version of Canola running on a Nokia 770 device. After a whole day building packages and compiling stuff, our mate Renato Chencarek was finally able to make it run on the device. We thought it also deserved a video, just like others we posted.

It's a Nokia 770 device running OS2006 (gregale) and you can see it performs surprisingly well! Actually, it feels like the performance is better than on N800/N810. As we don't have that damn tearing effect, you can see the UI elements just move smoothly. Unfortunately, the screen is not as sensitive as the N800 or N810, so some tasks like dragging and panning will demand more effort than in the other devices.

Reinteract News

It seems lots of people got interested in Reinteract. Owen Taylor has started a new project page and integrated the patches people sent him. Guess what? The maemo patch was integrated to the branch master as well. It was slightly different from the first patch I provided in my previous post since I had forgotten to add support for hildon file chooser dialogs. We also agreed provide a way for the user to select which UI to run, the standard or the hildon one.

I was able to run Reinteract in a N800 device and it performs really well. In a small talk I had with Osvaldo and Luciano, they showed interest to provide packages for Reinteract in next PyMaemo releases. Great news!

By the way, I have to say: Python rocks! Git rocks even more!

Reinteract on Maemo

I followed a couple of posts today in Planet Gnome and read about Reinteract. This project is freaking awesome!!! Watch the screencast. It worths every minute. Reinteract is something that fits like a glove in Maemo. I've started playing with it a bit and a few minutes later I got something really interesting:



Wooohooo!!! The patch is really small, about 60 lines. I have not tested it a real device, but it should perform well. Any one would like to try??

Ubuntu Cola

It seems the OS wars has been reaching new levels. After Windows Vista soft drink, we have also Ubuntu Cola.



More pictures on Flickr.

Maemo Chinook SDK Final Released

I've just read in the Maemo site news The final Chinook SDK has been released, what means the N810 device is shopping in the next weeks. I haven't noticed it in the moment I received the email about the N810 discount program. Great news!!! I have already downloaded and installed the rootstraps which can be found here.

Personally, I prefer a manual installation, so it's just a matter of creating and setting up new targets, downloading the i386 and armel rootstraps, run a couple of simple apt-get commands and you're done.

We already have the new version of Canola running on Chinook. It is unbelievable how beautiful and delightful the new UI feels, thanks to our design team, which has been doing an excellent job. I can say it brings a totally new concept and you'll certainly enjoy it *A LOT*. We'll bring other hot news about Canola really soon!

Meanwhile, I encourage everybody to try to learn how to develop applications using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, specially Evas and Edje.

N810 maemo submission accepted

N810 maemo submission accepted

Congratulations! You have been accepted to the N810 maemo device
program. We will send your discount and instructions as soon as the
device is available in your selected shop (soon).

Thanks Nokia!!! I can't wait to receive the discount code!

Maemo - code in your hands

Maemo - code in your hands
Originally uploaded by Setanta!

Trying Chinook

We can't have one of those cool N810 yet, but we're already able start developing/porting applications to the new API. Renato kicked off the ball and updated the Abiword patch to make it compatible and also removed the code which used so long deprecated HildonApp and HildonAppView API. Some days ago I set up the Chinook SDK environment and decided to start with something simple or, in other words, Leafpad.



Packages coming soon.

Linux is everywhere

Linux chair on sale for R$ 169,00. I wonder if it includes the source code. :P

QoTD: Michael Mace

Nokia's phones often appear as if their hardware and software were designed by completely different groups and slapped together at the last minute (because, in many cases, that's exactly what happened).

Advised by Marcelo, I've just read Michael Mace's post about the imminent "war" between Nokia and Apple. It's really worth reading.

Gnome-Mobile

Daniel sent us the following image of a product he found in Amazon:


Link for the IMDB entry.

Capoeira Videos

I recorded these videos yesterday at the gym using the camera of my N73. They had the baptism and belt change ceremony, which is, for those of you who don't know about capoeira, the equivalent to graduation exams in any other martial art.