FOSDEM was really nice this year. Still too many interesting presentations to attend than our physical condition allows but that’s life.

Like I announced on my last post, I gave two presentations there and I am glad with both of them. People seemed really interested in OCRFeeder and I hope they try it out, send me feedback and spread the word about it.
I could personally meet P. Christeas, who had send me a patch for it, and listen to the questions and suggestions of people about how OCRFeeder works.

I must say the most impressive presentation I attended was by  Professor Andrew Tanenbaum himself, about MINIX 3, what a beautiful piece of software it seems.
If you have not attended it, maybe you can watch the video recording once it is available.
Later on I had a nice chat with him regarding web browsers on MINIX and the real portability of applications that are said to be multi-platform.

Here are the slides for the presentations I gave:

Looking forward for FOSDEM 2011!

I have been working for the past months in Hildon Input Methods (HIM) and many things have changed in it (and many will) with only a target in mind: make the experience of typing in N900, physically or virtually, a great experience.
Still, one thing I dislike in HIM is the fact that it is semi-closed source. Now what’s this semi-closed source thingy? It means that some modules are open, others are closed (HIM is a complex project).

(this is not the project logo)

For the open ones, and have you failed noticing it, the sad truth was that they were updated from time to time. No open development was done… but this has changed!
Since last week, HIM’s open source modules are now developed “in the open”, using Gitorious (thanks to Kimmo)!
The modules are hildon-input-method and hildon-input-method-framework.

This constitutes another step of freedom inside Fremantle and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Yesterday I finally uploaded the changes I had locally committed in my git clone of SeriesFinale and send them also for building in the extras repository of Maemo.

The 0.3 version has the following changes:

Added extra information to tree views

While you can enter the list of episodes and check what’s the next you need to watch, it is boring to need to navigate so much just to check this, so I added some extra information to the shows and seasons views. Basically now you’ll readily know how many seasons you have in a show, how many episodes you are left to watch, what’s the next one to go and which seasons/shows are completely watched.

SeriesFinale 0.3 seasons view

Added configuration file handling and episodes order recall

Paco Zafra, a SeriesFinale user, asked for the app to remember his episodes’ sorting preferences and with this version it will start doing so. Hope you like it Paco.
This also means it now stores an XML file with these preferences and will do it for other future preferences added to the program.

i18n:

With this release I also added support for internationalization and included the Portuguese translation already.
You can contribute to SeriesFinale by sending me a .po file translated in your language.

SeriesFinale 0.3 in Portuguese

Apart from the changes above, several code improvements were made.

The update should be arriving at you N900 any time soon.

Hope you like it!

SeriesFinale seems to have had a good reception by the community. I didn’t imagine that such a simple app could please to so many people, or more particularly, that so many people would have issues with keeping up with TV series’ episodes. I’m happy for having written it.

(SeriesFinale together with some of the community apps I use)

So, in the middle of last week I uploaded the version 0.1 to extras devel repository after solving the Debian package generation within the Scratchbox (Lizardo, from PyMaemo, helped me on this and wrote a helpful FAQ entry to the PyMaemo website). Still, the repository builder kept using Python 2.3 to build the package just like the problem I had on Scratchbox… tried again to push some changes and build it and still: fail! In the end I just gave up using CDBS for the package generation and edited the template of dh_make directly. Luckily, having a working Python setup script cuts part of the work (I like writing software, not packaging it!) and about the failed attempts, that’s what extras devel are for anyway…

Now version 0.2.1 is the one you can install and not call me ugly names afterwards
This version should have been available since last week but apparently there was some kind of problem in the Extras Devel repository and some apps weren’t made available until yesterday.

What does version 0.2.1 brings apart from working out of the Application Manager?

* Added mark all/none menus to the episode list view (suggested by Paco Zafra on the comments to my last post)
* The configurations folder is now stored under /home/user/.osso . My co-worker Calvaris suggested this to me since it will include the folder when you backup the device. And don’t worry with the current configurations you have now because I added a script to move the old folder automatically to the new location after this package is installed.
* Code improvements, among them, corrected local paths inclusion in sys path (for developing and running)

For the next version I plan to enhance the visual of things a bit (how or what lies in my brain currently) and to introduce translation files.

Add your suggestions as comments to this post or sent them by email to me.

Have a nice weekend!

Last weekend was a long weekend in Spain with two holidays and I took the chance to go south to Portugal with my girlfriend and meet my family and friends who I was missing.

Now if you’re a Maemo user/developer, why should you care about this? Because during the days there, I had the chance to show the N900 to two of my best friends and to my girlfriend’s family and it was interesting to see their reactions.

The two friends I mentioned have different profiles: one is Luís Seco, a high-school English teacher (and the best I had) who can be considered an advanced internaut who also runs a very good website about traveling; the other is Luís Rodrigues, a genius programmer and my pal in several projects. Note that as you see by me, not everybody in Portugal is called Luís… but for the sake of clarification, let’s call them “The Teacher” and “The Programmer”, respectively.

The Teacher:

He wanted a device where he could access WIFI, do calls, play simple games and have a reasonable camera. In fact, he had already pre-ordered an N900 from a store and was waiting for it. I should also add that he has a Winmo smartphone but is not really satisfied, like most Windows’ users are not.
After I gave him an introduction to the device, his questions were, among others, about the battery autonomy, the quality of the photos, how messaging looked like and the keyboard felt like. He also liked the fact that he can play mp3 in his car, without having to connect any cables, by using the FM transmitter. The one thing he complains about is the lack of MMS support. The key question he asked, for me, was if he could take a photo and send it right away to Facebook.

The Programmer:

He is a GNOME user and is always looking for the perfect device, owns a Winmo powered HTC which, apart from the phone, he uses mainly for its agenda and notes.
He really seemed to like how the contacts, email and Skype were integrated seamlessly. He explored how to choose a list of contacts to send a message to and how contacts were organized and didn’t like that he could not create custom groups of contacts. Since he deals with groups of students normally, this would come handy for him. Plus, he thought it was really  weird that the device doesn’t have a general portrait mode support.
He also asked about text editors and I mentioned the notes application, Conboy and even KOffice that have been shown on video some time ago.
(Okay, he asked also a few technical questions not relevant for this post)

Both of them were interested also in the GPS and were not really happy when I told them about the lack of efficiency when it is not connected to the web.

The Family:

My girlfriend’s family didn’t really try the device (instead I showed them its main features) apart from her little brother (9 years old). He played a bit with Sketch (“look this is you!” he said pointing to some stick-man that resembled me when it came to the beard… black), Xournal (“look, I even got an eraser!”) and with the media player (“don’t you have any music apart from the TSHUN! TSHUN! TSHUN! ??”, Lamb of God was on).

As you can see, N900 can please to please that are not familiar with the “old” tablets. Of course, an internet literate and a programmer are not the usual “mainstream” but I think N900 targets a new mainstream, people that have been using the internet since a while now and like to share their photos, read their email and browse their social networks anywhere.
If you’re part of this new mainstream, the N900 will please you.