meego – Joaquim Rocha

SeriesFinale for BlackBerry

May 19, 2013May 20, 2013

I would like to share with you this port of SeriesFinale for Blackberry.

Unlike the other versions, I was not involved in the development of this one. It was developed by Micke Prag, who also started the Meego/N9 port back in the day.
I developed the first version of SeriesFinale in 2009 for the defunct Maemo system and released also a version for the N9/Meego in 2011 (there was also a version for GNOME but I never finished it…). It is very good to see that it continues its life even if I am not involved this time.

I don’t own a BlackBerry so I am not able to try it but judging from this video, it definitely looks good so if you’re a BB user, check it out!

Judging from the success that a clone for Android and a similar online service have, it seems like I could have started a whole business out of it… 🙂

New SeriesFinale Harmattan and Fremantle releases

June 16, 2012

That’s right, a couple of weeks ago new versions of SeriesFinale were released.
There was a long absence between these and the previous releases. The truth is that it has become more and more difficult for me to find the motivation (and time) to do work on an application for platforms I am not currently using. Still, I have had some emails from people showing their appreciation and Juan has also helped a lot (he is the reason there is also a new N900 release).

If you’re following the development of SeriesFinale, I have recently moved the repository over to GitHub (like I did for most of my projects). GitHub is so much faster than Gitorious and has nice features such as an issue tracker. Before you say it, although GitHub is not Open Source software, we’re talking about a hosted solution for Git repositories from a very cool company and I had no intentions of hosting Gitorious on my own anyway.

So what’s new in SeriesFinale? I need to differentiate between the platforms’ versions first.
Harmattan (N9) is on the 0.6.9 version and many bugs were solved like:
* Marking all episodes from the episodes’ list menu (nd#1)
* Episodes’ overview height (nd#9)
* Updating the shows season list
* Add a close button to show info dialog
* Add mark none action to the episodes’ list menu

There are still some issues when scrolling the lists which I’ve looked into and could not find any solution, I am convinced it actually has to do with the Python bindings of QML…

Fremantle (N900) is on version 0.6.10 and has less visible changes but the threads, languages and sorting functions were improved.

Adding the the new Harmattan version to the Nokia Store was also a challenge (it kept being rejected due to tiny details) but it eventually went through.

Be sure to test and vote for SF on Fremantle, or, in case you have an N9, get the new version from the Nokia Store:

SeriesFinale for Harmattan (N9/N950)

November 18, 2011

As promised before, here is the first release of SeriesFinale for MeeGo Harmattan.

This summer Micke Prag, a fellow programmer from Sweden contacted me because he was starting a port of SF for Harmattan. By then I still didn’t have an N950 because of having missed the deadline for the first developers program. Later, when the second developers program was launched I managed to finally get one. At that point, even though I already had my Samsung Galaxy S (yes, with Android) I still wanted to have a port of SeriesFinale as I had received many emails asking for this port so I started from Micke’s code and finally here it is!

The Harmattan port

Maybe it is something obvious but this version is not written in PyGTK/PyMaemo. It uses part of the “old” Python backend that was changed to play well with the new UI code written in QML.

This port’s code is a bit dirty by now and I’m sure there are bugs in this first version but at least it can be used and I didn’t want to make people wait much more. The support and feedback that SeriesFinale’s users have given me is amazing (some people even saying they still use the N900 only for SF!), thank you all for it.
My heart is still filled with GNOME/GTK+ love but QML is really impressive; there are some things I still need to spend some time with to figure out but I like how quick and flexible one can do stuff in QML.

The OVI Store

It was also the first time I published something on Nokia’s Ovi Store and the process took around 2 weeks before it finally got approved (it was rejected twice before due to weird stuff like “they” thinking bugs.maemo.org was not a good place to report issues or the fact that an application that says it works only with English US is eligible only for the USA, not for all the countries…).

The future

I really like the N9/N950. The user experience is something awesome and I believe this was the phone that could really compete with the iPhone and Android. Unfortunately someone at Nokia disagrees and the future of this incredible phone is doomed even though Nokia’s alternative is not better. Due to this mainly, I’m not using the N950 as my main phone. This and the fact that my personal time, in which I develop SF, is very limited, means that unless things change, I don’t know how much more releases I will do but I still wanted to add some cool features. It will probably depend again on the feedback and support.

Anyway here it is at an Ovi Store a few taps/swipes away and for free, as always (although I appreciate when someone buys me a beer 🙂 ):