Last spring I started to write QuickFlickr application i.e. a Flickr client for N900. Back then I wrote this article of it. For me this is just a learning process to study QML and trying to figure out how I can write a real application using C++ for a lower layer and QML for the UI.  The biggest challenge so far has been to design C++ side so that it provides usable interface to QML side. Before going too deep into details here’s the video about QuickFlickr running first on OS X and after that on N900.

(more…)

I was in Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2010, but as you probably know, everyone’s is stucked here now. As many of my friends have said, the San Francisco is not the worst place on earth to get stucked. I tried to get a flight to the southern part of Europe this morning, but it was impossible. Update: I manage to get flight to the Madrid for Tuesday. After that I decided to do some work and I wrote an article about the Collaboration Summit. You can read it from here.

Instead of staying the whole day in the hotel room,  I headed to the Fisherman’s Wharf to the Bay area. The weather was nice and I met my new Swedish friends Jonas and Linus there. I’ve been hanging around with these two guys here in SF for couple days now.

Jonas and Linus

The picture above is actually not from the Fisherman’s Wharf, it’s from the Apple Store nearby the Union Square.

(more…)

Some time ago I wrote how you can build and run QML applications on N900, but since that I haven’t done anything related to QML, until now. I’m not the only one at the moment who is trying to study how QML works and how you can deploy it in your application. I have always learned by doing, so therefore I decided to write a small application with QML.

I like to photograph and I have missed a good Flickr client for N900, so it was a natural choice to write a small Flickr client. I call it QuickFlickr, naturally:) So here’s the sneak preview of QuickFlickr. On the video I run it on Mac, because it takes too much time to build exactly the same version of Qt and Declarative module that I’m running on my laptop.

The application is far from ready and it lacks of proper graphics and bunch of functionality like uploading local images to the Flickr, but I will work on this app in order to learn more QML. I also managed to improve the performance quite much after I shot this screencast. I’ll add another video where you can see the performance improvement.

(more…)

This article has been in my mind quite a long time already, but now I finally had time to test MADDE and write something about it. MADDE stands for Maemo Application and Debugging Environment. Before going any further, I want to say that this is not a MADDE tutorial, this is about the MADDE and Qt Creator integration.

Why I am interested in about MADDE is that you can quite easily to integrate it with Qt Creator. In practice, this means that you can use Qt Creator in the same way as you would create an application for your desktop environment, but instead of running your application on a desktop, you can also run and debug it directly on N900.

I know, there are bunch of people who are screaming: “you can use Qt Creator with Scratchbox too.” This is true and there are two ways to do it: you can run it inside the scratchbox or you can make your Qt Creator to use compiler and qmake inside the scratchbox from outside. (Sounds complicated)

Both of these ways work, but they are also bit problematic. Running Qt Creator inside the scratchbox requires bit “configuring”, but is quite easy to do. Basically what you need to do, is that you install the Qt Creator to the X86 target and set the DISPLAY=:0 before launching Qt Creator. The problem with this approach is that when you need to switch the target, Qt Creator will be closed. If you want to develop your app  on ARMEL target, then it means that you need to run ARMEL version of Qt Creator in Scratchbox too. For me, this sounds not-so-nice-solution.

I have never tried to set Qt Creator to use qmake inside the Scratchbox from outside, but I know guys who have used this approach. With this way, there have been bit more problems than using Qt Creator inside the Scratchbox. Even though it’s possible to “integrate” Qt Creator with scratchbox, it is still missing an easy way to debug and run your application on a device during the development.

(more…)

Now I have digested an idea of MeeGo for few days, I decided to take a look at it little closer and write a small article about it. The reason for writing this article is to self educate myself and trying to solve what MeeGo really is. Note that this is not a review of the MeeGo platform.  A good starting point for doing this study is the online information that Nokia and Intel has provided. I have used the following material as a bases of this article:

• Nokia Software Strategy
• http://meego.com
• http://ofono.org
• Ari Jaaksi’s Blog
• Jim Zemlin’s Blog

WHAT IS MeeGo?

It is a merge of Maemo 6 and Mobilin 2 – it takes the best pieces of the both platform and combines them into a one called MeeGo. MeeGo is fully open, cross-platform and it targets not only to mobile devices, but to netbooks, automotive and basically to any hardware. This means that MeeGo platform is available for any device manufacturers or network operators and for developers of course.

Yet, a one important thing to mention is that MeeGo is a project that is hosted by Linux Foundation. As a Qt developer, I of course want to mention here, that the default UI toolkit for MeeGo is Qt. As NOKIA advertises it, code once and use everywhere. I hope that this is what we really get this time.

(more…)