My two unique holidays weeks this year are being busy. Some party with friends, good sessions of one of my hobbies (maemo development), a well-deserved rest and even sport.

In the last days I have been porting some applications to the Internet Tablets.
Firstly, the most bored application for the users (but I like more :P), EasyChem.
EasyChem is an application to draw chemical molecules in 2D. It’s a very simple app but that do very well its function. It can export to .fig and .eps. I will try add a .png exporter.

Though I am a python guy (and not very good at it) and I never learnt C, I have come to a point that I can read C code, and even I can write some GTK and Hildon in C code (but not too much). So with little effort I hildonized EasyChem and now it’s perfectly integrated in maemo: hildon window, menus, fullscreen, filechooser dialogs and so on.

You can download it from the extras repository in your application manager or in its downloads page in maemo.org: Easychem

Another available application in the extras repository now is Hex-a-hop. Hex-a-hop is a very funny puzzle game.

I have got the debian sources and I added a few modifications by pipeline (he was the first one who ported this game to the tablets and put it in Internet Tablet Talk). I modified the icons to the sizes used in maemo, the desktop file, and added a couple of code lines in order that it had an icon in the task navigator. And so it was to the extras repository. My next challenge is add sound to the game.

Try it, it’s very addictive: Hex-a-hop for OS2008

I am just uploading versions for OS2007 and OS2006 for both apps, so it will be available in few hours.

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Do you like cookies? I like cookies and I like cook cookies.

Yes, I like cook very much and I like to have my recipes always to hand, but the paper is already gone out of fashion, so I wrote a new application to manage my cooking recipes in the Internet Tablet.

And today I have released Pyrecipe’s first version. It can create, edit and show recipes. Actually it can import recipes in the Gourmet and Krecipes formats. It can export to HTML, Gourmet, Krecipes and Mealmaster formats. More formats are coming.

It has other functions as Timer, where you will be able to control the time you are cooking.
Also it has a small Shopping List. It has a basic interface, with options to add, to delete and to mark items. You can save shopping lists in a file to open them in another moment.

Pyrecipe is in beta state yet. Actually it only run in OS2008. Soon it will support previous versions.
If you want to try it, you can install pyrecipe pressing in this arrow in your Internet Tablet browser:

It will add the extras-devel catalogue with beta software to your application manager. I recommend that after installing pyrecipe you should deactivate this catalogue. You can do it with the following way:

• Go to the application manager.
• Menu ->Tools -> Application catalogue.
• Search the ‘maemo Extras Devel’ catalogue and select it.
• Press Edit button.
• Check Disable.
• OK and Close, and it’s all.

I would receive charmed comments about the application as well as international recipes or even a lunch invite

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It seems there is a new feature in the maemo downloads page, bug 2155. (And other new bugs)

So if you have your application in the extras repository, now you have a measure of your application downloads from the repository:

Undoubtedly it’s a very good news and I hope now that we have this option more developers upload her packages to the extras repository. It’s a small feature but the progresses they will do in this field soon, surely will be more reasons for upload packages to the extras repository.

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Between exam and exam, I had time to launch Maemo WordPy’s new version.
Well it was almost finished and there was a beta in extras-devel repository and it seemed it was working well and it became slightly popular but I didn’t want to launch the final version until I wasn’t receiving the n810 to be able to test the OS2008 version.
So launching it today, I have time to rest and to enjoy tomorrow during my birthday.

Well, here there is a list of the new features for this version:

• Powerful image edition.
• New preferences with support for multiple accounts.
• Define images in offline and upload it when publish. Yes it’s possible now!
• Insert flickr images in an article.
• Upload images to flickr.
• Option for set font size.
• Zoom in text with hardware keys.
• OS2008: Preview article tab.
• OS2008: Option for finger-friendly scrollbars.
• OS2007-OS2006: Preview article in the browser.
• Wordpress: Categories sorted alphabetically.
• Wordpress: Option for allow or avoid pings.
• Blogger support: Write articles, set labels, upload local images to Picasa, publish/draft. Thanks to Jayesh Salvi.
  An explanation, the support for Picasa is only when you want to insert a local image in an article. In the future there will be major support for Picasa, especially if MS-love-Yahoo goes out forward.
• A nice easter-egg. It’s a small silly thing, but it can be funny. I am going to add a small easter egg in every new version. Please, python gurus, don’t look at the code

Known Issues:
Only for Blogger
If you have installed Erminig, you will have gdataclient 1.0.9 installed.
Maemo WordPy depends on the same library but I have called it python-gdata (taking Debian’s directives) and I have upload it to the extras repository.
I have uploaded the version 1.0.10, which has support for Picasa, this way if you have gdataclient 1.0.9 you will not be able to upload images to Picasa.
There is a solution, uninstall gdataclient and to reinstall Maemo WordPy, with what you will install the new python-gdata version and I think Erminig will be able to work with this version equally.

Unknown Issues:
Many
As you can see this version has a good jump in features, so if there is some problem, please to comment it. Feedback is welcome.

You can download the new version, following the instructions in its web: Install Maemo WordPy
Or it’s possible that already it’s available in your application manager.

You can see the roadmap as it’s changing with every version, since the people suggest ideas to improve Maemo WordPy: Roadmap.

Have fun.

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I was bored and reading moblin mailinglist, when in a message there was a link to the libmokoui2 code, there was mentioned that there were a python bindings. This library has the famous Moko Finger Scroll function.

So I compiled libmokoui2 with its fingerscroll function in maemo. Nothing that other people hadn’t done in the past. But also I verified if the python bindings were functional in maemo, and it worked, in a few minutes I had working a small example with a treeview, so I modified mabugz to test this scroll widget, instead of a normal gtk.Scrolledwindow. Also I did some tests with Mirage and its thumbnail pane.

You can see the test video in youtube: Mabugz with finger scroll.

Let’s go on to the practical part, what do I do to have this widget in a python app?

Firstly to say that I have tested it in Chinook, and I don’t know if it will work in previous versions. I also don’t know if it will work in the device (I can’t test it in a device thanks to the Nokia spanish shop), but I don’t see because it should not

1) Download the code from the SVN:

svn co http://svn.openmoko.org/trunk/src/target/OM-2007.2/libraries/libmokoui2/

2) Install some dependences.
fakeroot apt-get install python2.5-gobject-dev python2.5-dev libffi4-dev gtk-doc-tools

I suppose that other python packages already are installed if you are a python developer.

3) The built of the python bindings depends of python-gnome, that’s not available for maemo. But in this case only we need to be deceptive with the configure script, as if we had this library.
To do this, download the following package python-gnome2-dev from debian,
Uncompress it and to copy gnome-python-2.0.pc to the pkgconfig directory:
dpkg -x python-gnome2-dev python-gnome2-dev/
cp python-gnome2/usr/lib/pkgconfig/gnome-python-2.0.pc /usr/lib/pkgconfig/

4) Enter in the libmokoui2 directory and:
./autogen.sh
Probably you will have to execute the autogen.sh from out of scratchbox, since it was giving some error that I couldn’t understand

export PYTHON=python2.5
./configure --enable-python --prefix=/usr
make
fakeroot make install

5) We are going to verify that everything works correctly, so go to the console, and write:
python2.5
and into the python interpreter:
import moko
If the module is imported correctly, it won’t show any error.

6) This way now we are going to make it work in a python app, having a program with a
gtk.Treeview into a gtk.ScrolledWindow, we are going to replace the scrolledwindow with the moko finger scroll widget.
I have tried also in a gtk.Textview with the property sensitive in False in Mabugz
This way if our code was something like that:

sw = gtk.ScrolledWindow()
treeview = gtk.Treeview()
sw.add(treeview)
window.add(sw)

now it will have this form:

mokoscroll = moko.FingerScroll()
treeview = gtk.Treeview(
mokoscroll.add(treeview)
window.add(mokoscroll)

And voilá it will work.
This also will work if we do the interface with glade, the only thing we should do is to reparent the new widget.

It would be perfect that someone was packing libmokoui2 with its python bindings for Chinook, some volunteer?
Does Chris have plans to do that?

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I am developing hardly Maemo WordPy so the next version (0.6) is a great application for blogging. To even be much better than most blogging software that can be found on the desktop

When you are in your computer and you think “I am going to write an article on my blog”, you leave the computer and you are going to write to the tablet because Maemo WordPy offers you a few advantages that no other software doesn’t offer, then I will think “Eh Maemo WordPy finally is a good software”.

After these thoughts, I am going to present a feature that will be availably in Maemo WordPy 0.6. This one is image edition. Maemo WordPy will be able to edit live images, some of its characteristics are:

• Resize images. It’s a very logical option, you don’t want to show an image of 2Mpx in an article of your blog, it would be horrible.
• Crop images. You only want to show an important part of an image, now you can crop an image from Maemo WordPy.
• Rotate and Flip. These options are a must. Rotate could be very useful, and flip is nice.
• Some filters. Brightness, Colorize, Invert, Contour. You can adjust the brightness of an image, something also very useful if you have a photo something dark it could not look well in an article. With Colorize you can add more color to the image, or if you choose the minimum value the image will be black and white. Invert and Contour filters are very nice, but it isn’t very useful.
• Screenshot. Now you can grab a screenshot directly from Maemo WordPy and you can edit it as if it were a normal image.
• Flickr support. There will be an option to upload images to your Flickr account and even an option to choose one of these images in Flickr and add it to an article.

There is a video available in youtube showing how this works: Image handling in Maemo WordPy.
I don’t like flash videos here, but the original ogg/theora video (propietary? :)) is 7 Mb, and the server doesn’t want more than 500kb files.
The video is somewhat slow but it’s for the way of recording it, that was some tricky. In the device the most operations in the image handling are fast.

Please comment what options you would add to the image handling in Maemo WordPy. Or how that could be improved. Now is the perfect time.

There will be many changes more in Maemo WordPy 0.6 when it is launched, but I wanted to write this article to report on this feature before tomorrow it is launched Canola2 and it takes all the protagonism

Technorati Tags: maemo, wordpy, maemo-wordpy, n800, n810, 770, internet tablets, wordpress

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I have ported the latest upstream version of Mirage to Chinook.

Have some improvements that can be found in the changelog.
The most important for the end user are:

• Support for tap and hold.
• Thumbnails pane, without kinetic scrolling
• Ability to open remote images (http and ftp).

If someone with a N810 or N800 with ITOS2008 might try and give me her impressions would be great.
Especially on the tap and hold support, if translations (en, es, fr, it, de, pl, ru) are working properly and if all dialogs are shown correctly.
And any bug that might have.

Download: Mirage 0.9 Chinook
Yes, it needs Python

Thanks in advance.

I will release the 0.9 version also for the ITOS2006 and ITOS2007 ASAP.

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