OVI Maps with Voice Navigation coming to N900! Unofficially…

In case you are not an active reader of talk.maemo.org I have something very interesting for you.

You already read the title of this post (or you probably wouldn’t have read the post) so you probably… maaaybe are already going to know what I’m writing about.

THIS – will hopefully grow into a full blown navigation solution. They are working on POI showing/hiding (including different categories), voice navigation with nokia provided speech files and automatic language detection – as well as reading out street names using espeak or other solutions. And what is also on their TODO is offline routing support =)

Sounds great doesn’t it? 🙂 The project is still pretty early – and I don’t think it will help OVI maps get faster on N900 but it for sure will help boost its features =) For those not knowing: OVI Maps is based on HTML/JS! So they are just editing one single index.html which originally was about 800KB and is now already up at 1.2MB.

Tracking the GPS position and automatically following the map already works but I couldn’t get speech to work. Also it has problems with loosing GPS connectivity (e.g. in tunnels) or if you choose another route (no automatic route recalculation yet).

Still it is REALLY great someone is working on this 🙂 On the other hand it is really sad that some volunteers who are not even programmers succeed at something Nokia failed to do for quite some time…. I hate business…

To end this post with something nice… here a screenshot 🙂 (yeah I know those were rare lately on my blog)…

Yeah I know this isn’t a picture of my (at least I didn’t know I live in taiwan…) – but taking a picture while driving may not be the brightest idea… 😉

How to install (as of 23.1.2011)

Integration is wonderful

Hi!

Just a short one this time… I was browsing the internet looking up some news about maemo when I found a document describing the requirements for submitting a package to the Ovi Store. It was a pdf file and I clicked on “Download” in firefox – it suggested to open the document with $some_application… didn’t look at it… I read the document – and pressed the middle mouse button and held it to drag the page down… When I suddenly realized: when did Okular get this functionality? oO

I looked up into the menubar – opened the Help menu – pressed info – to suddenly realize Firefox had opened Evince instead of Okular. The style perfectly matches those of my kde programs =) So THANKS to all oxygen-gtk contributors!

For those not knowing: oxygen-gtk is a native implementation of the oxygen style with a new gtk style engine. Its goal is to create a style perfectly the same as the KDE one – and to also use its settings. 🙂

Works great for Firefox, Thunderbird, and it seems like all other programs are doing good as well =) … only vuze seems to have problems (crash) 😦

For ArchLinux there are some pkgbuilds in AUR available as well as the 1.0 release (don’t know how old it is already) in the repositories.

Thanks for reading =) I’ll soon post an update on the Dinjam progress as well.

Dinjam Qml progress

Hi!

It is late already, I have to go to work tomorrow… today… so this will be a short status update. Today I had enough motivation to work on the Qml frontend of Dinjam again 🙂 and it shows off with SOME results 🙂

We can load scripts and they can actually do something. So this Dialog (with the white area in it) is actually a QGraphicsView subclass created by the Base script (the same script used in the desktop version) YAY 🙂

So that’s it for now =) Hopefully I can soon continue working on it…

Btw: happy new year 😛 hope everyone had a good start 🙂