I recently found out about the buildservice plugin (OBS, Meego) for Qt Creator (branch: buildservice). I wanted to give it a try and sadly I had to compile an old instance of QtCreator as it was based on an old version of QtCreator.
Therefore I just patched it to work with current master of QtCreator.
You can find the patch here. (okay I actually wrote this article 5 days ago but I had to overcome some hurdles to setup my server… -.-)
I’ll lo0k into contacting the project Bretzn developers to rebase their repo onto the current master of QtCreator. Will report back if they plan to do it soon 🙂
PS: this patch should apply cleanly to qtcreator master – it is only a small diff compared to the buildservice branch (I think only one cpp file changed (changed a list to a custom class as an interface in QtCreator changed))
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 🙂
Just a short update on the current status of Dinjam. I didn’t have much time recently but still there was some progress. First of all I want to welcome back Peter, a member of the original Dinjam team – he recently joined back by contributing 2 patches to the build system. Thanks.
Hopefully there is much more to come 🙂
On another note I invested some time into fixing the Scriptmanager interaction as well as Document interaction across library and the frontends. The functionality is still not 100% (I think) and it is pretty hackish/not yet cleaned up – but it is working initially – maybe not yet as good as master but we are getting there 🙂
And because Christmas is nearing here a little Screenshot of the latest version of Dinjam mobileui branch.
What is often forgot by opensource projects is their homepage. I try not make the typical mistakes and create a easy to keep up2date site early on. Therefore I’m in the process of setting up joomla on Sourceforge (see dinjams project page).
As recent news stated Symbian ^4 will not be released but instead updates will be released for Symbian ^3 and the platform will evolve into what should have become Symbian ^4 at some point.
Also stated in the comments on conversations.nokia.com is that Orbit Ui (Ui Extensions for mobile) (Uiemo) has been discontinued in favour of native Qt and Qt Quick.
I don’t know what to think about this yet but at least there are not two competing Frameworks for Ui development anymore (Meego Touch Framework and Orbit).
As mentioned in my last blog entry about Dinjam I’m in the progress of separating the core stuff of Dinjam into a library (libdinjam) and creating Uis for different scenarios (like mobile usage).
There are 4 different uis in the works – even though I’m not sure all of them will ever be finished (more about that later).
1.) Desktop (QWidget based)
This is the traditional Ui as it has always been with the Ui designed using Qt Designer and the QGraphicsScene created from within the scripts.
Atm Scripts are broken in the sense of that there are no C++ exports of for example documentmanagement. (and there are some other broken pieces everywhere)
A new ui based on the MTF developed by Nokia/Intel for Meego. Atm I’m trying to setup a devel environment but it is not as easy as I had hoped – I’m trying the qemugl approach from the wiki – but the image won’t boot using kvm (just stops at loading the kernel) and without it starts X and then stops (no handset UX shows up). How to get network up and running can be found here.
After packaging libmeegotouch and meegotouchtheme for ArchLinux I can now sort of execute/link/use meego applications although there is some really weird gconf stuff going on and I’m not sure if my system is correctly set up now. Maybe I’ve got to set up a Fedora VM or something similar. Or just wait for PR 1.3 of Maemo to easily dualboot Meego natively on my N900 to execute directly on my N900.
Basically everything here are placeholders – as I just recently found out that meego applications run at all (before I had a white square and nothing else appearing).
3.) QML Ui (QDeclarativeView based)
QML or “Qt Quick” how the cool guys at Nokia are calling it seems to be the future Nokia envisions for app development. Combined with their ongoing lab project QSceneGraph which should bring enormous performance gains as all painting will shift from QPainter to OpenGL/on GPU based painting, this may really be the future – at least in the long run. I must admit that the whole affair is really new stuff to me so I’m having a pretty hard time figuring out how to transform a traditional ui into a QML based version.
I’m currently trying basic things like navigating between a basic menu to another page showing an about dialog – and I want to make that happen using a nice transition – and not showing/hiding elements but instead loading them as I need them (to save ressources). Sadly I wasn’t able to find any QML application out there using such an approach… I’m looking for the pages concept of MTF I think…
Anyway… here’s my first try…
So what works? The quit button – and About switches to another page – but atm without a nice sliding transition effect and using show/hide of the different rectangles… not nice imho.
4.) Qt Components (QML based)
The last frontend Dinjam may provide in the future is the Qt Components based one – although atm there isn’t much progress as Qt Components itself are not really anywhere atm. Afaik there exists some sort of a Meego “style” atm and an incomplete MX “style”, with a plasma (KDE) “style” in the working (see this post on plasma-devel mailing list) but there is not really anything useable atm I could plug into. At least to my knowledge.
So no screenshot for that one 😦
TODO
So what is still left to do? A LOT! It starts out with library recompiles as soon as I switch platform (3 object files want to relink again), cmake fixes to incorporate the possibility to build not only one but many/all platforms at once. And of course: finish those uis.
I think the best step would be to first get the desktop ui working again and then slowly start creating the others. It remains to be seen how to integrate a QGraphicsScene/View with MTF/QML. Interesting times ahead… that’s for sure.
Stay tuned for more updates. I hope I won’t disappoint you
To end this post: Orbit/Directui anyone? 😛 anyone strange enough to create a KDE ui? 😛
The FS Editor was created to show an example of how a big software system can be done with Qt, and how you build it with CMake. The focus is on architecture and on showing how features are done
As stated on the homepage there is no real documentation but instead he will post blog entries which can be found here.
So today I’ve got an update about firefox-qt for you 🙂 I finally had the time and energy to fix those ArchLinux PKGBUILDs I had lying around on my disk…
We’ve now got one single pkgbuild to install using yaourt -S firefox-qt-hg
No need to uninstall firefox/xulrunner anymore.
The only thing I would recommend you to do is:
BACKUP YOUR PROFILE!!
or even better: change the path to your profile (in /home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini change the path and create the folder before starting firefox-qt-hg
I’ve written down a summary of what is working here. Feel free to extend it 🙂 We could create a nice changelog imho and track the progress of Firefox-Qt for users 🙂
So as you can see the Firefox-Qt port is progressing quite nicely – even if there is still a long road to go – I think the mobile effort helps the Qt port a lot.. (firefox-mobile for Meego is Qt based) 🙂
Wayland may first come to Meego and replace X.org which imho should result in a cleaner stack and maybe fewer dependencies/bloat 🙂 *me looks forward to Qt on Wayland*
D-Bus kernel implementation resulting in massive speedups in some areas 🙂 and all this demoed on Maemo – so I see the possibility to this getting into Meego too? 🙂
Meego keeps getting more exciting 🙂
Edit: of course there’s also systemd which is also being looked at integration into Meego 🙂
Beside of sex, love and rock’n’ roll there are also other things going on… 🙂 (yeah I know those things are laaame in comparison ^^)
Dinjam is going to get a revival as a mobile app for maemo or meego (have I mentioned that before?). I’m planning to do that using a library and mulitple frontends.
One of the frontends planned is a Qml frontend using Qt Quick Components. Another one is a native libmeegotouch UI. And of course the already existing frontend using traditional QWidgets.
Currently everything is in a broken state – and can be found in my mobileui branch on gitorious.
The current status is that CMake migration is in the progress… the library is already created but I’m not sure yet if I need some export macros? or how I should handle include paths… I also need to figure out what has to be cleaned up from the desktop (widget based) ui into the library and how I can strip down those components…
Next will be that I’ve gotta figure out how I can use the QGraphicsView in Qml OR how I can paint from within QtScript onto the Qml Scene… I would like to be able to animate the View (roll it to the side like a paper or something like that …)
So if anyone has got any idea on how to do this I would really appreciate it 🙂
Maybe you are asking yourself what has kept me busy and why it took so long for those small looking steps… well life… and cmake… this grandious build system had something against my complex folder structure… yeah… until I found out how to use it the right way(tm)…. did you know that CMake had an include statement? using it you can include other CMakeLists and therefore you can set variables in a subdir and still use this variable in the topdir where you included the list… who needs add_subdirectory if you can use include? 😛 cool thing… 🙂
I found that solution through the help of a german qt forum 🙂 thanks. so for all my german readers (are there any? oO): here you can find the thread.
When the decision to buy a new phone has been made the first question many of us are asking themselves is: what do I want (at least I hope many do ^^)
The choices are wide-spread, hard to overlook but still there are some aspects which should be taken into consideration. Of course the following ultra-short reviews are just MY opinion and are by far not complete – mentioning all aspects would be just impossible…
Meego
Nokias and Intels new platform merges the hardly spread Maemo platform (used on earlier Nokia tablets and the N900 supercomputer.. eh mobile phone) and the Intel Moblin distro for Netbooks. It’s base is fully open source, everything is build upstream – as far as possible, communication happens in the open (mailinglists, …) and it is still under very active development. but it is not ready yet.. Nokias next high end phone will be powered by the meego touch libs and therefore be a Meego SOMEHOW but not really… its base platform will still be a modified Fremantle – called Harmatan… so you aren’t getting a true Meego phone with the next released Nokia phone..
I also doubt that the first generation of Meego will be able to incorporate all the features Maemo currently has AND provide even more to keep up with the competition. Well if it has Ovi maps it’s mine 😛 Really missing a fully featured ovi maps on my N900 running Maemo so I hope that once we are able to run a fully working Meego on N900 that it will not only be the free parts but also those with Nokias proprietary extras (maps, …)
At the moment everything we can do is waiting for an awesome platform with a bright future imho with my favourite platform underlying.. Qt ❤
Symbian
The widest spread operating system for phones to date… currently it rapidly loosed market shares because there were some design desicions taken which were not the best – or Nokia just took too long to come up to par with the competition or succeed them – even if it has some strong points where all the others can’t compete (synchronisation, business features, …).
But I think that the future will show us that Symbian has also a bright future as with Symbian ^4 it will receive a completely reworked/redesigned UI and with the power and uncountable hours of work which have gone into the underlying libraries I think that could very well be a very big step into the right direction. And again: we are getting a Qt UI 🙂 although it’s not libmeegotouch but another one: Orbit – sadly they are not compatible…
With Symbian ^3 Nokia already made big step into the right direction (Nokia N8) and I think that will continue with Symbian ^4. We’ve gotta wait 🙂
One important point also worth mentioning and really needed for Symbian and Meego to succeed is the AppStore… Ovi Store to be precise. This needs to be vastly improved imho…
Frankenstein.. ehm… well.. at least it looks like that to me from a technical POV 😀 java based all over, a modified Linux kernel, a pretty closed stack… the opposite to Meego… but apparently it is well received by non-geeks 😛 its market shares are RAPIDLY increasing taking away Apple its market share… so far so good 😀
well.. if it works.. why not… it will never be my favourite platform in terms of programming or openness… but well.. it’s a phone… it needs to work… and look cool ^^ and obviously it fulfills those points… and its appstore is pretty good filled so yeah – if you like it – just use it 🙂
one thing really missing with Android is a synchronisation suite afaik (never had an Android phone myself) – HTC has got one (I think) – but there’s no common solution…
Maemo
life is over… not supported anymore… get yourself another solution (nitdroid anyone?) … or just be happy with it 🙂 I’m running Maemo PR 1.2 on my N900 and I’m pretty happy with it 🙂
maybe someday I will upgrade to Meego (unsupported tough) when it’s stable enough or will go to nitdroid – if it fulfills my needs… who knows… at least I know that I’ve got the power at my hand with my N900 🙂
iOS
Everyone knows that strange company producing fruits… apples to be precisely… I don’t like their product policy to be honest… but they are well thought out, play nice together, are closed from the top to the bottom, only work with their own brothers and sisters and are white… or grey.. or black… with an apple on it…
Those who like it should use it… it’s just not what I need/want
So what do you think about phone operating systems? Let me know in the comments 🙂
friesoft
Friesoft's Blog 