Wednesday, July 07, 2010
mSoma a Qt client for SomaFM
Andrea Grandi proposed me a few weeks ago to try and develop a client for SomaFM, a streaming radio with near 16 different channels, available for free. Indeed we wanted to try to develop an application for our cool Nokia N900 smartphone. Since this phone is now based on my beloved Qt framework, I accepted with much pleasure.
The really cool thing was that, by relying on the qt-mobility APIs (new Qt APIs for mobile application developers), we could enjoy cross-platform developing: all the code that I wrote for this player was tested and debuged on my computer, as a desktop application. Then, we deployed on the Nokia N900 and tried it there (and it worked seamlessly).
For instance, this are some screenshots of msoma running as a desktop application (in Linux in this case):
Of course, this is the very first version of this application, and surely the UI should be different in the desktop application with respect to the cellphone version (in order to be more usable in the mobile devices). But, as it is, it's already enjoyable (but I may be biased ;)
Source code is available on Gitorious and it's always updated with latest version we're working on. If someone want to test the application, it's available in extras-devel repository ("msoma" under Multimedia section) of N900.
In case you want to use it as a desktop application, please remember that you need qt-mobility. I blogged about the installation of qt-mobility in Linux.
We really want to thank, Rusty Hodge, SomaFM's founder, who provided so many details about SomaFM for developing our application (and of course we thank him also for SomaFM itself :)
We look forward to receiving feedback, patches, suggestions, and help! :)
Our maemo profiles:
Pubblicato da betto a 10:12 AM 1 commenti
Etichette: maemo, msoma, my programs, n900, nokia, qt, qt-mobility
Friday, December 26, 2008
Nokia 6630 and Internet Connection in Linux
Finally, I managed to connect to the Internet with my Nokia 6630 in Linux Kubuntu; it's not that I had troubles before: it's just that I had never had to connect with the cellphone, and I must admit that I quite appreciated that it was really easy and straightforward to this :-)
Actually, first I had tried with the bluetooth way and thanks to many documentation found on the web, I succeeded, though the procedure might not be trivial. However, in that case, I noticed that the connection was not reliable and not very fast. So I decided to buy a (quite expensive for what it does) USB cable (it's just a usb cable... why does it cost 20 euros?!).
Well, with USB the procedure is even more trivial: you just connect it and you'll see that dmesg happily reports this:
[ 149.162045] usb 3-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2Isn't it nice? It correctly detects the modem and creates a device for it!
[ 149.207194] usb 3-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 149.461122] cdc_acm 3-2:1.8: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
[ 149.463589] usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_acm
[ 149.463594] /build/buildd/linux-2.6.24/drivers/usb/class/cdc-acm.c: v0.25:USB Abstract Control Model driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters
ll /dev/ttyACM0So you'll just have to configure your dialup tool using that specific modem. In particular I use kppp, and I have a TIM connection, so I created a new modem using /dev/ttyACM0 and setting as INIT 2 string the following one:
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 166, 0 2008年12月24日 17:28 /dev/ttyACM0
AT+cgdcont=,"ip","ibox.tim.it"and as for the telephone number *99# (username and password are not used, so you can use dummy ones). Here are some screenshots:
Pubblicato da betto a 10:34 AM 0 commenti
Monday, March 31, 2008
Nokia n800: my new toy
Here's my new toy, the Nokia N800! Isn't it wonderful? :-)
It's a sort of tablet handheld PC with wireless and bluetooth connectivity and lots of multimedia features which really rock!
I must thank Matteo Baldoni, my colleague from University of Torino (or should I say "blame" ;-) that convinced me to buy this gadget, which is pretty useful for surfing the web, reading my email, listening to web radios, using remote calendars, watching movies and all those sorts of things you can find in the very supported site http://maemo.org.
However, what really pushed me to buy this small computer it's the fact that it has a Linux operating system, which, you should have learned by now, I'm in love with ;-)
I have the linux shell I can play with! I have the apt Debian package manager! I really praise Nokia for adopting this operating system, which also lets many already existing open source programs be easily portable (and already ported) to this device!
I must admit that writing with the small touchpad keyboard on the screen might not be comfortable all the time, but you can still do that (you can enable the bigger on screen keyboard where you can touch the virtual keys with your fingers, or you can switch to handwriting).
Well, the next step is now to start developing for this device, using the Maemo SDK!
Here are some final screenshots!
Pubblicato da betto a 8:49 PM 0 commenti