Introduction
I have been planning this post for a while, but I had some real life troubles and also other duties. Finally, I have some time to write this down briefly!
In short, I have created two new applications for Blackberry 10. I tested them on my DevAlpha device. The first one became the candidate for getting a Limited Edition device in the end.
Wiki Reader
As I have been a wikipedia fan for a while, I thought this would be a good idea to help myself and others to have an application for reading wikipedia pages easily. There was an application on Harmattan (N9) called "Cutewiki" available in Ovi Store. I had been using that a lot because I think it is a great application. As the author did not plan to port that to Blackberry 10, I wrote one for myself.
The source code is available under the KDE umbrella. The application was approved in AppWorld, but here you can find some screenshots embedded as well:
 |
| Searching for articles |
 |
| Reading articles |
Mrdanga Player
I had been playing bass guitar for many years during my student years, and I have been a fan of mrdanga recently. There was an application for Harmattan (N9) called "Finger Drums". I felt in love with that application after the first checkout. It is an awesome piece of software with lots of fun!
This drove me to write an application for Blackberry 10 to enable people to get to know what mrdanga is and how it sounds. It is a lot simpler emulation than a whole drum kit. I think it is still nice for those who like this instrument, and potential newcomers that can get to know it this way. There is also a nice video on youtube if you would like to check out what the masters can do with this instrument. :)
The source code is available under the KDE umbrella. The migration is now ongoing to Playground/Mobile where the wiki-reader also resides.
The application was submitted to AppWorld, and it is in review stage. For those who would like to try out the latest version, I uploaded the package to my dropbox. I would also like to share some screenshots here.
 |
| Splash screen |
 |
| Mrdanga heads with darker background |
 |
| Mrdanga heads with brighter background |
Kudos
Many thanks go to RIM for providing DevAlpha and Limited Edition devices to the community!
For sure, many thanks go to the KDE Project as well for providing the source code repository, bugtracker, and the whole KDE infrastructure for this!
There will be a follow up post soon about developing Blackberry 10 applications from command line with cmake. Stay tuned!
Nice ! I'll be also writing an article about my Mieru port for BB10, once it finally clears the review queue.
ReplyDeletegreat , btw dont you feel the need for a repo/client for floss on this platform like f-droid ?
ReplyDeleteI am afraid, I have not used Android that much.
DeleteI do not know, for instance, how the requestable credentials would work with that.
What do they do to achieve the audience (i.e. end users) at large?
Is Blackberry cool with licensing apps under GPL? I know that Apple is not.
ReplyDeleteAs Eduardo wrote below, at least (L)GPL v2.x seem to be fine. My applications are also under the LGPL v2.x license.
DeleteHope, it helps. :-)
Awesome news! Congrats for the new apps :)
ReplyDeletegood :) and hello to #n950club here :)
ReplyDeleteHi Lazlo! I am not a lawyer but I work for BlackBerry. BlackBerry does not automatically reject (L)GPL v2.x apps that are in compliance with applicable licenses.
ReplyDeleteHi,
ReplyDeleteWiki Reader says "Unavailable for this device"
On Z10 in the UK
What gives?
Hi Unknown.
DeleteUnfortunately, I do not yet have a Z10 device, so I was unable to test it before. I had put the support for that device into a request for AppWorld a few days ago.
Hope, they make it available soon, and then you can check out. :-)
I will try to remember to inform you once the open CR is approved. Thank you for your interest!
Hello,
DeleteSame issue here, nearly two months later. Any news for the Z10 support?
Unfortunately, I have not still received my Limited Edition device.
DeleteIn addition, the Blackberry App World team decided to reject the Wiki Reader for Z10 since they found a runtime bug even though the application would be otherwise useful.
Apologies for the inconvenience. I will inform you once the application ends up in the App World.
I'm trying to build it to test (and why not improve/fix it if I found bugs!), but I can't get it compiling with CMake (but I'm really interested in it for my own projects): even if the QNX_TARGET and QNX_HOST are well defined, it can't find BBSystem:
DeleteCMake Error at /usr/share/cmake-2.8/Modules/FindPackageHandleStandardArgs.cmake:97 (message):
Could NOT find BBSystem (missing: BBSYSTEM_LIBRARY BBSYSTEM_INCLUDE_DIR)
Call Stack (most recent call first):
/usr/share/cmake-2.8/Modules/FindPackageHandleStandardArgs.cmake:291 (_FPHSA_FAILURE_MESSAGE)
frontends/blackberry/cmake/FindBBSystem.cmake:51 (FIND_PACKAGE_HANDLE_STANDARD_ARGS)
frontends/blackberry/cmake/FindBBCascades.cmake:19 (find_package)
frontends/blackberry/CMakeLists.txt:11 (find_package)
-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
~/d/wiki-reader git:master ❯❯❯ env | grep QNX
QNX_TARGET=/opt/bbndk/target_10_0_10_822/qnx6
QNX_HOST=/opt/bbndk/host_10_0_10_536/linux/x86
The file it's looking for is existing:
~/d/wiki-reader git:master ❯❯❯ ls -hl ${QNX_TARGET}/usr/include/bb/system/Global.hpp
-rw-r--r-- 1 marc users 525 16 mars 01:36 /opt/bbndk/target_10_0_10_822/qnx6/usr/include/bb/system/Global.hpp
Any hint?
Well, I was missing the toolchain. Working great on the Z10.
Delete