New applications for Blackberry 10

Hi everyone,


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!

Qt5 packages for Archlinux

Hi all,

I had built modularized Qt5 packages (except qtdocs and qtwebkit) for Archlinux x86_64 a few days ago, but unfortunately I did not have time to write even a short blog post for the time. Here you can find the packages:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gfn3bm9jno9c9ev/L8rCozTWtF

There are python3 issues with WebKit for now, so it is not included. I had submitted a patch, but I have not yet had time to continue the investigation. As it turns out the issue is more complex than previously thought.

Nevertheless, It should be fixable by using python2 if someone is interested in that.

I will try to keep it up to date once 5.0.1 is out. Hope, it helps.

The Future of C++: Live broadcast this Friday

http://herbsutter.com/2012/10/29/the-future-of-c-live-broadcast-this-friday/

Randa: KDE Edu installer for Windows

Some of you may question why I was working on the Rekonq Windows installer at the KDE Edu sprint in Randa. This is a very good question because it seems at first glance that got I distracted from my reason for travelling there. Although, I do not unfortunately have screenshots in this post, let me explain the situation. It is a bit dry for a reason, but please bear with me. :-)

The KDE Edu sprint began with the KDE Edu on Windows session, at least for me. We had a very productive discussion during the session and among many topics one topic was particularly close to my heart; just like at the KDE Windows BoF in Tallinn at aKademy:

How can we proceed with promoting KDE Edu on Windows? How can we get an installer as soon as possible?

Having had the session I briefly decided in my mind I was going to work on an installer as an experiment when we have spare time among the sessions.

The KDE Windows team did a great job for aiding the situation, so many thanks to them. One thing which was immediately obvious in this area: we have to have an installer for a full KDE Edu stack, so not just a single application. We have had examples out there for having a Windows Installer for Amarok and so forth, but they are all standalone applications.

Although I have made Windows NSIS installers previously for Gluon, Mula and so forth by using CPack, as a total newbie about making Windows installers this way, I have decided to make an in-between step. What in-between step exactly? That said, having thought through, it was clear to me I should grab the "qewitter" package and get something similar done for a KDE application. As I previously had the urgent need for a Rekonq installer  at my company, I stuck with the idea of creating a standalone installer for Rekonq and then learning the basics along the way, and once that is done I can introduce the new factor of having an installer for a full stack, and not just a standalone.

As you may have read my previous blog post about the initial success of the Rekonq installer, I began the work on the KDE Edu installer. Actually I got that working during Randa with a few quirks. The most important issue was that I did not get a shortcut in the Start menu for each application. Meanwhile the KDE Edu suite installed fine with a simple "next workflow", one had to go the executable files and run them manually. Therefore, theoretically it was installable, but not too user friendly. ;-)

As for accomplishing that goal, I had to make a custom NSIS script which did not have time in Randa, but actually I got that done and committed at the Milan Bergamo airport and also onboard the plane. Vis major situation is vis major... Unfortunately when I was generating the latest version of the installer, my Windows 7 froze on the airplane, and did not respond, no matter what I did. When I tried to force a hard reboot, the operating system did not boot anymore. The last days I have tried to repair the ntfs filesystem on my Linux operating system with "ntfsfix", I have also tried to get the boot manager repaired. I have also tried to use the Windows 7 DVD I got from my colleague, but after two unsuccessful tries (3 hours repair / try), I just gave up.

If anybody has a good idea how I could get my Windws 7 working again, let me know. Otherwise I will just back-up the kderoot folder, and execute a reinstall when I have a little free time. In the meantime, if anybody is interested in the "raw installer", no shortcuts in the Start menu as it is not the latest generation, I can upload to the winkde.org server. :-)

Alternatively, if someone has a KDE Windows emerge environment, "emerge --package kdeedu-package" should also work theoretically. That even worked for me practically. :)

Last, but not least: I left out the "Step" and "Rocs" project out of the KDE Edu installer for now as they have had some build issues. I began to address the Rocs build issues at the sprint, but I was unable to solve that completely. "Step" is currently a bit of unmaintained piece, and the compilation errors were not too easy to fix up, so we did not spend too much time with that.

Reminder from Randa: Free Playbook for KDE contributors!

While I was in Randa at the Edu mobile session, I realized that we still have the KDE Playbook Contributor Device Program open. There are only a few days left, so do not be shy. Hurry up if you would like to apply for a device and help the KDE Project to rock on further. ;-)

http://community.kde.org/index.php?title=KDE_Mobile/Blackberry/Contributor_Device_Program

Also, please spread the word. Thank you in advance!

Blackberry Playbook

Randa: Rekonq installer for Windows

As a Rekonq fan, I always have been interested in helping with Rekonq development, even if I had very limited time to do so. Although my daily job has been recently migrating to Windows XP, I am still preserving my Linux roots. I have always wanted to switch to Rekonq on my Windows box instead of the alternative solutions.

There was an excellent KDE Windows BoF at Akademy this year in Tallinn. There was some interest from the participants' side, including me, to make Rekonq run on Windows. I was compiling the software during the session, and I actually got it running for my generic purposes right there, as in gtalk, ssl, and so forth. While I was able to make it compile, it is not a process that the average user will find easy.




Therefore, I decided to go to the #rekonq channel on irc back then and talk to "adjam", the maintainer. We were both excited to get this up and running.  However, unfortunately, as usual, I personally got distracted with other tasks. That was more than two months ago, but now I have found the time here in Randa again to work on bringing this vision to practice.

Install Path selection

Thanks to the very helpful KDE Windows team (in this case Patrick and Patrick ;), I was able to pull it all together. Here you can find the link for the installer:
http://winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/repository/other/rekonq-x86-setup-1.1.exe

Installing...

Last, but not least: this is not the end of the story. There is still lots of improvement needed for the installer to get really fine tuned. Currently, the installer and installed sizes are bigger than they should be. Even with those issues and some runtime inconveniences, this is a great milestone for Rekonq in my opinion. Hope this makes someone's day more bright in the future. If not, it is also okay; I had a lot of fun while doing this. :-)

In action

Randa: KDE Games for Windows

As you may have already heard or read, the kde games stack has recently migrated to the git infrastructure. The new KDE Windows source packages are finally available now by using emerge. The changes will be hopefully available for end users later at the 4.9 release.

I have just skimmed through the build for all the packages by using "emerge kdegames" and there were no build issues which is cool. I do not have time for now to test all the games during the runtime, but I briefly fired up KBreakOut before going to sleep. :-)