Eyrie is an application for the Nokia N900, N950 and N9 phones that can find out information about music that’s playing nearby. The latest version adds support for the N900 in addition to the N9 and N950. On the N9/N950 there’s now a graphical waveform displayed whilst recording and on both platforms music is assessed more continuously allowing some songs to be recognised faster and providing more chance for songs that were previously problematic to be recognised.
Eyrie is an application for the Nokia N9 and N950 phones that can find out information about music that’s playing nearby. It does this by making use of the EchoPrint algorithm to extract musical features from whatever you’re currently hearing. This is then used to find out the name of the artist and track from The EchoNest. Currently the database of songs accessible via EchoPrint fingerprints is a bit small, but it has the advantage of being an open database that anyone can submit fingerprint information to (although at the moment the process for adding new fingerprints isn’t very clear).
Recently I’ve spent a little time getting the Ogre3D engine into a state where it’ll work on the Nokia N9 and N950 MeeGo phones.
To test the port out a bit more extensively I decided it’d be a good idea to try porting an existing game, at which point rzr suggested Those Funny Funguloids. So after a fair amount of hacking to make it compatible with my version of Ogre and to make the controls work reasonably on a touch screen device I have a playable version.
The aim of the game is to collect mushrooms (…IN SPACE), and bring them back to your base without running into any asteroids. Only mushrooms of the same colour as your base are added to your score and your base changes colour each level (but you can hang on to mushrooms between levels and score them later). The controls are fairly simple, touch the left side of the screen to turn left, the right side to turn right and the middle to start moving.
When I have a bit more time I’ll see about writing a little tutorial on making use of my modified version of Ogre3D to create 3D applications and games in a way that’s easy to distribute.
A while back a wrote a little game for the Nokia N9 and N950, mostly as a way to explore the QML Box2D bindings. However, whilst packaging up my StatusNet client I thought I might as well release this as well since it can be a fairly enjoyable distraction. Below is a short video demonstrating how it works, and at the end of the post you can find details on where to get hold of it.
StatusNet for MeeGo makes it possible for Nokia N9, N950 and similar phones to connect to StatusNet compatible microblogging services such as Identi.ca. It supports viewing statuses in the phone’s event feed alongside Twitter and Facebook updates, viewing conversations, posting new status updates and replying to other people.
New Features
Support for followings links in posts.
Links to groups, tags, and users.
Support for posting messages using UTF-8 characters.
Slight improvements to the clarity of the login screen.
StatusNet for MeeGo makes it possible for Nokia N9, N950 and similar phones to connect to StatusNet compatible microblogging services such as Identi.ca. It supports viewing statuses in the phone’s event feed alongside Twitter and Facebook updates, viewing conversations, posting new status updates and replying to other people.
Assuming no issues are encountered by testers I plan on submitting this version to the Apps For MeeGo repository, and later also the Nokia Ovi Store.
You’ll need to restart your phone before statuses start appearing in the events feed, although you’ll be able to use the main app straight away. Because of some changes in the dbus services its also necessary to restart your phone even if you’ve already installed version 0.1 (this won’t be needed after future updates though).
New features
Posting updates.
Posting replies.
Viewing messages in the application.
Display full conversations.
Load additional statuses from earlier in time.
Splash screen while connecting.
Improved dbus handling.
Asynchronous message loading and posting.
Planned features
Support for displaying rich content (pictures, videos, etc.)
There’s one thing that my Nokia N950 has been lacking and that’s a StatusNet client, so I set about hacking one together. I love the way that the N9/N950 events feed displays messages from Twitter and Facebook, so my main focus so far has been to integrate with this. I’ve now got my client to a stage at which it covers most of my own needs so I thought I’d make an early release for others to play with.
Once I’ve extended it a little further I plan on submitting it to both Apps For Meego and the general Nokia Ovi Store, but for now you can download the Debian package directly here.
One thing to note is that you will need to restart your phone before events will start to appear (this is due to a limitation in the way the SyncFW framework loads plugins).
The client is written mostly in Python, with a little C++ for integrating with the events synchronisation framework. It makes use of the StatusNet module written for the command line StatusNet client IdentiCurse and the python-eventfeed module written by Thomas Perl.
Features
* OAuth login for identi.ca.
* Standard login for any other StatusNet services.
* Shows messages in the events feed.
* Fetches (and caches) user avatars.
* Displays messages from the events feed in the browser when clicked.
* Automatically fetches new messages in the events feed based on your events feed preferences.
* Can manually fetch new messages via the events feed ‘Refresh’ button.
Not yet implemented
* Posting messages.
* Displaying messages locally within the application.
* Displaying rich content (messages with multimedia attachments)
I’ve just built some Box2D and Box2D-QML packages for Harmattan. The Box2D-QML package is especially interesting, this wraps the Box2D API as QObjects allowing them to be made use of directly from within QML. So you don’t need any extra C++ to handle physics simulation for simple games or similar. Here’s a short video of one of the demos running on an N950:
The source code for the above demo can be seen in the Box2D-QML repository here: Monera Example and thanks to these wrappers is very simple.
Packages for the N9/N950 can be found in my OBS repository, simply download elleo.list into /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and run apt-get update to make the repository available on your device, or just download the packages you’re interested in directly from http://repo.pub.meego.com/home:/elleo/Harmattan/armel/.
Many thanks to the Box2D and Box2D-QML teams for creating such nice tools, I’d certainly recommend them to anyone interested in 2D game development on the N9/N950 phones.
Last week I got the news that I’d been accepted into Nokia’s community device program and would be receiving a Nokia N950 so that I could help produce some nice open source MeeGo apps ready for the launch of the Nokia N9 later in the year. The device hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ve already started on the first of my projects which is to create a Libre.fm radio client. Most of the basic functionality now works including authentication, tuning to stations, playing, pausing and skipping back and forth through the playlist. I won’t be making a release until after I’ve had a chance to actually test it on the device itself, but the code is all in the GNU FM git repository. Here’s a quick video of it in action:
Update: All dictionaries except for Welsh and Esperanto (which aren’t supported by kindlegen) have been updated to work with the Kindle 4.
I’ve had a Kindle for a little while and really like it, but one of the areas it seems to be somewhat lacking in is the availability of translation dictionaries, as such I knocked up a quick script to convert TinyLex dictionaries from the Apertium project into indexed Kindle dictionaries. The most useful of these is probably the German – English dictionaries as these are very complete (over 160,000 entries).
One thing that I find quite useful is setting the German -> English dictionary as my primary dictionary (instructions below) then opening the English -> German dictionary and searching for words (or vice versa), this way you can get an instant re-translation of any words suggested to you.
Installation
Kindle 3
Download whichever dictionary you’re interested in from the list below.
Transfer the file across to your Kindle as normal.
Press the menu key on your Kindle.
Select Settings.
Press the menu key again.
Select Change Primary Dictionary.
Select your new dictionary from the list.
Kindle 4
Download whichever dictionary you’re interested in from the list below.
Transfer the file across to your Kindle as normal.
If this is the only dictionary you have for this language you’re now done. If you have multiple dictionaries continue:
Press the menu key on your Kindle.
Select Settings.
Select edit next to Dictionaries on the second page.
Select the language you wish to set the dictionary for.
For those of you interested in the scripts used to generate these dictionaries, they can now be downloaded here: kindle-dict.tar.gz.
Most of the heavy lifting is done by the tab2opf.py script from StarDict-Lingea, the tinylex.sh script will do the necessary conversion to get a tinylex dictionary into a tab delimited format suitable for use by tab2opf.py, it’ll then run tab2opf.py and kindlegen on the output, providing you with a Mobipocket dictionary for use with the Kindle. See the README for more in depth instructions on how to make use of it.
