Michael Sheldon's android Stuff

Tomorrow (Monday the 3rd of March) at 5pm UTC I’ll be giving a talk about QML and Box2D based game development for the Ubuntu App Developer Week, details of my talk can be found here: http://summit.ubuntu.com/appdevweek-1403/meeting/22144/game-development-with-qml-and-box2d/

In preparation for this I’ve put together a simple template for getting started with QML and Box2D development for both desktop Ubuntu and Ubuntu Touch. It’s available in two flavours:

• Precompiled version – Includes QML Box2D already compiled for amd64 and armhf (when I have more time I’ll add i386 to this as well).
• Source version – Makes it easy to compile everything yourself on whatever architecture you’re interested in.

This means that if your game is going to be purely QML based you can just grab the precompiled version, and run “make click-packages” and have packages built for both desktop and mobile use at the same time.

The template comes populated with an example application (one of the standard QML Box2D demos), which is found in the “src/” directory; so you’ll be able to see something running straight out of the box, then when you’re ready you can just replace this with your own game.

In the future I also plan to extend these templates to provide example packaging for multiple different QML + Box2D compatible mobile platforms (Sailfish, MeeGo, Blackberry, Android, etc.)

If you’re interested in seeing an example of the sort of thing you can achieve fairly easily with QML and Box2D I’ve also uploaded a video of one of my current work in progress projects:

I’ve just released a new version of Libre Droid onto the Android Market (also downloadable here: http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/libredroid-1.4.apk). The main changes in this release are:

• Android 2.2 (Froyo) support – Previous versions didn’t work under Froyo due to the new streaming framework (libstagefright) not supporting HTTP redirection, so resolving the final URL is now handled by Libre Droid itself.
• Ability to add custom tag stations – You’re no longer restricted to the preset tag stations so if you want to listen to female vocals, finger picked guitar, monkeys or anything else our music might be tagged with then you can create a dedicated station for it.
• Support for playing a user’s loved station – All the music you’ve ever loved in one easy station.
• Support for the community loved station – The Libre.fm community’s favourite music, this is a selection of all the music that’s ever been loved by any of our users with the most popular tracks playing most frequently.
• New artwork.
• Plus a few miscellaneous bug fixes.

To access it directly on your phone either scan the QR code below or click on it from within your phone’s browser. Alternatively you can simply search for “Libre Droid” in the Android Market.

For the past few months I’ve been working on the Libre.fm music service. It provides Last.fm compatible APIs, allowing you to submit your listening habits and to stream creative commons music.

Over the past week I’ve put together an Android application called Libre Droid, allowing people to stream music from libre.fm directly to their Android mobile phones. Here’s a short video of it in action:

It’s now available for download (for free) from the Android marketplace, scan the image below with your phone (or click it in your phone’s browser) to download it:

Alternatively if you don’t have access to the marketplace (e.g. if you’re using Android on an unofficial platform like the OpenMoko phones) you can download the package directly from: http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/libredroid-1.2.apk