Michael Sheldon's qt 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:

Overview

Eyrie is a music identification program that I originally created for the Nokia N9 but which I’ve now also ported to Ubuntu Touch. It works in a similar way to commercial applications like Shazam and SoundHound, listening to music through the phone’s microphone and then generating an acoustic fingerprint using the open source EchoPrint algorithm. Currently the EchoPrint database isn’t anywhere near as large as the various commercial offerings, so it won’t recognise everything, but it has reasonable coverage.

Video

Installation

To install Eyrie on Ubuntu Touch simply search for “Eyrie” on your phone and it should appear.

Overview

Erudite makes it possible to use Amazon’s Cloud Reader on various mobile platforms which aren’t officially supported by Amazon. You can either read books online, or download them for reading offline. Your progress in a book is then also kept synchronised between your phone and other Kindle devices.

Symbian Belle support

Until recently Erudite only supported MeeGo Harmattan and Mer based phones (such as the Nokia N9), but now it’s also available for Symbian Belle phones as well. I’ll try and put together a build for Symbian Anna phones in the near future.

There’s a fairly comprehensive review of Erudite for Symbian over on All About Symbian: Erudite review.

Upcoming features

In the next release for both Symbian and MeeGo I’ll be focusing on orientation switching support, so users can optionally view their books in landscape mode, as well as investigating some apparent issues with very large books.

Download

• Symbian Belle version — Nokia 701, Nokia C6-01, Nokia C7-00, Nokia N8-00, Nokia X7-00, Nokia E6-00, Nokia 808 Pureview, Nokia 603, Nokia Oro, Nokia E7-00, and Nokia 700
• MeeGo Harmattan version — Nokia N9, Nokia N950