Harmattan development without a device

The 250 recipients of N950s from the community device program were selected the week before last, and then the nail-biting saga that was waiting for their delivery began. It has now, thankfully, been largely concluded for those receiving them and development efforts have kicked off with gusto.

Andrew Olmsted, also among the lucky, made good use of the intervening waiting time by working his way through the SDK and its testing tools and summarizing his experiences developing for Harmattan without the benefit of a device to test on. Being able to easily write an interface and code a program is all fine a good, but doing this without a device isn't really the hard part. Testing the code is what can be difficult. Not being content to wait until I had development hardware in my hands, I began the testing phase - or rather, began trying to figure out how to test. Nokia provides a fairly reasonable environment for testing applications without a device Given the rather limited supply of N950s out there and the likely-to-be-long wait for the N9, these testing methods will prove useful for many developers without access to devices. Commenters have also proposed a couple of other testing methods including Nokia's Remote Device Access service and testing against desktop Qt.

Sharing your Harmattan work with others via OBS

Your editor, Andrew Flegg on the "apps.meego.com in the Nokia N9" thread, has produced a wiki page to track the various "home repos" (equivalent to Ubuntu's PPAs or a per-developer Extras-devel) containing Harmattan applications: Whilst X-Fade continues to work on the promotion from home repository to Apps-testing, I've created the following wiki page so we can track what everyone is doing. The lack of a free-for-all Extras-devel equivalent is, medium- and long-term, a good thing. However, in the short-term, this leads to a lot of kinks in the road whilst this new ecosystem is explored.

Adam Harwell is working on a search web-based search interface for finding package based on Marat Fayzullin's previous work on the Pack Rat package search (which old-time Maemo users will recall from the Good Old Days), which should make it easier to track down specific packages.

Changes to "stable" MeeGo 1.2 being merged without discussion?

Another interesting development has arisen in MeeGo's continuing saga of not-keeping-up-with-its-own-platform-policies. Yet again, I see that the patches to tracker are integrated to MeeGo1.2 without discussing with the developers or even notifying the maintainers. Previously, patch 0007-Fix-USB-disk-not-recognized-as-removable.patch was integrated without informing us and has triggered a lot of discussions [...] and it was found that this patch was absolutely unnecessary. So, can we work the open source way and have discussions before Unfortunately the responsible party hasn't yet weighed in on the discussion, so we don't yet have both sides of the story. Given that patches have been integrated into the stable branch seemingly-unilaterally on the part of someone not responsible for the packages in question - and apparently without discussion - there would seem to be a problem.

Intel AppUp store plugin for Qt Creator

Intel's Bob Duffy explains a new plugin for Qt Creator which allows submission to their AppUp store directly from within the IDE: The Intel AppUp SDK Plug-in 1.0 for Qt Creator software provides a set of tools and instructions for Qt Creator IDE for MeeGo development, allowing the developer to stay within the IDE to do many tasks without having to go to the AppUp developer website. This plug-in puts MeeGo development tools in line with features and support of other program supported IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse. He also teases more "cool stuff" coming in the next few weeks and months.

Theming the application toolbar using Qt Components. How?

Stuart Howarth, in working on cuteTube for Harmattan, stumbled across an issue with Qt Components, PageStackWindow components, and inverted themes. A solution was found by Christoph Keller: There is also a global "theme" object. Setting "theme.inverted = true" will make your whole application go black.

Retronome - metronome for Qt and Harmattan in development

Jos Van den OEver has put together a simple metronome for all of you aspiring musicians with access to Harmattan devices: Retronome. The first application I wrote for the N950 is a simple metronome written in QML. It is available on gitorious. It works just like an old fashioned metronome: move the weight up the bar to have a lower frequency and move it down to have a higher frequency.