Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Meego

As I hav ethis toy for more than week, I can share a little more information about it. Please note that some experiences are based on fact that this is my first "big" phone with touchscreen.

The big screen is great for reading. Much better than my old Nokia E52. It is also much better readable on direct sun light. The dark side of this is of course power consumption, but I think this might still get improved for production pieces.

Having Linux on the phone is nice, ssh to phone and you can do anything comfortably with real keyboard (N950's QWERTY keyboard is great, but still quite small). Having Debian based system there is even better, though I felt a bit strange when I first ran apt-get upgrade on my phone :-). Well there are some changes from standard Debian system like extented fields in debian/control for icons, but generally it feels pretty much as Debian.

There are lot of things to try on N950, you can find some hints on N950 landing page, I still need to try most of that :-).

My first MeeGo application called DOF Calc today got in much better shape and actually is closer to being really usable.

First I've implemented landscape view, so it now looks correct when you rotate the device:

Another missing bit was configuration handling. I have not found something for simple configuration storing and everybody seems to suggest using Database API for that, so that's what I did as well.

For now only camera selection is persistent, for the others I have to consider whether it is really expected. Besides selection persistence, the database should allow to configure list of cameras/lenses/apertures, because I'm sure not everybody will like my predefined set :-). For now only camera definitions are stored in database and there is no interface yet for changing that.

After some troubles I finally managed to write first usable application for MeeGo. The first thing I have choosen was intentionally simple as I more or less wanted to get used to Qt Quick. However I still think it can be useful (after some polishing), at least I used similar application on my older phone :-).

The application is meant for photographers who don't remember hyperfocal distance for all their lenses and apertures or want to calculate depth of field:

Code is released under GNU GPL on Gitorious: https://gitorious.org/dofcalc

As the main reason why I got Nokia N950 is that I promised to write some applications for that, I started to look deeply at available options how to write them. Unfortunately there are too many options and all documentation I've found is pretty confusing.

The short story is that you should use Qt for user interface. However it is not that easy as it looks, you can use regular Qt, which can be run on the phone, but looks ugly in the end (maybe I did something wrong, but it did look completely different to anything else running in the phone). You can use Qt Quick, which is easy to write (simple UI definition and JavaScript variant for code), but it does not seem to support much of the widgets. And then there is Meego Touch library, which seems like a best option, however not mentioned at all on Nokia developer website.

Looks like I need to learn few more things before actually starting to code.

Yesterday, I've received developer kit with Nokia N950. After almost day of using it, it is time to share first experiences.

The phone feels big and heavy to me (just to clarify, this is my first touch screen phone). Well at least when compared to Nokia E52 I used up to now. However it is still acceptable to bring it with me in pocket. Having real keyboard is great, because typing on touchscreen is not really comfortable (what is not specialty of this phone, but applies to all touchscreen phones).

Included software does the "basic" things well (as in basic things for smartphone, including maps, music player, web browser,...), in the end the device was shipped to develop applications, so I did not even expect to have that much. What really surprised me was migration of data from my old phone, it was able to fetch all I wanted including SMS messages.