| Developing and distributing QT applications for Nokia… not yet!Posted on May 4, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under apple, nokia, phonegap, qt, technology This information was posted to Phonegap Google groups also. Next N900 release (PR1.2) will include QT 4 in the default install. It has been delayed due to various problems observed in the leaked beta. Also, N8 will be the first device supporting Qt out of the box. It is not shipping yet. Nokia Qt SDK should allow unified Qt apps for Symbian and Meego:
It is not yet possible to deploy Qt apps through OVI store, so targeting third party apps to Nokia Qt is kind of pointless. If you need to develop to Nokia using a web framework, don’t rely on native QT Webkit, but target to Nokia WRT instead. Nokia bought Qt in January 2008. It has taken over two years to ship the first Qt enabled mobile phone. Meanwhile, Apple has released App Store and risen to be the leading smartphone provider with its iPhone…. talk about slow development and the lack of leadership. So the hype around “QT will solve everything” is still just hype… they still don’t have nothing solid out there.
Mobile browser wars: Nokia microB vs. Firefox FennecPosted on January 2, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under Business, browser, fennec, maemo, mobile, mozilla, n900, nokia Begun, this mobile browser war, has. When mobile internet is growing 8x faster than desktop internet everyone wants to have a share of it. In the core of this fight is the mobile browser – the doorway to the mobile internet. Usually phone comes with a browser from the phone manufacturer: Safari ships with iPhone, Android ships with WebKit based browser and Maemo comes with Nokia microB. Besides the default browser, open platforms have seen third party browsers created for them: Opera Mini has 30 million users and several browsers have been created for Symbian platforms. (Note that iPhone is not really open platform regarding this as Apple developer terms specifically forbid creating alternative browser engines for their Safari – all iPhone “browsers” are just the same Safari with new toppings). Now Mozilla foundation is releasing Firefox Fennec (RC1 version is available for Nokia N900), touted as the most innovative mobile browser this far. New user interface ideas, desktop syncronization and vibrant add-on community are something yet to be seen for mobile browsers. Mozilla did an amazing thing with Firefox when it actually managed to push Internet experience forward and compete against Microsoft’s bundled Internet Explorer with sheer quality. Can Mozilla repeat the same thing it did for desktop browsing for mobile browsing too? Is Fennec good? I installed the release candidate and conducted some tests by visiting on popular sites. It is especially fruitful to compare Fennec against Nokia’s own microB browser as they both are based on the same Gecko rendering engine beneath the hood. The differences of the browsers are, actually surprisingly, not limited to branding and user interface shell. Fennec is portable browser – Mozilla hopes to run Fennec on other mobile platforms beside Maemo in the future. Fennec user interface is based on Mozilla’s XUL library and you can actually run Fennec on your desktop computer too. Nokia’s interest, on the other hand, is have an optimized browser for their own mobile phones: microB user interface is using native Maemo user interface components. Below are some aspects of the browsers compared against each other. Start up time
This is a pain for Fennec. Loading all that XUL Javascript needed to run Fennec is just too much. You really don’t want to start Fennec for a quick browsing session, unless you have the patience of a cow. I am not sure whether N900 keeps microB loaded on the background all the time or what’s causing the difference. User interfaceThis is really where Fennec shines. Nokia enjoys some reputation of being a boring engineer house with little innovation left to stir. After learning the trick of left and right sweep, which is cleverly demostrated on the start page, Fennec user interface instantly feels intuitive. microB, on the other hand, uses somehow clumsy “bottom right corner full-screen button” to access buttons and left-right sweep is not very well thought. For example, switching a tab/browser window takes three “clicks” on microB (show menu – switch application – choose next browser window) when Fennec does it with one sweep and click. Also, backward navigation is much more intuitive on Fennec and takes too many gestures on microB. Both browsers have search integrated to the navigation bar. Fennec start screen is more clever, showing the history and shortcuts, while microB shows only the bookmarks. Fennec navigation bar also is a combination of title and navigation bar, saving the precious screen estate on small physical form factor. Fennec zooms to text fields automatically when you start to input text into them and also have soft “tab keys” to navigate to next and previous input field. Page reading and speedOn sites with above average layout complexity, Fennec is unbearable slow compared to microB, up to the point the browser is next to unusable in its current incarnation. As they both use the same rendering engine, I have hard time to understand how microB manages even the heaviest dynamic pages (Facebook profile page) when Fennec becomes unusable even on a moderate complex page (slashdot.org). The thing with Fennec is that for some of the the time it does not register your interaction and does not have any indicator showing if it is responding – it has grinded to halt, little bit like desktop computer when swapping. And even when Fennec is responding the scrolling of the page refreshment is sluggish compared to microB. This makes the page reading experience unusable. A normal user won’t stand 1-3 second frequent responsivity pauses or page movement which cannot be controlled. microB must do the rendering somehow different - is it hardware acceleration on font rendering, smarter management of images or some other trick?. However, until Fennec reaches the smoothiness of microB, there is no way I would switch to Fennec over microB. (Note: You can press CTRL-Backspace from N900 keyboard to force application switch if you cannot exit from halted Fennec otherwise) Mobile browsingThough N900 has 800 pixel wide screen, it is still a mobile phone. Small physical size, low bandwidth with high latency and limited CPU power might make you to pick a mobile internet version of the site when it is available. However, since the screen has exceptional high Dots-Per-Inch value, this poses a problem for rendering sites with the default font sizes. Fennec does not seem to have a shortcut for setting a large text size. This is something one would hope to see on such high DPI device as the most of the time default web site fonts are too small to be usable. Also, Fennec does not use the shoulder plus and minus volume buttons for zooming – microB does it and it is very natural place for this function. Fennec seems to have some difficulties with mobile site rendering: for example touch.facebook.com and yle.mobi are not scaled to full width. Instead a narrow colum of 1/3 screen width is displayed. BugginessmicroB is very solid piece of software. It crashes more rarely than Safari on iPhone (might this be because of more memory – low memory conditions seem to be a normal crashing condition for Safari?). Fennec is still in its first version and have some issues. (Note: I managed to get Fennec to zombie state – I had to go to terminal and type killall fennec command to make the browser become launchable again). Sites testedSlashdot.org Geek discussion site microB: no problems Fennec: slow, frequent pauses, not smooth scrolling slashdot.org/palm Very simple mobile version of the above. microB: Font too small Fennec: Scales correctly Facebook.com High profile social networking site microB: Sometimes little slow, but seems to work perfectly Fennec: Unusable slow touch.facebook.com microB: Perfect (at least when scaling font up a little) Fennec: Does not scale correctly (default scale uses only 1/3 of screen width, double click zooming scales too much) yle.fi Finnish national broadcasting company site microB: Ok. Readable and usable with text size large. Fennec: Ok. The default view is navigable, but not readable. You need to double-click zoom to read the text (Fennec doesn’t seem to have text size large option)- yle.mobi The mobile version of above. microB: Perfect with text size large, ok otherwise (need to double click to zoom and then click to choose a link to follow). Fennec: Ok – font size too small GMail HTML version The default Javascript version of GMail is too heavy for both the browsers. GMail still provides “Basic HTML” view as the fallback for devices with less CPU power and network bandwidth. microB: Ok – you can do some basic emailing Fennec: Ok. Does not seem to be affected by as much of “slugginess” as other sites are (might the slugginess be a Javascript issue?) Youtube.com The web version of flash based video sharing site. microB: Plays Flash movies ok – smooth scrolling even whilst a Flash movie is playing Fennec: Frequent grinds to halt, sluggish, unusable. Manages to open Flash video, though. m.google.com/youtube The mobile version of above. microB: Youtube claims the browser is unsuppoted Fennec: Cannot enter the site – shows only the page of Youtube Mobile instructions twitter.com (web site) microB: Perfect Fennec: Ok. Sluggish when opening new pages, but still usable. Fennec start view ships with Twitter button, so one might assume this site is well tested for Fennec. m.twitter.com The mobile site of above. microB: Ok – the default font size too small, but when settings text size large works well Fennec: Ok – the default font size too small. Double click zoom does not work well on the twit feed, making reading difficult. plone.org A community site with relatively simple layout. microB: Ok – minor rendering errors Fennec: Ok – minor rendering errors iltalehti.fi Finnish tabloid web site with lots of images. microB: Ok Fennec: Grinds to halt, unusable slow SummaryThough having nice promise of innovation, the advise for Fennec development team would be “back to the basics”. The slugginess and response times of Fennec are such an issue that one would not yet consider it as an real alternative for Nokia’s default microB browser. With Fennec’s user interface and microB’s speed one could have a near perfect mobile browser. Depending what kind of future co-operation Nokia and Mozilla foundation will have, we might live to see it. Nokia N900, sports tracking and geotaggingPosted on November 29, 2009 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under geotagging, mobile, n900, nokia, sports tracker, technology This blog contains some tips how to use your Nokia N900 smart phone as a “augmented reality” sports device. Sports trackingSport tracking is about collecting your sports activity data using GPS and other equipment. After running/cycling/skiing/whatever you see where you have been, how much time it took and how fast you are. In same cases you are able to calculate burnt calories and estimated heart rate. N900 has at least one sports tracking application out there, eCoach. eCoach is also suitable for professionals as it has heart rate monitor integration. eCoach allows you record and store sport activities. During the activity it uses Open Street Map based map viewer to show your current location. At least Helsinki area has very detailed maps available there, showing even the smallest trails, so you can safely venture to unknown neighbourhoods. eCoach exports its tracks as GPX gps data file format. eCoach does not have any service integration yet, but you can upload this file to Nokia Sports Tracker and Map My Tracks. The recommend the latter as it has better social media integration and seems to be under active development. On the otherhand I have been using Nokia Sportstracker since 2007 and it has not really development during the whole this time and seems to lack will to go forward. Also Nokia has disabled track profile for imported GPX files which gives a message “we really don’t care about this service”. There is also a service called mapmyrun.com with various domain names like “maymysomething.com”. Steer away from this service as I tested it and it didn’t live up to my expections (too much advertising, horrible user interface). Some sport tracks I have made
GeotaggingGeotagging is about having GPS coordinates on your photos. This way photos can be put on the map autotically in photo sharing services like Yahoo Flick or Google Picasa. When you known location, capture time and sharing license of the photo, all kind of fantastic services can be created, like Microsoft Photosynth. Technically geotagging works by embedded GPS coordiates into the EXIF metadata of JPEG files. N900 has geotagging as out of the box feature – no additional software needed. Just turn on it on in Camera application settings. Also, you can retrofit your photos with geotagging information afterwards. You can do this by hand using labels and drag and drop in the most of photo sharing applications, like Google Picasa. Also there exist automated tools if you have relates GPS records available as GPX or KML file: checkout GPicSync. This is handy if you record your sports in eCoach and forgot to turn on geotagging in N900 camera. GPicSync also has a Google Maps export feature if you want to create custom maps for your friends or customers.
Sports tracking + geotagging = ?I am still trying to figure out how to combine sports tracking and geotagging to something cool. Maybe something along the lines of urban exploration. But in any case here are some of cities I have “collected” from my travels |
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