Lots has been happening downunder lately. Namely, summer has come and gone. Wasn’t too hot this year, but rained heaps. Causing my pitiful electric mower to die a horrible death on my back yard that was in some spots, a meter tall. Several lawn mowing services balked at the idea of mowing it, so I bit the big one, and bought a petrol mower. How I hate mowing grass, it goes against nature, is noisy and smelly. My daughter of almost 6 months has started sitting and somewhat getting some sort of locomotion going, although it usually ends up in tears, because she wants to just jump into the whole walking thing like her brother and everyone else does. My 2.5 year old son started painting. Luckily not on the walls, but on an easel.
On the Trolltech front, besides the whole Nokia thing, we released Qtopia 4.3.1 SDK for Neo. What better way to create software for Qtopia for your FIC Neo. It seems that OpenMoko have been slowly coming around to officially using Qtopia, in some sort.
Other than the SDK I have been busy preparing the Qtopia 4.4 webkit demonstration, that was at 3GSM, errr MWC. Cool things are possible with webkit in Qtopia. Although it is rather large, the sizes of flash memory can be quite large, and most phones now have huge amounts of space, classing them not in the embedded space any longer.
The Neuros OSD I have has some competition, as I bought an already-configured-for-Australian-use series 1, Oztivo’ified Tivo (thanks Ian!), (for research purposes, my dear wife!). Neuros really needs some scheduling information, they know it, and have put up a bounty
What I like about the Neuros OSD over the tivo is it’s size. The tivo is just huge, like a regular desktop box, and has cooling fans. The OSD has sexy curves, is sleek, glossy black and silent. Makes me want to lick it. Not to mention Neuros will be using Qt Embedded, errr Qtopia Core soon.
I feel bad about my old Sharp Zaurus 5000d’s. Gathering dust, or played with by my son, until he realizes they need charging. Perhaps I will charge them up…
Almost forgot to mention, I have been putting together a virtual keyboard for X11 using Qt. Based largely on kvkbd for kde, but reads the keys and keycodes from an xml file. It works too!
tsdogs, who is one of the HTC-linux guys (who have ported linux to HTC Universal phones and friends), recently gotten embeddedkonsole 4 to run on Qtopia 4. It’s named qterminal and I have put a qpk package for the Neo at qtopia.net. For those who think they need a terminal on their phone. The HTC-linux guys have done quite a lot to hack Linux onto these phones, although it needs to be run from an sd card. The sources can be found in the unofficial Qtopia git repository : git clone git://git.asheesh.org/qtopia_snapshot.git
We’ve always been wanting to give something back to the talented developers of these tools, be it money or just praise. These tools make our working day better, more efficient and sometimes even FUN!
