The other half of the Jolla story

They say there are two sides to every coin, and that holds true for the story of the history leading up to Jolla and it's Sailfish OS. The Jolla story usually starts out with Nokia, but it's really a convergence with Nokia as the center point.

This side of the story starts in Norway, not Finland. Oslo, in fact. Not with Nokia, but with a small company named Trolltech.

I won't start at the very beginning but skip to the part where I join in and include a bit about myself. It was 2001, I was writing a Qt based app called Gutenbrowser. I got an email from A. Kozak at Trolltech, makers of Qt. Saying that Sharp was planning to release a new PDA based on Qt, and wouldn't it be cool if Gutenbrowser would be ported to it? I replied, yes, but as I have no device it might be difficult. He replied back with a name/email of a guy that might be able to help. Sharp was putting on a Developer Symposium where they were going to announce the Zaurus and hand out devices to developers. I jumped at the chance.

It was in California. At that time I was in Colorado. Jason Perlow was working for Sharp at that time, and said he had an extra invite to the Developer symposium. WooHoo! The Zaurus was going to run a Qt based interface originally named QPE, later named Qtopia (and even later renamed Qt Extended). The sdk was released, so I downloaded it and started porting even before I had a device to test it on.

Qtopia was open source, and it was available for developers to tinker with, and put on other devices. There was a community project based on the open source Qtopia called Opie that I became involved with. That turned into me getting a job with Trolltech in Australia, where Qtopia was being developed, as the Qtopia Community Liaison, which luckily later somehow turned into a developer job.

Around the time that Nokia came out with the Maemo tablets, I was putting Qtopia on them. N770, N800, N810, and N900 all got the Qt/Qtopia treatment. (Not to mention the OpenMoko phones I did as well).

Then I was told to flash a Qtopia on an N810 because some Trolls were meeting with Nokia. That became two or three images I had to flash over the coarse of a few weeks. I knew something was up.

Around this time, one of the Brisbane developers (A. Kennedy, I'm looking at you!) had a Creative Friday project to make a dynamic user interface framework using xml. (Creative Friday was something Trolltech did that allowed developers to spend every Friday (unless impending doom of bug fixes/release) of their time on research projects) It was really quite fluid and there was a "prototype" interface running on that N810 as well. It only took a few lines of non c++ code to get dynamic UI's. This would have turned into what the next generation of Qtopia's interface would be made with. It was (and still is) quite amazing.

Then came the news that Nokia was buying Trolltech! Holy cow! A HUGE company that makes zillions of phones wanted to buy little ol' Trolltech. But they already had a Linux based interface - Maemo that was based on Gtk toolkit, and not Qt. WTH!?

Everyone speculated they wanted Trolltech for Qtopia. Wrong. Nokia wanted Qt, and decided to ditch Qtopia. We had a wake for the Qtopia event loop to say our good riddance. All of us in Brissie worried about our jobs.

So our little Trolltech got assimilated into this huge behemoth phone company from Finland. Or was it that Trolltech took over Nokia...? Nokia had plans for Qt that would provide a common toolkit for their massively popular Symbian and new Linux based phones.

The Brisbane office started working on creating the QtMobility API's. Yes, there are parts of Qtopia in QtMobility.

Meanwhile, that creative friday xml interface was still being worked on. It got canceled a few times and also revived a few. That eventually evolved into QML, and QtQuick.
Then came N9 and MeeGo, which was going to use this new fangled dynamic UI. MeeGo was also open source, and it's community version was called Mer and Nemo. Yes, there are parts of Qtopia in MeeGo.

The rest of the story is famous, or rather, infamous now. Nokia made redundant the people working on MeeGo. Later on, all of us Brisbane developers, QA and others were also made redundant. The rest of what I call the Trolltech entity got sold to Digia. The QA server room was packed up and shipped to Digia, who is doing a fantastic job of getting Qt Everywhere!

A few of those guys that were working on MeeGo got together and created a company called Jolla, and created a Linux based mobile OS based on Mer named Sailfish. Yes, there are a few Trolltech Trolls working for Jolla. and yes, there are parts of Qtopia in Sailfish.

state of QSensor and Qt's sensor gestures

I wanted my next post to include some videos demonstrating QSensors and QSensorGestures. I got sidelined by learning BlackBerry Cascades development.


I am happy to report that Qt5's QSensor and QSensorGestures work very well on BB10.

The qt-project, in cooperation with Qt copyright holders Digia, have recently opened up Qt Mobility project and included that code in the Open Governance model that Qt is currently developed under.

This means that I can contribute to qt-mobility again since Nokia closed the Brisbane office.

There are a number of high profile projects that use Qt 4 and Qt Mobility, namely Jolla Mobile and BlackBerry 10.

One of the first community committed patches was me backporting QSensorGesture to Qt Mobility.
You can get the code here:
http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-mobility


There is one change in the signals being generated. I decided to remove the runtime generated signals such as 'shake()' and 'whip()' that use QMetaObjectBuilder. So now there is only 'detected(QString)' signal. The QML API remains the same, with an additional 1.3 version.

On top of that, I added a freefall gesture, as well as moving the irProximity sensor to it's proper place with all the other QSensors.

As for Qt 5...

QSensors unfortunately will not be part of the Qt 5 release package. On top of that, you wont be able to currently find the documentation at qt-project.org nor build QSensors using the normal 'make module-qtsensors'. So, it's a bit like it fell off the face of the Earth.

But fear not, it's still there in git. Still being worked on and improved.

motion sensor gestures

It's been quite a bit of time since I blogged about anything. No longer able to post to the official Qt Labs blog, so I will post here, and maybe it will get picked up to a wider audience.

It's been about 60 days since my last day at the Nokia office In Brisbane, Australia. My days are now full of house duties, kids, recording music, and looking for appropriate workage.

Blatant self promotion

I have been trying to keep my chops up, taking a short contract doing some desktopy work with Qt. But also keeping up with the Mer and Nemo projects.

We have been working on refactoring the Qt 5 QSensor qml API, removing the old qt-mobility stuff and merging the two imports.

As well, I will, in the near future be adding a QFreeFall sensor that detects when a device is freefalling, and a Wii controller sensor plugin to drive the normal motion QSensors and well as some of the QSensorGestures.

I have done the easily possible, and back ported QSensorGesture and friends to Qt 4, so projects such as Mer/Nemo/Jolla, as well as the Blackberry 10 projects could use some cool sensor gestures API.

When most people think of gesture recognition, they think of the touch sensor. Within Qt, this would be the QGesture classes. They also think about using the image sensor to decipher gestures through a computer vision API such as openCV.
and although I would like to extend QSensorGesture to include the openCV and touch sensors techniques, this is really about existing device motion gestures.

Things such as the obvious gesture of 'shake' - when you shake your phone/tablet, your audio playlist gets randomized. But it can be extended to other gestures as well.

QSensors include the qtsensors gesture recognition plugin, that includes such gestures as whip, shake, pickup, twist, cover, hover, turnover and slam.

http://doc-snapshot.qt-project.org/5.0/sensorgesture-plugins-topics.html#recognizer-plugins

The above url shows about how to perform these gestures.

These are simple ad-hock gesture recognizers, and do not verge into the more robust and technically challenging HMM realm of recognizers.


Nor is it currently possible for a user to create their own gestures and use them. I'd planned on doing this at my day job, but someone thought it better I needed to take my own time doing them. These are still on my todo list.

Of course, the backport isn't in the official Qt Mobility repo until becomes a part of the qt-project, but I believe that is only a matter of time and resources.

In my next blog, I will demonstrate the use of motion sensor gestures and the advantages that they might bring to a mobile UX.

hello world mk II

been a long time.. where ya been?

sensors now.

hey apple!

N900 has video calling, right now. Nokia phones have had video calling for yonks. FaceTime is not the first.
There, I said. I feel better.

python

ok, I'm a c++ Qt kinda guy. I have developed using perl, php, and a touch of python.

What I don't understand, is the current fascination for python.


Please, someone try and enlighten me.

Gutenbrowser

It has been 7 years since I started the Gutenbrowser project on Sourceforge. I had developed it for at least a year or so before that.
I have started hacking on it again, to fix a few things up. It is still far from what I entirely imagine when I think about what it should be.

In 7 years, the Project Gutenberg when from a few hundred books, maybe even a few thousand, to 10's of thousands. All free.
Now there are devices like the Kindle where you can buy ebooks and read them.
You don't have to buy any books from Gutenberg project. That are all free. Everyone of them.

I will create a new release in the coming weeks, with Linux, Windows and Mac OS X binaries.
You can always get Gutenbrowser in Debian. I am not entirely sure which version it is, but they usually keep it up to date, and occasionally pester me for updates or bug fixes.

I am pretty sure I started working on gutenbrowser 9 years ago. My how things have changed in the last 9 years... blah blah blah....