TwimGo 2.6 with auto-refresh, colored tweets etc.

Posted on Sunday, February 6, 2011 by Tommi Laukkanen

Since Nokia’s Qt SDK 1.1 Technology Preview release I’ve found myself launching the Qt Creator pretty often on my Mac. The whole IDE along with plain QML Viewer are really stable so that I can be very productive on writing Qt Quick based apps.

During the last week I focused on adding bunch of new features to my Twitter client app, TwimGo. This new version includes the following changes:

Auto-login
Auto-refresh (5 minutes)
Indicator if new tweets were found on auto-refresh for home or mentions timelines
Fixed the bug of retweeting incorrect tweet
New mentions icon
Slightly colored tweets for own tweets (red) and mentions (green)
Small improvements to error handling: Twitter API errors are shown
N900: Minimize app by tapping top left corner

You can download the TwimGo 2.6 binaries from here. It runs on Nokia N900 and N8. It should also run on other Symbian^3 phones too which have Qt 4.7 installed. If you have installed great Nokia Bubbles app from Nokia Beta Labs recently then you’ll have Qt 4.7 already on your phone. I’ll try to publish this through Ovi Store soon.

Leave a comment if you have trouble with the release, find any bugs or have some ideas for improvements or new features! Happy Tweeting! Follow me for new releases: @tlaukkanen.

TwimGo Qt Preview Release (v2.5)

Posted on Saturday, January 29, 2011 by Tommi Laukkanen

As I wrote last year that it’s good to follow the pragmatic programmer suggestion of learning a new programming language each year. Few years ago I named JavaScript as my language for that year and that was wise since now I’m able to craft mobile apps easily with help of JavaScipt and QML. This year I might dive more into some C++ too since it is so easy to switch between those three languages (QML, JS and C++) in the latest release of Qt SDK 1.1. C++ ain’t that odd to me since I did create some game and 3D engines with C++ and OpenGL ten years ago. Time flies…

I’ve been converting the TwimGo application to Qt Quick from the beginning of this year and now it’s starting to be in some shape. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles as the WRT version but it gets the job done. It’s still missing something like auto refresh and proper error handling.

If you’d like to help me out and test how it works on your phones, then download application to your Nokia N8 (with Qt 4.7) or Nokia N900 from TwimGo project site: https://projects.forum.nokia.com/twimgo. I’ll upload the source code there too after I clean it up a little.

If, or when, you find some bugs you could report those as new tickets to the project with this link. One nasty bug is that application doesn’t load images on N900 on some sessions. This might be Qt related bug, QTBUG-15004.

This is a first time when I’m using Forum Nokia Projects for hosting my applications. Let’s see how that works out :)

Happy Tweeting! You can find me at @tlaukkanen

p.s. Here is a small video preview of TwimGo 2.5 running on N8

TwimGo for Symbian in Ovi Store

Posted on Sunday, January 9, 2011 by Tommi Laukkanen

TwimGo in Ovi Store

TwimGo, Twitter client for Symbian touch phones was finally accepted to Ovi Store. You can download TwimGo from here: http://store.ovi.com/content/78596

It’s a bit odd that app can’t be found when searching with “TwimGo”. Ovi Store search engine might only be using app’s meta-data keywords for search index and I didn’t list “TwimGo” as one of the keywords. On the other hand I did use “Twitter” and “Social” as keywords but TwimGo is still not listed when you search with “twitter social”.

If you don’t know what TwimGo is then check out this demo video in YouTube.

TwimGo with Location Support

Posted on Sunday, October 24, 2010 by Tommi Laukkanen

It’s already a week since last release of TwimGo. Last release included the clickable user tags and improved follow/unfollow functionality.

On last Tuesday I went to Tampere MeeGo Network MeetUp and I had an opportunity to talk to Qt Web Runtime developer, Xizhi Zhu. We talked briefly about the location support in current version of Qt WRT and a day later I had a good instructions on how to use the location API in my apps.

Here you can see how you can easily add your current location to your tweets in TwimGo:

1. Click the “Get your location” button in tweet dialog

2. Now your phone starts to pickup GPS signal

3. Once the GPS signal is good enough it’ll show your current coordinates. You can click the button again and it will update the coordinates. Sometimes the GPS signal gets accurate in a minute so you could refresh your location just before tweeting.

4. Twitter will show your location with nice little map beside your tweet.

This version also includes saved searches support and ability to search tweets near you. I have found really interesting tweets with this feature.

Download the latest release to your Nokia N900 from http://twimgo.com.

Games with Qt Web Runtime – BlockGo for Nokia N900

Posted on Sunday, October 17, 2010 by Tommi Laukkanen

I tested how easy it is to create a simple puzzle game with HTML, JavaScript and CSS by creating a new version of my SubBrain game to my Nokia N900 by using Qt Web Runtime.

The idea in the game is to remove all the blocks by clicking block areas of the same color. You’ll need to have at least two blocks of the same color side by side so that they get removed.

I created the SubBrain for my Nokia 7650 several years ago with Java ME. Java ME was a flexible and rapid platform at that time but now after writing the same functionality with plain JavaScript it makes me laugh how easy it is to craft this sort of games with WRT platforms nowadays. And even as Java was (or is?) “write once, run anywhere” platform it doesn’t come to close to WRT where you can develop apps with your browser and text editor and run the same code on your phones.

I used some CSS animations on BlockGo which seem to look nice even on N900. When you select a blocks they fade away nicely. I used jQuery UI’s effect functionality: