Substance of Code » Devices

Tweeting with TwimGo on MeeGo Tablet

Tommi Laukkanen — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 20:23:26 +0000

Got my hands on a first MeeGo tablet, WeTab, and I couldn’t be happier :) The tablet itself is really solid and latest WeTab OS 2.0 (based on MeeGo) is stable and working very well. Even the WeTab’s dashboard view turns out to be working better then expected.

Last but not least surprise was that I could run my Qt Quick apps on the Tablet without any code changes(!) So the same TwimGo that works on Maemo and Symbian^3 devices works also nicely on the WeTab.

Next I will learn how to package the apps as RPM so that I can distribute them nicely also for other WeTab and MeeGo tablet users.

Nokia E71 and new Twitter client

Tommi Laukkanen — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 12:54:12 +0000

I finally upgraded my phone from N80 to E71. The new Nokia E71 is a really nice. Even the Symbian S60 feels much better now that the phone has enough memory to run it. Operating system still has not changed that much compared to my first smart phone, Nokia 7650 which I had in 2002. This phone is still the best one I have ever had. Even Joel Spolsky is using it.

Twitter Client Twim running on Nokia E71

The new phone got me inspired to improve my Twitter client, Twim. I fixed a few bugs like showing the replies feed. I also added a new feature for displaying public feed in own tab. You can download the JAR and JAD files from the Twim page or directly from these links:

Twim v1.2: Twim.jar and Twim.jad

How to fix Nokia 770′s 3.5mm audio jack?

Tommi Laukkanen — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 19:23:13 +0000

Nokia 770 3.5mm audio jack

I have used my Nokia 770 as a portable media player since the Canola player was released. The Canola player was also the reason I was forced to disassemble my device.

I’ve been using the player during the bus trips to work and even though the device is quite small it is quite large to fit in the pocket when head phones are plugged in. The audio plug must have twisted the audio port somehow as now I’ll have to bend the audio plug with my finger whenever I wish to listen to music with stereo sound.

So here is the picture of my 770′s audio port when I was able to disassemble the device but as you can see there isn’t much that can be done without changing the whole part. Maybe I just should send the device to repair. Would you have any advices?

BlackBerry JDE, NetBeans IDE 5.5 and Vista

Tommi Laukkanen — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 11:54:15 +0000

I’m just about to release the next version of the RSS Reader MIDlet. I had a bit of a trouble when I tried to get a BlackBerry JDE to work with NetBeans IDE 5.5 and Windows Vista. As I wrote earlier it was rather easy to setup for Windows XP.

I set up the environment like it is described in NetBeans support pages except I used the latest version of BlackBerry JDE v4.2.0. After few clicks on the build button I wondered why it didn’t create the COD file as it did with the XP. I started to look around the build.xml to discover that Vista is filtered out with the following command:

… exec os=”Windows NT Windows 95 Windows 98 Windows 2000 Windows XP” …

So it didn’t really require much of a brain work to figure out that Vista should be added to this list:

… exec os=”Windows NT Windows 95 Windows 98 Windows 2000 Windows XP Windows Vista” …

And now when I press the build button the COD file is created without any problems. I’ll try to publish the RSS Reader v1.3 within the few days.

New laptop running Windows Vista

Tommi Laukkanen — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 21:21:56 +0000

I bought a new laptop and just finished installing Windows Vista’s Ultimate edition on it. Vista was released for MSDN users a week ago and it seems that it will be available to general public in February 2007.

It is good to know that NetBeans IDE seems to work with Vista without any problems whereas Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 isn’t yet officially supported.

New version of Windows feels quite nice for the first few hours and after that it feels like Windows XP with some additional eye candy. I don’t see any significant innovations in the user interface or functionality but maybe it is a good thing as I didn’t feel that XP would have been poor to use. I would have still expected a bit more progress in seven years, but maybe Microsoft have became a too giant dinosaur that isn’t able to move as agile as smaller companies. I keep reading the Joel Spolsky’s Joel on Software blog and he have written good posts on this subject.

Next time I’ll buy MacBook Pro.

RSS Reader for BlackBerry

Tommi Laukkanen — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 10:26:40 +0000

There were some anonymous requests for releasing a BlackBerry version of the RSS Reader MIDlet so I took the challenge and was able to build a version for BlackBerry. The application seems to work with the BlackBerry emulator and according to the anonymous comment it installs over the air on the actual device. Here are links for the BlackBerry files:

www.substanceofcode.com/downloads/midlets/rim/RSSReader.jad
www.substanceofcode.com/downloads/midlets/rim/RSSReader.cod

If you have the actual device please leave some comments how it works on the device in real life. We don’t have any BlackBerrys here in Finland and I think that these devices are quite rare in the whole Europe. The BlackBerry Pearl seems to be quite an interesting device after using the emulator and reading specification’s from the home page.

How did I build BlackBerry versions? I downloaded BlackBerry JDE 4.2 from BlackBerry Developer site and followed the instructions that I found from NetBeans knowledgebase. In the end it was quite easy.Сувенири

Internet in a tablet, Nokia 770

Tommi Laukkanen — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 09:56:31 +0000

I have been using the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet for a few months and I’ll have to say that it is a fantastic piece of hardware. I was quite uncertain that I would keep using it after the “wow” effect but it has indeed become very handy device that I use daily for checking emails, reading news feeds and browsing the web. I have even watched some prerecorded TV episodes on it with very good results.

As a software oriented gadgeteer I was eager to start developing some software for it. To my unpleasant surpise it doesn’t have a Java runtime environment (yet). This seems to be because of some licensing issues between the Maemo OS and Sun’s Java Platform. Hopefully we will see Java in the 770 in the near future. Currently I’m able to use atleast C/C++, Python and even Mono for my applications. Time will tell if I’ll be able to develope some fun applications for this device.