First MeeGo conference is around the corner

So, the first MeeGo conference will be upon us in two months and it's time for me to wrap up what's been going on with me and the transition from Maemo to MeeGo.

First of all, I hoped to have more spare time to dedicate to the completion of the Maemo version of Xournal. The latest version in extras-devel still need some fixing and at least a bunch of features before pushing it to Extras.
I still plan to finish it BEFORE starting some work on MeeGo.
Weird enough, even though I didn't touch it lately, some users are reporting crashes in Xournal. I do experience it myself.
I have, on my N900, the latest dev version (not in Extras, but with not many new changes) and it has always worked fine until few weeks ago I got a message from a user complaining it was crashing for him.
At first I thought it was an isolated case. But then I grabbed my N900 and Xournal was crashing on me as well! As soon as the File Dialog tries to appear, it crashes.
I have no idea, yet, of what is happening. It clearly seems some other app we've both installed changed some shared library. I'll have to try on my girlfriend's N900 and see what's happening. Her version (older, I think she's using the Extras one) seems to work fine and she hasn't installed that much crap anyway.

So, the plan is to complete the Maemo version, push it to Extras and then start working on the MeeGo version.
Hopefully by that time, the MeeGo SDK would be stable enough.

Only big issue is, again, time. I already dealt with a customer go-live deadline in July and moved to East Canada to follow a new customer go-live process since then. I can't speak of any go-live date as this is confidential, but I can tell you that a news we recently got ourselves will mean even less spare time for me and thus Xournal.
But I still think I'll manage to fix this issue, add a few feature to Xournal from the desktop version and push it to Extra before the conference.

Speaking of which, I do wish I could attend and I did apply for sponsorship, but I am not sure it'll get accepted. Flying from Canada is expensive and my contributions to MeeGo sum up to none so far.
However, that won't mean I will stop supporting Xournal and working on it for Maemo and/or MeeGo :)

That, I guess, is good news for Xournal users, right ? :)

Last thing, a user on the Xournal thread on talk.maemo.org is willing to help and I still haven't got time to wrap up a small e-mail highlighting the parts of the code where he should concentrate most... that says how much spare time I've got :/

Anyway...I'll make it work :)
Sooner or later, I'll make it work and have a final stable version of Xournal on Extras with a few new useful features.

Aniello

MeeGo is born, what about me?

Today I was thinking...too much.

Too many news in the last few days. Coupled with my imminent relocation to Canada. Coupled with Xournal demanding more and more time.

Anyway.. I gave up thinking. MeeGo didn't Go, it Came and it's going to stay.
Maemo went. And I say goodbye to it. I will miss the brand.

So now, as Maemo developer and as Maemo community member I need to choose.
And I suppose the answer is easy to reach.

MeeGo came and I am going to jump on it.
Why shouldn't I ?

I was going (actually... let's use the proper word: forced; I was forced) to move to Qt anyway.
From my developer point of view nothing will change.
If Maemo 6 was about to arrive, I'd have to learn Qt anyway if I wanted to stay up to date with it.

I hate thinking I need to rewrite to whole Xournal UI because of that.
I had to postpone a few ideas (HRW and better 'background' tools) to when the Qt transaction of Xournal will be completed.
And I don't like that. I wanted to have some fun implementing new features, whilst now I need to re-concentrate, again, on the UI.
Sure I will have the opportunity to learn Qt, I will try to implement the Xournal "Next Gen" UI that Patricia kindly developed for Xournal.
But I planned differently and I am forced to change that.

I hope Nokia won't change idea again. I hope THIS is their commitment. And that they will stick with it.
The Qt UI has to be the latest mobile UI that Xournal will have. Please.

Aniello

Xournal

Shaping nicely...

Xournal

Portrait of Xournal

Rotation

Xournal caught while rotatin...

Xournal alpha for Fremantle

Today I was thinking...that well it's better to play for Maemo than working :)

So I went ahead and, after a whole day fighting with bugs and
packaging, I am proud to say that finally Xournal is available for
Fremantle!!

It's only an alpha version (as you can see from the screenshot above) and probably it won't even start on your SDK, but it's the very first step on the right path.

You can find it in Fremantle extras-devel (the build cauldron just sent me the OK message)

Stay tuned for the next updates.

PS: a note for Diablo users, I think I found a bug that was preventing
Diablo version from functioning. I will try to re-compile it again
sometime soon.

Xournal and Fremantle

Today I was thinking...that the community is amazing :)

In order to port Xournal to Fremantle I needed my old code. Unfortunately that was on my old desktop in Italy lying in the lab there. And that box was shut down (ready to be wiped out!).
I called my friends and told them to wait before wiping it out so that I could back up my stuff, but the machine is still off. I had to wait for people to come back from vacation before doing any serious work on the port.

Here comes the help from the community!
They read my comments on my previous post and managed to find someone who actually had a copy of the source code I uploaded to Diablo extras-devel!

That's great news, as now I can seriously start working on porting it to Fremantle :)

Thanks guys (qwerty12, X-Fade and stkeeps!)

Anidel

Xournal meets Fremantle

Today I was thinking...that it's time to start doing the port of Xournal for Fremantle.

As you can see from the screenshot I've almost started from scratch, but it shouldn't take long before I can release a working version of it.

Stay tuned.

Maemo 5 Beta SDK up & running

Today I was thinking...that it's finally time to start working on porting Xournal to Maemo 5 and start implementing a few new features I had in mind lately.

I've just installed it and t works OK on my system (Dell Mini 9), but it's kinda... slow :(

I'll have to check if a better driver for its graphic card exists.

I'll keep posting here updates about the development.

Thank you.

Thank you Jane, little genius, for this.

Back on Xournal

UPDATE:
Looks like too many people have the maemo extras-devel repository installed.
They should not. Or at least, they should know what the extras-devel repo is.
The maemo extras-devel repository is intended as a tool for the developer to test out its code before promoting it to the real maemo Extras repository (the one that's pre-configured in your tablet when you buy it, disable).

Today I've uploaded an alpha version of Xournal (packaged for diablo) on the maemo extras-devel repository. Thus, those people got the notification of an update available and went straight to the Application Manager in order to update.

I see here two mistakes:

1) they should have not installed the -devel repository (unless they knew what they were doing)
2) the Application Manager should TELL from WHERE the package is coming from

However, the next release of Xournal HAS NOT YET been released.
And I strongly suggest, whoever has the maemo extras-devel repo installed, to NOT update to the Diablo version yet.

Check out this ITt forum thread for more info.
My post #198 on that thread explain how to solve the issue.

Thank you.

Original post:

Today I noticed that Xournal has been selected as "The Pearl" in the Maemo Downloads section.

Right on time, I would say as this morning I woke up and decided that it's time to upgrade my Maemo SDK to Diablo and re-package Xournal in order to make it appear in the Diablo extras repository.

So, thank you Maemo team for choosing Xournal as the current pearl!

Stay tuned, it shouldn't take too much time.

Xournal is skyrocketing...

Wow!!
Since I have released Xournal few days ago, a lot of people downloaded it and now Xournal is among the first 4 (yes, four!) most downloaded applications !
Thank you guys and thanks to Denis Auroux, the real developer of Xournal.

And thanks also for the great votes Xournal has got so far.

We're climbing fast :)

I was really surprised to see how many people downloaded Xournal, but really surprised to see that it was downloaded more than Canola or Maemo Mapper!
I would have never thought this was possible.

:) it's awesome!

UPDATE: We're second only to Pidgin...I can't believe it.

Xournal 0.4.2.1 available in Maemo Extras

Hello,

I just wanted to let people know that I have just finished to port the latest Xournal (version 0.4.2.1) to Maemo (sorry, only chinook for now).

The most interesting features of the new version are Pressure Sensitivity and Shape Recognition.
You can find more info about that on the Xournal page.

The Maemo port has a bunch of new features compared to the old port (version 0.4.1):

- The user interface has been fully hildonized
- Added pressure sensitivity toggle button (enabled by default)
- Added support for the Maemo File Manager (double tapping a .xoj file opens Xournal)
- Added support for the Backup/Restore application (the saved settings will be backed up)
- Menus have been shortened to contain Maemo useful options (Uncheck "Options->Shorten Menus" to get the whole menu items back)
- Color support has been greatly enhanced
- Help support added (russian translation also available, thanks to ITT forum member "sashabe")
- Overall size has been reduced to the bare minimum

You can find Xournal in the Maemo Extras repository, so just go to your Application Manager, enable the "maemo Extras" repository and refresh the list of applications.
Go to the Tools category to find Xournal and install it.
The full size should be a bit more than 1Mb.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed porting it.

Click on the image above to see it at full size.

Note: Xournal depends on the package "poppler-utils". It is actually in the "maemo Extras Devel" repository
(http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/ free non-free).
I will contact the poppler-utils maintainer to see if he can move it to "maemo Extras".
In the meanwhile you can use the install file that I have added to the Xournal page in the Maemo Downloads section.

Xournal chosen as "Featured Downloads" on OS2008 User Site

Today I was thinking...that wow! After the cool video tutorial at Internet Tablet School, Xournal made a second strike and this time on the OS2008 User Site (the old "tableteer", reachable only from a Nokia Internet Tablet).

Indeed, the description is not correct. I am not the developer of Xournal, but there are four developers behind it and I am not among them.
I only did the port to the Maemo platform.

Moreover, they listed Xournal with the blue tag, i.e. as a "Nokia or commercial partners" application.
I am glad they consider me at the very same level of a big organization, but unfortunately I am not so big, yet :-p

Anyway, I am very happy that Xournal and its port to Maemo went so far.

Thanks.

UPDATE: The OS2008 User page has been updated with the link to the video tutorial :)
UPDATE2: The OS2008 User's Site N8x0 specific version is reachable also from a regular desktop at this address: Xournal Featured on Tableteer

Internet Tablet School made a tutorial for Xournal

Today I was thinking...that while waiting for me to finish the Xournal port, you guys should have something to do with the beta released so far :)
To help came the folks at Internet Tablet School who made a nice tutorial (Nokia N800 & N810: Take notes and doodle with Xournal) on some of the features you can find in Xournal (even though they missed the most important feature for me: Annotate PDF).

Simply jump here and take a look at it!

Xournal port and the usual story

Today I was thinking...that damn!
Weeks have passed away and I still need to repackage Xournal to properly make use of existing libraries.
I gave it a shot last week and I can say I am half way to finishing the re-packaging.
Unfortunately (and that's the "usual story" part) I have things to get done before the end of this week.
If I am lucky with the current code (at work), I will finish and have spare time towards the end of the week.
If not.. most probably we will see the finished Xournal port (not anymore labeled "beta") by the end of the next week.

I plan to get integrated some usefult suggestions that I have got from the ITT forum.
Moreover I will try to upload the port onto the Maemo extras repository.

Thanks for your patience!

Update on Xournal port development

Today I was thinking...that I should tell you guys that I am just too busy at work these days.
I should have a bunch of hours next week.
Things to do:

a) make it a real port. I should start from the debian sources (for ghostscript, xournal and imagemagick) and put the correctly made deb files to maemo extras-devel waiting to put them in extras.
b) fix the libart dependency (this follows almost automatically from (a) )
c) fix the icon placementes as noted in a post on the ITT forum and on a comment here on this blog

It shouldn't take too much, but I need at least an afternoon to make it.

Keep sending feedback on the port (particulary on improvements and on issues you may think are related to the port).
I have noticed that some requests should be made to the Xournal author
You should use the Xournal feedback channels to do that. I don't have the time to forward them and they are not looking at my port's pages.

So... see you next week.

UPDATE: next week has come and is almost gone already. I have been busy at work and busy preparing for two job interviews I am going thru these days. Wish me good luck about those and let's hope I will have some spare time this week end to fix the issues with Xournal.
Thanks for your understanding ! (as I am sure you all understand)

Xournal for Maemo in Maemo Downlads

Today I was thinking...that I should tell you that I have put the Xournal port in the Maemo Downloads.
You can leave comments there as well as rate it.

Just search for Xournal in the OS2008 applications section of the Maemo Downloads web pages.

Xournal for Maemo 4.0 (OS2008) is here (beta)!

Today I was thinking...that I should release the Xournal version for OS2008 Beta before the week end :)
And here it is, although it's in beta. And I need people to test it.

So here we are:

Go to this link: Xournal install and you should be fine.

It will install two catalogues (extras-devel needed for libgail) and my own catalogue (with xournal and its dependencies).

I tried to open the .install file from my tablet, but it opens the file instead of interpreting it as a regular .install file. I still don't know why. Try to save it and open it from the file manager.

One note, a big one: I tried to open a PDF file (Annotate PDF) and it didn't work. I'm focusing on this issue as this is by far the most useful feature of Xournal.
So do not complain about this :) I know it already.

Let me know EVERYTHING you find about the package, from the application installation to the usability itself.

As soon as the application is stable I'll forward the patches upstream and I will try to make everything available on the garage website (and put the libraries in maemo extras).

So keep this in mind: this is a BETA software. Provided as it is and I, by no mean, take ANY responsibility on what happens to you, your device and whatever is surrounding you! ;-)

I want to thank Etrunko (Eduardo Lima), for his first patch to the Xournal source code to make it work on the Nokia 770, and Henry Tang for his patch to make Etrunko's Xournal work on the N800.
I've used their patches to make my port.

UPDATE: Xournal port is now at its third release. I have fixed the PDF annotation bug and added support for Zoom In/Out and Fullscreen buttons. I've tested it on my N800 with OS2008 Beta firmware, but it should work on the N810 too.

UPDATE2: Actually the port is already at its fourth release. I have added a few more buttons to the toolbar at the bottom and bound the Escape button to the Undo action.

I am still experiencing random crashes and have no idea how to check this out. The console does not show any error or warning. So, actually, I think it closes itself rather than crashing.

UPDATE3: I have fixed the random crashes!! For the developers: you need to be sure that the D-BUS service Name clause has the same value as the osso_initialize first parameter! Or the application will close after few seconds.

Release #5 is in the repo, go update it!