Developing applications for Maemo

When I first got my nokia 770 I intended to develop for it. I had a few ideas of what to write, but discovered apps already existing for just about everything I could think of. I also discovered that it’s not that easy developing for maemo. To write in C you need scratchbox and an emulated environment. It all looked very complicated and I never got into it.When I got my n810 I figured it would be fun to try and write an app that could render openstreetmap data, as an alternative to maemo mapper which uses pre-rendered tiles. But again I found Navit, already very good.
I thought about getting involved with Navit development. But I have no C experience and the code is somewhat light on comments.

Recently I decided to have a go again. This time I chose to ignore existing apps. The point is to learn, so I have decided to work on my own twitter client. Yes very trendy…there are hundreds around, but only one really for Maemo, which is mauku.
Part of my reason for chosing to write a twitter client is that it’s pretty simple but covers some basics that will be helpful.
Writing a GUI app that displays data and can scroll
calling out to some webservice and processing the response

I figure if I can get those two then I’ll have a good grounding for lots of projects.

The other part of my reason is that mauku has some very annoying ‘features’ which are driving me crazy. Now I could just raise feature requests and bug reports etc. But again, the point is to learn, so I have to start somewhere. At least this way I don’t feel it’s a complete duplicated effort, I will scratch my personal itch and make a twitter client the way I want it.

I started off trying to write a c application. I found esbox which makes the whole developing with scratchbox thing a much nicer prospect than plain text editors. Being an eclipse tool, I feel right at home using it.

I got my C application as far as being able to display a window, with a menu. And in the menu was a fetch tweets option. When selected it would talk to twitter and fetch my friends timeline into memory, then parse each tweet into a simple structure of name:tweet. Which was then inserted into a list in the display. Hurrah.

However C is a horrible language to work in. I just don’t have time to learn memory management etc. I know I should, I know that the potential is to write a much faster application in C. But I got sick of segfaults. I have no idea how to debug C. I am truly a Java boy. Give me stack traces! Trying to debug why my C code would just randomly explode was impossible (for me) It seemed like sometimes something in the reponse from twitter would cause it to segfault. But more likely I was just memory management completely wrong and was just lucky that occassionally it didn’t explode in my face.

So I’ve decided life is too short for C. Instead I’ve moved on to python. I’ve never written any python before, but it at least saves me from managing memory, and it looks like it’s going to be much closer to things I do know, such as perl.

Python can still be developed in ESBOX with pluthon plugin. This basically lets me write an app then use SSH to dispatch it direct to my n810 to run. So I no longer test in a fake environment. It is probably much slower working this way, but the benefit is that I really know that the app runs on the device. Where as I think I’d always have a nagging fear with running in scratchbox that I might hit some difference in how I had it setup to the real device.

So I started my application again. I’ve been able to reuse at least some of what I had learned about GTK development. This is still the area that I know the least about. It took me ages to get to the point I had the ability to display items on the screen, in a TreeView pulling data from a ListStore. Figuring out how to use items that could be added to by triggered methods and generally getting my head around the scope of objects etc.

Having gotten some basic information appearing on the screen, it then took about 30mins to pick uip the liburl2 library and use it to call twitter to get my status feed.

Now I just need to write some code to parse it into some sensible structure and dislpay. I would point out that I have found that someone has already created a twitter API for python which I could just pick up. I’m sure it does way more, way better than my code will. However, I have to remind myself that the point of this exersise is for me to learn, not just for me to glue other peoples code together.
Also I may not bother with a lot of the things I could process from twitter, Instead just writing a fairly minimal application. At least to start with.

First impression of python is that it’s pretty weird the way it uses indentation to imply structure. If you get the indents wrong then the code won’t work. It feels like it was done by someone who got very upset about people having badly formatted code, so decided to invent a language in which the formatting is enforced because that’s the only way the language will work. Not that I have anything against nicely formatted code. But I’d just as soon have an editor do nice formatting for me to suit my preferences.

Once I feel I know what I’m doing a bit more, I shall write up a post with code fragments to explain what I’ve learned. I think if I put up the code I have right now it would just be confusing. I always find that my initial attempts to get something working are very badly commented and horribly structured. At the moment I’m just throwing stuff in based on API doc and examples and I’m not sure I understand the implications of everything yet. Once I understand it, I can comment it and make it presentable.

I’m hoping that given enough time I’ll understand what I’m doing enough that I can start turning out interesting little tools and hacks. And perhaps finally realise my original intention with my internet tablet to do some mobile development.