Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I was fooling around a bit with the screen rotation support for Maemo this morning on my N800 (didn’t want to risk mucking with the N810 yet). I would put up some screenshots, but for some reason the screenshot applet is messing up in my version and trying to still take a landscape image. Not sure how those screenshots on the sse2 page were taken, looks like they’re running the same load applet with integrated screenshot that I am. The instructions on that page worked great for me, booted the kernel without flashing, install the xomap package and use the installer for the rotate applet.

There’s still a bunch of funkiness for me: onscreen keyboard on the N800 works, but is really smushed, orientation of the dpad doesn’t change so you have to take that into account, can’t really use the home menu rotated cause it goes straight off the screen. Some of this stuff could be hacked around if the base packages of the OS2008 user environment were also open source. Hint. Hint.

Generally though the rotation itself works fantastic. I installed the Firefox release to muck around with that, but forgot that it doesn’t have an onscreen keyboard. Have to dig out the bluetooth keyboard to poke at it. IUI applications look much slicker on the rotated browser for example, with the screen format being much closer to the expected.

I was mulling some of the geo hacks for the N810 that are out there now. Maemo Mapper is a great open source mapping application, there’s a little app that geocodes photos as well. Then there’s Maemo WordPy for posting to Wordpress, and I was wondering if that allowed for geocoding posts. And I was pondering the user of the N810 as a geocontent production device. As well as wondering if the geoaware primitives we could use in mobile browsers would at all be helped by the evolving state of mobile Firefox.

All the little hacks on the N810 could really be solved more easily on the web if there were a way to hook the stuff together. What I started thinking about was hacking around with the new firefox release and see if I could get it to shove geoinfo into the outgoing headers. But then I realized most of the stuff I wanted to fool around with wouldn’t take the headers in anyway. So for now instead I made just a simple little python launcher app that pulls your current location from the GPS and launches a browser with Google Maps pointed at your current location. Very simple, but I imagine with some basic URL crafting you can use it to create geocoded Wordpress posts or geotag images uploaded to flickr. Maybe I can make it a little homescreen applet to display your location and launch one of a number of sites with your location fed in.

Thinking about the way the web facing geographic services have worked out, passing a URL with the location filled in seems to make more sense right now. There was a geo-headers ietf draft floating around at one point.. but I can’t find that as an official version. Are there services out there that use it? Or something else that’s common across services?

Inspired by some screenshots that came through my feed reader the other day, I updated the firmware on my N810 and installed a few new bits of hackery:

Those are transparent homescreen apps, and more important than looking slick (if that’s possible) they’re written in python! Homescreen hackery here I come!

Getting the packages installed is a bit of a pain. They don’t one click install unless you install two packages by hand. I had to download python-hildondesktop and hildon-desktop-python loader from this site in order to be able to install and use them. And yes, download and install manually, the app installer doesn’t like them. Download them to your tablet somewhere, become root (I do that with an ssh to localhost myself), and run dpkg -i for both of them. Then you’ll be able to install the actual applets and enable them. w00t!

I was somewhat curious how the new Wordpress 2.5 admin interface would play with the browser on the N810 so I spent a little time poking around. Even though the new interface seems to be a lot more squishy than the previous version, it actually seems to work a bit smoother on the device. I like Maemo Wordpy as well, but it’s nice to be able to go in and do stuff like make sure a sudden spam surge hasn’t completely overrun my comments when I’m on the go.

While I was in a testing mood I poked around with some of the Google apps as well. The search, calendar, maps, and mail apps (as well as a few others) have bookmarks loaded into the browser by default. But I wanted to play around with the reader and the iGoogle homepage. The reader worked pretty much as I expected it to. The fact that it worked at all was great, but it was a bit slow and some screen elements overlapped each other. The kind of thing that might benefit from a bit of Greasemonkey hackery.

What I was relatively surprised by however was the iGoogle version of the homepage. All the controls worked well, even dragging around modules to change the layout. The layout is dense and efficient, I can add calendar and gmail apps in there. I added a weather app in there and then was about to pull it back out cause I already have OMWeather on the desktop of the device. But then I realized iGoogle is actually a better homescreen for the N810 than the device native applet based homescreen is.

When using the RSS reader applet on the N810 the only option is to put a blended list of every item from all feeds I’m subscribed to. No way to pick and choose and select just individual feeds or a single feed to display. The font is ridiculously large and the only options for reading are punching out to either web or RSS app, no expand in place. The same goes for the email app built into the device, just overly simplistic and at the same time fragile when compared to the other apps like Claws mail (but AFAIK Claws doesn’t have an applet to go along with it). Compare that to iGoogle configured similarly. The information density is much higher, configuration options a lot richer and more flexible, and there are just more options there for existing widgets. It’s an excellent example of rising browser capability allowing online applications to displace native apps, even when those native apps have direct operating system level support on a mobile device.

Looking at the recent updates on maemo.org I noticed a utility for putting the USB controller into host mode. I had seen Kate’s post about modifying a standard cable or getting a USB On the Go cable to take advantage of host mode. So I didn’t expect it to work when I just hooked up my USB flash drive with the shipped cable and an adapter, but it did:

Here’s a shot of the df output:

Sexy huh? So of course the next thing I was wondering was if my 250 gig travel USB hard drive would work. No dice though. Even with a powered hub. With the native compiler, thats a great little standalone system.

After my IUI Maemo Microb hackery the other day I started pondering making the browser lie to say it was an iPhone. More cause I wanted to hack around some with extensions and Microb than because I really find myself using iPhone sites all that often (though I will say that ShifD on the iPhone is way way more pleasing than it is on any other device).

I expected it to be no problem, there’s a Modify Headers extension for Firefox, there’s documentation about how to package an extension, there’s a working set of extensions to start from. Yet still I have failed.

Microb doesn’t support XUL, so I knew I couldn’t rely on the stuff for preferences and additional windows, etc. I just created a version of the plugin that held a static Modify user-agent rule to make the browser emit the same UA as an iPhone example I pulled from my logs. I loaded the xpi into my desktop browser, and sure enough when I restarted it was telling everyone it was as iPhone. W3wt! Used the instructions from the Microb site to package the extension, but there the browser behavior didn’t change. The extension wasn’t listed. I must be doing something wrong says me, how can I test this out?

Fast forward to some time hours later and way way into the wee hours of the morning. I’ve stripped out all the chrome, rewritten the install script, repackaged the browser extra packages to make sure things weren’t funky with my build system, pored over the adblock source, merged modify headers /components directory into adblock to get it to load that way, compared the installed files to my starting files, and attempted installing the extension by hand.

I know a hell of a lot more about Mozilla extensions than I did before, but I can’t help but feel much of it was in vain. Why do all these extensions work no problem on my desktop browser but fail to load on Microb? Is there a way I can get some kind of console or debugging info out of Microb? Should I be running Microb on my desktop when debugging these things? I would love to be able to just hack out Microb extensions on a whim. The way this worked out in my head was actually that I could have a few bits of pieces of stuff I liked to use and I could hack the extensions right on the device. Totally p1mp, I might even have to get a new velvet coat to wear while I do it if I can get it working. But my experience is running very counter to my expectation so far.

I’m going to pick up the handheld of the year thread from TabletBlog and encourage all you N810 fans to go vote N810 at the Engadget awards.

I’ve been fooling around a bit with doing IUI dev on and for the N810. IUI is the javascript library behind those cool iPhone web apps. It does a menu style rendering and slides and all that. It actually works quite well on the Microb browser that ships with OS2008. Here’s one of my test pages for instance:

It renders well on the minefield browser at well, but navigation doesn’t currently work:

And kick ass, with VIM installed on the N810 hacking on the pages when disconnected even is possible:

That colorscheme is delek by the way, and I think it works great on the device.

Some of the comments to my previous posts about Firefox mobile pointed me toward the packaged extensions to the Microb browser, which is the default browser on the N810. One of the extensions is a spellcheck extension that underlines misspelled words right in a text area. Fantastic! Now I can blog from my device without fear of looking like a complete eediot cause I spell worse than a 4th grader. Now if I can just find extensions to correct grammar, poor sentence structure, and boneheaded predictions and market analysis.

After getting an initial version of mobile Firefox (currently called minefield) compiled and running on the Maemo SDK, I compiled a version for ARM and put it on my n810:

It’s definitely a very early effort, like all of the pages say. It’s not even a release yet, just a hint of things to come and an attempt to start the effort rolling along. I’m actually impressed that it worked out so well. I was able to build the code for both targets, get it installed, and poke around some. It loads pages, settings work, extensions work, tabs, session saving, etc. All told, fantastic for what is effectively a rough port of the desktop version with few tweaks made.

I installed Greasemonkey to poke around some. I’m just really interested in there being a user contributed set of hacks to get existing web content to work on mobile devices. This seems to provide an excellent way to fool around with that concept. I tried out a few user scripts and they do work, although I had a few crashes here and there while fooling around. It’s still an early effort, so no surprise there.

This whole thing has me really excited. I wasn’t sure what to make of the announcement that there was going to be a mobile Firefox somewhere down the line. With so much momentum behind the Webkit based browsers I wasn’t sure if Firefox was going to be able to make a dent. I’m happy to see working code and an early demo, nothing gets interest for an open source more than a working set of code. Fantastic, this just might work out yet.

One of the aspects that I think is a huge deal is that Firefox is actually open source. When you look at the Nokia open source browser (like that included in the N95) and the Safari browser in the iPhone they’re both based on the open source WebKit project. However, they are not themselves open source. WebKit includes the guts of the web browser (HTML parsing, CSS, rendering engine, JavaScript, DOM interface, etc) but that’s not all that goes into a browser. So there are proprietary bits of code that go in with WebKit in order to make up the browser on my N95. The result being, I can’t decide I don’t like the way my N95 works and get in there and hack up a new version of the browser that suits my taste. With the mobile Firefox browser that will be the case. And I’m hoping that a genuine open source browser on the mobile end will catalyze innovation in the client the same way that having an open source desktop browser has kept things interesting in that arena.

Now if only I could get the browser compiled for a device with a cellular interface in it, or get a Maemo device with a cellular interface.