Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

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.

I got networking going in my scratchbox install and was able to build my own minefield 1.9 Mozilla and get it talking to the intarwebs:

Pimp, I know, you’re jealous. Turns out Brad is way more pimp, and actually had debs packaged that I could play with and all.

I actually found his stuff before I did this, but I wanted to figure out how to build my own so that I could hack on it a bit. Unfortunately the extension developers extension didn’t install cause it doesn’t “provide secure updates”.. whatever that means. But Greasemonkey did:

I know, it’s hard to comprehend. I’ll give you a bit of time to catch your breath, I’m getting all excited myself.

I started out trying to install the rtcomm update that gives all kinds of new protocol support to the built in messaging app. I was having install problems even with red pill mode on. Then when poking around in the app manager I saw an entry for gcc. gcc? Oh my dear, how pimp would that be? Hell yea:

There’s gcc, g++, and dev header installs for all kinds of stuff. Why was I not informed of this earlier?

I saw the post on Maemo Apps about the WordPy update. I just installed it and used it to upload an image to Flickr, now I’m posting from it. The image I uploaded is my Serial Experiments Lain inspired N810 background:

In the comments to my previous post about remapping keys on the keyboard of my N810 there was a mention of editing the X server keyboard mapping file at /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-44, which I assumed was a pretty nasty hack. But Daniel Stone, who does the X server development for Maemo, said that it wasn’t a hack at all. xmodmap is the hack.

Yesterday I was starting to get annoyed at having to manually load the mapping at every reboot (cause I have to reboot frequently to get GPS working again, groan), so I swapped techniques. The format of the file is pretty easy to understand, use “bar” where you want to put the pipe symbol and “Tab” where you want to put tab. And while I was in there digging at it I changed my mappings to, I made Fn-space the tab key instead of using semicolon. Just seems like a more intuitive setup.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for OS2008 software that I was using on my N800, and last night I just saw that Subversion is now available. That’s a killer bit of software for me. I use my own svn repository to sync up the stuff I’m working on, keep notes and little scripts, etc. The N810 (now with hardware keyboard) I expected to be killer for little bits of hackery here and there. And it has been, just getting the stuff onto and off the device hasn’t been as braindead as I had hoped. Now it is. Can world domination be far behind? I expect not.

I haven’t quite made it to the point of keeping everything in Subversion. But enough stuff is creeping in that direction that I’m thinking it might not be a bad idea to give it another try.

There’s a storm currently rolling through the Bay Area. Not really a major storm for most places, but we don’t get weather too frequently. My power had been flickering, and just a few minutes ago finally knocked off completely. I was starnding at the window for a few minutes before I realized I have no idea what to do with myself. “I can still blog with the N810 over the N95s internet connection” was my first full thought. Probably not a healthy state of affairs in retrospect.

I have programming I can work on, but being mostly disconnected from the network its hardly as effective. I’m feeling the isolation and dumbness of being cut off from my external storage devices pretty sharply right now.

I’ve been poking around with remapping the keys on the N810 keyboard and got xmodmap working this morning. I didn’t think it was available for OS2008, but you can snag the xmodmap binary for OS2008 from here. I used some of the information on the page about using a Bluetooth keyboard with older Maemo releases, but also just read some general hints about how to use xmodmap and where to find info about keysyms.

I started out just testing the modifications I wanted from the command line in xterm. You can use a command like the following to test out a mapping before adding it to any config files:

xmodmap -e ‘keysym m = m M bar bar bar’

My targets for remapping were the euro and pound signs (Fn-M and Fn-; on the built in keyboard). I live in the United States, and as everyone knows one of our favorite pastimes when not destroying other countries during religious crusades is to ignore them completely. So the chances of me needing to use those symbols is pretty low unless I suddenly decide to write some kind of political satire. What I wanted there were the tab character and the pipe character. Essential to sanity when doing a lot of command line stuff, which I do. So I ended up with this .xmodmap file:

keysym m = m M bar bar bar
keysym semicolon = semicolon colon Tab Tab Tab

Fantastic! Now I can run ‘xmodmap /home/user/.xmodmap’ and get the remapped keys I want. I had seen mentions on some of the discussion boards about the keymappings getting reset with every keypress or something. I’m not seeing that on my relatively recent OS2008 install (1.2007.42-19). Once I set the mappings they stay around till I reboot. What I can’t figure out how to do however is to run xmodmap automatically at startup and have it work. I tried adding it to a bunch of different places in startup files, but the remappings weren’t active for some reason. So I just created a nice short script I can run from xterm, which is mostly when I want to enact these mappings anyway. Good enough for now. Still, would be really slick to just have them working, is there a thread out there with a working example for .19? I didn’t run across one in my wanderings.

I fooled around a little bit with the mapping application built into the N810, but wasn’t too impressed. Sure, it could be useful for when I get lost and need to find out where the hell I’ve ended up. A situation which I admit isn’t all too uncommon. But it did seem pretty much like a teaser application, bare bones functionality with the desire being to upsell me on some navigation package so that I could get access to the rest of the features. No thanks.

So I also downloaded the Maemo Mapper application and gave it a shot at one point. Unfortunately the first time I tried it I was actually trying to do something with it. Riding along in a friend’s car trying to figure out where we were. It didn’t want to sync with the GPS and then I was struggling trying to figure out how to download map data over my phone’s data connection out in a spot where connectivity was spotty at best. I missed a few options and didn’t quite understand how the thing worked. Ended up just using GMaps on my phone to figure it out, with the intention of coming back to the N810 setup and poking at it later.

Today was later as it ends up, partially cause I was at home and wanted to familiarize myself with it before I was on the road again. But also because I saw a few things on the Maemo Mapper homepage which made me think I had missed some major functions. The first and most important part is to make sure that map auto-downloading is on. Otherwise you might end up like me, trying to figure out how to use the manage maps dialog to define an area to download at different zoom levels. Furrowing your brow over and over at the confirmation dialog telling you the system is about to download -2078382 maps for a total of 15678.6 meg of map data. WTF? You don’t need to worry about that though, just turn on Auto-Download. Thing is it’s on the top level maps submemu, not within the manage maps dialog where I was looking for it. Once I turned that on I was able to start seeing map info and finally got to understand what was going on.

Personally I have trouble with the GPS in my N810 every once in a while. I’ll pop up any of the map applications (built in maps, Maemo Mapper, or even the configuration panel dialog for the GPS) and there isn’t any info at all. No satellites, no fix, no updates, nothing. Turn the GPS off and back on, still nothing. Restart the device, GPS works. Just a note to others out there who might be seeing similar things, if you see no updates to the GPS info after a minute, don’t assume that restarting the device is a useless procedure.

Other thing I realized once I was past the basic setup was that you can actually route live using the software. Go into Route/Download… and you can create a new route on the fly with the assistance of a web service. I created a route from my current home to my old home just to see how sane it was. Simple route, but there are some backroads that could confuse it. Worked quite well! The route info didn’t completely sync up with the OpenStreet map source I’m using, so the route seemed to be slightly off from the road. But more than good enough. And to my surprise it picked up my Festival Lite (flite package) install and started speaking the first steps of the directions to me. There are all sorts of settings in there about how long of a warning distance to give for turns and how to lead the auto-centering on the map. Really amazing setup, I’m impressed all that stuff is in there. And yet I don’t hear people raving about it more often.

With the 3G phone downloading map data in realtime as I’m driving down the road seems to be no problem either. If I were taking a trip through the middle of nowhere I might try to download the map data in advance. But for most of the stuff I do I think I can assume I’ll have decent cellular coverage. It even seems to have support for layering in your own points of interest data and recording routes, stuff I haven’t played around with yet. Unfortunately all this location stuff still seems to be pretty niche activity. Would be great if Nokia would embrace this part of the open source effort and concentrate on getting Maemo Mapper and like apps up the capability curve instead of trying to pimp some commercial app for mapping on top of a perfectly good open source device.

A weird quirk I’ve run into while fooling around with doing a little development on the N810, there doesn’t seem to be a way to enter redirection characters (great than or less than signs, or angle brackets, whatever you want to call them) using the hardware keyboard. They’re not on the keyboard itself. And there’s a “Chr” key that brings up a character picker onscreen for odd characters, but the greater than and less than signs aren’t there.

Escape and page up/page down are on the toolbar. So I figured maybe I could use the onscreen keyboard to add the characters I wanted to the toolbar, but also no dice. Making an entry on the toolbar with a name of ‘gt’ and value of ‘>’ just seems to generate nothing at all when I tap it.

I don’t see any general remapping tools for the hardware keyboard (though there are for a bluetooth keyboard). Any way to get these characters easily accessible? Right now I have to just use the onscreen keyboard (or use the hardware keyboard and physically close the slider, bring up the onscreen keyboard, type my characters, and switch back). There’s gotta be an easy way to get those characters available though.