I've been playing round with developing native UIs for different mobile platforms using QML.

I've quite a fan of 'common-base, separate UI' development, and QML provides a great way to implement it.

Code is available on github.

Fremantle (Maemo 5)

Harmattan (Maemo 6 / MeeGo)

Ubuntu Touch

Sailfish

I recently received my N900 (it had to be forwarded on to me in Australia from the UK) - and it's easily the best phone i have ever used. Maemo 5 rocks, and its amazing to be running this kind of software on a device like this.

The web browser is fantastic (based on the gecko backend) - I've composed all of this post on the device using the standard wordpress backend.

Seems to work fine with Ubuntu as well - it shows up as a mass storage device and a GSM connection when I connected it to my machine with USB.

I have been attempting to improve my python skills, so maybe I'll attempt to create some simple python and gtk apps.

I recently bought an ASUS EeePC 1000HE, and have been very pleased with it. I immediately installed Ubuntu 9.04, and was delighted to find all functionality working out-of-the-box.

However, the one thing that has puzzled me the last couple of weeks has been random websites loading in Firefox as I was scrolling web pages (with the two-finger multi-touch functionality), or sometimes even an error dialogue saying the URL was invalid and could not be loaded.

It turns out that this is because the touchpad sometimes interpreted my scrolling as a middle-mouse-button click - which (previously unknown to me) causes Firefox to load the text in the clipboard as a URL.

This behavior is easily disabled by going to about:config in the address bar, searching for middlemouse.contentLoadURL, and changing the value to false.

Hopefully this might help anyone experiencing the same issues as me. There is more info on the middlemouse.contentLoadURL property at MozillaZine.

Update 05/09/09: since I originally posted this information it looks like the Webkit Team re-organised their PPA. I have updated the instructions - thanks to those who let me know.

I just installed the Epiphany Webkit 2.27.2 browser from the Webkit Team PPA. It seems pretty speedy - and the flash plugin can now used.

1. Add the Webkit Team PPA and Epiphany Webkit Team PPA repositories by adding the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:

   # Epiphany Webkit PPA
   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
   deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/epiphany/ubuntu jaunty main
   deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/epiphany/ubuntu jaunty main
   

2. Add the Webkit Team PPA Key:

   wget -O webkit.key http://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371/pks/lookup?op=get\&search=0x991E6CF92D9A3C5B
   sudo apt-key add webkit.key
   

3. Install epiphany-webkit:

   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install epiphany-webkit
   

Not sure if this will replace Firefox on my desktop machine (I won't be able to give up my Firefox extensions). But I will certainly use this as my main browser on my netbook.

I recently needed to install RealPlayer and the RealPlayer mozilla firefox plugin so that I could listen to Adam & Joe's show on BBC 6 Music.

I had previously been using the mplayer mozilla plugin, and although playback worked, it was quite choppy (it didn't seem to buffer too well), and I could not pause/resume or seek.

My first thought was to look in the Medibuntu repositories, and sure enough, there was a realplayer package - unfortunately it seems that this did not include the mozilla plugin.

My next try was to look at the RealPlayer for linux website, but it only has a download for the 32-bit version. I did notice that there was a link to helix player for other platforms. Helix player is an open source media player on which RealPlayer is based. I tried helix player, but this can not play back proprietary codecs (and therefore not the real stream from the BBC website), however it did include a mozilla plugin!

I tried a combination of both - I installed RealPlayer from the Medibuntu repositories, and installed the mozilla plugin from the helix tarball to my home directory. And it works!

Instructions follow:

1. Enable the Medibuntu repositories.
2. Install the RealPlayer and libstdc++5 packages: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install realplayer libstdc++5
3. Load RealPlayer (Applications > Sound & Video > RealPlayer), and in Tools > Preferences, select the hardware tab, and set the audio driver to OSS. Press OK, and close RealPlayer.
4. Download and unpack (into a temporary location) the Helix Player for AMD64 - I grabbed the linux-2.6-glibc23-amd64 tar.
5. Copy the contents of the "mozilla" folder to ~/.mozilla/plugins (in your home directory - you may need to create the plugins folder).

Update: Looks as if I may have jumped the gun a bit - looking at the files installed by the medibuntu realplayer package, it does indeed look as if it comes with the mozilla plugin. I do not know why it wasn't working for me (maybe it places it in the wrong location?) - but I am running fine with the above solution (even if it is a bit messy).