Antinormal

It’s the 31st, baby!

So I convinced Milla Jovovich to sleep with me.
And she told me she doesn't fake.
(Turns out she wanted to bone me when we first met on the set of the first Resident Evil movie).
Then I woke up.

And nothing happened. I have the weirdest dreams.

2011's almost over! The year didn't go exactly as planned, but it still turned out alright. Trust me when I say this, 2012 is the game changer. That, and the world is probably gonna end in 12 months. Meanwhile, I've got to say, what's up will all the bombings going on in Nigeria? It's starting to get silly. And the president says it's a burden we must live with. Really? That sucks.

I published a few apps for the Nokia N9: Football Live Scores, TopVideo and the SimpleIRC port. The first two are free, so go download them if you own an N9. I've been busy fixing bugs on the Symbian version of SimpleIRC, but I've not been able to add any of the planned features yet (chat logging, SASL support and DCC file transfers). I shall be working on these features next year. Thankfully, the codebase for the MeeGo/Harmattan and Symbian versions is shared so it shouldn't be a major problem bringing the new features to both platforms. I'm also working on a couple of game ideas I hope I can complete in the next year.

Here's to 2012, folks!

Football Live Scores for the N9

Football Live Scores just got published to the Nokia Store, my first app for the Nokia N9 which I wrote using QML and Javascript. There have been so many improvements to Qt Quick, it's just a joy to use. It's basically just an app for keeping eyes on the goals from matches played in the top European Leagues: UEFA Champions League, Europa League, the English Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga and a few others.

It's available for free from the Nokia Store at http://store.ovi.com/content/214062

Apart from the SimpleIRC port (which is not as easy as I thought it would be), I'll be working on a number of other nifty apps for the N9, so stay tuned.

Hey folks!

If you haven't purchased SimpleIRC for your S60 5th Ed or Symbian^3 phone, then I recommend you do so. I hear it's quite good. I've been adding new features and fixing bugs since the 2.0 release, and it's really nice to be able to get feedback from the users. I'm not getting thousands of downloads, but sales have been fairly satisfactory.

I've got a couple of apps I need to port to Qt: Ultimate Stopwatch and Sliding8. Just haven't had the time to do so due to other commitments. However, I managed to release a new app called NSM. It's a free utility for checking daily stock prices on the Nigerian Stock Market at the close of trade for the day. It was meant to be an entry for a Nokia App Challenge organised locally. Be sure to check it out!

A lot has happened since my last post, so I'm just gonna summarise. Have you seen the N9? Now, that's what you call a sexy piece of hardware. I intend to get the 64GB version once it's available. I particularly like the ease of use of the whole "Swipe" interface and . It's a shame that Nokia dumped MeeGo though. Considering the praise that the N9's been getting (even from the US media), I suppose it's safe to assume they had a winner on their hands.

I'm still skeptical about Windows Phone 7, but maybe when I actually get to use one of the devices, I might change my mind. Also, Microsoft, what's up with Nigeria not being on the list of Windows Marketplace countries? I'd like to publish WP7 apps, you see, but it looks like you don't want me to.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution caught my eyes these past couple of weeks, and considering I hadn't been paying attention to the game series, I was pretty surprised. So I finally decided to stop procrastinating about playing the first one, but I just can't seem to get into it and I don't know why. Maybe everyone hyped it up a bit too much? However, Human Revolution is a sure buy for me once I get the cash.

Till next time.

SimpleIRC and NSM now available from the Ovi Store

That's right! The new and improved SimpleIRC is now available from the Ovi Store for Symbian^3 devices. NSM is also available for free for Symbian^3 devices.

Since these were my first Qt app submissions, I exclusively selected the Symbian^3 target in my builds. This however caused failure on the Symbian^1 devices during the QA process. Apparently, I should've targeted Symbian^1 so the binaries could work on both Symbian^1 and ^3 devices, but I guess I had to find out the hard way. The new builds are currently in the QA process so they should be available on the store within the next couple of weeks at most.

In other news, I've got this neat idea that I'd like to enter for the Sub-Saharan Africa Android Developer Challenge but if I told you, I'd have to kill you. At least, until I've got my submission in.

New Content

I've been rather busy for the past few weeks but I figured I should be able to get in blog post. And let's face it, I'm just incapable of churning out content too often.

I finally finished up with the new and improved SimpleIRC and submitted it to Ovi Publish. It should be appearing on the Ovi Store anytime soon. I also developed a new application called NSM which essentially means Nigerian Stock Market. As the name implies, it's an application for viewing stock market prices at the end of each stock trading day. It's also been submitted to Ovi Publish, and it's free. You can find screenshots here. I intend to extend the functionality to include price histories, charts and basic portfolio tracking.

So I've got this contract which requires me to extend Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for a client, which means I may not be able to publish new applications for a couple of months. I'm hoping I should be able to finish up with the Qt version of TopVideo within the next few weeks though. It's also gonna be a free application, with the ability to watch the videos within the app itself. We'll see how that goes.

I redecorated the screen of my E7 and it looked great. I should've taken pictures but I was too sad to think about it at that point. Either way, I'll have to wait till it makes it out of Nokia Care. At least, I've still got my trusty N8 which serves me well.

On to video games, I still have a few to beat - Borderlands, Fallout: New Vegas, Metro 2033. This is just sad as I haven't booted my gaming PC in a while (thanks to EVE Online running quite nicely on my HP Envy). I did finish Portal 2 within a week after I got it though. It's pretty cool but some of the puzzles kinda got frustrating. Maybe I'm just getting too old for that sort of shit. However, Spaaaaaaaaaace!

Happy Africa Day!

Porting SimpleIRC to Qt

Hello Internet. Decided to spend the weekend implementing SimpleIRC in Qt using C++ and QML. I had already started on this a while back, but I sort of lost interest due to other projects I had to take care of. I'm happy with the results so far since the Java version got seriously broken after Nokia implemented kinetic scrolling on the touchscreen devices where you couldn't scroll through the chat history.

I've also been able to add nifty new features: The ability to open links in your device browser directly from chat, auto-join channels on a per-server basis and UTF-8 support. DCC file transfer support is still in the works. I just can't for the life of me figure out the protocol properly.

Of course, this post wouldn't be complete without screenshots. First of all, the basic stuff. Here's the main UI showing just a status tab and the main menu. All shots were taken in portrait mode but the UI auto-adjusts nicely when the screen orientation changes.

Revamped settings and servers configuration sreens built using QML. The QML views are actually integrated with the application UI using a dialog.

Links are underlined in the chat window and will be launched with the native device browser when pressed.

Other fancy stuff: editing servers, error and confirmation dialogs, copying text and UTF-8.

Overall, this is a very, very nice improvement from the Java version. I'm looking to finish it up within the next week so I can get it published once the Ovi Store starts accepting Qt 4.7 applications (within about 2 weeks from what I've heard). As usual, comments and feedback are appreciated.

Well, that’s disappointing

I take back all the good things I may have said about SWIFT Networks. I was pretty excited and upgraded to their unlimited plan. What I didn't know (and wasn't told) was that the unlimited plan has a reduced speed. It's pretty much the same as my former provider, but at twice the price. I have not renewed my subscription and I don't plan to unless they fix that.

Nokia announced a switch to Windows Phone 7 for smartphones and Qt is not going to be one of the development platforms going forward. Now, I'm a bit familiar with Windows Phone 7 development, and it's nice, but I feel like I wasted quite a bit of my time learning Qt. It's not all bad however since there's Qt Quick which is fairly straightforward and easy to use, and I'm liking it. It's probably what I'll solely be using to develop applications for Symbian devices going forward. I also will be getting a free E7 as a Forum Nokia Launchpad member, then a Nokia Windows Phone 7 when they start shipping as encouragement to keep developing for Nokida devices. Sounds like bribery, but hey, I'll take it!

I haven't been doing much development work lately as I've been feeling a bit off, but I should get past that phase in a bit.