mobile – Joaquim Rocha

New SeriesFinale Harmattan and Fremantle releases

June 16, 2012

That’s right, a couple of weeks ago new versions of SeriesFinale were released.
There was a long absence between these and the previous releases. The truth is that it has become more and more difficult for me to find the motivation (and time) to do work on an application for platforms I am not currently using. Still, I have had some emails from people showing their appreciation and Juan has also helped a lot (he is the reason there is also a new N900 release).

If you’re following the development of SeriesFinale, I have recently moved the repository over to GitHub (like I did for most of my projects). GitHub is so much faster than Gitorious and has nice features such as an issue tracker. Before you say it, although GitHub is not Open Source software, we’re talking about a hosted solution for Git repositories from a very cool company and I had no intentions of hosting Gitorious on my own anyway.

So what’s new in SeriesFinale? I need to differentiate between the platforms’ versions first.
Harmattan (N9) is on the 0.6.9 version and many bugs were solved like:
* Marking all episodes from the episodes’ list menu (nd#1)
* Episodes’ overview height (nd#9)
* Updating the shows season list
* Add a close button to show info dialog
* Add mark none action to the episodes’ list menu

There are still some issues when scrolling the lists which I’ve looked into and could not find any solution, I am convinced it actually has to do with the Python bindings of QML…

Fremantle (N900) is on version 0.6.10 and has less visible changes but the threads, languages and sorting functions were improved.

Adding the the new Harmattan version to the Nokia Store was also a challenge (it kept being rejected due to tiny details) but it eventually went through.

Be sure to test and vote for SF on Fremantle, or, in case you have an N9, get the new version from the Nokia Store:

SeriesFinale for Harmattan (N9/N950)

November 18, 2011

As promised before, here is the first release of SeriesFinale for MeeGo Harmattan.

This summer Micke Prag, a fellow programmer from Sweden contacted me because he was starting a port of SF for Harmattan. By then I still didn’t have an N950 because of having missed the deadline for the first developers program. Later, when the second developers program was launched I managed to finally get one. At that point, even though I already had my Samsung Galaxy S (yes, with Android) I still wanted to have a port of SeriesFinale as I had received many emails asking for this port so I started from Micke’s code and finally here it is!

The Harmattan port

Maybe it is something obvious but this version is not written in PyGTK/PyMaemo. It uses part of the “old” Python backend that was changed to play well with the new UI code written in QML.

This port’s code is a bit dirty by now and I’m sure there are bugs in this first version but at least it can be used and I didn’t want to make people wait much more. The support and feedback that SeriesFinale’s users have given me is amazing (some people even saying they still use the N900 only for SF!), thank you all for it.
My heart is still filled with GNOME/GTK+ love but QML is really impressive; there are some things I still need to spend some time with to figure out but I like how quick and flexible one can do stuff in QML.

The OVI Store

It was also the first time I published something on Nokia’s Ovi Store and the process took around 2 weeks before it finally got approved (it was rejected twice before due to weird stuff like “they” thinking bugs.maemo.org was not a good place to report issues or the fact that an application that says it works only with English US is eligible only for the USA, not for all the countries…).

The future

I really like the N9/N950. The user experience is something awesome and I believe this was the phone that could really compete with the iPhone and Android. Unfortunately someone at Nokia disagrees and the future of this incredible phone is doomed even though Nokia’s alternative is not better. Due to this mainly, I’m not using the N950 as my main phone. This and the fact that my personal time, in which I develop SF, is very limited, means that unless things change, I don’t know how much more releases I will do but I still wanted to add some cool features. It will probably depend again on the feedback and support.

Anyway here it is at an Ovi Store a few taps/swipes away and for free, as always (although I appreciate when someone buys me a beer 🙂 ):

SeriesFinale 0.6.9

October 14, 2011October 14, 2011

Yup, after some months, here is a new version of SeriesFinale.

This new version doesn’t have many new features but brings an important one related to my previous blog post: the context menu.
When long-pressing a show or a season, a dialog will be shown with some actions. On the show’s context menu (or context dialog?), the user can update it, delete it, view its info or, more importantly, mark the next episode to watch as watched. On the season’s context menu, it can be deleted or, as many users have requested, mark all episodes.

Here are a couple of screenshots:

Of course that by only seeing the screenshots you don’t get the same feeling has when you quickly open the dialog and mark the next episode to watch so give it a try.
It it already in Extras Testing and if it works well for you, please vote for it to get into Extras.

The Future

This summer I bought myself an Android phone. That’s right, because of pure curiosity and with the help of Nokia’s decisions regarding MeeGo, I bought a Samsung Galaxy S.
I’ve been using it ever since as my main phone but I didn’t want to leave SF unattended yet. There are a couple of things more that I want to do and I’ll keep an eye on the download statistics to try to guess how many people is still interested in this app.

I haven’t yet found a full replacement for it on Android. I’ve installed a few apps that either don’t work well, require login or are bloated with features making it harder to use so I don’t know if I’ll end up contributing to some FOSS one or developing an official port of SF. Do you think that developing an official version for Android makes sense?
Also, people have asked me for a Symbian and Blackberry versions of it but I just don’t own any phone with these systems.

As for SF on the N9/N950, a release could be out there soon so stay tuned.