Maemo Developer Interview – OM Weather

Maemo and open-source community in general is built on the strengths of it’s developers. Community thrives or dies based on the altruist sharing among it’s members. For Maemo devices, Nokia has understood this fully and embraces the community by being much more open and transparent in Maemo platform development than other business areas. Engaging in true two-way dialogue with the community is something quite special for the big Finnish behemoth of past and developers are appreciating it by being active contributors.

Developers are the true kings and queens in any open-source community, including Maemo. In the coming weeks, MaemoNews is going to run a series of interviews with Maemo developers. We are covering topics like open-source vs. commercial, development environments and thoughts about N900 as a new device to develop for.

Our first community king is Vlad Vasilyev and his team, the developers of the great OM Weather application. In the Maemo.org downloads section, OM Weather is currently the number one with more than 158.000 downloads. It is also one of the three featured applications in the Maemo Select teaser page at maemo.nokia.com.

Let’s begin our discussion with Vlad.

1. Why do you develop for Nokia’s Maemo platform?

One way or another for the last ten years I have had to do with introducing open-source solutions at the enterprise and I was always short of a free platform for mobile solutions. In addition I always wanted to be engaged in programming of any open-source project. My friend Ed Bartosh said: There is a new wonderful platform Maemo and it is short of programs. And I tried to deal with it. Maemo is a very attractive mobile linux platform for porting and creating programs. Having a good Maemo community makes it possible to apply my creative potential fully.

2. Can you describe OM Weather application and functionalities to all of us?

The main goal of our project is weather forecast display in Maemo devices. We wished to create a very convenient program for users. I think we have made it. One more aim is the full usage of the Maemo platform features in the program. OM Weather for Diablo has the following main features:

• The program can show Weather forecast for 10 days and current weather
• Temperature, humidity, pressure, wind, gust and other parameters are displayed
• There is a possibility to choose various units for parameters:
  • Imperial units, Metric units
  • Parameters for weather forecast update are flexible
  • GPS for automatic selection of weather station is used
  • There are many other configurable options

There is one more important feature: Flexibility of applet external outlook which includes

• 5 layouts
• 6 icon sets
• 5 variants of icon size
• The number of displayed icons is changeable
• There are 5 possible positions of the text around icons
• The transparency for applet background is widely ranged. It may be transparent, semitransparent or opaque.
• The font size and the font color may be chosen

In connection with the fact that Maemo will be a mass market platform we’ve changed the paradigm beginning with Fremantle. Now the OMWeather has the minimum of users’ settings and it is very simple for using. Now we’ll wait for the users’ reaction for such a change. Currently we have only source of weather forecasts, but in the nearest future we’ll add some more. The program can be used as widget(applet) of Desktop as well as an application.

3. What was the most difficult development part for your application?

Language C and problem of the following memory leaks. It’s a joke. In reality no super complicated algorithms and no difficult to handle technologies are used in the program. The problem is that the program is an applet. And Nokia is changing interface in Hildon as well as in Hildon Desktop in every new release. Till recent time we tried to keep in one code all four main Maemo platforms: Greagle, Bora, Chinook and Diablo. It was really a problem but after the appearance of Fremantle we stopped to support old releases(Greagle and Bora). Fremantle has principle distinctions from early versions of Maemo.

4. Do you have anything (and what) on the plans for future releases of this application?

Surely we are not going to stop. The To Do list is very big. To begin with our designer Andrew Zhilin is not satisfied with the current design of OMWeather for Fremantle. We’ll improve it for all appearance we are going to use new hardware features, for example screen orientation. There are ideas to make icon animation in our application. Some things of the kind http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdpBKUXdCQ. We are thinking of making radars. Maybe we’ll make it possible to run the application in status bar in addition to many other of our ideas.

5. Have you developed the application by yourself or with a group of contributors?

The project team is organized according to a classical scheme, typical for open-source projects. OMWeather has a coordinator, two leading developers me and Pavel Fialko, some programmers (they did some unfinished pieces of the project in various periods). A very good designer, five translators and a technical writer who maintains help file in our team. There are some testers but the main testers are the end-users who are active enough to inform us about bugs and suggest new possibilities for the application. Coordination of work in our team is done by means the site http://garage.maemo.org on which the project hosts. The site uses the engine Gforge which fully satisfies the needs for organizing the work of middle sized open source projects. The members of the team communicate by means of e-mail, IM and VoIP. We are an international team. Our members live in 6 countries of the world. For example, our designer is from Moscow (Russia), I am from Belarus and our technical writer is from north of Finland.

6. Have you utilized upstream software or components in your application? Which ones have been the most beneficial for your development?

The program has been written from scratch. I haven’t used any ready components.

7. Are you participating in any other open-source Maemo projects?

I made small patches for the packages evince, mplayer, open-ssh, ported dictd for Maemo, took part in the porting Mnemosyne. This year this project has been presented from Nokia in GoogleSummer 09 but OM Weather development is my major work. It engorges almost all of my free time.

8. What kind of tools you use in different development phases?

May be I am old-fashioned but I use only vim, valgrind, and Google Search in my work on the project.

9. What is it that makes a professional & excellent usability Maemo application?

A good UI designer (and he is in our team), because the mobile program design differs in principle from the desktop computer design. An active community that wants to have a more convenient program (it exists in Maemo) and a strong wish to make a very good program.

10. What kind of application you would like to see in Maemo that is now missing or not fantastically implemented?

I don’t know. I am satisfied with everything, Maemo lacked PIM, it seems Fremantle has it now. I haven’t tested it yet.

11. How do you feel about QT coming to Maemo?

Thanks to Maemo I am constantly learning new technologies and tools. So I highly appreciate the appearance of a new tool. Owing to the fact that the next Maemo platform (Harmattan) will be based on QT we are going to make a full redesign source code of application and rewrite it on QT using C++ or Python.

12. Any hints or feedback to other Maemo Developers? Tips or guidance for beginners?

Maemo demands a good knowledge of Unix and programming technologies. I think that beginners should read at least one serious book on programming under Unix/Linux. I believe that beginners should have deep knowledge of this operation system. Perhaps tutorial and code examples on Maemo.org will be sufficient for those who are acquainted with programming to some extent.

13. How do you feel about coming Nokia N900?

It’s a super device, it’s my dream. It’s the first real mass market Linux phone. I think that due to mass production of this device, Maemo will have a brilliant future.

14. What are your views on open-source vs. closed-source commercial applications on Maemo platform?

I keep to Darwin’s theory on the origin of species and evolution. The better and more various programs there will be the more chances will be for the platform to survive. And there will be a sound competition among programs. As for me I use only open-source applications in my everyday life. It’s more convenient for me I can always correct the source code, if I please. However I am a developer and common users may have other appraisal criteria.

15. How do you connect with Maemo community? Forums, Twitter, something else?

On the whole I use the resource Internet Tablet Talk and garage.maemo.org. The users often write to me by e-mail.