[maemo-developers] Making my app. appear on the Navigator menu

[From: David Hazel]

Hi Thomas,

I really appreciate you taking the time and trouble to offer your words of
support here. I haven't had time to read your email in full yet (I've just
got back from walking the dog!), but I will.

It's felt very lonely here, on occasions, while I've been banging my head
against brick wall after brick wall, trying to find documentation that
apparently exists but isn't very well referenced by the stuff I've been able
to find. I've posted numerous questions along the way, and most of the
replies have been either answers to one of several questions, or else fairly
basic advice about things I haven't even asked about. I've had several
slap-downs for daring to be a non-Unix person - something which people seem
to assume means I'm a Windows person instead. In fact, I've 24 years of
development experience on things as diverse as VMS, iRMX, Mac OS X, and,
yes, Windows. Of all of them, only VMS and Mac OS really seem to have their
act fully in gear (and VMS is of course dead now, pretty much).

Thanks again for your support. Maybe the powers-that-be at Nokia might take
notice if two of us are telling them the documentation is crap (sorry,
incomplete in some key areas).


David Hazel


-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Waelti [mailto:twaelti at gmail.com]
Sent: 25 September 2007 19:02
To: Gregory 'guardian' Pakosz; David Hazel
Cc: maemo-developers at maemo.org
Subject: Re: Making my app. appear on the Navigator menu


I can really feel with David, as I encountered exactly the same issues when
developing mClock during the last few weeks.
While the N800 motivated me enough to plunge into Linux development, some
issues around the Hildon Dekstop and D-Bus were indeed extremely
frustrating.

>> The problem I'm having now is understanding what I'm supposed to
>> do to fix this. Having looked at all of the documentation I've
>> listed above, I began reading [...]
>>
>>
> i suggest you convert the energy you put in writing those long
> emails into reading carefully
>
> http://maemo.org/development/documentation/tutorials/Maemo_tutorial_bo
> ra.html http://maemo.org/development/documentation/how-tos/3-
> x/howto_new_application_bora.html
>
>> My biggest problem is that all of the instructions I've read so
>> far insist on giving me examples, and I can't pick out which
>> things are relevant to me and which are not.
>> [...]
> studying maemopad is a good exercise to understand what's going on
> (apt-get source maemopad), it worked for me.

Isn't this a very non-efficient way to achieve something, especially if
someone's needs differ a bit?
Normally, there should be enough basic documentation covering a theme, and
the example would then show the real-world application of it.
The docs you quote are a good start - but not sufficient, as they only show
how, but don't tell why - which is crucial to understand the area and be
able to resolve problems.


> "D-BUS service file is installed in “/usr/share/dbus-1/services/”
> and maemo GUI needs to be restarted with “af-sb-init.sh restart”
> before D-BUS daemon recognizes it."

But isn't this only valid for Scratchbox? IIRC, I can't do this in xterm on
my N800. My app still doesn't properly connect to the D-Bus, even altough I
did exactly like the examples tell me (PyMaemo doc) and how I could observe
in various examples that I dissected. I believe this has something to do
with services keeping running even after an uninstall of a service file or
with services not getting up and running even properly. (I did a lot of
installs/uninstalls of my app)


>> Any offers of help? Or is this going to be another of my
>> questions that disappears into a black hole never to get answered?

Using PyPackager (www.khertan.net ), I build my simple .debs directly on the
device. Makes it much easier to get started in a simple way.
-The yourappname.desktop file must go to usr\share\applications\hildon
-The yourappname.service file must go to usr\share\dbus-1\services
-Put a yourapp.png (26x26 pix) under usr\share\pixmaps

Install OpenSSH, then connect as root to the device. Now SFTP through the
directories, download what interests you and look at it.
This way, you can also control if your files ended up where you wanted
them...


>> The N800 is an interesting piece of
>> kit, but without MUCH better documentation and properly
>> integrated development tools, it is too expensive to write for
>> and more trouble than it's worth.
>>
> welcome to the embedded world, no you're no more under windows
> sitting comfortably behind visual studio's brilliant debugger :)

Even if this is the embedded world, stuff must become much better documented
if Nokia wants to gain more support from developers.
One thing Microsoft excels at is in documentation, example code and support
(you get what you are paying for ;-)
In the end, it is the maturity, ease-of-use and extent of the available
software that makes a platform successful.
Right now, its is still too hard for the less-than-hardcore devs to get up
and running on Maemo. Which is a shame, because the concept and the device
are fantastic IMHO. But then, this is a "young" platform that is still
ripening...

In my example, I had the code for mClock done after a few hours, thanks to
the ease of use of Python with Pygame (even if it was my first ever Python
app).
OTOH, I literally wasted more than double that time in trying to get the
D-Bus service to properly work with my app. And no, my Icon doesn't yet show
up in the tasks - but at least I can see and launch it from the Extras menu
:-)
[Currently, my app doesn't seem to connect to it anymore, as I can't seem to
stop the screen blanking with display_blanking_pause; even altough I had it
up and running one evening... However, I DO launch the app using the D-Bus
service (at least I get the "mClock is loading..." info window when starting
it from the desktop and the app comes up. And with that comes my other
issue: the infowindow keeps being in the foreground for at least 20 seconds
even if the app has finished loading long ago. Annoying.

(Another long mail, but at least this shows the energy and enthusiasm
available :-)

Best regards
-Tom