Here’s a list of all these posts, which I’ll keep updated as I add new ones.

Matters arising from last time. A number of people asked, in the comments here and on Y Combinator, whether the change to using Qt instead of GTK in Maemo 6 will mean that Maemo 5 apps will need to be rewritten. I think it’s understandable that the switch will make people ask this question, but I don’t foresee any problems. If you want to write Qt applications, you can write them now under Maemo 5 and they’ll run; if you write GTK applications now, they will still run under Maemo 6 when it comes out. The GTK libraries won’t stop shipping with Maemo just because Qt becomes the primary toolkit.

Work behind the scenes. Today we’re talking about packaging. The version of raeddit we wrote last time downloads all the data from reddit and then puts up a window. If you’re on a slow connection, this could take several seconds. The Maemo guidelines say programs should put up a window as soon as possible, and indeed if they don’t put one up within a fairly long amount of time, the desktop assumes they’ve stalled and puts up a message to tell the user there was a problem.

So I’ve modified raeddit to put up the window immediately it launches, and to load the data in a separate thread. I was simply going to put up one of those whirly “please wait” symbols in the titlebar, but my ten-year-old user interface consultant told me that percentage-loaded bars are much more helpful. So I made the change to version 04 (diff to version 03), but since it has little to do with writing Maemo apps in particular, I’m not going to go into great detail about it. This also involved a slight change to the reddit client library, so that it could call a callback every so often to update the progress bar. The new version is backward-compatible with the old.

Where to find the files. The files we’re going to talk about are at the link; if you’d like a local copy you can get one with

git clone http://www.gnome.org/~tthurman/pics/maemo/raeddit-04/.git

So, packaging. Packaging under Maemo isn’t much different from packaging under Debian or Ubuntu. I said last time that I wasn’t going to replicate the contents of existing tutorials, and there are plenty of good packaging tutorials out there. But I’ll bend the rule a little in order to tell you what I changed to turn this into a packaged program.

The Makefile. Last time we were compiling by hand, but now we need the package to be capable of building itself. We could use autotools, but we’re trying to keep things really simple. So here’s a simple Makefile that knows how to compile and install the program.

But what do we need to install?

The compiled binary itself, into /usr/bin .

. A desktop file, into /usr/share/applications . This tells the desktop where to find the program, how to launch it, and what the icon is. The moment you drop the file into that directory, through installing the package or otherwise, the desktop will pick it up and add it to the menus. The file is pretty straightforward, but if you want the full details you can read the spec.

. This tells the desktop where to find the program, how to launch it, and what the icon is. The moment you drop the file into that directory, through installing the package or otherwise, the desktop will pick it up and add it to the menus. The file is pretty straightforward, but if you want the full details you can read the spec. An icon for the desktop file to refer to. We’ll use the obvious candidate– the reddit alien– and hope the reddit admins don’t mind us borrowing their logo to refer to their site.

The debian/ directory. That’s all very well, but we also need some instructions about how the package should be put together. These live in the debian/ directory. There are only three you really need to concern yourself with:

debian/rules is another Makefile to explain how to package the program. (Now you understand the in-joke with that shirt). I’ve been using the same debian/rules with minor ad hoc tweaks for a while now; you can probably adapt it.

is another Makefile to explain how to package the program. (Now you understand the in-joke with that shirt). I’ve been using the same debian/rules with minor ad hoc tweaks for a while now; you can probably adapt it. debian/changelog needs to say, at the very least, the date, your name, “initial release”, and that this is (say) version 0.01.

needs to say, at the very least, the date, your name, “initial release”, and that this is (say) version 0.01. debian/control is mostly self-explanatory, but there’s one thing you need to know…

Adding an icon to debian/control. If we added the basic package to App Manager, it would appear like this:

The blue square means that it doesn’t have an icon. App Manager isn’t going to download and unpack every package just to see whether we’ve included an icon, so we need to include one in debian/control, which will make its way into the package index. However, there’s not as much room, so it needs to be just 26×26. We’ll just show the alien’s head: All we have to do to get it into debian/control is to uuencode it (producing this result) and then put it into debian/control, indented by one space, under the heading XB-Maemo-Icon-26: . (No, I don’t know what the B is for either.)

This makes our entry in App Manager much prettier:



Building it. So now all we need to do is to run dpkg-buildpackage on our package, copy it to the phone, and install it. Rather than show how to do that here, I’ll just show you a log of me doing it, since it’s quite a mechanical process.

Firing it up. And now we can load the program from the ordinary menu and run it. I would show you screenshots, but I think screencasts are far more fun. So here’s a quick video on YouTube of raeddit in use. I’ve added the current version of raeddit, such as it is, to maemo-extras, so that you can actually install it with App Manager if you feel so inclined.

One quick plug: if you’d like to see a longer screencast of a more advanced Maemo 5 program, I’m working on a location-aware system to find nearby belltowers hung for English full-circle change ringing. It uses the database from Dove’s Guide. You can see a screencast of the work in progress here.

Next time, when the user clicks a post, instead of going straight to the linked site we’ll figure out how to put up one of these menus:

After that, who knows? I added a long list of possibilities to the previous post, so feel free to advocate as to which you’d like to see fixed first.