Started to work on screen capture utility

Today I finally decied I need a good and free screen capture utility, so I started to work on a new project called TOSC – The Open Screen Capture. Prety lame name, I know… but it’s good enough for me… temporary.

Anyway, as the name sais, it will be a completely free and even opensource program… when it will be ready, but right now I have some problems with it

First of all the floating window I created doesn’t seem to get any pointer event if the main view is not visible.

Second: it behaves pretty strangly when the main view is visible as well. But hopefully I will sort out these errors ASAP.

Generating skeleton helloworld like uiq3 apps on linux

Lately I’ve been start to work on many small symbian/uiq3 apps, and it became really annoying to copy an old project, remove the unneded code, rename the files, rename the variables, etc, so I made a little shell script to create a basic file from a template, given the app name and uid. You can download it here: projgen_0_1.tar.gz

Usage is pretty simple: unpack it, go to the directory where genproj.sh is and execute:

./genproj.sh outdir "Program name" 0xe0001234

TABU for UIQ2

Pheww… finaly…after some work of coding I managed to port TABU to UIQ2… well, sort of. The UIQ3 version runs better, the UIQ2 has some flickering. And since it lacks window transparency, Ihad to do a dirty trick: make a screenshot of the screen, and draw that region below the sprite/animation. The screenshot can be done only before showing the sprite, otherwise it would include the sprite as well, so if the background changes while the animation is running, it will look odd… but still far better then using a solid color.

Oh, and the download link: tabu_0_2_uiq2.sis

Btw, most of time in porting was spent with fixing/hacking the development environment. Since I use gnu/linux, I have a modified version of the SDK (gnupoc). But I had problems creating the AIF file. I used genaif then (open source, you can find it on the net), but it created faulty files. It turned out it doesn’t like certain bitdepths in the MBM file. So, the solution was to use /c12.

New GFX for TABU

Well, I had 2 more hours to work today, so I decided to add some more animations to TABU. Here are the new images:

And here is the new download link: tabu_0_2_uiq3.sis

TABU 0.1 released

I finished today the first version of TABU (The Anti-Boredom Union). It’s a simple application for UIQ3 phones (ie. SE M600/P990/W950), in which a series of cute, little sprites pop up on the screen. Well, for now there is only one sprite, and I’m not sure about it’s cuteness So, pixel artists: if you have a nice little animation, and you are willing to “donate” it to a freeware program, just drop me a line at tabu [at] saxoft [dot] com.

And a few more notes about the program: the program doesn’t worm always, only when there is some activity, ie. if you don’t use the phone, (theoretically) no sprites should pop up. So it should drain your battery

To start the application download and install tabu_0_1_uiq3.sis start it, then select “More->Start”. After a few seconds a small head (seen in the post below) should pop up. More animations will follow soon.

Oh, I almost forgot: any idea/comment/etc is welcome

First pixelart for TABU

TABU is a new Symbian/UIQ3 application I’m working on at the moment… actually I will be working on when I’ll have more time.

The name is an abbreviation: The Anti-Boredom Union. So I think you can guess that it’s not a serious business application, rather a toy, to waste more battery power (Actually I will write it to have minimal impact on the energy consumption).

The application simply shows some cute little animations on the screen, hopefully with the result of getting you to smile

Anyway, long story short, I need a first animation to start with, so here it is:

Hello world!

Welcome everybody!

This is  my first blog, and my first post, more to come.

First of all: why?

Short answer: Why not?!

Long answer: I’m interested in a lot of things (but mainly computer, mobile phone related stuff), so I thought I migth share my interest, experience, etc. So here you will find mostly stuff from my “research” work, hence things related to mobile phone programming, linux, etc.