rfk, belltower
 

I have made a couple of N900 applications over the past few weeks. They are both available from the maemo-extras repository. I thought you might like to hear about them.

rfk (robotfindskitten) is a port of Leonard Richardson's abstract game to Maemo.

Belltower is an application to find belltowers hung for change-ringing. It uses the data from Dove's Guide, which they say can be freely reused. The program lets you find the nearest belltowers using the GPS, and search by area and name. At present Dove's Guide is included in the archive, but I'm planning to make the program download it from the Dove site. There are some screenshots here. I'm not sure how many people will find this useful, but I think it shows off some of the device's capabilities quite nicely.

Re: rfk, belltower
 

Nice. How did you get the screenshots, with the top-left switcher button and status bar icons? Do you have access to a real N900?

Re: rfk, belltower
 

Wow, Belltower has to be the strangest application I've seen on the tablets yet. Just goes to show how people have such different use cases and how versatile the tablets can be. Good job.

Re: rfk, belltower
 

I agree, for instance, I love to visit Light houses whenever I travel.

Re: rfk, belltower
 

I have the honour of being on the development team.

Re: rfk, belltower
 

I have also made a screencast of Belltower in use, in case anyone's interested. I think it shows quite well how easy to use the N900's UI is.

Re: rfk, belltower
 

This one really needs a built-in map widget :D

Re: rfk, belltower
 

It occurred to me the other day that Belltower could be usefully generalised. Imagine if there was a Maemo package called "nearby" which provided an app which, given a set of items with coordinates and associated URLs, allowed you to find the nearest ones, find them on the map, get driving directions, bookmark them, and so on-- but it would be agnostic as to what the items actually were.

Then there could be other packages which installed, for example:

- a machine-readable list of all the Tube stations in London with their latitude and longitude, or
- all the petrol stations in a given region, or
- all the outlets of a given retailer in a given country (suppose Supermarket Foo wanted to have a N900 app to help people find their shops)...

and a .desktop file which launched the "nearby" app with that list as a parameter. And there'd be some amount of skinning possible so that you could have the icons looking like whatever it was you were looking for. Dozens of individually useful apps would become quite simple to create.

Belltower has almost all of the functionality needed for this already; it just needs a bit of generalising.

Re: rfk, belltower
 

And today I uploaded a screencast of robotfindskitten as well.

Re: rfk, belltower
 

I have been enjoying rfk for a while now. And it is simply so robot finds kitten!

Thank you!

Re: rfk, belltower
 

There is a clock tower at 43.081423,-70.73899 that rings out ships bells instead of hours if that helps with your project. I once heard that it's the only one in the world that does that. I have no idea if that's true or not. That's a big claim.

Re: rfk, belltower
 

Excellent! A "nearby public toilets" dataset would be useful, as would "nearby swimming pools", "nearby cinemas", "nearby beaches", "nearby bookstores" etc.

These datasets wouldn't even need to be installed on the device. They could be communally maintained on a wiki, downloaded on demand, and updated instantly "from the device" if they were out of date.

Regards,
Roger

Re: rfk, belltower
 

This sounds like basically creating a user-editable Points of Interest database. I wonder if something like OpenStreetMaps already has something like this? Of course, the belltower app stores and displays much more than just location coordinates...

Re: rfk, belltower
 

OpenStreetMaps certainly has this facility, but the barrier to entry is too high unless you're interested in mapmaking. Also you need to consider social issues. The OSMappers would no doubt be very happy for you to add POIs for public toilets, but would probably consider that POIs for (say) rumored UFO abduction sites was not within the spirit of the OSM project.

What I have in mind is that anyone could edit a web page or wiki page. Perhaps the convention could be as simple as "Put the points of interest in a bulleted list. For each one, list the name followed by the GPS co-ordinates, followed by optional IMG tags and a textual description. Voila, your POIs are immediately accessible to anyone with a Maemo device.

Regards,
Roger

Re: rfk, belltower
 

So for the belltowers, the import from Dove's Guide could be done on the wiki, and the Maemo app would just need to download from there. Nice idea.

Re: rfk, belltower
 

So as to the front page: currently, it looks like this:

http://belltower.garage.maemo.org/screenshot00.png

I wonder whether it would be more Maemo-ish if I made it look something more like this:

http://spectrum.myriadcolours.com/~m...lltower-mockup

Thoughts?

Re: rfk, belltower
 

robotfindskitten 1.40 adds portrait mode; it also has a new system for touchscreen control suggested by Will Thompson. If you'd like to playtest, let me know.

http://people.collabora.co.uk/~tthur...-landscape.png