[Announce] Old School for n900
 

Are you fed up with all of the bells and whistles of PR1.2? Do you want to harken back to a simpler time when your cell phone glowed green and if you wanted to know the time you wore a watch? Are you jealous of the sizable number of totally useless apps on those other phone platforms?

Well today is your day. The second most useless app for the N900 has now made its way into the extras-devel repository: Old School (in the Desktop category). This app will make your phone look like one of the crappy old models where you could actually count the number of "bars" of signal or battery without a magnifying glass.

Functionally, the app does very little. The signal and battery bars are active, reading the values from DBus. Just run the app and, if you want to return to the 21st century simply press where it says QUIT.

Technical notes: this was my first Maemo app, and for anyone writing their first app I would recommend starting with something simple as well. I wrote it in Python using PyQt, mainly because I really like the loose coupling provided by the signals and slots. The DBus interaction is in a separate class, and PyQt does not seem to provide the QT interfaces for that so I used the standard dbus-python methods.

Having never created a .deb package, that was also somewhat of an adventure (anyone with experience putting together java war packages is ready for this challenge, though). There is some info to be found out there on creating .deb packages from python, as well as stuff like py2deb. I couldn't make py2deb work, and eventually concluded that the easiest path was a mostly manual process that copied the format of existing python projects in the repository. If I can, I will put the steps I followed together and gather feedback from others for some best practices--it is actually quite simple to package up a python app once you get the directories and files together.

So enjoy, and let me know if you have any feedback. I will now sit back and await my award for the app competition!

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

Thanks for the app but you know, screenshots are a must-have!

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

Memories....like the corners of my mind.

Thanks for the app.

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

Here is a screenshot.

Looks like I need to plug in the power soon...

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

Broken link?

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

Fixed...sorry.

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

wow, how useless... gave me a laugh tho

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

Ha, it's actually the most useful cellphone app. What is more important than knowing your signal strength and how much battery you have left on your 90s celluar phone?

These young whippersnappers and their techno whatchamacallits.....back in my day the killer app and best feature of a celluar phone was that it was MOBILE!!!!!!!!!

Look Ma, no wires!!!!!!!!!!!!

j/k :D

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

Oh man, I was going to make this app during my next break. Kudos (still might make a skinnable desktop widget for the battery and signal meters reminiscent of this)

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

How about adding a good old 70's digital clock ?

It would be perfect then ! :-)

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

Flip Clock already has that retro angle covered. Both flip clock and red led are covered there.

There is lots of good retro stuff. Perhaps I should turn toward steampunk...

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

I think you should make it read and display the actual current operator name in the place of Nokia (would be even more realistic). But anyway a great app!

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

I can seem to find this in app manager, and a link is mentioned, cant see this in your post, can anyone help?! :)

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

Some suggestions:

Add operator name and time, in the way the old nokia phones (like 3210 did it).
Next step could be also implement the phone book, with the real contacts from n900 in the old interface style :-)

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

ability to use it as a phone would be cool (thru this app)

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

OMG I'm dying!

Reading the description and then scrolling down to see the screenshot was just too funny :)

LMAO nicely done

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

I may add a clock at some point, but I think phone controls and more details is kind of pushing it. Also there are no buttons on the front of the phone to map to for simulating the neanderthal-phone experience. I may consider the phone book as a way of playing with QT Mobility, but I am trying to stay away from that package until it hits the mainstream (whenever that might be--PR1.3?).

Also, other than the bars, everything is built into a jpg image--I am not drawing the text directly. I have not looked into what fonts are available on the N900, though for the numbers in the time it might be easy to get around that.

I have started playing with desktop widgets written in C++/QT for another app, and I have diverted some time to manage my way through the differences in packaging that entails. Besides, if I add any actual functionality to this app, it will be way too useful to get ported to the iPhone...

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

Personally I think this app has loads of potential. I like it so far but it does still seem pointless.
How about:
- Clock in the top right (like the old nokia's ui)
- If you receive a sms it could appear as an envelope which you could click to view.

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

I think it is going to stay pointless. Call it a visual fart app.

Re: [Announce] Old School for n900
 

Hey, I just thought it would be great to make "at least a bit" functioning oldschool mobile emulator for Maemo! You know - something like Nokia 5110 (or 3310, or whatever) emulator - being able to make calls, send sms... Too bad my programming skills are just few programs in Pascal and C# (all CLI). Anyway, my vision is something like: don't use fullscreen screen, but make one tiny (remember old phones, right? :) ) at top and bellow it place classical keyboard, like on those old phones was.