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!