Notices

I am pleased to announce the availability of a currency convertor for the "Chinook" Maemo release of the Nokia Internet Tablet. The program "gcur", originally by Pierre-Paul Lavoie, has gotten some slight updates.

The "gcur" program does conversion between 166 different currencies. The program will update foreign exchange currency rates from the internet, or use a saved data file if a connection is not available.


Please see the Maemo Garage project site to download the ".deb" package or browse the source code:

• https://garage.maemo.org/projects/gcur/

The program is fully functional now, but I welcome the assistance of developers in creating compiled versions for the Bora and Mistral environments and improving the user interface. The gcur program is written in "C" and already has some Hildon customization.

is there an obvious method of updating the currency values?

has anyone ported "gnucash" for IT yet?

Yes...did you look at the package?

[1] if the currency values as saved in the data file are more than 30
days old, or if the data file does not exist, the program tries
to download new data

[2] at any time, you can select the "update" choice from the menu
within gcur to update the values

[3] you can run gcur from the command-line with the "-u" option
(which could be put into the gcur.desktop file) in order to update
the values whenever the program is run

i see it now. it didn't seem to be updating, since every time i selected 'update' it did not indicate it was updating, only telling me it had data from 1969. but now, three hours later, i see it has updated the currency.

two more wuestions then:
how long should i expect it to take to update the data when i select 'update'
is the currency data current to the hour, day, week, (etc.)?

john

off_topic:

http://home.cfl.rr.com/genecash/nokia/index.html

(see the 'Spend It' program - it's not GNUcash, but may help?)

on_topic:

tks for the currency calc app - will take a looksee!

The currency convertor gets it's data from the Yahoo! Finance site, at downloads.yahoo.com. In theory, it should take as long to download using gcur as it would through a web browser. However, I've also seen a wide range in download times (a few seconds to a few minutes).

The "timeliness" and accuracy of the data are dependent on Yahoo. One future enhancement to the program would be to specify and use multiple data sources (xe.com, ecb.eu, ucb.ca, etc.), much as the KDE package "keurocalc" does. I would gladly welcome assistance from any developer interested in enhancing the program.

Nice Program! Two suggestions:

(1) Show some sort of progress when updating the currency exchange rates. Or at the very least pop up a "Done!" box upon successful completion.
(2) Have an option to keep the input fields and/or currency pull-down menu selections persistent from one run to the next.

They are both good suggestions. Though my development skills and time are quite limited, I might be able to get to (1). I believe that the "right way" to do (1) is to update the timestamp message in the footer line of the window.

The "ToDo" file in the source code tree lists something much like (2).

Feel free to grab the source code from the Maemo garage site and make changes, or help out by encouraging someone else, or by submitting documentation, etc.

Some of the other "update" type of programs, e.g. omweather, will pop up a box with 'Updating' (e.g. 'Update weather'), it disappears when it's finished.