Notices

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.

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?

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.

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

I have the honour of being on the development team.

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.

This one really needs a built-in map widget

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.

And today I uploaded a screencast of robotfindskitten as well.

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

Thank you!