Welcome!!!

 

Welcome to Nicolinux! This is my first blog, and I’ve decided to open it to talk a little bit about my experience with software development. I’m not a professional developer, but I started for fun.

I bought a Nokia N900 and I’m really happy with this phone. While looking around the net I discovered that with Qt libraries it was possible to easily develop Apps for Nokia phones. So I decided to give it a try… and PocketGTT came out, easier than expected!

On this blog I would like to give some tips on problems that I have encounter and that probably also other newbie can experience. And hopefully, this blog will be helpful :)

Projects

 

With this page I would like to keep order in my projects… a task that at this moments looks really out of my limits.. :)

I hope one day this page will contain a great list of projects I’ve been working on, but at the moment I only have to talk about PocketGTT.

This is a Nokia app based on the  Qt framework that should support public transport user in the italian city of Turin. In Turin the public transport service is managed by Gruppo Trasporti Torinese, or GTT. The app checks and shows in real time passages of buses, trams and metro at a desired stop. PockeGTT is now available on Nokia Store.

Aug 16

Important links for starters

 

Before going into detail of the steps for creating a program, may be it is useful to list some resources available online that I used to learn:

But Qt is based on C++, and I was out of knowledge of it. In internet it is well known the work of Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield: C++ GUI programming with Qt4. I found a pdf of it’s first edition. Here I found that also the second edition is available. The book is great for learning Qt, but I primarly used it for learning C++ :) it has a great appendix about C++ very compact but effective. It will give you the required C++ basis to use Qt in a proper way!

A great resource is also this page: it refers to a list of official tutorial and example included in the Qt Documentation. Out of these example I made some of the QtCreator section and the QtQuick section as I wanted to create the UI of my program with QML.

Except tutorial there is another great place to visit: Qt eLearning videos. I have watched some of those and would like to suggest a series about QtQuick recorded ad Qt DevDays 2010:

I have also watched a video about deploying to Symbian devices, and another for Android development.

This is a short selection of the useful documentation you can find online. I will complete this post with new resources that I do consider important, but if you have something to suggest, don’t hesitate!

Aug 04

PocketGTT project start-up

 

You know, as soon as you come up with a new goal, a lot of ideas collect in your mind, and the best thing would be collect them and try to put them in order :) and of course that is not what I did!

Just while you are doing you everyday life activities, a flash come to your mind and you have a great idea on how the user interface could look like, or may be on how the background of your program should store preferences… well write them down as soon as you can in order to avoid the risk to forget them ;) and of course that is not what I did!

Read the rest of this entry »

Aug 01

PocketGTT genesis

 

During Christmas 2011 holidays I got an idea! It could have been useful to make the good service provided by GTT easily available on mobile phones. If you visit GTT’s website, you could get a lot of realtime information about the public transport in Turin. Public transport in Turin are really well spreaded, and city’s coverage is great. But unfortunately Turin suffers from a typical problem in italian cities: the traffic congestion!

Now imagine that you are waiting at a bus stop, you won’t really see a timesheet… I’ll make an example: on the paper time sheet you  will read something like “on Tuesday from 17:00 to 19:00 bus N. 5 comes every 10 minutes“. But the statistic is still valid if you wait 30 minutes and then 3 buses arrive all together! Don’t laugh… it happens!!! :)

In central stops GTT built digital displays to show how many minutes you will have to wait for your bus, but what if you’re not in one of those stops? Or, if it is January and outside it is raining and you don’t want to exit and wait 15 minutes for the bus? Well then the idea of a simple app doesn’t look that bad, doesn’t it?

Jul 30

Welcome!!!

 

Welcome to Nicolinux! This is my first blog, and I’ve decided to open it to talk a little bit about my experience with software development. I’m not a professional developer, but I started for fun.

I bought a Nokia N900 and I’m really happy with this phone. While looking around the net I discovered that with Qt libraries it was possible to easily develop Apps for Nokia phones. So I decided to give it a try… and PocketGTT came out, easier than expected!

On this blog I would like to give some tips on problems that I have encounter and that probably also other newbie can experience. And hopefully, this blog will be helpful :)

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