A week+ ago I wrote a review of some applications submitted to opkg.org, the software directory for Openmoko phones. This way I want to encourage people to submit their applications to opkg.org, use GPL licence and also make sure their software installs easily by just running the install command from opkg.org. That’s why I made some rules or requirements for the packages that I’ll approve in these reviews. In the first review there were 14 apps included, this time we have six new packages. If you want your app to be tested, check the rules here and let me know about your package. I can’t guarantee I’ll test everything that fulfill the requirements but I’ll see what I can do. I now added the requirement for name of the package author in the rules as well as that it has to install an icon where the app starts – I won’t use command line for these tests.
Ready?
Linball
GPL / pinball game / opkg.org
Linball
All depending packages (SDL and more) are installed from the default repositories. Starting the game doesn’t rotate the screen to horizontal although this would be better for the game so you have to do it manually with Rotate/Rotater/TapUntap/other. The flippers are controlled by pressing the ‘left flipper’ and ‘right flipper’ buttons. There are two problems here. First, it feels quite unresponsible: the flippers don’t always move when you press the right or left side of the screen. The other, hard to fix problem is that the flippers can’t be used at the same time because the touch screen doesn’t support multi-touch. I don’t have any suggestions what to do with this. I think I read somewhere in the mailing lists a suggestion that one would create extra button in the middle that would launch both flippers or something. It actually should work better than you think: doing a multi-touch on Freerunner should average the coordinates so clicking on both flipper buttons should average it to the midde! Might work. Using accelerometers would also be interesting: tilt left for left flipper, right for right flipper, down for both and so on.. This game actually makes you wish Freerunner had two hardware buttons on the side so that you could better use it as a game console.
The game has various background musics. Depending on the music you get that time you might want to start it without sound (using the -n parameter). The sound also doesn’t always work smoothly but starts to scramble. It’s not a big loss to turn it of, it might also make the game itself run a bit smoother.
Due to the unresponsiveness I didn’t play it much, only some balls in the first field – I suppose there are more fields to play. The screen moves a lot & fast – maybe showing more of the game with a bit smaller size might help to follow the game better – or maybe I should play it more to get used to the fast moving screen.
Verdict: Some more work on the responsiveness and controls can make this into a nice game for Freerunner.
Xlogical
GPL / logic game / opkg.org
Xlogical & level ~50
Xlogical depends on SDL and installs the required libraries from default repositories.
It’s a cool, semi-addicting logic/speed game where you have to make the balls entering the level find four of the same color in the rotating wheels. Later the levels get more difficult with some new fancy gates and more requirements for the colors. It has nice music and cool graphics and you definitely want to play this with a stylus and not your fingers.
It’s sometimes very difficult to click in the middle of the wheels where the balls end up. You want to click the wheel to rotate it and this way control the order the balls are in. You have limited time per ball to find a place for it and also there’s a limit for the number of concurrent balls. You also might want to know that during the game clicking the green timer in the top right corner will give you a menu to quit and so on.
Verdict: A high quality logic game well suitable for Freerunner except the difficulty to be able to click the middle of the wheel. Try it!
Orrery
GPL / planetarium in your pocket / opkg.org
Installation without any problems.
Orrery & the sky above someone, somewhere
Starting from the first version published version of Orrery it has been one of my favorites (see my Freerunner GPS software review). From the beginning it’s been stable, it’s able to show loads of information about the sky above you, or anywhere else and at any time. As the new version are coming out it is able to show more and more details.
For a Random Joe like me it’s difficult to remember the planet symbols it uses so you end up being able to navigate to Opts -> About Orrery/Symbol key without even having to look at the screen:) The buttons or the menu don’t look very professional but AFAIK it’s about the GUI libraries that are used, not the program itself. Orrery also doesn’t work in horizontal mode: the navigation doesn’t show up.
Orrery is able to pick the time and location from the GPS signal. I’d like all GPS programs show some kind of information about the status of the GPS signal: is there a fix and how many satellites are used or how accurate the location is. Orrery doesn’t do this so always when you use GPS you end up having Tangogps in the background to tell you the status of the satellites. I’ve also usually had problems making Orrery really understand the location & time, most likely there has been something wrong with the user but I’d like to see it by default using the time and location where I currently am and not show ‘Cambridge MA’ just to trick me. It might do it already but I can’t be sure. Maybe it could ask for a default location on the first start (I know you can set it via the locations menu). I’ve also had some problems with the pan/zoom tools. Clicking in the area below the horizon pans the view. Drawing a line around interesting area will zoom the view there – but how do you get away to ‘normal’ view?
Since the first Orrery version I’ve had some nice walks under a bright night sky with Orrery and learned (with the kind assistance of my wife :) some new star constellations. Orrery can also act as a red or white flashlight, show all sun and moon information (rise and set times), moon phases, planet compass and a solar system view: you can animate the positions of the planets for the next (or previous) 10 years.
Verdict: Install it. It’s one of the top apps for Openmoko!
ps. Not sure but I think the Orrery version just got updated at opkg.org so the latest changes might not be included here
Centerim
GPL / multi-protocol instant messenger / opkg.org
CenterIM & gmail-jabber connected
Installs smoothly. Doesn’t depend on xterm but uses it by default so it’s also installed.
Years ago I used Centericq as my primary instant messenger on my desktop computer. IRC, MSN and Jabber in the same command-line interface that you could leave running on the server and then remotely connect there no matter what computer & where I was. It had some issues with the screen size and everything so some poeple decided to start CenterIM-project and then some years later another guy decided to port it to Freerunner and here we are: the first working multiprotocol instant messenger for Freerunner that includes RSS and IRC (to me Pidgin doesn’t work, I haven’t been able to configure the accounts there ):
So back to CenterIM. Since it’s meant to be used without X, you run it with keyboard shortcuts. g takes you to the menu to edit the account information where you can find Gmail -jabber sample account for easy connection. After typing in your account information CenterIM loads your contact list from the server. If you have another Jabber-client running somewhere (outside Gmail chat, I guess), you might have some problems connectin. It may take a while to see all your online contacts at the first time but after that it works nice. You can adjust the sizes of the screen parts from the menu as well as idle/away/not available times.
Installing mplayer (if you can find it somewhere) will let you hear sound notifications on arrival of new messages.
Verdict: A simple and usable multiprotocol instant messenger. Try it if Pidgin isn’t for you.
Vala-terminal
Vala-terminal
GPL / Terminal / opkg.org
Installs without problems.
Vala-terminal is a rewrite of openmoko-terminal2. It’s far more advanced than xterm: tabs, zoom, changing of tab position and kind of clipboard. There’s not much to report here, it just works – except it has some issues with fonts: some characters are drawn partly on top of others. If you need a terminal (I’m sure you do and I can’t stop wondering why 2008.12 doesn’t install a terminal..), install vala-terminal, at the moment it’s the best there is.
Verdict: Just install it, you’ll need a terminal app anyway.
MokoConv
MokoConv
GPL / Unit converter / opkg.org
Something every mobile phone should have, Luca Luppi wrote an python based unit converter for Openmoko. It installs a nice icon that looks maybe more of a calculator icon but maths anyway. The program has ‘value’ field where you type in the input value. Then you select the unit category (length, time, speed, temperature, volume, computer units, mass, area, energy) and ‘from’ and ‘to’ units. There’s a nice list of predefined units and you can add more yourself in the database file. It’s nice to have this option but I’d also like to see the a GUI allowing you to do this. A phone isn’t something you use from command line in a moving car on a bad road for example.
The biggest problem I can see is that it has a built in keyboard that gets hidden by the Illume keyboard always when you click on the ‘value’ field rendering it useless – I prefer the on-screen keyboard to the one built in the program. The built in keyboard is also missing ‘e’ to write values in scientific form like 345e-5 (=345*10^-5) even though the program supports this form and I can use the ‘e’ of Illume keyboard.
Maybe removing the built in keyboard and showing the ‘from’ and ‘to’ as a list on the screen for easier usability would make this a bit easier to use. Reorganizing the GUI elements would give enough space for lists and you always can make a scrollable textbox.
Verdict: Useful unit converter, good to have around just in case you need it some day!
Notes
If you want your opkg.org package to be tested, read the rules and Just Do It! I heard of some c0000l apps for iPhone and I’d like to see innovation like those to hit Openmoko as well. The problem might be that OM community is so small and resources are scarce but if I can help encouraging people to do it, I’ll try :) If it helps someone to work knowing they’ll have the change to get some kind of review and feedback from it, I’ll do it. Beware, the third part will be out.. at some stage..
Comments, requests, wishes, objections, opinions? Do you think it’s useful to write reviews like this or is it waste of (a non-coders) time? Write your comment below and have a nice day :)
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Thanks for writing a review on my orrery program. It is always interesting to hear comments from users. I get very few of them. You are not the first user (you’re the second!) to comment that the planet symbols are hard to remember. On the next version, I’ll include a separate toggle under the items menu to allow labelling the planets by name. That happens now, if you enable “Display Names”, but you get all the star names too, which you might not want.
As far as the buttons looking nonprofessional, their appearance is controlled by the gtk theme parameters. They look completely different under 2007.2, 2008.12 and SHR. I don’t think I should override the theme defaults, since it would be nice for all gtk apps to have the same look and feel.
I will add more GPS feedback – at least the number of satellites. As for the “Cambridge MA” issue, all you need to do is go to the place menu, and either select a location from one of the menus (which contain all large cities), or enter the location name and latitude plus longitude. Then be sure to hit “Save to Configuration File” – that will make it your default location anytime the program is restarted. You can also populate a private menu of locations, in
case you want to be able to quickly select one of a few different locations. If you think I’ve left an important city off of my menus, please drop me a line, and I’ll update the list. I’m especially clueless about cities in Asia – I just used a list of cities with populations above 1 million, which I found on the net.
I too am not completely happy with how I handle pan/zoom. Since different OM distributions use the two push buttons for differing functions, I don’t really feel like I can grab either one of them for use by the application code. So I am restricted to screen gestures. I think circling the area you want to have zoomed is fairly intuitive, but since no other application seems to use that technique, I can see how it might be annoying. I may add the option of using a magnifying glass icon, as is the standard on Android. To unzoom, just press the screen for more than 0.5 seconds, without moving your finger (much).
I’ve tried to put a pretty complete description of the program on the Wiki page, but that page is now so long, people might not want to wade through it.
If anyone has questions about or problems with the orrery, please email them to me at orrery.moko@gmail.com. I am especially interested in hearing suggestions for new features you would like to have added.
Thanks again for taking the time to write a review of my program!
Ken Young
Thanks Ken for you detailed answer, respect!
Ability to easily toggle planet names on/off would be nice.
I agree that it’d be nice if all apps would look more or less the same so using standard GTK theme makes sense. Too bad the theme doesn’t look that good, maybe it’ll change in the future :) I myself like the qtopia looks with black
GPS feedback sounds good too, number of satellites is handy but 5 satellites doesn’t always mean you have a fix
Now that you told me how to zoom out it’s easier, thanks :) I was also thinking of a button somewhere that would manage the zoom factor or 100% button or similar.
And doing the tests I haven’t read any documentation wanting to simulate a bit how a first-time user feels and what he could do.
Thanks for the great app, keep up the good work!
One thing I forgot to mention above: The reason I have not made the program work in landscape mode is that the mapping projection I use, the Transverse Mercator projection, is not well suited to the landscape aspect ratio. There is too much distortion at the edges. So I need to use a different projection then the phone’s display is rotated. That will be fixed in an upcoming release. But it is a non-trivial change.
Hey .. just wanted to say that I think its *very* useful to keep writing reviews and I hope you will continue to do so .. You got me inspired to use my Freerunner for something useful again .. ;)
@Ken, ah, okay so there’s a real reason behind it :) Thanks!
@Jay: Thanks, nice to hear that people like to read these and also nice if it inspires you to do something useful :)
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