http://openclipart.org/media/files/ben/9651
This competition is organized to encourage the Openmoko community members to write the applications we’re still missing, but also to have fun! The winner will get a prize provided by the community, currently at 314€ and a leather case for Freerunner (39€)!
Task
Write a working solution to play audiobooks and podcasts with a graphical user interface on Openmoko phones.
Update 2009-03-06: Some rules updated, see below.
Update 2009-04-06: Results published
Listening spoken word is a bit different from listening to music. You do not want to miss a single second. That’s why a player should have instant-pause and ability to easily jump back some seconds. A music collection on a device doesn’t change much but podcasts are usually listened only once and then deleted. New episodes are aggregated from the web daily or weekly so scanning the local directory for audio files is not enough. Of course a good music player can be a good podcast player and vice versa but at the moment the audio players are designed to play music.
Remember that You can use any existing backend and podcast aggregation tool as long as your solution works and can be ported to the most popular distributions for Openmoko phones (OM200X.Y, SHR, …). You can also port an existing podcast player if You think it works well on the small Openmoko screen with big fingers in a bus on the bumpy road. The final result and the Freedom is what counts!
Proposed features:
- Finger friendly!
- Ability to manage podcast feeds (existing solutions?)
- Ability to work with large audio files
- Easy rewind (-10s, -5s?)
- Easy play/pause
- Automatically remembering the play position (for each file?)
- Support for headphones
Rules
Announcement: March 2nd, 2009
Registration deadline: March 15th (see below, updated)
Submission deadline: March 24th, 2009 07:00 UTC
Required license: GPL v2 or newer (updated)
Programming language: c/c++ (no python/bash)
General information
In the spirit of Open Source you are allowed to reuse existing code from other programs as long as you respect the licenses. You are also allowed to release your code to the community before the deadlines to test, comment, send patches and whatever you want. That’s why we can’t limit participation to individual developers only – also teams are welcome to participate!
The registration is only to let the organizers know how many are interested. Drop us an e-mail telling that you’re planning to participate.
When submitting your work, send both the organizers (see below) the tar.gz-package which contains the source files and instructions how to make an ipk/opk package which can be installed on Freerunner. We will email you a confirmation that your work has been received.
Winner, jury & prize
The winner will be decided by the Jury: Michael ‘Mickey’ Lauer, Marco ‘Treviño’ Trevisan and the organizers. Also the community will vote for it’s favourite candidate and when deciding the winner, the Jury will also listen to the opinion of the community. (updated)
The winner will be awarded with a prize provided by the community members and fame amongst the community members, of course! Everyone wanting to support the programmers are warmly welcome to donate by bidding in Cofundos (OpenID login!). The prize is currently 314€ and a leather case (39€) or if a team wins, 5€ discount for each member for a leather case. The Jury has the right to decide how the money in Cofundos is shared. (updated)
If the community shows interest in the competition, we’ll be launching another next month. Feel free to suggest us topics and jury members and let us know if you’re interested in sponsoring the competition by paying the prize.
Organizers
Aapo Rantalainen (aapo.rantalainen at gmailcom)
Risto H. Kurppa (risto at kurppa d0t fi)
Links/Getting started
- Cross-compiling on Ubuntu for Freerunner
- Making ipk/opk-package
- Librivox – audiobooks from public domain
- Floss weekly -podcast
SPREAD THE WORD!
No related posts.
This is a great idea! I would even be willing to contribute money for the prize to encourage broader participation. Maybe the platform http://www.cofundos.org/ could be used to organize bounty of this competition, because I am sure that also other people would like to support this.
Good idea, but why are only C and C++ allowed ? What about python, D, vala, cython, etc… ? What about hybrid solutions (python / C) ?
I’ve just made a program that does that this weekend, except it’s in Python, so I’ll not compete. I’ll try to make an opk file today, and upload it to opkg.org.
But a very nice idea! :)
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Guess this is because all the C/C++ programmers feel so superior :-(
I agree that these languages are fast. But this does not really matter for a frontend application. IMHO
We hope to get many participants. If they are all written in the same language, it’ll be easier merge the best features to one excellent player, if someone want’s to do it, instead of having many pretty good players that all have some cool features but something missing from all.
@Torsten: Glad to hear you like it :) I’ve had a short look at Cofundos and I think it’s a nice idea and I agree with you that it could maybe be one option here. I understood that you make an offer that others accept, before you start coding or something. Maybe we could misuse it and set a task ‘Win the first Openmoko programming competition’ or similar. Would you be interested in finding out if it’s suitable for this?
Something else we have to think about is if we want to pay the prize to the winner or to an OS project the winner proposes. Any ideas?
@Esben: Can’t wait to see your solution! Maybe the next competition will be something you also can participate, now that you know about this :)
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Ahh, finally I could figure out how to make an ipk :)
http://www.opkg.org/package_151.html
This is my little podcast program. Only downside (for me) is that it is slow to download. Maybe I’ll change it.. anywho: try it out :)
@Esben: Sorry, can’t comment it when the competition is running but thanks for uploading it to opkg.org!!
Ok I created a project on cofundos.org to manage the prize money. It can be found here:
http://www.cofundos.org/project.php?id=150
Please place your bid there to increase the prize and encourage good work!
In my opinion, we should pay the prize to the winner directly and let her decide what to do with the prize money. She might give it to some project or use it for further improvements…
Another question: Why is the license specifically GPLv2 and not GPLv2 or v3? Since GPLv3 protects the freedom of software better, I would not exclude it from the competition.
Some links to this post found in the net:
http://www.javipas.com
http://www.linuxphone.ru
http://www.cofundos.org
digg.com
wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page
lists.openmoko.org
lwn.net
openmoko-fr.org
mobile-developer.ru
wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Community_Updates
newlc.com
Pingback: Jury & updated rules for the OM programming competition! | Risto H. Kurppa
Based on your feedback we’ve now updated the rules and we also have a new jury member, see http://risto.kurppa.fi/blog/juryupdated-rules-for-the-om-programming-competition/
We’d also like to discuss python a bit more, would you think it’d be a good idea to allow, in addition to C/C++. We can’t allow it any more for this round, it’s too late for that, but in the next round it’s possible to allow it if that’s what you want :)
Let everyone know about this competition so we get many good participants!
@Torsten: is it OK for you that the Jury will make the final decision on the money, based on the community opinion? Just asking ’cause you’ve already bid.
Hey thanks for incorporating all the feedback. Yes, I’m fine with the way the money is handled. Hopefully, others start contributing soon, too ;)
We should have another Openmoko programming contest. If nobody has
a better suggestion, I would recommend having the goal be to add thumbnail
viewing to Neon, so that pictures could be selected from thumbnail images,
rather than by file name.