In just about one week it is time for Cybercom Developer Day 2010! You still have a chance to participate the event, but hurry up, there’s only a couple of more days to request an invitation!
Just to recap, some basic facts about Cybercom Developer Day 2010:
What: A FREE one-day event on Qt Quick and KDE Plasma
When: 7th of September 2010, from 9.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m.
Where: Technopolis Ruoholahti, Conference room Marx, Hiilikatu 3, 00180 HELSINKI
Cybercom Channel is undergoing some changes at the moment, and we will upgrade it soon. In addition to the graphical facelift the new platform will introduce a lot of new functionality to the site as well as new features for the readers.
Stay tuned!
-We like penguins-
September is approaching quickly, and in less than three weeks it is time for Cybercom Developer Day 2010! As you might already know, the event is held on 7th Septempber from 9.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. at Technopolis Ruoholahti in Helsinki.
The event will focus on Qt Quick & KDE Plasma and we are sure that the participants will experience an absolutely interesting and exciting event!
There are still some seats available, so be quick to request an invitation, and join us at Cybercom Developer Day 2010.
-We like penguins-
Cybercom organizes the first Cybercom Developer Day in Helsinki, Ruoholahti at Technopolis on September 7th. It’s a FREE, one day event and the topic this year is Qt Quick & Plasma. We are very excited because we managed to get really cool speakers there: Alexis Menard from Qt Development Frameworks, Nokia and Marco Martin from KDE Plasma community.
The event consists of lectures and demos with also an opportunity for the guests to demonstrate their own applications.
We have opened a Cybercom Developer Day 2010 -page, where you can find more detailed information about the event, for example its Agenda and Speakers. The amount of seats in the event is limited, but you can request an invitation to try to ensure your attendance in the definitely interesting event!
Cybercom NSD Ltd Business Intelligence Unit takes part second year in a row in a leading Business Intelligence and Data Management conference in Meripuisto, Espoo. Conference is hosted by the Management Events.
In last year’s conference meeting Cybercom NSD Ltd had a keynote on ”Efficiency in Data Management: From Data Management Strategy into a practical BI Solution” presented by Jani K. Savolainen, Director – Business Intelligence Solutions. This year’s keynote topic will be “Map-based Business Intelligence”, presented in co-operation with Cybercom NSD Ltd customer Municipality Finance Plc.
The new Asus multi-touch netbook, Asus Eee PC T91MT landed a couple of months ago with Windows 7. At the moment, Asus does not sell this model with Linux and has no plans to do so. We were curious to test our UI concept on Asus T91MT, so we had to dig T91MT’s multi-touch support a bit. Regardless of the model name, T91MT does not have a true multi-touch display but the display supports only two touch points.
Since 2.6.30, the Linux input system supports multi-touch events. However, only a few kernel-space drivers are available at the moment and the involved API’s are somewhat in inconsistent state. Interactive computing lab at ENAC University (France) has done valuable job and publications for Linux multi-touch support in general. Once T91MT reached stores, ENAC University published a driver for it. However, this driver was aimed for their own showcase. The driver reads multi-touch input events and passes them as effects to compiz-fusion desktop using dbus. X was not involved with events, since it still lacked support for them. However, X’s support is under way and so far there are working solutions using evtouch (input device driver for Xorg).
As our concept aimed to have its own window compositing, virtual keyboard and no generic applications support, the solution was kept as intact from X server’s dependencies as possible. For multi-touch, this meant that our applications could interact with kernel’s input API directly.
At first, the driver available from ENAC’s site was compiled and tested. It appeared not to emit multi-touch events like expected. Shortly it appeared that ENAC had no T91MT at all, and the driver was written based on information from their other contacts. In co-operation with driver’s author, we were able to figure its main issues that prevented multi-touch use.
The touch controller in T91MT provides USB HID interface, making it easy to communicate with the device. The controller follows the latest specifications made public with Windows 7. Windows 7 HID has few additions that do not exist in generic HID specification:
These new HID usage codes were not generally supported with Linux HID support. The one that counted the most, was the read/write value called InputMode. The InputMode allows device to be configured to act differently. The default mode with T91MT was “Mouse emulation” that causes controller to emit only mouse-like input data. Other InputMode-values were also tested and the one activating the required features was shared with ENACs colleague as an exchange from overall support we received. Later we developed the driver further to suit our own needs and it is no longer suitable for ENAC’s showcase.
Check out the video from CybercomLab/YouTube demonstrates Linux T91MT touch screen with Qt’s Finger Paint.
I have spent three days here in San Francisco at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2010 and I will spend even more days because the Iceland’s volcano eruption caused such a huge ash cloud which closed the almost the whole air space of the Europe.
Collaboration summit 2010 has been very interesting this year especially because of all the buzz that MeeGo has caused. It seems that all those gigantic companies like Intel, Nokia and IBM are all about linux and the way how they do it, is very open.
My name is Marko Mattila and I am one of the Cybercom guys who’s been involved in this blog. I work here at Cybercom as a Senior Specialist and I am mostly dealing with Qt in my daily work.
This is the first post in the CybercomChannel’s Events category. In this category we will inform about the events which Cybercom is organizing or participating in. I’m glad that I have an opportunity to go to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit this year.
There have been so much hype and rumours around MeeGo – Nokia and Intel released MeeGo repositories just a few days ago and discussion forums have been full of MeeGo speculations. Now that Linux Foundation has a big role in MeeGo world, the agenda includes many MeeGo presentations and work groups. I will participate in at least those presentations and I hope that I will get some answer for open questions.
I’m also planning to write at least one blog entry here from the Collaboration Summit. Until then, thanks for reading the CybercomChannel.
Some time ago we published an article and a YouTube video about the PhotoTranslator application which we have developed. We were surprised of the attention it gained. Many people asked us, when will it be available and we have decided to release an alpha version of PhotoTranslator. So if you want to test it, you can install it directly from Maemo extras devel repository AT YOUR OWN RISK.
As you probably have understood already, the PhotoTranslator is not a final version yet and it lacks features. It may, or it may not work as you expect, but as stated before, use it at your own risk. We also needed to remove bunch of languages from the application because they increased the package size to 95M. PhotoTranslator supports only the following languages from tesseract i.e. the languages that it can read from the images (OCR) at the moment:
NOTE: This means that you can translate, but you can only use the OCR for the languages listed above. The workaround for this is that you can write the text manually and then translate it.
PhotoTranslator is a neat application for Nokia N900. It allows you to translate text from pictures to various languages.
Imagine yourself walking on a street somewhere in a foreign country and you face a warning sign, but you have no idea what it says. Just take a picture of the sign and open it with PhotoTranslator, crop the text in the sign and PhotoTranslator translates the text to your language. In addition the PhotoTranslator can be used also for translating copy/pasted or typed text, not just for text from pictures.
The PhotoTranslator project started as a technology study for Nokia N900: how easy would it be to make useful software with some actual purpose for N900 using Qt? I found it to be very easy indeed. Although Qt 4.6 for N900 was far from being ready (at December 2009) it still provided me the necessary tools for creating working Hildon-like software without too much extra work. At that point the Hildon-looks on UI needed some N900 specific Qt code which means that using the same UI code directly on other platforms is not possible. However the code can be modified to be cross-platform quite easily.
What happens under the hood?
PhotoTranslator deploys two Google APIs. For parsing text from pictures I used Google’s tesseract-ocr (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/) library that is installed as binary to N900 with PhotoTranslator. For translating the text to other languages I used Google’s Language API (http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/) which obviously is used through HTML queries. So basically what I did was just that I glued these two APIs work together and wrapped them into nice UI for which Qt is a very powerful tool.
Here is a little demo of the PhotoTranslator in action: