mSoma a Qt client for SomaFM

Andrea Grandi proposed me a few weeks ago to try and develop a client for SomaFM, a streaming radio with near 16 different channels, available for free. Indeed we wanted to try to develop an application for our cool Nokia N900 smartphone. Since this phone is now based on my beloved Qt framework, I accepted with much pleasure.

The really cool thing was that, by relying on the qt-mobility APIs (new Qt APIs for mobile application developers), we could enjoy cross-platform developing: all the code that I wrote for this player was tested and debuged on my computer, as a desktop application. Then, we deployed on the Nokia N900 and tried it there (and it worked seamlessly).

For instance, this are some screenshots of msoma running as a desktop application (in Linux in this case):

And this is a screenshot of the application running in the N900 (taken from Andrea's blog post):

Which is just a recompilation targeting Maemo (with this respect, the Nokia Qt SDK, based on QtCreator, is really helpful when developing).

Of course, this is the very first version of this application, and surely the UI should be different in the desktop application with respect to the cellphone version (in order to be more usable in the mobile devices). But, as it is, it's already enjoyable (but I may be biased ;)

Source code is available on Gitorious and it's always updated with latest version we're working on. If someone want to test the application, it's available in extras-devel repository ("msoma" under Multimedia section) of N900.

In case you want to use it as a desktop application, please remember that you need qt-mobility. I blogged about the installation of qt-mobility in Linux.

We really want to thank, Rusty Hodge, SomaFM's founder, who provided so many details about SomaFM for developing our application (and of course we thank him also for SomaFM itself :)

We look forward to receiving feedback, patches, suggestions, and help! :)

Our maemo profiles:

• Andrea Grandi
• Lorenzo Bettini

MyIpTrack: keep track of the IP addresses you use

I've just released a new program, which is actually a php script to install on a web site.

MyIpTrack is a php script that allows you to store the IP addresses with which you connect to the Internet. It stores such information on a text file. The information stored are: the IP address, date and time and some notes.

This is pretty useful if you connect to the Internet with many different providers (wireless networks, Internet cafe, etc.) and you want to keep track of all the IPs you've used (and date and time). You can also fill some notes for each such record.

MyIpTrack only needs a web server with PHP; it does not use any database: it stores the information in a text file. The archive consists of a record per line (thus records are separated by newline characters), and fields are separated by a tab character:

IP TAB date TAB address TAB notes

How it works

The idea is that when you connect to the Internet, you visit the page where you put MyIpTrack; at this point you'll be presented a web form already filled with the IP, the date (and time) and the address corresponding to the IP you are currently using. Then you'll be able to add some notes (e.g., that help you remember for what you used that IP).

If you're using an IP that you've used before, MyIpTrack will show a table with all the dates you used that specific IP.

It also shows a table with all the IP addresses used in the past. See the screenshot below.

License

MyIpTrack is Open Source, under the GPL license.

Installation

After you downloaded the .zip file and extracted its contents, all you need to do is copy the contents of the directory html into a directory of your web server. Make sure to give full write access to the text file where the information will be stored: archive.txt.

MyIpTrack is not thought to be part of a public web site: its web page is considered to be used only by the user who installed it, so it should be put in a private web directory. However, MyIpTrack provides also a basic authentication mechanism based on a user name and a password, specified in the file config.php. Just leave the user name empty if you're not interested in the authentication. If you want to use authentication, change the user name and password.