Hello all!

I promised this new release for the end of the last year, but I delayed it a bit due some changes in my professional and personal life.

Anyway, basically this release is about bug fixing and performance improvement. It’s using less power now, and playing faster.

If you want to try this version, you can get the package here.

And bugs reports are always welcome, and needed ;)

ps.: I’m still trying to upload it to OVI, lets see…

With a little help of Ademar, we’ve selected a good use case: a bouncing game.

The game

The flags

The flags I want to comment on this post are:

• QGraphicsScene::ItemIndexMethod
• QGraphicsView::OptimizationFlags
• QGraphicsView::ViewportUpdateMode

The results

* Those tests were performed on a Nokia 5800, type RM-356, with V51.0.006 firmware and Qt 4.6.3.
** The Y axis is measuring FPS: the higher, the better.

10 elements on the screen

First of all, I’ve tried the four ViewportUpdate methods, with 10 items on the screen, and the MinimalViewportUpdate and the SmartViewportUpdate gave me the highest FPS( 34 and 33.5) . Qt documentation shows NoIndex as the best option for dynamic scenes… well, the difference is small for few items, but it’s true =)

So, for the other tests, lets use the NoIndex flag.

What about optimization flags?

I took two results from the latest test (SmartViewportUpdate and BoundingRectViewportUpdate) and ran it again with two optimizationFlags: QGraphicsView::DontSavePainterState and QGraphicsView::DontAdjustForAntialiasing. So, optimizations flags brings us a little bit of improvement when we can control precisely how the items will be drawn.

20 elements

30 elements

40 elements

Lessons Learned

It’s important to select the correct ViewportUpdate method for your kind of scene. It can make the difference.

If there is a lot of dynamic elements, and if they are scattered throughout the scene, it’s cheaper to paint the whole screen (or, at least, the bounding rect) instead of trying to determinate the affected area.

To be honest I was expecting a better result from FullViewportUpdate, but I believe it would be better than BoundingRect if we use non-static background.

What if?

What if I use only one graphicsItem to paint all the balls? What if a ball was not an item but an object with a render method?

I got a little bit surprised, it wasn’t the result I was expecting – it’s worst. It only gets to be better when I put more than 60 items on the screen.

Will I throw the code in the garbage can?

No! As the result of the tests and with a creative help of Nara – INdT designer – I’m releasing a playable alpha version of this game, called by Chubba-Lubba. It’s not finished, since it’s still missing the icon, sounds and scores features, but it’s testable =)

Symbian package here!

When I was trying to pairing my keyboard, I could see that Su-8W is a pre-configurated keyboard, and with a little of patience, I dicovered the file who manages this: /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/su-8w.

With 5 minutes by reading this file you can be familiarized with file syntax. And, with 10 minutes, you can note that THERE IS NOT A LAYOUT DEFINITION FOR PORTUGUESE/SPANISH. So, now I know why the Portuguese layout doesn’t work =).

But, Ok. Lets try to fix it.

If I select portuguese layout, and there is no portuguese layout, I assume that it’ll use us-intl, right? But, in the begining of the intl definition exists a anoying comment: “I can’t belive! It’s not intl”. Hummm…

Lets ignore this, and go on… What do I need? Dead_keys in `,~,",',^, and ç when I press “ALTgr + c”.

I’ll not explain all the changes I did (it’s not too much, just 4 boring lines), is easier to download and replace the old file by this one, or see the diff. [ADVISE: DO NOT FORGET TO BACKUP THE OLD FILE]

And Voilà, Accents and Cedilla working like a charm.

The right workaround for it is create a valid portuguese layout, but just for testing proposes you can alter the intl layout.

Ok, that is it,

Cheers!

You cannot just put a son in the world. You need to take care of it, to suport it, and help it to grow.

So, because of this, I’m releasing a new N8X0 version of Pychord.

As you know, Pychord is an application to help musicians with song chords. It can be summarized as a Song Book, but it’s not only a song book. Think about having all your musics in a small device with a good screen. Think about fast searches by lyrics. Think on changing music tones on demand! It’s Pychord!

So, if you want to test it, get the install file here.

Pychord HowTo

1 – Pychord file format

First, you need to know the format pychord accepts. It uses a chr file format. Bellow you can see a simple example of a valid chr file.


name:Backet Case
artist:Green Day
D#5 A#5
Do you have the time
C5 G5
To listen to me whine
G#5 D#5 A#5
About nothing and everything all at once
D#5 A#5
I am one of those
C5 G5
Melodramatic fools
G#5 D#5 A#5
Neurotic to the bone no doubt about it

So, we have two headers:

1. name: Name of the music
2. artist: Name of the artist

And below we have the chords in pure text. It’s very simple.

2 – Installation

Take the latest deb file here and install it on your device. After that, go to your “Extra Menu” and open Pychord.

In the pychord first screen we have some informations like:

1. Text you want to search in the database
2. Search context. You can search music by “Music Name”, “Artist” or “Word” (Lyric part)
3. Search button
4. Close window button
5. Information window
6. Playlist window

3 – Start and update

First of all, you need to create your database file. When you have new lyrics, or in the first time that you execute pychord, you have to execute pychord’s update procedures. To do that, just click on Information Window[item 5 for the list above]. There’ll be a window like this:

1. Where pychord will install their database files (Internal Memory, external memory card, Internal memory card)
2. Where pychord will look for chr files on updates (Internal Memory, external memory card, Internal memory card)
3. Show Advanced Options
4. Save settings
5. Update database

Just explaining: [1] and [2] are combo boxes with a few options (I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible). If you want to set a specific local, click on advanced options. ComboBox[1,2] will be replaced by input boxes. And there you can type full paths.

When you are done configuring Pychord, just press Save.

Suppose that your chr files are in your external MMC. On “Song Directory” select “Pychord/ (External Memory Card)“. Then, click on Save, and click on Update.

Probably this operation will take 1 or 2 minutes. Pychord will search by every chr file in “Song Directory” and put this songs in its database.

Your files needs to be encoded in UTF-8!!! This very is important!!! Remember: UTF-8!!!

4 – Using Pychord as an advanced SongBook

One major advantage of using Pychord instead of using conventional songbooks is: Faster searches!

Go to pychord main screen and type anything about the song that you are looking for. Now, select the field to be used. It can be the name of the artist ( Artist ), part of the lyric ( Word ) or part of the music’s name ( Music ). Now, click on Search button.

In the next screen you will see a list of results. If the result list does not fit in the screen size, it can be scrolled down so that more results can be seen. To scroll the screen just press anywhere on the result list, and scroll. If you want to do a click, just click the screen without moving.

4.1 – When viewing a song

After choosing your song, it will be displayed in a screen like this:

1. Song (scrollable list)
2. Options window
3. Scroll speed down
4. Scroll stop
5. Scroll speed up

4,5,6 are scroll control buttons. Keep the button 5 pressed and see the song [1] scrolling. To reduce the scrolling speed, press button 3, and to stop it press buton 4.

To change song’s font size, press hardware keys ZoomIn/ZoomOut.

Pressing Button-2, a new screen will be displayed.

Inside this window, we have tree buttons:

1. T+: increase the music tone
2. T-: decrease music tone
3. Add to playlist: adds (or remove from) the music to playlist =)

5 – Using Playlist

On pychord main screen, click the Playlist button and a new window will be shown. In that window you will find all the songs you have added to your playlist.

To remove a song from your playlist, open this song, and click on information button and after that, click on “Remove from playlist”

You can clear your Playlist by clicking in “Clear Playlist” on your Playlist screen.

6 – Final comments

I’m working on an heuristic to recognize whether a line is lyrics or chords. It’s far away from being perfect, but I’m working on it!

Pychord is not working with OpenSong format yet because it’s not so easy to create the xml file. I thought of an easy way to put songs into pychord, and chr file was the easiest format I found. But I want to support opensong, and it will happen soon.

This is a beta version, the main features are working, but you can find some bugs!

PLEASE: WE NEED YOUR HELP! How?

1. Tell me your ideas
2. Send me suggestions and critics
3. Report bugs

So, I’m finishing this post. You are invited to test pychord. I’m waiting your comments.

[ ]‘s

Thanks to Gustavo Boiko, who helped me with this text.

Here in my city (Curitiba – Paraná – Brazil), maemo-mapper works very well…. My car is always in the route ( a green line in maemo-mapper ), I know perfectly where streets are, and I know exactly where take the exits on the highways. But Curitiba is a big and important city, so I decided to test it in Londrina – PR.

Londrina is a little country tow here in Paraná, but probably is the second more important city in my state. Anyway, how I was saying writing before, GoogleMaps is so faw away to be precise in Londrina. Take a look in the photo below:

The red line is what my car was doing and the green line is what GoogleStreetMaps was telling me to do.

Now I know; it’s not a Google’s problem, but it’s a MapLink problem. Maplink is the company who provides street-maps to google in Brazil.

Anyway, on this situation, I can’t trust in maemo advises anymore. Google’s way points doesn’t work anymore. So I decide to fix this problem writing a “mapper-calibration” feature inside maemo-mapper. And its ready now.

Go to “Menu/Maps/Map Calibrate“. After that, just click in a point that you think you really are.

I sugest you to stop your car in some corner, find this corner in mapper, and click on it. It’ll be more precise.

And the result will be something like that:

Há! Much better now!

I don’t know if this problem happens in another countries too, but if you think that this feature is interesting to you, you can download the patch here, or get the compiled package. (2008-version only, sorry folks)

Just remember to disable this feature when you don’t need it. =)

So, on the next weekend I’ll be in Sorocaba testing this feature. Then I’ll describe if this is useful.

So, nice weekend for everyone!

Bye!

[update: 19/01/2008] BTW, I was forgotting. Maemo-Mapper is very well developed. They have a nice (and interesting) unit-system, so its very easy to transform pixels into latitude/longitude and vice versa. Congratulations Maemo-Mapper’s Team!

All features (about 1.0 version) are working. Now I need to work in two different lines.

• Source Code improvement [1]
• Bug Fixes[2]

[1] I didn’t have enough knowledge about pygame when I started this project. So I need to change some parts of the code to fix wrong decisions that I made before.
[2] If you are using this application, please, give me a feedback and I will try to make it better!

Then I will start to develop the 1.1 version ( with some features that I promised before ).

In this version, I created a configuration file (/home/user/.pychord.conf), and this file has to have two simple lines:

db=/home/user/.pychord.db
datadir=/home/user/pychord/data

Where:
“db” is your DataBase file, with all your chords. Its a sqlite’s file.
“datadir” is the folder where pychord will get the chords to put into database file on update process.

You can edit these options by clicking on “i” symbol in PyChord’s first screen. You can also choose by what type of update you want: Full-update or Incremental Update. In Full-update you will lose all your database data. In incremental update pychord will get all files of your datadir and put into database.

All files in your datadir folder have to have the “.chr” extension, and have to be like this example:

Name: Music Name
Artist: Music Artist Name
D# E F
Your chords
D # E F
Your chords
D E# F
Your chords

(Two first lines are used like headers, describing the Name of the music and the name of the Artist. Followed by the chords)

Ok, its too easy right?!

So, you have to have a directory (datadir) and put all your files there. Default folder is /home/user/pychord/data. Don’t forget to update your database when you start to use this application.

So, Ok! Now you can download .install here!

If you have problems to install this application, try again by searching for it on ApplicationManager->Browse Installable Applications->others->pychord

If you have any problems after that (or suggestions), please, let me know!

[]‘s