Replacement for Google Reader?

Does complete replacement for Google Reader exist?

Threre is just couple of weeks of time to find a replacement and so far I haven't found what I need. To me most important part is to have 3rd party API available so I can write a client for my favourite mobile platforms, which obviously are MeeGo Harmattan for my N9 and Sailfish OS for Jolla. I'd also like to have good Android tablet app for my Nexus7 and decent website when I'm at work.

Best part of Google Reader was that it offered all of these for free. The replacements I've seen so far are either paid solutions or are not offering an API. I'd really love to find a free solution (free with ads is fine).

FeedWrangler is the paid solution I'm currently considering if I can't find a decent free one. It's 19$/year and looks like it offers the things I want.

I haven't looked into the alternatives in that much detail so I'd really appreciate any recommendations.

Swipe on!

Nokia's new Asha 501 is quite an interesting device.

I like the user interface, which is quite close to the Swipe UI on the N9. On demo videos UI is running quite nicely, even though the device is cheap and probably quite low-end specs. My understanding is that making modern UI running nicely Nokia ditched S40 platform and developed a new one based on the SmartedPhone OS. To me this makes the Asha 501 one of the most ambitious devices Nokia has developed recently.

I'm happy to see Nokia innovate again and that they had the guts to actually ship. Battle agains cheap droid manufacturers will be hard. For true innovators sake I really hope Asha platform will succeed.

Nokia's challenge is to make consumers understand the benefits of having platform optimized for low-end devices. The problem is that on paper these cheap Android devices look good, too good to be true if fact. And in real life most of the time they aren't good at all. Their battery life sucks, they are buggy, despite seemingly nice specs the UI can be laggy, and they are quite complex to operate. Some devices are obviously better than others, but in general at least usability, durability, and battery life should be clearly better in Asha 501. I'd also expect basic phone functions (calling, texting, etc.) to be way better in Asha given Nokia's years of experience in building mobile phones.

I think there are two markets for these new Ashas. Developing world is the obvious one. The second one is people in western world that want some smartphone features, but do not want complex device. I think iPhone has a lot of users that prefer it over Android just because its simpler to operate. Now, with modern UI Asha is way cheaper alternative and should be just as usable. For example I think I could recommend Asha 501 for my retired parents, or I might buy one for myself as backup phone for travel, etc.

As an application developer, I'm not that interested in the platform. I'm generally ok with Java as language, but I do not like traditional UI Frameworks and as long as there is no proper declarative way (like QML) of building the UI, I'm not going to bother. Good interface building tool might help here, for example Apple's interface builder is quite nice. I haven't actually checked if there exists one nowadays for J2ME, but I doubt it. As an alternative to J2ME it is possible to write Web Apps for Asha platform. These devices are having quite limited performance and with web technologies its even more difficult to write well performing apps so I'm not really interested in trying that route either.

It has been a while from the last time I was as exited about Nokia product as I am now. Glad to see old colleagues still delivering cool stuff.

Tweetian

One of my hobby projects for Sailfish OS has been porting Tweetian on it. This is not a complete port yet. There is plenty of stuff that does not yet work, but basic stuff is already working as you can see from the video below.

My code is still hackish and incomplete. I'm hoping to get it soon to good enough shape so that I can contribute it to upstream project. In the meanwhile sources of my port are available be found from my github fork under branch sailfish-port.

Sailfish SDK Alpha

After a lot of hard work, we finally got the Sailfish SDK alpha version out. I've been involved in the SDK work for some time now, and I'm extremely happy to see the community to start to port their apps to Sailfish OS.

After the launch I've seen some really cool screen shots of apps being developed or ported to our platform. Now, I'd like to show something I've been doing. I've got a few of my own hobby projects brewing, and I've done couple of initial ports of nice open source apps to Sailfish as part of testing and presenting the initial SDK. So for benefit of the community, I'm now publishing the sources of my first porting project, Grrok. Grrok is a great little Google Reader client by Jon Levell. Its open source and I like it, so I did a quick port of it to Sailfish and used it to demo developing for Sailfish at Jolla Hackday and at Qt Developer Days 2012 at Santa Clara, California.

Here is couple of screenshots:

The sources of my port are available at: https://github.com/veskuh/grrok

Qt Developer Days 2012, Santa Clara

It was -17°C and snowing when I left from snowy Tampere. About 24h later I was at San Francisco Airport. I did not sleep too much and I was dead tired the whole next day. Unfortunately I still needed to stay sharp for the whole day since there was important stuff to be done. In the official program it was a training day. I had registered to Effective QML -training, but after sitting there for couple of hours I realized it was not really targeted for me since pretty much all the stuff trainer covered I knew already.

We had agreed to give a hands-on demo and interview of Sailfish OS to Engadget in the afternoon so I decided to skip the training and prepare for Engadget and for the Jolla BoF -session in the evening. I think it was the right choice, since the interview and the hands-on went pretty well even though I was dead tired due to jet lag. The article is now available at Engadget.

In the evening we had a Jolla BoF session that we had agreed just couple of days before the conference. I gave demo of the UI and David talked about SDK, Mer, Nemo Mobile, and Sailfish. It was quite nice to give the UI demo, but the best part of the session was the chats with Qt people after the "official" part. People seemed genuinely curious and sympathetic towards what we do at Jolla.

The next day the conference really started.

Qt5 release candidate was obviously the big news from Qt-project and Digia. Qt5 is definitely interesting technology. Since Nokia doesn't anymore control Qt, the cross platform aspect of it is gaining more support again, even on mobile. In Digia's booth they had demos of Qt5 running on iOS, WP, Androrid, and other platforms. Official support for Android and iOS will be coming later in 5.x releases.

RIM had a strong push to motivate developers to code for BlackBerry 10. The platform is interesting and their UI seems quite nice. I think they do have same kind of thinking behind their UI choices as we do, but that is just inevitable when you try to optimize for single handed use or optimal screen estate use.

In the afternoon I attended Open Source Tablets -panel as one of the panelist and had my own presentation in the last patch of sessions. I talked about Jolla Developer Story and gave a short overview of Sailfish architecture. My slides are available here.

One great thing about Qt Developer Days presentations were that almost all had live-coding part that showed what the subject is really about. In my presentation I took an open source Google Reader -client called Grrok and ported it from N9 to Jolla Sailfish OS. Since the original app is QML/JS and utilizes MeeGo QML Components, porting it to use Jolla Components really was quite quick and easy. I haven't yet published sources of my port, but will do as soon as Jolla Components will be publicly available.

Conference diner was fun. I was still a bit jet lagged so I didn't even drink more than two beers, but I sat down with interesting people from various backgrounds and we had really good discussions. I enjoyed the food too.

In the last day I listened to David's presentation about Mer-project and couple of other interesting sessions. From the technical sessions, I found desktop Qt Components session quite impressive. I was also curious about the QtWebkit in Qt5 and it seems so promising. Can't wait for that to get it in Mer.

In the evening I ended up having diner with couple of Digia's Qt guys. Again, nice people and we ended up agreeing that we would go together to drop our luggage to airport in the following day and then go sightseeing in SF.

Sightseeing in San Francisco was great. It's a nice city and it was especially cool to take a cruise at the bay. It was 20°C and sun was shining. Perfect ending for a great trip.

Slush

Jolla's Sailfish OS has now made first public appearance at Slush conference. I think this video shows quite nicely what the UI is all about:

It took a lot of hard work and determination to get here. At the moment, I'm tired after working long days and then partying hard at Slush. I'm happy and so darn proud of what we have achieved. I know that there is still a long road ahead and a lot to do, but in a very short time we have already achieved a lot. We were able to show pretty impressive UI.

It's amazing what a small, talented, and motivated team can do with right technologies and tools.

MeeGo Tale

Taskumuro did a pretty cool job in collecting the story of MeeGo. Despite all the chaos, annoyances, and all, I loved working there. I'm happy that I stayed until the end and I'm extremely proud of the N9 product.

After the WP announcement in Feb11, when I still was at Nokia, I felt a bit like I had a deckchair on Titanic and most of the stuff we had been doing was just rearranging the seats while the boat hit iceberg. All that was left to do was to see the boat sinking and save whatever we could. If you read the article, I think you will understand my feelings at the time.

Luckily, a lot of the stuff we did is out there as contributions to various open source projects, and there is Jolla to continue coming out with cool Linux-based devices.