Amora: 14001 downloads

Around 2 years ago, I did the release of Amora (A mobile remote assistant) for Nokia smartphones. This started as a pet project, mostly driven by my own requirements to have a good software for reliably controlling slides and movies using my cellphone through bluetooth. It has a server part, installed in the desktop (written in ANSI C) and a client part, installed in the cellphone (written in Python for S60).

Recently, I haven’t being really active developing it, mostly thanks to some factors:

• At the time, I was waiting for PyS60 2.0 being released (and it took a long time to finally being made public);
• This is my perception, but I feel that there is a shift from python to javascript as a scripting language in general;
• I have being waiting for Qt in Symbian starting to support some features required (like bluetooth, for example). There is a QBluetooth project, but it requires some special capabilities to even install in a real device (and AFAICT, there is not an official build of it for third-party developers to use, say like Qt mobility);
• Finally, I have being quite busy with other projects.

Last week, while checking the project’s webpage, I noticed this:

Not too bad, hum? If you consider that from all the demographics, it targets only the Nokia, smartphone users (3rd and 2nd edition), non-touch, that runs linux as desktop (i.e. a subset of a subset of a subset of…). There is the added complication that the client is also available in other websites for download, so this number probably is not that accurate.

I guess that the fact that it followed the Unix philosophy (“do one thing, do it well”) and the great artwork (provided by my friend Wilson Prata and Alexis Younes) helped. And the fact that it is included in several Linux distros too! Special thanks to all the pacman (package mantainer) who packaged amora.

ps: initially, I thought about naming this post “Amora: 14k downloads”, but that would be incorrect, since 14k == 14336.

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