Posts filed under ‘multiplatform’
CellarDoor in German plus Debian package
Dear friends
Some quick updates on CellarDoor are due. Since last week, it has debian packaging support in the buildsystem, contributed by Milton Soares.
Simply run ‘make deb’ and you are set: a nice debian package is generated at end.
Next, Adriano Cavalcanti contributed another translation to CellarDoor, German:
Thanks to the fact that German has some bigger than average words, it will require some adjustment in some parts of the UI, but so far so good! As soon I finish some missing features, I’m planning to make a ‘non-hackers’ release.
Currently CellarDoor is available in:
- English
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Italian
- German
Do you known French or Spanish?
🙂
Presenting CellarDoor
Last January I was talking with my friend Wilson Prata about applications. We have partnered a couple of years ago when creating amora (which by the way needs some care urgently, but this is another matter) and he presented to me a concept for a nice and cool new app: CellarDoor.
What is CellaDoor? Well, it is a wine app. Have you ever started a conversation with someone that also appreciate wines and then failed when trying to remember the name of a good wine you tasted a couple of months ago?
Or what about easily exchanging a wine recommendation? Trying to keep notes in a restaurant napkin is not really much effective.
Trying to address this and other user cases, I started to work in the mockups that he had at time. A great UX designer once taught me the value of close cooperation between programmers X designers to create something that looks good and performs well (and I honestly believe that the best way to create an app is to have at least one designer aboard since the very beginning). This is a different approach than the traditional hack-hack-hack then later ask a designer for some cute icons which is, with some exceptions, the rule in OSS/Freesoftware world.
Unfortunately, I lacked enough free time to progress quickly, but I believe that the app has progressed well enough for a public release. You can checkout the project’s webpage.
So, what are the current features? Here they are:
- good looking UI with nice usability
- create a wine card with basic information (year, name, vineyard, etc)
- filter by wine type (e.g. red, white, other)
- persistence of data in a sqlite database (which by the way you can edit in the desktop)
- Supported platforms: Linux, OSX, Windows 7, Symbian 5th and 3 (e.g N8, N5800, etc)
- snap a photo of the bottle/cork in supported platforms (Linux, Symbian). Persistence of this photo is my todo list (hey, I didn’t say that the app is completely done!).
The magic to support such varying OSes (Linux, Window, OSX, Symbian), form factors (Mobile, Netbook, Desktop) and resolutions (from 360×640, ranging in 1024×800 and up) is that I used Qt/QML for the UI. At time that I started, Qt Components were not ready yet, so I got to implement my own (probably buggy) widgets like a combobox (based in joint work with my other friend Ricardo Sato) and a calendar widget (coded together with my friend Igor Trindade), this last widget deserves to be pictured bellow:
A long backlog indeed waits in the issue tracker of the project. Between those, I believe that next steps should be:
- Packaging: for symbian I have it done (self signed), Window7 I played with WiX to create an installer but I need help for testing. OSX packaging (.dmg) and rpm/deb help would be greatly appreciated;
- Translation: it currently supports English and Brazilian Portuguese. I believe it would be cool to support other languages (French, Italian, German);
- Coding: there are several features that would be awesome to have, if you are interested, let me known.
So, since ATM there aren’t public packages yet, I guess this is a ‘hacker’s only release’. What you need to compile it is Qt 4.7.x and if in Linux, Qt Mobility 1.1.
Concerning the license, it is good and old GPL v2 code with CC non-commercial for the artwork.
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