Marco Barisione’s Weblog

I finally released a version of “Custom ringtones for your contacts” that implements every basic feature I wanted to have for a first stable version, so I think it deserves being called 1.0 .
Apart from some bug fixes, this new version is translatable and allow you to set a ringtone for callers with a [...]

I just released ringtoned 0.2.4 with a fix to make the N900 able to vibrate again when a call is received.
Ringtoned (displayed in the application manager as “Custom ringtones for your contacts”) is available from extras-devel (that contains a lot of other unstable software!) or from my personal repository:
Install from my personal repository(follow the link [...]

The Fremantle daemon that decodes ringtones seems to have a bug that, in some cases, makes it produce wave files with an invalid size in them. These files cannot be played by libcanberra, so it meant that some ringtones couldn’t be played when you receive a phone call. I just released ringtoned 0.2.1 with a [...]

Several people complained that my custom ringtones application is too slow when receiving calls, so I started analysing what ringtoned does when a new call is received. The three main operations in this case are creating the object that represents a call after retrieving all the needed information (caller ID, etc.) from Telepathy, looking up [...]

If you have any application that adds buttons to the address book (like the contacts merger), you could have noticed that the buttons recently disappeared. This happened because of a bug in Monorail, the IM file transfer application.
Alban already fixed this bug and uploaded a new version to extras-devel. This new version also fixes other [...]

Yesterday I finished implementing the first release of a new program (ringtoned, i.e. ringtone daemon, i.e. I don’t have any imagination for program names) that allows setting a custom ringtone for specific contacts. Ringtoned tries to integrate nicely with the system:

You can select the default ringtone in Settings → Profiles as usual
To set a custom [...]

Often in blogs, forums or IRC you can find people complaining of missing features in some programs (and some of them are very rude). While they can be right sometimes, other times they just make me angry because they don’t know how difficult writing software can be, and they don’t understand the difference between a [...]

Just a quick post to inform the N900 users that didn’t enable the extras-devel or extras-testing repositories that the contacts merger has been promoted to Maemo extras. Just look for “Merge your duplicate contacts” in the application manager and enjoy

I’m often asked questions about the handling and parsing of phone numbers, so I’m going to explain how we do it on Maemo 5. I hope this can be useful also for developers of other applications.
There is no unique standardised way to write phone numbers; in the UK the phone number of the Buckingham Palace [...]

Since my previous post about the contacts merger, I fixed a crash, made it handle better broken vcards, improved the partial matching and made the installer quit the address book when the plugin is installed, so no reboot is needed.
The new 0.1.3 merger is now available in Maemo extras-testing, just look for “Merge your duplicate [...]

One of the common complaints about the Maemo address book is that it’s easy to get a lot of duplicate contacts as the address book is able to pull your contacts from various IM services. From the beginning there has been a way to merge duplicates, but it meant manually going through all of your [...]

Finally the new update for Maemo 5 is out; it’s good to see that months of bug fixes and new features are finally available to everybody! One of the new features, not directly visible to users, is that developers can now add new buttons to the Contacts application menu. At the beginning we wanted to [...]

As I said in my previous blog post, some changes in the Facebook XMPP servers lead to the unmerging of the Facebook contacts that were merged with local contacts in the N900 address book. To fix this problem I wrote the small utility Facebook migrator, now available in Maemo extras-testing, that automatically merges back your [...]

The N900 address book can merge multiple contacts into a single entity: if you have a friend that has a phone number, an email address, a Jabber user name, a MSN one and so on, then you can merge all of the different entities into a single meta-contact.
Locally stored details and an IM user name [...]

Sometimes the creation of the contact chooser used on the N900 can be slow so, using callgrind and kcachegrind, I tried to understand what is the source of the slowness. This lead me to find some unexpected, and apparently undocumented, differences between upstream GTK and the Maemo version.
The Maemo 5 contact chooser
The widget contains a [...]

During the Christmas holidays I managed to find some time to write a couple of small programs related to the address book on the N900; they are nothing too fancy (no UI, no proper packaging, not the best code quality, etc.) as I wrote them for my personal use, but I still think it could [...]

It looks like Santa Claus arrived early for the Collabora employees
N900 pyramid, and sadly some of them didn’t arrive yet

In the last months the traffic on the #telepathy IRC channel on Freenode has been constantly growing, reaching the point where communication among developers is difficult and, at the same time, some new Empathy users are scared and don’t talk on the channel. This is why we just created a new #empathy channel on GIMPNet [...]

After the Maemo Summit the details on the address book application and framework in Maemo 5 are finally completely public so I can openly talk about what I worked on during the past year and, even better, I actually have a smartphone that runs this software! (Thanks to Nokia that gave out 300 N900s, but [...]

Ross, your examples are not as bad as something I found in some code I had to fix recently:

GList *list = e_vcard_get_attributes (evcard);

for (list = g_list_first (list);
list != NULL;
list = g_list_next (list))
{
/* Do something */
}

for (list [...]

In the last weeks I have been asked several times to modify some components I’m working on to add the ability to split a full name in its components (first name, family name, etc.).
It looks like most people have great expectations about this working correctly but they get annoyed when it fails, and you can [...]

When I joined Collabora last year I started to work on porting WebKit GTK to a device produced by iRex technologies based on the GNOME mobile stack and with an electonic paper display. My task was to make WebKit usable for the browser that they want to ship with the next version (with Wi-Fi connectivity) [...]

In the Telepathy framework there is a mechanism, called tubes, for arbitrary data transfer with your IM contacts so you can play games, do collaborative editing, etc. Until now telepathy-gabble (the component that does XMPP) supported only in-band bytestreams, or IBB for short: all the data is sent inside the XMPP stream encoded in base64. [...]