Marco Barisione’s Weblog

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 some times, 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 [...]

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 [...]