My N9 apps and games now self-hosted and on openrepos.net

As the versions of my apps on Nokia Store grow more and more outdated, I've decided to remove the apps from there and instead self-host them on my web page and/or put them on OpenRepos.net instead. A handful of apps stay on Nokia Store; those are mostly S40 apps or apps for which a Symbian version also exists.

Here's a list of my N9 apps that you can now get for free ("deb download" is as of posting this, for new versions visit the webpage or openrepos.net):

• Billboard Standby Screen (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)
• Volume+ As Camera Button (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)
• Headset Camera Button (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)
• Personal Web Server (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)
• Mustr (web page, deb download, openrepos.net) 
• gPodder (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)

And here's a list of my N9 games that you can now get for free (again, "deb download" is as of posting this; new versions on the webpage or openrepos.net):

• qw The Game (web page, openrepos.net)
• Tennix! Redux Demo (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)
• Petals (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)
• Brain Party (web page, openrepos.net)
• Numpty Physics (web page, openrepos.net)
• Plonk (web page, openrepos.net)
• chro.mono (web page, deb download, openrepos.net)

Of these, the "greatest hits" and most useful apps/most fun games are (in my opinion): Billboard, Volume+ As Camera Button and chro.mono, but also give qw The Game and Petals a try :)

A list of all my apps on OpenRepos.net is also available.

Please note that unless otherwise noted, do not copy the .deb files and distribute them yourself, please always link to the project webpage (the page, not the file) or the openrepos.net page - this makes sure users can always download the latest version and from a known-good source (always be careful when downloading and installing .debs from random webpages). For end users who want to stay up to date and install the packages comfortably, the Warehouse client for OpenRepos.net is recommended.

For some of these apps (not games) that are not open source yet, I plan to clean up and publish the source at some point in the future, so interested developers can have a look, add features and/or port it to new platforms.

gPodder 4.0.0 for Sailfish OS released

While we're supplying N9 users with fresh releases of gPodder 3 regularly (the latest version, 3.6.1, has been released last week, and the update is available on gpodder.org/downloads), of course we've also been busy working on a newer, Qt 5 and PyOtherSide-based version of gPodder. After weeks of testing, I think it's good enough for a first release now, so let's warmly welcome gPodder 4.0.0 to the world of Sailfish apps. You can download it and its dependencies from the gPodder downloads page.

If you haven't read last year's article about Python and Qt 5, now might be a good time to do so. PyOtherSide is a much more minimalistic approach to Python bindings, and - in my obviously biased opinion - works better for gluing together a QML UI with a Python backend. In fact, it lends itself to clearly splitting the frontend from the backend, and with the "asynchronous by default" design, you have to work really hard to block your UI thread with long-running Python code (or multithreaded Python code that's waiting for the GIL to be released). PyOtherSide these days is also well-documented, and some early annoyances and bugs have been fixed with recent releases in February. In combination with Qt 5 and Python 3, it works well on OS X, Blackberry 10, Linux, Sailfish OS and Windows. With Qt 5.2 having official support for Android, and a Python 3 port being available, it's only a matter of time before PyOtherSide lands on Android.

For all Sailfish OS users out there: Until the next Sailfish OS update, you might have to install some dependencies before gPodder will correctly start up, these are:

1. libpython3 (the Python 3 interpreter)
2. python3-base (the Python 3 standard library)
3. pyotherside (the Qt 5-Python3 bindings)

As these links point to the current version in OBS, they will break once one of these packages is updated. In this case, just look into the home:thp:gpodder armv7hl repository for the latest versions of these packages. With the next Sailfish OS update, recent-enough packages of PyOtherSide should be in the repositories, so you don't need to install the dependencies manually.