Artem's blog

Daily wallpaper 1.1 for Nokia N9. Knows how to cut and rotate

Artem — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:23:45 +0000

Direct Nokia Store link - http://store.ovi.com/content/214273

I've released the free Daily Wallpaper for Nokia N9 a couple of months ago. Since that time it enjoyed nearly nine thousands of downloads (quite a number for this platform) and was keeping me personally entertained. Once an hour (or once a day or once a month) it is downloading the fresh cool wallpaper from flickr and every time I unlock the phone I can enjoy a new interesting photo.

Since the moment of release, the most popular request (sometimes even causing the low rating in the Nokia Store) was not to rotate the too wide images, but to cut the central part out of it. I do love the rotation, but my opinion is totally irrelevant compared to the customers. So since yesterday, version 1.1 knows how to do both rotation and cutting. Cutting is the default mode. Enjoy and, please, submit more requests or vote on the existing ones.

Winter holidays: 50% discount on Easy Discount Calculator for Nokia N9 and Symbian phones

Artem — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:47:46 +0000

For those too busy to read the whole post: from now and until the end of winter you can get Easy Discount Calculator for Symbian and Nokia N9 for 50% cheaper (1 euro in most of the countries) from Nokia Store at http://store.ovi.com/content/186742

I am a big fan of small utilities tuned for the very concrete purpose. And I don't enjoy messing with the lots of discount calculations. You know, when one headset for my phone was 49 euro and now it it is 33% cheaper, but then there is the other one that used to be 69 euro and now it is 40% cheaper. How much do they actually cost?

Simple, elegant, slick, fast!

That was exactly the reason a group of friends (Artem Marchenko, Jarmo Parkkinen, Tuukka Lindoos and Ekaterina Kuts) decided to solve and created Easy Discount Calculator, the first ever real app that runs on Symbian devices, MeeGo Harmattan devices (Nokia N9) and Android devices from the same source code. OK, Android support was a bit of an experiment, so on some phones it works flawlessly, on others it doesn't, so we offer it for free.

Top ranked and top rated after a couple of months in sales

From the sales start in September, this Discount Calculator was steadily climbing up the best seller list and is right now is the top rated and second top seller business app for Nokia N9 and just below the top page of Symbian business apps top seller list. So we figured if people like the clean UX and find the app useful, why don't we give it out cheaper for after-Christmas sales and maybe we manage to climb to the very top seller position for the business apps.

Winter discounts! Get it for just one euro or even cheaper

So from now and until the end of February 2012, Easy Discount Calculator is available for the cheapest possible price for Symbian phones and Nokia N9! That is 50% reduction of what it used to cost. Exact price is determined by Nokia store, I believe for most of the European and American countries it should be around 1 euro or 1 dollar.

You can get the Symbian and N9 versions from Nokia Store at http://store.ovi.com/content/186742 and Android beta is available for free at http://bit.ly/discountcalculator

If you happen to have a minute for comments, we would also love to reply to your comments and proposals at our support web-site http://discussions.zoho.com/easydiscountcalculator

Daily Wallpaper - a top photo & video download for Nokia N9. Free until Christmas 2011

Artem — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:48:41 +0000

N9 is a wonderful Nokia device totally unlike the smarphones it was doing earlier. To the date it gathered a number of extremely positive reviews and is arguably the first phone able to compete the iPhone in the user experience area and in how beautiful it looks. It got a beautiful AMOLED screen that just begs to be used for pictures, new and interesting pictures. Yet finding great wallpapers and setting them manually is tedious. Well, no more. Meet Daily Wallpaper, one of the top downloads for N9 in the photos & videos category enoying several thousands downloads a month (quite a number for a device released just a month or two ago in a small number of markets).

Daily Wallpaper is a small app that every hour, every day, week or month gets to flickr, downloads a fresh photo from a group focused on gathering great wallpapers and sets it as a device wallpaper that you can see on the device lock screen. Certainly you can set choose the wallpaper yourself at any moment as well.

The app is evolving actively, new features and improvements get released sometimes once a week and while I am still working on the fresh features, I am keeping the app available for free until at least Christmas 2011, possibly longer. Later the app will become a paid one, but once you downloaded a free version, you should be able to get updates for free forever (that is if I've git the Nokia store rules correctly).

Have a look, give it a try and let me know which features you are missing the most. Go vote for your favorite features or submt a new idea to the Daily Wapaper's uservoice portal.

Enjoy!

How to make your QML applications scale to and look nice on Symbian, MeeGo/Harmattan and android

Artem — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 12:35:37 +0000

Yesterday I was talking at the 2nd Tampere barcamp about how you can make your application automatically scale to different devices, yet allow for pixel perfect fine-tuning when needed. We used this approach for Easy Discount Calculator that is to my understanding the first real app available simultaneously for Symbian, MeeGo/Harmattan and Android (on some Android devices it runs smoothly, on som it has problems due to bugs in not yet mature the porting technology).

Unfortunately the presentation may not make much sense to you if you haven’t been to the barcamp as well, but you may like to have a look at the application on your device. Here are the links to the app stores:
- Easy Discount Calculator for Nokia devices. BTW right now it is the second in the top seller Business apps for Nokia N9.
- Easy Discount Calculator for Android devices

QML settings

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Tampere Goes Agile 2011 - conference photos

Artem — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:58:46 +0000

A couple of days earlier, on Saturday, Sep 17 in a city of Tampere I was co-organizing the conference called Tampere Goes Agile. Conference was a big success, preparations were challenging and interesting and I should really write about it. For now, here is the slideshow for the conference photos. If you want your photos to appear here, tag them on flickr with tamperegoesagile.

There are no comments allowed on this blog (until I find time to solve the overspamming problem), but feel free to copy-paste the slideshow code to wherever you like. The best way for providing feedback is a tweet tagged with #tamperegoesagile or a blog post with a tweet linking to it.

Created with flickr slideshow.

Agile Eastern Europe 2011. A unique conference and a unique marketing opportunity

Artem — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 11:49:26 +0000

As some of you may know, I used to go to quite many Agile conferences from relatively academic XP20XX to pretty-much industrial Agile20XX. Yet there was always one conference that remained special for me - Agile Eastern Europe that happened first time in Kiev, Ukraine in 2009.

Even from the first time it was a huge event never seen before in the region. The reasons were three:
- The region was ripe for a big event. Agile was still in its infancy and a number of local conferences just had to turn into something big
- Excellent speaker line up. The team did excellent job attracting the best speakers one could hope for, including David Hussman, J.B. Raisenberg, Jurgen Appelo and others. Yours truly was also speaking on Estimating and Planning, though in a somewhat different league
- A unique location that is visa-free to nearly whole world. It is pretty much the only country in the world where EU, US, Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian people can meet without any visa hassles

AGILEEE 2011

This year AGILEEE is going to happen again and I am glad to help with finding sponsors for it. Besides being a great place for participants, AGILEEE is also an excellent marketing opportunity with the crowd full of influence on the company purchasing decision. Last year we had people from 22 countries (twenty two!), nearly half of 450 participants were project managers and executives.

So if you happen to know a company with software industry related interests in the region or just a maker of a tool for the software developers, tell them about this post or about my direct contacts: marketing@agileee.org. skype:artem.marchenko, phone: +358-50-486-1137, twitter:AgileArtem

Test-Driving QML

Artem — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 10:08:44 +0000

On March 15, 2011 I was taking part in the Tampere MeeGo meetup . I was talking there about how you can test-drive your QML projects using a semi-official qtest-qml library.

Here are the slides and the example code.

Test driving QML

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Photos from AgileEE 2009 in Kev, Ukraine

Artem — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:37:22 +0000

Few days ago I was honored to speak about Agile Planning on Agile Eastern Europe conference that happened in Kiev on 18th and 19th of September. I promised many people to share the conference photos, so here is a slideshow. I also added some pictures of the Kiev and its people to help you feel the atmosphere and ~~showcase my great photo talent~~ If you prefer looking at photos one by one, you can find them in this flickr collection.

I hope you'll like the pictures.
Enjoy!

XP2009

Artem — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:40:31 +0000

I tend to go to one big agile conference a year (doing a PhD helps to add motivation). This year it is XP2009 - the premier European conference on all things agile. Usually I publish some reports either after or even before the conference. This year I got ~~lazy~~ extremely busy having a PhD symposium, a paper and a workshop to run and instead of a creative reporting I just let you see the photos to get a feeling of what the conference atmosphere was like.

If you wonder about the place, everything happens on a very lovely place on the Italian island Sardinia.

Unfortunately I am still bad with remembering people I don’t know very well, so if you recognize an unnamed person, tell his name in the comment and I’ll update the post. This post will be updated if I add more photos later.

First several random pictures of the people talking.

Evening singer in the restaurant

You have to pass this area on the way to the restaurant

Thinking about a common problem I guess

Coffee break queue

Helen who was a co-runner of the PhD symposium and the students

The guy on the right is Hubert, one of two official photographers on the conference. Ask him for the better photos. The other official photographer is Tom Poppendieck, but somehow I didn’t take a photo of him yet.

Mary Poppendieck sharing her wizdom and humor – as usual

That’s what the hotel territory looks like

About 50 meters from the hotel

You can see the hotel on the background

I think white is one of the two the favorite colors of Joshua Kerievsky. At least he always wears either white or black, when I meet him.

The guy in the middle is Patrick Kua who writes a very useful blog on agile coaching

Couple of finns (Kati and Mikko) and, well, couple of non-finns. The amount of of conversations in Finnish on this conference skyrocketed comparing to, say, XP2007. I wonder whether it’s a sign that Finland wasn’t hit by the recession as much as the other countries.

There are quite many “just tourists” in the hotel.

Unregistered participant

PhD symposium dinner. It was the first time I ever tried a dinner with seven or maybe even eight meals. Too bad they were also very tasty – will definitely have to spend some quality time in the gym.

Workshop on Agile Software Production Line Engineering. A manager from F-Secure, Pekka Abrahamsson and Frank Maurer

Lasse Koskela and Dave Nicolette demonstrate the art of test-driven development on legacy code.

Yours truly

Read Agile Software Development blog on Kindle

Artem — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:50:08 +0000

Not that we would be expecting many of you to do this, but if you have an Amazon Kindle , you can subscribe ($$) and have new articles on Agile Software Development automatically downloaded.

Read on Kindle

I find Kindle a fantastic idea. Be it available in my country and cost less, I would probably read books on it. I am not sure whether I would pay for reading blogs that are anyway available online for free, but then maybe you find it comfortable enough for paying. Anyway now you have the option. If anyone tries it, let us know in comments to this blog.