Recently, I've been working on a file transfer app for the N900. It's called monorail and I uploaded it to extras-devel last night, so you can try it out right now.

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I implemented an OssoABookContactView with support for filtering on Contact Capabilities (or a draft of it, at least) as old-style caps aren't great. This gives a nice list of address book contacts who have at least one account that should support receiving file transfers. It would be nice if these extra caps could go into the address book which is where they belong, but it won't.

If someone would find this widget useful, I'll clean up the code and maybe throw it in its own library.

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Choose one of the accounts which support file transfer.

I also started to implement a sharing plugin, but it turns out it's poorly documented and appears to be impossible to do anything useful for my use-case, like popping up a dialog when the user taps "Share". The example isn't very exemplary, but does contain some amusing code.

This sharing plugin is only half-written and impossible to debug. If anyone has any pointers on writing these plugins, I would appreciate them.

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It's a shame that although Hildon widgets can look really good on the device, it can often take some fiddling to make them look consistent with the rest of the UI. Additionally, oddities in some widgets can leave you baffled, or amused.

The most annoying thing I have come across regarding this app is just how little I can get it integrated. The file manager is all hard-coded so there's no way to add a Send to Contact menu item, and no buttons can be added to the libsharing dialog (which appears when the user shares a photo) which is annoying as it looks like it's missing this feature.

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Oh, and Telepathy is pretty sweet.

You are talking about hildonfm widgets, mind you.
Comment by Claudio Thu Jan 14 15:42:00 2010
There's already a piece of software called MonoRail, and it's pretty popular in the Mono/.NET scene.
Comment by Andres G. Aragoneses Thu Jan 14 15:56:40 2010
Just tried it out, works very nicely! Good work!
Comment by Jörgen Thu Jan 14 19:22:01 2010

It took me a while to realise how to make the labels and image in the status panel button, showing the number of active transfers (as shown in the blog entry), take up the entire space available, like all the other buttons do there. Perhaps that's just me though.

I'm not going to rename this because users shouldn't actually see the word "monorail" anywhere. It's all labelled "File Transfers" and "Send a file" in the interface.

Comment by jonny Thu Jan 14 22:09:47 2010
Will you upload to Debian too?
Comment by Anonymous Fri Jan 15 04:24:38 2010
I just started working on developer documentation for maemo.org, and agree with you that the API reference for libsharing, the example sharing plugin and the wiki documentation is quite poor. I have started to improve the wiki documentation, but it will take longer for the API reference to get updated and improved. If you have any specific comments or suggestions for improvement, please file a bug at https://bugs.maemo.org/ or contact me directly at davidk@openismus.com.
Comment by David King Mon Jan 18 13:01:32 2010

i download it from extra -devel and when i open it it it keeps looking for contacts and stays like this forever with empty contacts!!@although i'm connected to different accounts msn,jabber,google,skype...! is there any additional package should i add to make it work!?

thanx

Comment by Ahmed Wed Feb 17 22:48:12 2010
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