Handful of Nothing

Lot’s of video coming out our office =) You will be able to see a lot of Canola action, and also a thank you to all the guys who waited a lot for the release, sending a lot of comments here.

Video showing off the WoodBox Theme, Exchanging cards and saying thank you

Canola HOW TO : first video showing off the features in canola.

Take a look at this video to learn about the canola applet, using the configurator, shared media browsing, now playing shortcuts etc.

Under the Hood : 3 am in Brazil, after some months of hard working and overnight hours in the last weeks.

I’m not able to keep my eye opens! But it has been a lot of fun.

Andrunko FIXED it. the repository has just been updated. Please anyone that had problems, please try again:

using this repository :

“Distribution” scirocco
“Component” user

We are uploading a second server in the US, so no more time outs in the brazilian one. just a second

If the first repository fails try this one:

“Distribution” scirocco
“Component” user

Sorry for the small delay. We really tried our best, but of course there’s a lot to enhance after today. We really need your feedback to know what needs to be improved (besides a lot of things we already know :) )

If you were a beta tester click here
How to Install Canola on your Nokia 770
if you don’t have the latest firmware, please change scirocco for mistral

After installing : Restart the 770.don’t forget this step please :)
On the Nokia 770, go to Application Manager.
On Application Manager main menu, select Application Catalogue on Tools.
Press “New” Button.
And then, fill the “Web address” text box with
http://openbossa.indt.org/canola/repository
“Distribution” with
scirocco
and “Components” with
user

Press “OK” Button.
Press “New” Button.
And then, fill the “Web address” text box with:
http://repository.maemo.org
“Distribution” text box with:
scirocco
and “Components” text box with
free non-free

Press “OK” Button.
Press “Close” Button.
If a pop-up window appears asking: “Refresh package list?”, press “OK” Button. Or, select Refresh package list on Tools, on Application Manager main menu.
*If it fails, you must have a typo, please check the address.
It will be shown a list of installable packages. Select Canola.
Press “OK” Button.
Press “OK” Button again in warning pop-up window.
Accept license agreement
Choose folder
Press “OK” Button again after correctly installed.
After installing : Restart the 770 -> this is mandatory, unfortunately. If don’t do this it will crash, cause the reboot starts some important services.

If 770 is not updated with scirocco version, user must change “scirocco” by “mistral”.
Now, Canola is ready to be used.

More info, while the site is not ready!

Known Issues

We expect to get lots of feedbacks. Good ones, bad ones and the most important: the constructive ones. These feedbacks will enable us
to improve Canola in a way we believe to be very important: The way that you, Canola users, want.

So, before sending us some bugs, take a peek into this list to see whether it’s already here. If so, it’s very likely that we are already fixing it,
bug reporting to other project, or even trying to modify Canola to behave better about it until a solution turns up.

Memory
The device, as any personal computer device, can run out of memory. This will cause strange effects, and some of those can be produced
when using Canola. Trying to load big pictures (e.g. 1600×1200) to show on the 800×480 screen gives the 770 a big workload, and consumes
a lot of memory.

Solution: Resize your pictures to the optimal sizes of 640×480 or 800×480 before sending it to the device. This will not only speed up the image browsing (as no resize is required) but will also let you do other things like playing music while re-scanning the library in the background without any problems.

Other scenarios where it happens:

When trying to stream not optimized videos via UPnP. Solution: use the Maemo movie converter.

If you remove the memory card while using it as swap memory, you will face some heavy system instability. This is a logical problem and will happen even outside of Canola, so avoid this at all costs. If you really need to use the card, turn the swap off or turn the device off and use a memory card reader.

If the device starts rebooting sequentially, just remove the battery.

Canola screen is black when minimized
When you hit the “home” button on your maemo device, you can hit it again to return to Canola. In this first release, Canola doesn’t come back in
the first keypress and the screen remains black on the application view (see image). This is due to some issues in the SDL library that don’t deal
very well with the system signals.

Solution: Pretty simple: just hit the home button twice, or select Canola twice from the taskbar (see image).

Random Freezes while browsing shared media
Sometimes when browsing shared media you can run out of memory, and the platform will kill some important components and go into a reboot.

Using Canola

Canola is quite simple, but does have some more advanced use cases.
But remember to activate one Applet in the desktop of your 770 to be able to acess canola faster.

Also, to configure your feeds, try out the great theme Wood_box, use the canola configuration in the menu, or point your browser to:
http://canoladeviceip:9000/

Beta testers
Unfortunately, we had to change a lot of things, so you must flash your device! sorry for that but for now there’s no easy option!

LibSoap problem
Try verifying your repositories please! We had this problem during beta tester and it was fixed, but you should really see if there’s nothing in the repository.
If it persist, please send me your repository list. We tried with new, old, flashed, mistral, scirocco everyt single device. So please send your repository for us. We can fix it right now!

12:00 here in recife : Ok, actually we are going to be late some 5 minutes. Sorry very much for that. We are just uploading the repository.

Sorry for making you wait guys, but we really need to test the last stuff. And opera browse in the device is killing me. AHHH!
It will be release today =) at least here in brazil!

Ok, this is my last post before the launching. Today it’s the big day and of course I’m going to use each minute of this day to make sure everything is fine. Testing repositories, testing and retesting debians package with mistral and scirrocco (wrong I know) finishing the hot site with instructions, known issues and of course + videos, and to end also launch our lab’s site, Openbossa.

So folks, we did our best, we hope you all enjoy canola, and the most important thing : please give us a lot of feedback. Your comments will be the main motivation for the future versions and of course we will try our best to make it better and better.

It’s 1:27 am , november 29th, and I’ll post again only to link to the hotsite, etc. Hours left only know.. OMG! so much to do! no sleep, no rest… every project has been like this in all these 7 years of professional experience, but I really don’t want to give up doing things like this!

I know there’s no much time left, but I think it should be nice to see at least in a blurry way (sorry folks only my 3250’s camera photos) some of the things that we pumped into canola since the testing release (last week). I’m impressed with the amount of work and debugging we did.

First thing I would like to thanks again every single tester that gave us a lot of excellent feedbacks and bug reports. This really made us focus on the things that needed a lot more love : the canola configuration tool, and the scan for new media daemons.

Also, Chenca did some nice key + touch combos for browsing the list along with some improvements on text rendering. He and Cidorvan also did a great job pumping the volume bar and rating features in the playing screen. Now I think we are even closer to the point that we really want for local media playblack. Some basic features are missing, and some users will complain about it… but we swear that we are going to release it as fast as possible!

To finish, I think people will also like Miguels (the new graphics intern) new theme, wood_box, and I will also release for the themers, a guide line with all dimensions and how to create new themes. To change them is pretty easy just go to the Canola Web Configure and choose your favorite theme!

Tip for themers : Chenca did us a great favor : you can just (via ssh) create a new dir, and put there only the images that you want to change. Some people just want a new background, so just place you background.png image in the /usr/share/canola/themes/YourBrandNewTheme/data/ folder that the theme changer will treat it as a complete folder =) A simple 200×120 png saved as thumb.png in the root of your theme’s folder will also make it better !

See you all in 1 day! =)

Yes the deadline is pretty near. Now it’s 03:05am in Recife, Brazil and we just left the office. Some final tests with the Canola configuration tool, and a lot of UI polishing to it. Funny moments in this final stage: It’s the first time that I’m working with an application that needs to be tested in a device besides the computer with the same stylesheet and focusing mainly on readability, because the Nokia 770 has one of the most impressive resolutions in the market. So, the text that is pretty visible on the desktop version may not be so easy on the eyes in the 770.

The worst part is the need of transfering all files for very simple tests, cause there’s no way to emulate the felling in a conventional lcd monitor. (I’m using a apple cinema display). So, my first tip for people engaging in project like this is : save your photoshop mockups in a png file, create a simple html without borders and test it a lot before setting up the html markup.

The good thing: I’m impressed to see mochikit working pretty well on both Nokia 770 default browser (Opera based) and in the Minimo (mozilla port). Our application is pure html + ajax and it’s working pretty well!

I think I will allow myself now some 4 hours of sleep. see you!

I wrote this in the internet tablet talk forum and I confirm it here:

Canola will be available for download on november 29th

That gives us 17 days to make it even better than what you’ve seen in the video!

Our time at INdT is listening to everything people says about Canola, and that is the best input for a future version.

Well, 1 week after releasing some canola videos I’m pretty excited with the feedbacks we’ve been receiving. Of course there was sort of “negative” ones but in a vast majority they were all encouraging ones.

The better of all this feedback is to see that we we weren’t wrong with some of our choices, and that we made some right decisions in the project to make it more stable and simple than in the beggining.

What we expected :

1) People telling us that is just a mere rip off of any other famous thing UI

2) People telling us that everything Canola does can already be done

3) People complaining about not being able to ………….. (put here something)

4) People saying that screen would be completely dirty if you use your fingers

So these things were said, and I’m very happy to be able to answer them all!

1) Well it’s not a ripoff. We needed a development mock up and the mockup was made of course to show off to managers that we’re trying to bring the “front row” feeling to the 770. You use your Mac or your windows media to browse the web, chat, blog like I’m doing right now and all other stuff, including all your work. But when you want only to browse all your media, and be able to control it with the minimum effort and maybe without keyboard shortcuts or mouse manipulations what you do? If you have used one of those media interfaces you go for it. That’s our case. We’re a not replacing Maemo’s ui we are adding more to the platform letting users browse their media with ease.

Now it’s time to finish and improve the real Canola theme visuals and show that we are not a rip off. To use it only in the screen, drag stuff around, touch on the things that you want to do and watch them do it it’s a lot of fun. Of course we are inspired by all sucessful media cases, and like any other company out there we try at least to make things a little bit focused on the device they are going to run instead of trying to rip some sucessful UI off and roughly adapt it to a new use case.

Also there’s a lot of thing In my humble opinion (IMHO) Ipod, despite of it’s out-of-this-world sucess has that are annoying. And we tried to keep ourselves out of problems with that. The not so funny thing is that some of this annoying things are OF COURSE very hard to solve and a lot of work or at least re-work was needed.

About wanted features : Well, I’m not a 37signals fan or something but I remember well something about “it just doesn’t matter’. It’s like that… not being able to bring down an asteroid just doesn’t matter. Not being able to input text? It just doesn’t matter for us… Just because since the begin we had a vision and that vision should be smaller never bigger for a first version. Why? Because if you cannot tell what your 6-8 months application will do in the first month and even more important: if you cannot tell how much time you will need to do it, you will never receive a “GO” signal from your boss. Simple like that. We needed focus, we did focused in our basic use cases and now we are very proud of being able to do it in the most solid way we can think off. Canola is solid! It does break, for god sake it’s a software that was never released to the user, but I can tell you that I’ve used softwares that are less stable than Canola a lot of times only this week. It’s the price we paid for having it stable : less features.

About dirty screen : well, who knows what can appears in the future right? =) some nano-technology that keeps your screen clean or even some very very kind company manufacturer that sends you a lot of screen protectors was a gift =)

So, does canola do what can already be done in the Maemo? Yes.
Does it do something that cannot be done in Maemo? Yes to.
OH! Is it a really out-of-this-world feature? No. Just some details! But I think they are going to be very useful to some 770 owners.

In the end, all I want to do is to finish this version, start the work in the next improved and more powerful version and for god sake’s : I wanna go on vacations!

=)

This video shows Canola app scrolling a lot of songs in a huge list. Well, to be honest the list has only 8000 songs, but Osvaldo promised me to bring his whole ripped Cd collection (30k songs) to our final test.

So I keep my promise: This application will be available (repository & package) for 770 owners this month! And better : it will support most of things people said they would like to have in forums about Maemo. (of couse : don’t expect any miracles)

So, what about a final logo for Canola?

Without needing the stylus to browser your music / videos / photos ? And what about it if it was more a “media player” oriented usage than a internet tablet experience? Something like a networked aware media center? You can listen to your music while someone is using your PC, or even you can watch those lost episodes while your parents browse the internet on your box using a very simple yet familiar user interface? Yeah, apart from the stylus, you can do *almost* everything in the maemo enviroment, but this will show exactly the flexibility and greatness of the maemo platform.

We are preparing something for you, 770 owners, and we will really appreciate any feedback!