Handful of Nothing

Hi after this crazy week, where nobody could believe the repositories would be down for so much time (I still can’t believe that also). So the great guys from tabletrepo have a stable place for those interested in installing canola2.

1st: disable all other repositories (Maemo extras specially).
to do that : open settings -> application Manager , hit menu, Application Catalogues and mark disabled for Maemo Extras.

To make sure things can go even smoother, please disable all the others, leaving only the 2 nokia ones enabled.

2. hit the button bellow:

Things should go fine.

So, you work like crazy you see you work buddies working weeks non-stop, hit a wall that was the wait to go message, and now the servers are down.

I know that I will start sounding like a “excuse-me” crying little baby, but again we are just out of luck. I think I have bad Karma. So I will start making a list of all bad design decisions I made in Canola to be a better person.

About the repositories: Apart from the Canola package, canola uses a lot of components from Maemo extra that’s why we didn’t placed in our own, and come guy… we didn’t expect it to be down : /

So for those who got to download it: Thanks for the email, I’m trying to answer everysingle one of them (actually a couple were not answered because no email or wrong ones were provided) so make sure you write it down. It’s not company bullshit but you will not be placed in any kind of spam list =)

Future: The guys are already fixing stuff, some of them during the vacations, but I think our schedule for the 1.0 will be able to fulfill most of the suggestions (of course that we already had most of them designed so makes it faster)

Known issues : I will also try to make a list, but I’m theorically on vacations so it can take longer.

Finally: I want to make my personal “Congrats dude” to the whole team. I really believe we made a great job in the deadline given, now it’s time to fix things and put the core team to work on Canola3.

See you all!

Hello everyone!

So we made it! If you have one of the following supported distros on your devices you can already install it quite easy going to the website and hitting install now. Just make sure you unninstall canola1, if possible reboot (to get rid of the canola scanner) and you ready to go.

While we do want to receive as many bugs (send them there) and suggestions / critics etc, I can already say some of the things that we know already, or wasn’t implemented because of time, and it’s already on the todo list:

1. Scrolling sometimes “stick” when I click too close to the right border of the screen.
   1. yes, indeed we placed a ” scrollbar ” like area there to allow you to scroll faster on bigger lists but unfortunately the device cannot handle pretty fast animation so theres no visual clue what’s happening. I found myself thinkting that this was a bug, when I realized that gustavo made it and I asked him to increase the area.
   2. Solution: for now trying scrolling a little bit more to the center of the screen.
2. First touch on main icon is slow to start the animation. Yes, We are hard working on this, as this is quite the first impressions. Just because too much things are being loaded in first use. After that is quite the speed we want.
   1. We will fix it =) don’t worry.
3. Scrolling sometimes looks ” locked ” : actually you’ve reached some of the limits, and there’s no visual indication of that happening (actually there is… the scrollbar but it’s easily missed)
   1. So we are going to implement some kind of bump (unfortunately) to show off that you’ve reached
4. There’s no 770 support YET. Sorry, 770 demanded a lot more work, but we are working on it and it will be supported. HE is ” theorically” a BORA distro, but we don’t want to mess if your device so.. please allows more time to test and make sure we are not going to screw your precious installation
5. The way we wanted to support the hardware keys are not yet implemented so also hold on on this one ( I’ve posted about it before)

So, there’s a lot of rough edges to polish and we promise that we will be working hard on this (of course after the parties) and the final release will be as complete as we promised.

We really need your feedback this time, and we count on you.

So hit the Canola2 site link button and make a hit

It’s really really sad to write this (and this in the ITT forums) but we really cannot release it today.

We are ready. Code, UI are actually more than what was planned for today, we are excited, expecting a lot of bug reports and things to improve but… there’s one last “OK” that we need that is beyond our reach. And it didn’t come.

So, when? I could say tomorrow, but something wrong can happen again and we don’t want to fall in the same mistake. So expect it in pretty pretty soon. I still believe that we will receive it tomorrow (14th) and we just need to move a folder to the server, and upload the package to the repository.

We are very very sorry that we created a little excitement about the launch and now we are not able to fulfill it. Looks like an amateur mistake but we just want to make sure that people knows one thing : It’s ready and we worked our a** off to make it ready for today.

The only good side of this is that we will do another battery of testing, and if something happens a little bit more fixes will enter this release.

So don’t wait if for today, and I will try to warn as fast as possible once we have a OK. then we will release it immediately.

:(

So we are almost there. This year was again a crazy year due to some parallels projects but again the Dev team showed that they are off the hook, they were able to build everything in a couple of months. Very proud of them.

Tomorrow, probably at night in Brazil, like the last time we will launch the Beta site where you can download the Canola2 beta.

Unfortunately you will need to uninstall and reboot CANOLA1 from your tablet before installing beta2. But good news: if you don’t have Canola you don’t even need to reboot after installing Canola2 like it was necessary for the version1.

There are also a couple of things I would like you to learn before hand. that will help you a lot.

The main Canola UI (present and next release)

1) System indicator.
Today it shows the clock, Wifi signal strength and the Battery level.
Tomorrow we want to provide the ability to search / join networks etc.

2) Task Switcher?
This was supposed to be a task switcher, but we decided not to it. This will be a notification area. For now you will be able to return to play now screen, but in the future this will also hold any kind of notification.

3) Contextual Options buttons
This is our “safe harbour” to avoid add multiple buttons to the ui, while still allowing other features to be added, we add this options buttons. It will works just like a softkey on a phone. Contextual options for the screen you are in. In this case the home screen actually doesn’t have it. This will also be available for plugin coders in the final release.

4) Back button.
This is always back. Only in the home screen you get an “exit” canola with this. You can return to home at any point in canola (except fullscreen playback) holding down the back button a little bit.

5) Hardware keys shortcuts

Unfortunately this will not be as useful in the N810 as in the others, but ok, this can help people with N770 and N800 a little bit.

The first goal, as Canola is mainly touch-based. Is to provide basic controls to help users of Nokia 770 which has a not that sensitive screen. So for the final 1.0 release we plan to add this controls. (Thanks to patricia for prototyping it).

How it works :

If you are in any of the screens that has content, you can press up or down to scroll content up or down, as well left and right. It will work as a simple, one screen throw in the kinetic scroll.

If you in the other hand press the middle button this will bring up the screen you see, with music controls on it. I think it’s also fair enough to put the volume control to the up and down keys as well as maybe the music name. if you hold down the select key it will give you the playing now screen.

I really complained a lot about the lack of physical keys in the iPhone, so I wouldn’t leave this out.

Suggestion will be welcome, as this is not closed yet.

Playing Now Screen

5) Volume bar
This is available only in players today but you can access it also with the buttons on top of the device. The plan is to make available in our “hardkey solution” for the future but this in dangerous because n810 thrown the 4-way navigator in the sliding keyboard, thus is not suitable for that.

6) Album art
They are stored in a folder (home/user/.canola/covers) in the folders following this convention : Artist/Album/ and then cover-1.jpg. don’t touch the the cover.jpg (it’s a link) to allow also to change covers as we plan to support in the near future.

We have some neat plans for interacting with the Album art, of course first one would be to show the album list of musics (like the iPod) but I really don’t like the fact that if you are not in album mode, and selects a song from the list it takes you out of your choice and put you back in artist->album playback. This I really want to avoid. So if you select a new song album while playing your random playlist for example you just put the song on “random” queue and then you go back to your random playblack. I know some people maybe hate it but it’s our chance to try different things.

7) Rating Start
Pretty simple like the previous version. I hope to implement this also for pictures in the future.

8) The Switcher
As said, the switcher when you leave the playing now screen becomes a “play” sign and a shortcut to the now playing screen from any screen that is not fullscreen.

9) Options in the player
As said, the contextual button holds options for that screen. So in the player screen we will add pretty soon the support for the random, shuffle and more like for example the ability to control (set playblack device) to other upnp capable renderer.

10) The drag bar
We trying to make it quite consistent that everywhere you can seek you have this drag bar. So now you can just drag like previous canola but soon we will implement tooltips, and actually new kinds of browsings methods in this part (like alphabetical hints, etc)

also the player will remember all the states and you can return to it just by touching the switcher or the music icon on the main menu.

ps: Kenne, Gustavo: you’re right I forgot to put CANOLA1 there =) : p

Hello everyone (actually I know you are not that much =) ). As we are approaching the launch day of the Canola2 beta, I think it’s good to explain a couple of things.

 1st : why open beta? Well, in the first version we did a closed beta testing to check how it was going to work in peoples device but we were not able to really “test” it properly and a lot of problems happened in the installation. So it was our fear that we wouldn’t be able to do a proper testing with a small amount of users. Add to that also that we were caught by surprise with a deadline smaller then we expected, and we really have a beta now. So we need the feedback from interested users to fixes all basic bugs that can appear and after that (having a good infra makes it easier to grow in feature number without making a bloated unstable software)

2nd : Where is the feature ______ that I saw in the site or the flash? Some of the features are in the oven, and as they were planned for a little bit later release we decided to let them out to do not put in risk the stability at this point. So you will notice some missing screens, maybe some plugins are missing and some balls are not there but the good point is that we are really going to keep this version quite alive with regular updates / additional features.

3rd : Wheres the plugin support ? This is the major update in our opinion in the architecture side, and this need extra love. So we will wait for the basic bugs to come, fix them as fast as possible then we will release some of our plugins as open source examples of how to write plugins. So expect this in the first set of updates. We don’t want to let people write plugins right now, then some user shows us some nasty bug that makes us break the users plugin. So first we make sure everything is working nicely then we release the documentation / examples to the coders interested in writing plugins.

4th : So canola will leave the beta status? Sure. As much as we like to see those “forever beta” applications I think we will make clear when Canola2 reachs the version 1.0 and let everyone knows that, and of course keep it improving over the time.

————–

Conclusions :

Yes, we are actually not ready to release a final version, and even doing the most that we could (I can say: the guys worked overnight for more than 4 weeks and weekends) we did our best for the date. And we will improve it so fast that I know you guys will really enjoy the speed.

 Price:

For those that told me that  “what is the point of giving canola for free and not making it open source” well I will start a new method of payment : it’s the first-usage-video-with-comments-WARE. Just send us a video of you installing / using canola with your feedbacks and we will be grateful for almost 379 thousand seconds =)

We are still fixing some issues to do not block the old site, but you can already access the website in the following address

http://openbossa.indt.org.br/canola2/

Bare in mind that this is a teaser =) not everything is there, and we have some nice surprises still for everyone.

Update at night: answering some comments

770 support: We actually tested in the Hacker Edition. Sorry but we really had no time for testing in the 2006. There was a little bit too much changes between the 2006 and the HE so we don’t know if things are going to run. But you will be able to test it pretty soon.

Different from the final product: Of course we are running to do everything you see plus more (actually theres things done that aren’t listed) but as gustavo pointed out, some little bits here and there may change, but now we are going to have a public roadmap. For the first update we will focus on fixes of course. Then we will have a little bit of work force to improve and create new features. Examples of possible plugins are: An Youtube browser - player, Integration with the Video Center, and a lot more that can be done by the developers. Even games they can do if they want =)

OGG support: As Gustavo commented in some other blog, canola scanner is open sourced in garage, and canola uses mplayer or osso-media player. So you can actually play your files, and even more if they are supported by those players. also, you can improve the scanner for some specific thing you may need =)