Handful of Nothing

This plugin will enable you to watch your favorite movies from youtube inside canola, easy :)

We added a bunch of bug fixes, a new version of the Scanner with MUCH more improved support, I think most of people’s problems with media will disappear now, and I also can say that we will be the application that can find more media on the tablet (Bold hun?)

Highlights with the bug fix:
Now you can backup your radios, podcast and covers with the maemo backup application, and it will be restored on canola future updates. Or at least will try no to break it :)

And finally, you can zoom on the photos! :)

Goals for next feature release?

Youtube -> it’s done
Last.fm -> It’s already playing radios etc scrobbling on the oven
Podcast -> Add to “today’s episode” and more smart playlist
Videocast -> Podcast ready videocast will be automatically
Upnp -> the third party client is under heavy optimization
Themes -> blue theme + simple theme + color variants

And more… so thanks for everyone that sent files bug reports, this really speeds ups and tells us where to go first.

Well, I always thought that the n95 looks didn’t express too much it’s real inner power. The Nokia flagship product last year still a incredible powerhouse (capable of bringing iphone to it’s knees if it had one - feature wise) but the looks.. unm, the looks just don’t comunicate that. The N96 brings that whole power with small improvements but adds something important: the very nice n81 design style.

It’s fun to see how this happened a lot in Nokia overtime, with great phones like the 6230 being visually not loyal to it’s power. The 6230 was by far the best phone of it’s time but people just failed to notice it in the beginning because of the looks. It was dull, too square, and showed nothing beyond some of it’s lower end friends. If you go more into the history you will find more and more examples. The funniest part is that, the phones were so good, but really so good that in the long run all of them succeded quite well, selling (I believe) a lot, and becoming easy spotted on people’s hands.

The N96 fix one out what I consider to be 3 major “flaws” in the N95. Those mistakes are normal, and don’t make the phone worst or something, is more about not being at the same level as the features are. Design is fixed, memory (RAM) was fixed in the 8 giga version, now it needs just a nicer UI :)

One thing is for sure, after the N95 8gb I didn’t expected nokia to pull out a design revamp so fast. It’s the time for fast changes and Nokia is showing that is not sleeping. Pointing that is always easy right? doing I know it’s a lot of pain.

Come on Samsung, you do such nice industrial designs but the previous UI was lame, this one for sure is better but seems like a bad rip of iPhone. No problem and doing things like iPhone, but this… is almost pathetic. The scrolling is lame, and I can’t think of anything, anything worse then the “selection” always on when scrolling, then when you touch an icon it goes there. Also it looks that is on the limit of sluggishness. When animating back to the home menu (like the iphone but without the rotation) you see the maximum speed of the UI. The Song name scrolling also looks quite sluggish.

Again, this only can be the final offer from a Manager demanding “I want a iPhone like UI!!! NOW!! in 4 months!!!!” and a good competent team trying to give him what he wanted, after all he pays the bills. : /

The only credit is that is actually looking more usable then the last one.

My highlight? The “change background” widget. It’s so big that you don’t want it on your “desktop” so to change the desktop pick you need to click on the widget menu, drag the widget to the screen, choose the picture, click on apply, open the widget menu again, drag the widget back there.

VERY USABLE. =) It could be a simple, small icon on the corner, that expanded when clicked to the picture browser. Chooses, minimizes it again. Of course could be added some live preview coolness but this would be like 3x more usable.

As I expected, the Sony Xperia it’s a shallow UI enabled phone. After the nice ” activity ” exposé based menu, the rest is pure windows mobile juice. Sour one. more details here, on Gizmodo

Also it was fun to hear the representative saying that the angular disposition is to follow the finger movement… but what if you’re left handed? Nice justification thought :).

I think I had a little bit more expectations from the first pictures of this phones, but is at least interesting to notice the detail here: SE is going windows mobile. So no more Symbian PX phones?

On the Korean side, Samsung’s Soul brings a functional way of using the a touchscreen as input device combining a 2 color OLED display with haptics. Haptics are for sure one way to go, but still doesn’t kill the problem of complete lack of physical feedback on touchscreen only devices. Maybe in the future we will be able to have surfaces that can actually “interact” with us in all touchscreen devices. Speaking about industrial design, the Soul phone is also very competent on that front.

Take a glance on the news from Samsung for this semester here

From the Finnish giant, the new Navigator phone, that brings one thing that I really miss when using GPS : the compass. The ability to really now where am I facing to! So this is really a pedestrian blessed phone. More details and video here

At the hidden front, in the sometimes not beloved hardware, the news comes from Texas Instrument that presented the 2 new mobile chips. The first one brings the ability to record HD movies on your phones! I was already happy with the quality in the N95… The second one will brings enough power to allow pico projectors to be on the phone. Add these 2 beasts with the one presented by Nvidia, and you get the felling of what’s happening in the Mobile World event in Barcelona.

I dream with the day that I will be able to enter a meeting with just a portable device, and will not need even to point it to a wall. Even on meetings the phone are incredible tools, and I don’t want to let it on the desk =) But for quick meetings this would be just perfect.

To end this collection of link post (almost exclusively from gizmodo) this concept design for a PSP device just rocks. I really like to see people doing those crazy concepts. Of course they are not working with industry limitations, but in a perfect world it would be nothing less then fun to see what we would be able to create with total freedom on industrial design. Would functionality be ahead of beauty bliss?

Very nice designs coming from SE. I really like the way they made the touchscreen phone, the g900:

click the picture to visit gizmodo

Apart from the simple T-bone menu, it does look quite clean the overall design. It seems that SE is renovating it’s marketing strategy with new additions and great new phones for Music and Photo.

Friday we uploaded the beta3 for Canola2. It is a small release but focus on some silly bugs that were present in the beta2.

You can check out the changelog (what’s changed) in the Canola2 website, here

And for those who use Canola-tuning to search for covers, take your time to touch covers on the 3 covers-view screen =)

Looks like that we are not the only ones who truly believe Python can be an excellent, high productive application framework.
Just in quick read in LinuxDevices today, I found 2 more companies, including mizi Research, with python based application frameworks (if no based at least powered)

I know people can start saying “bla bla bla 2 cents in a million” or something else, but the point is, if you have been involved in any aspect of software development, it doesn’t matter if GTK or QT (the nowdays flame) that much… it matters actually if you need to use them using C, C++, C# or Java against the more lean and productive languages like Python, Ruby and why not (Vala*).

I’m not a developer, but I’m surrounded by them enough to see and realize the amount of impact the language can have in the whole team productivity.

In Canola1 we went all C, and even with basic request (I will exclude UI) the basic software took at least 4 times more effort to be build and maintained with a “acceptable” bug rate.

In Canola2 we went with Python, leaving C only for the scanner of media, and the basic software came out not only faster but also more powerful (feature wise) flexible (expansible in several more ways) and with at least 4x time less “lines of code”.

I, thinking now as “product designer” envolved in the whole process, it is REALLY clear the value of creating a product today running from the most powerful languages to enable a incredible fast development process, with very good results in short and mid term that clearly allows you even to stop the project losing less money. Why? Because you will have a more full featured prototype running a lot faster and time is (the old cliche) money.

Does it have a price? For sure! it’s heavier, slower, but when the architecture is well done it can be done quite nicely and the best part : it opens the way for improving the more high level languages even more. Maybe LLVM improvements, maybe some sort of revolutionary JIT, or even just simple optimizations that give power enough to solve people’s problem in the best time x cost x quality equation.

*I think is not a real “language” but does it’s job right?

After a crazy week, we finally did it. Of course there will be now new bugs, but that’s life and we are ready to solve them. If any serious bug appears we will release a fix asap.