With high-level languages and good libraries, small teams can create great products at a rapid pace. We realized that we could write applications for the desktop in the exact same way. We rewrote SftpDrive from top to bottom in Python, with a GUI in Objective-C. It’s called ExpanDrive, and it took 1/3rd the time that SftpDrive took to develop.
That’s what happened to us on Canola and other projects development, and no Canola2 was not a rewrite, it was a brand new application from scratch, using totally different technologies and we also achieved the same performance, including : more features more polished and also : more maintainable and the best one : easier to get a new dev on board (start time quite small for simple / medium tasks)
Of course this is not a silver bullet, a magical way and you should only consider giving it a chance if you haven’t : ) of course there will always be “no go”s and other reasons not to do it, but for a lot of user space applications it’s just an amazing tool to work on.
I would like to say that this is coming, and if everything goes right you will have it at least for linux :)
Video :
It’s fully functional, has some small problems in fullscreen (some screens are not yet ready for fully scalable uis ) but you can test everything in windowed mode.
Also, there’s two more tutorials coming, and gustavo published one simpler one for those that were not too keen to try the more complex youtube source code :
We think that if we can release this tar file (the generation is also automatic, so it will be updated with each new release) it would be quite nice for developers that want to try out.
For windows and mac users there’s a solution (not a good one but..) you can run a live cd of ubuntu (in vmware client for example) and do all development inside, the same way you would do it on the device.
Kudos for fleury and the rest of the team, and I will now try to do what it takes to release this asap :)
So you can already download the new canola from the application installer and put it to test.
The beta7 brings the major modifications to allow third party plugins and youtube was developed like one. It’s indeed a full example because it has also “theme” files so if you are a python fan and would like to develop a plugin for your Canola, just grab the source and take a look.
Now we need to rush to add support to change the folder (it’s saving on internal disk) and also make sure you have latest mplayer, if not you will face some slowdowns in playback.
Known issue : Seek does not work. The FLV support does not give us a good seek, so we removed it because it was almost usable and really annoying. Let’s see if we can help mplayer in the future in this matter.
I made this video while ago, but it’s nice to see that are step by step moving to it :)
Youtube is coming to beta6, and we are working as hard as we can to make Upnp available for Beta7. We are just not satisfied with the user experience as it is. Of course I need to add this here or the developers will kill me: don’t take the video for granted, bad things can happen on the dev path blabla :) you got the point!
From our experiences we know that those guys will generate a lot of requests / bugs and specially Upnp will be a lot of work to fix compatibility to custom servers. That’s why we are trying to improve Canola2 itself to the maximum so then we can focus at least for a sprint on fixing youtube, upnp stuff.
Again, time is the only villain : /
Info : you can see that the menu is actually “media servers” then a ball for the upnp devices (names will probably change) this means that we are open one room, just for those guys, so if people want to implement support for other servers/standards they can be placed here :)
Yes, one more beta in this long road to final version :) if it is going to ever be a final version (just to be trendy we will be always on beta).
This is a huge update on the core of Canola2, and we tried to make it as stable as possible.
There was a small character bug on the scanner, fixed and already available (maemo2 packages) and apart from that no more serious problems. Of course we will try to see how to improve things, and we are investigating some video related issues, but as far as we could have information, it’s more the case of too high resolution videos (that plays on mplayer out of canola) but not on embedded mplayer.
At least seems that the problem with the scanner is gone, some people still have crazy files that don’t get indexed, but the least we can do is receive the files, test, and if it’s a bug we fix and release it again :)
Also: youtube and last.fm are not there, because we need a little bit more time for 2 things:
1. to separate bugs from beta6 to bugs from youtube and last.fm
2. to fine test it more. We had some other projects priorities and those 2 plugins were delayed :/
But, I we’re more than happy to receive your feedback, and if you send via the site, make sure you place your email, I answer every single email myself, no bots allowed :)
We are asking our friends in the Mamona project for Xrandr (enable us to rotate the screen, and it was not available on the maemo) and they not only heard our wishes but also did the patches to run it on the chinook distribution (os2008).
With this we were able to see how canola reacts in a rotated screen, and we are quite happy with the results. It’s not fully usable (playback, covers and photo details are not good at all) but the basic (menus, lists, settings, album cover grid) work just great.
We would not be able to have a separated person just to do a vertical version /and/or maintain it with our current staff (as we do other projects as well) but this can be the case of just very small changes to enable a vertical mode for those who really want. Of course we like eye candy, so by little changes we also mean : transition when rotating, rotating video to play on landscape and modifying the player screen theme to work like this.
If people still interested (in the forums mainly) we will try to do this :) If not, it will stay as a “playground” for ideas.
Update on canola portrait :
if you are interested to look at it (but please bare in mind that some screens are unusable - the main landscape ones) you can take the files and instructions from : http://sse2.net/rotate/ I was trying to get the site owners name, but for sure he’s a maemo friend :) he compiled the patch by vivi and kindly posted the instructions for those wanting to flash their device + applet to rotate easier than command line.
Bare in mind also : you do need to flash your kernel, so if you don’t know what that means, don’t try please :) We are already fighting against too many problems, so we will not be able to help on this :)
About the regular Maemo Desktop / Applications The desktop resizes it self, and it’s usable. even the 2 layers menu shows at least the icon so you can still recognize, but you cannot scroll with finger (in n810 will be quite awkward to do that but you can install some launcher to make it easier) the internal applications, well some of them will suffer because most of them were done like our landscape screens : to take maximum advantage of the landscape orientation :/ thus lots of elements can be out of screen :/ so…
THIS IS VERY VERY Experimental do not expect to have a full device working perfect :/
I liked the screenshot with the home screen, but watching the video…
The impression I get is that besides being a brand new device it is slow as hell. At least if they are really running Windows of any sort they didn’t do only a shallow UI, and in the video you can see how far they went on replacing (possibility) the lame windows shell.
The main screen looks quite welldone, but when going into some other screens it looks like they also needed to rush. The pictures and video playback screen looks rather poorly designed. (also the photo zoom is the tip about slowness)
Anyways, it’s surprising to see in times of iPhone speed, a top company releasing a sluggish device. Product Owners seems simply not to learn, or they have this hardwares thrown down their throats. I think I will become a monk.
Engadget has the usual full cover up of the event. I was amazed because I only expected a xcode based tool, but they again come with a end to end solution (also controversial : 100 bucks for the dev license).
If the community did a incredible amount of apps with a hacked sdk, let’s see what the real apple developers will do with that (we saw some)
What pisses me off, is that is not about the apple thing, but the apple way to promote design more, and how this create a very powerful community because even a simple app looks nice. Looks does matter. Looks does matter!
