So we received the last test build friday and we got pretty excited because it’s already on release shape. So expect an update monday or tuesday :)

Why took it so long this time?
Compared with the other releases, yes it took more time, but some guys left the company (all luck to both in their brand new company) and we were re-organizing ourselves to deal with 3 new projects. The team responsible for the Canola, has actually grown, but Canola team doesn’t exist anymore :) Actually it has always been the “Concepts Team” and Canola and Carman were the only public applications. Before that you probably played the “Blocks” (tetris-like games), the port of Doom, the improved Chess bundled game, the first port of abiword and gnumeric, maemomyth, videocenter, Video Converter, just to name some of public projects, but across our small office.

Now the team needs to deal again (like in Canola2) with simultaneous projects so we needed help. Gathering together the buddies from another office (Manaus) we are now becoming a slightly bigger team, but the productivity speed will only come with time.

So, what’s coming?
Apart from the usual big package of debugging, we are finally deploying the test version (because it has never been public tested) UPNP support :) YES! The original project still far from what we needed, so Chenca took the lead and ported the old support to a Canola2 plugin format and now you will be able to use it. Please forgive us for the simplicity and the lack of controller profile but we did our best in the time available. Improvements for sure will come.

Also, we took a lot of the recommendations from the Users in the internet tablet talk forum and you gonna get a lot of asked features. Example being the youtube : Sort results, comments, log in to your account etc. Also better error handling, and fixed some situations that were not dealt before.

One of my favorite new features is the Canola tuning integration. Everything will be there. It’s going to be needed only to download the small plugin that “binds” the cover download to a source( Amazon, last.fm) the rest (id3, folder) will be already there integrated. Also the new list is being integrated and we expect to reduce the error when scrolling to the lowest rate possible.

There’s also a small effort in some improvements on the loading time, and more great things to come in beta10, like choice to change the picture view layout to simple grid (as well the cover art) and for those seeking speed the choice to see only 2 rows of pictures instead of 3, better navigation in the list (point to jump across the list) and finally a lot of small fixes to better support plugins. From the serious ITT posted bugs, we killed already the libseet0 problem and the battery problem described by HAL has been found and it’s being solved!

I hope everyone who uses canola enjoy this new upcoming update, and give us as much feedback as possible so we can improve for beta10.

Ok, enough of Canola2… Some links
Today, enjoy a full saturday of playing guitar and browsing the web between the technic exercises, I came across this nice desktop tablet concept that would really solve my problem of space. I think the foldable display is just genius when you want to move from digital do analog work (drawing?) and better yet if you’re doing other kind of activities just like old-style studies :).

Speaking of Concepts, looking at Frog Design’s new concept (the mask) brought my attention to the subject: how important or how relevant should be a concept? Of course when you think of Concept cars, they are there in expositions and they end up being implemented in some way (fully, only details, etc) but when you do some concept that is really far away and sometimes even worse: has been already described in some science fiction novel is it worth it? Or companies are just looking for publicity? I ask that because I really want to setup a blog for me and my team mates to post concepts (not like the mask) but a little bit more realistic ones. Are they going to start discussions on the concept itself or just bring some “this is not possible” comments?