Handful of Nothing

Apart from the title, that is just to grab your attention I really wanted to make sure some people understand one thing: Knowing how to criticize is a crucial thing to have your message heard. Also I wanted Maemo Developers and some heavy users to know another thing: The most important thing your software or your device must have is a target group, the group to which you design and develop your user interfaces.

So, the guys over tabletschool, were very kind with our project, but What I want to talk is on the end :

There’s been a lot of rather strong feedback (EXTREMELY strong, some of it!) for this article already, which is the main reason the ITS has avoided editorials. :-)

This would make me sad, if I was not surrounded by great Developers (physically or in the net - IRC, Gtalk) that are concerned with more than their own belly button. Let me clarify some thing that may help you understand better what is “User Centered Design”:

We picked a user profile. We analyze their needs, We see the competitors, We try to solve the USERs problem and most important: we try to solve that “User” profile problems, not EVERYONE’s problem. Why? Because it’s simply impossible to do so.

With that said, I then ask all the thumbs down guy here on maemo planet to read the following sentence:

“If you don’t agree with the basic concept behind canola, the simplicity and focus on consuming not editing, then Canola is not for you.”

But hei! What is the beauty of open platforms? : You have choice. You have the Hildon UI, you have KDE so you’re actually more well served than those users that do not care for the 95% of features you miss in Canola or any other simplified UI. They care about User oriented interfaces, not a powerhouse interface, and I can be wrong with that but the massive amount of emails I receive gives me the hint that there are a lot of user who wants the simplicity way.

Don’t get me wrong, this is like Itschools not about technical matters. I’m the one here in the company who says: I don’t care what Acronym you’re going to use, I just want the best user experience with everything that we can do on it. I want the cherry on top of the user’s pie. If you don’t think it’s important, pass it forward there are a lot of people that do care about.

And just to make clear: ~80% of the email asked for features, complained about bugs, requested improvements but none asked to include regular UI elements on the software. Why? They understood the goal.

So please, stop felling “hurt” when people talks good things about things you don’t agree. I think Hildon is a desktop like UI, and thus provide a desktop like experience. Canola tried to fill the other gap. If users think they should have more Canola, it’s their rights, as much as you think Hildon should “be ok for them”. It’s not. That’s why the use Canola (or the other apps) and that’s why We focus on python development. Because we believe we need to do more, in a simple and python give us that power.

And about the whole Canola thing: If you also really want to criticize, I know it takes time, but read the forums in ITT. Look at our way of dealing with users. We do treat them as co-developers. We do listen, we do change. But we stick to our goal.

Also to make clear another thing, this time for the tabletschool: http://tableteer.nokia.com/tableteer/os2008/team_marcelo.xhtml, INdT stands for : Nokia Technology Institute and Canola only exists because Nokia indeed wanted it to exist. As I said Canola is in opposite direction to Hildon, but that doesn’t mean Hildon is not good. It just means that the user focus is different.

Concluding: Please understand the concept of user centered design, before trying to compare things. And please be ok with the fact that it was not made for you. As it probably was not made for the one who made it. Or do you really thing all the Devs in the team were happy to hear me shout that the thing was not “smooth” and fluffly enough?

There’s a LOT MORE after the click :) But please, bare in mind that the topic here is not about Canola, or hildon or this or even your taste. It’s about being humble enough to figure out that sometimes you may not be the target.

Continue reading…

We are trying to hit beta10 :) this release adds the requested audioscrobbling and fixes a lot of previous problems. If you use Canola2 please make sure to update, update themes and then install Last.fm and youtube updated version.

Hope people like it :)

Changelog : http://www.openbossa.indt.org/canola/news.html

Developer tool : http://www.openbossa.indt.org/canola/developer.html

Hei guys :)

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 :

Gustavo’s simple model tutorial for canola2 plugin development

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 :)

Marcelo

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 :)

Grab yours here : http://openbossa.indt.org/canola/add.html
or just refresh the application installer :)

The flat simple theme goal is to speed up some interactions by using less transparency on several images. It really works

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 :)

Marcelo

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.

Thanks Mamona guys :)

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 :/

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.

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.

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 =)

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.

We are now already testing the update that will fix most of the bugs the users found on the first version. It has been also a lot of work to really dig down the design problems and try to solve them (but most of those are bigger and will be out of this bug fix release).

Now is time for us to schedule the next release that will bring some of the missing features to Canola2. But let me talk first of some of things we are solving:
(so some of this are indeed in the update) but not everything and… Cover part is both in canola-tuning (downloading, finding embedded, cover.jpg) + canola (selecting from multiple available covers)

1. Compilation or SoundTrack albums being replicated N times: We did a wizard that helps you merge albums in that situation.
2. Cover Art support: Canola-tuning now looks for a local file inside the folder, looks also for the id3 tag art and in the end downloads it from the internet
3. Cover Art selection: The first support is coming : you will be able to choose a correct or another cover for an already downloaded cover.
4. Podcast downloading / playblack and remembering state : Kenneth did the download manager again, so we improved the whole podcast + added better error messages
5. MP4 not playing when mplayer installed : Mplayer has some problems with those files, so now it’s by default played by the default media player always
6. Some Pictures not appearing at all in the application: A user sent us the pictures we found the problem and fixed!
7. Support for WMA and WMV files: It’s also on the scanner, thus we think is not a final support

Also, we are already baking up some surprises for the real Update (feature update) coming in february : More video applications, more audio applications, more options for the podcast (auto download, current download, download all)

The work is going on quite hard and we are really excited to see that what we imagined is happening: We have a lot of great feedback, suggestions, bugs from the users and now it’s time to give back to you the help in the form of an update.

So, we are already testing it, planning to release on monday (then we are able to fast solve any problems).

It has been a great project to work on, and I’m more happy to be able to find time to answer all the emails, and give each user the respected time and respect. Even not being a opensource project I believe we are doing a great work of keeping all users as friends and co-developers and always on the loop and more than that: Really listen to the request and evolving the software the way they need and that fits our concept for Canola.

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.