You Can read Etrunko’s post about the release: here and the code is located in our code repository:

http://code.openbossa.org/

Canola2 : the whole year chaos

Canola2 was full throttle. Actually we released it on december 18th. Really chaotic launch, servers down and we were struggling against the bugs. The reviews were quite harsh on the fact that the software was not “ready” or even installable. We kept it going, and today one year later we reached milestone 10 (it’s in the developer repository if someone wants to have a try just ask me).

After changes in the team, canola moving from one office to another it’s finally back on the main creators: Barbieri and Ulisses that now own a company called profusion, are the ones working for us to maintain the goals for Canola. It couldn’t be better. INdT still have the full control over Canola and we are working to release opensource. Everything seems to be ready, we just need the final license / disclaimer from the company. Finally.

Carman

Carman

Carman & Canola evolution, that I have demonstrated on the Maemo summit in Berlin, was a great goal to go for it, but it will have to wait for the tools needed to do it to be ready.

Ux Team Our team grew, and I am quite proud of the amount of talent that we’ve managed to gather. André, Tatiana, Juliana, Hugo were the additions this year in Recife and in Manaus the team started with Abrãao and Glauber that are guided by Miguel who was the first team member I hired almost 3 years ago.

I think the best thing about our team is the ability to really reinvent ourselves, to help each other on the chaos and specially to do not fall for the need of having a closed, solid process. All projects are different and they need evolution daily to be on the top of the quality. We managed to use free-from-process way of working with a really tight and controlled way and found ourselves quite happy in the middle, using the parallel scrum way. While the developers are being selected, the design team runs one month ahead to make sure everything is as clear as possible. This improves the accuracy when estimating tasks, reduces the need for a lot of really not important documentation and focus the team in one goal : creating a great experience in the smaller time possible. The time that is left we use to evaluate and improve, step by step.

Nokia Smart Home Announced in Barcelona (that screen is quite a mockup, see the video for the real thing), it was really a blast to see it public, and the UI being used in the video. The product Owner Mikael has set a incredible team, and in the phone application I had the chance to work since day zero. It has been a lot of work since then, specially because symbian is not easy to deal with as Linux, but I think we’ve managed to squeeze a lot of great stuff from the OS and the guys did some amazing work with openGL to have a really simple UI layer that feels great to use. Of course it could use more time to be even more refined, but that’s the designer… give us more time and we will never finish it :)

Lots of projects, tons of experience, megatons of fun During the year we have been doing a lot of concept proof, and it has been quite fun to explore completely different areas for a couple of months. I had the chance not only to create and guide the creation of a couple of really nice concepts, but also to understand a lot more about the whole product chain, that was a little far from me since I always focused on the software side.

Traveling and Vacations

This has been an unusual year when it comes to travels, but it had a good reason. We were able to close, approve and kick start the projects in a faster way than all the previous years combined. Of course there was a high price to pay, and my wife Tatiana was not happy about it. To make it up to her, I took 2 big vacations in the year:

we explored a little part of Europe (where we spent all our savings, and did that happily) stayed for 5 days in Fortaleza getting to know some family from my father’s side of the family and in June we crossed the south of Brazil to meet her grandmother and grandfather. The year was heading to the end and after a couple of project travels to europe and us, where I manage to get on board of the project 2 of the best Brazilian designers, when we closed the month in a quick visit to Rio and then Brasilia to gather with the guys from Mopa (the cream of the next wave of Brazilian Designers with a happy style that you should check it out), that will work with us in a project next year! Note: I also experimented playing golf for the first time. Having sun light even after 6 is a great advantage in Finnish lands on summer!

Personal Well, apart from what I consider a great professional year, there has been as well a lot of good things happening on the personal side. Maybe that is also the reason why the work was so good this year. After coming back from Europe, I was weighting 102 kilos. For a 1.68cm high guy that is a little over the “fat” level. It was time for a change. 3 months later I was weighting 81kgs and now I managed to stay on 79-82 level. No more snoring, more healthy, less exhausted on the business trips and the best: way more energetic on the office to face the 15h routines along the year :). I also saw the birth of Frau, my wife’s clothing brand. We are working on the website and almost all the dresses have already been sold, even without showing the off our inner circle. I am quite proud of her work. It is also worth mentioning the work that André Cunha did for the Frau logo and graphic material. top notch stuff.

——

What’s next?
Now 2009 will be the time to make the work become really solid, focusing on less projects and giving more attention to the level of detail and the chance to innovate in every single task. Each small task will be a point to make the difference for the clients. I commit myself to do way better things this year and we will start by bring one more product to market (if everything goes right of course). The crisis is there and this will be actually good for us. Less travel whenever possible (Even knowing that my trips are more one / year / client ) and more time to study and improve my skills.

also it’s the year to plan for a growth in the family. We have decided that now is time and a little baby will be the focus this year :) Things will change. Less time to video games, less over hour work, and more dedication to the family in all levels.

Wow. Lot’s of stuff, specially without being able to write about the half dozen projects that are cooking and are not public. See you all next year!

I hate when I need to excuse myself. Specially when it’s about delays. It happened in the first release of Canola2, and it is happening now. Canola should be out in august and we are reading to a middle sep. release that I am not confortable with.

Reasons (I also hate justifying, but people deserve at least an explanation):

a. New team is finally reaching a good speed of development
b. They had the complex task of fixing some old, core level bugs
c. We are implementing the new development process / project leading process remotely, so you can imagine the problems.
d. Teams are smaller. (again!)
e. Carman needs EFL, so deeper testing

And what about Carman?

a. Carman is now EFL based, like canola, so it needs some libraries so testing is intensive
b. The first team guiding it faced some heavy problems and it was replaced “during flight”

What about a date now?
I again hate to give dates because they always go wrong, but if today’s build is ok from both projects both projects will go live tomorrow :) * I hope so

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?

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.

And answering to the probably technical comments :

a) Indeed Canola has a multimedia face, but it was designed to hold any kind of mobile application, WITH FOCUS on the task. So no, we would never be able to support as many features as a Hildon ui. But our question is : Does our user group, need this function? We keep only the minimal.

b) Automatic media folder refresh: Ha! this is a funny one. Remember canola1? It indeed had it. Why we removed? Because a lot of people complained, that we were sucking resources etc. etc. So we decided, for the whole beta to remove it, and focus on other things until we have the installation wizard. This avoided sucking cpu when not needed, and bug reporting when that was not our focus. Again can you see the partern? we focus on what matters. It does matter for our users, but matter less then the other things on our list. It’s coming? Come on it’s just an “if” (this is a internal joke from Dev guys to myself, but you got the point)

c) While I do believe some more power users need more features, and thus are not satisfied with Canola, I can also make sure there are a lot of developers / power users / Tech enthusiasts that do uset it, and to contribute to the evolution, even being not fully open source.

— Updates answers to the comments —
@ossi1967 :

That’s what I felt was wrong. Hildon seems more “general purpose” whereas Canola is specialized for a certain, probably small group of users (doing simple tasks).

Hi Oskar, Sorry to disagree from you, but I think you didn’t noticed one thing: Even know being “hacker” or power user oriented, the goal for any nokia device is to have reach. To sell. It needs to sell right? And thus I totally disagree with your point of “small group of users” because to be honest, if something simpler was used and was fully integrated (let’s say dual boot) this “small group of users” would be at least 10x bigger then the current hildon fan group. Why? Because a non Desktop like UI is what the regular end user wants, not a small cluttered version of their desktop. Mobile is another scenario, you do different things.

You know what’s the best thing? Is that the first rule for a interaction / product designer is to be able to:
“Do not design for you. Design for your target user”. So I will make sure also to tell this : I’m sometimes not the right user for Canola things, and I do bend to the “target” users request because they are the more suitable ones to say it’s good or not. (Actually a lot of things were good to me, and I needed to changed)

With the tablets being the most versatile pocket-devices I know, a powerful, desktop-like UI seems more suitable.

Also, I seriously doubt that there is a relevant percentage of people who are not well trained in using desktop-like user interfaces. (And I’m talking about percentage of the overall population.) Statistics show this.

Simple cellphones? the Iphone? None of them are desktop oriented. and I don’t know but as product and interaction design I have a LOT of statistics that shows the opposite.

In my personal experience, new tablet users find Hildon very easy to use; I myself have to admit I sometimes simply close and restart Canola because I dont know how to return to the main screen. Other problems new users experience with Canolas UI were described elsewhere.

I agree with you in some points, but : Edit a wifi connection. Ask a real user to do so. I could tell you some more 15 to 20 simple tasks of simple users the are far off the best position. Also: the most of Canola problems comes for the fact that we “scaled” it down to fit to the device. And being honest : if you don’t know that your home button (one of the more useful buttons on hildon ui) brings you the home, open applications.. then it’s not so well designed and intuitive. For me (I receive user feedback from Canola I can tell you: the main problem comes from : media scanning, removed after several complaing against canola1 (coming as a installation wizard). Also the lack of visual feedback in a lot of operations, as well better Over the video ui (impossible to do today on gstreamer on the tablet) But we have it on libXine inside here, and of course the Scrolling list, that was our fault, to leave one parameter behind. Now we did real user testing, we are packaging a experimental testing list to users who didn’t have problems and for those with problems to validate before releasing.

Still I think that even those who were not enthusiastic about the article at tabletschool may love Canola as it is and use it as intended. Only the thought of having such an over-simplified UI instead of hildon everywhere on the NiTs is somewhat frightening.

I think you should note the point : this is to bring the end user. The one who think hildon is not good. Now imagine the good part of it all : you have the freedom to have the full hildon also. And more : you can still have your full desktop (KDE) / E17 ! :) that’s is what we would have that NO other app would :)

Think of over simplified UI as a way to provide a simple,fast and efficient way to do your needed task with easy. The hildon is exactly what you said. for those who need the desktop completeness on the go. There is space for both, but again : I can assure you : (not canola) A simple, task oriented, eye candy ready UI has a lot more audience.

@eric :

a) Minimal media focused UI is good, but abandoning hildon framework has come back and bitten you on many occasions ( problems with the OSK and failing to meet users expectations with the shift and Fn keys ). For being so “minimalist” it’s throwing off the hildon UI libraries also means that it consumes far more memory than necessary ( min 30MB under normal conditions ).

Hi Eric, the thing is we don’t say never abandoning it.. but just to let you know, it;’s not 30MB. In our Mamona based version (canola on top of mamona Nothing else, no hildon, nothing) we don’t use more than 17MB. The whole EFL stack has a memory footprint of 600kb, and we of course are using python, and then a lot of imagery. To multitask outside canola with another hungry app is complicated like the Browser. But remember : you fell almost no loading time between the more than 5 applications (complex ones like the podcast) that are instantly showed to you.

Then you point that we moved from hildon and got bitten. Yes, the hildon should be ready to provide extension to the other toolkits for simple things like the HW keyboard : / But we don’t stop for that, because as I said on the post the real goal is experimentation, is being different, is bringing more people on board.

and why dropped GTK+ ? let’s not say hildong, because we know hildon is quite a small layer on top of GTK. Well we dropped for the same reasons theres a Tsunami of activities to enable gtk to be flexible. It simply isn’t. Look at the gnome planet. look at how much proposals to have a scene component :)And why we picked up EFL? yes, a canvas with scene management.

c) I don’t care about power features… I care about *working* features and that is why I stopped using canola2 and went back to the built in media player. Too many regressions compared to the no-frills “Media Player”

No problems with that. We heard that a lot. And we are not ashamed. Why? We are a group of small guys, working on something like4 projects at the same time, Canola is only one.. so are we ashamed of the work done in the last 7 months? Not at all. Why we didn’t removed the beta label? because it needs more polishing and more work. Doing our widgets from zero, trying to do the right thing not hacks, having a nice, clean and really flexible design for the software and being able to have new guys helping with minimal time, I’m really proud of the guys. Last : being able to admit that SDL was not going to take us further (because of time limitations) and delaying for months the release because we needed to write the 16 bit version of the rendering engine… it was also a nice challenge and we took it. But the point is : We did it because we wanted to do in the other way. You can still use the simple media player, then install vagalume, mytube, a good podcast client, with a (now) solid download manager, then with the upcoming playlist feature I don’t think there will be much missing from the default media player.. and maybe it would be time to remove the beta label.. and drink a beer for that :)

Right now I would not call Canola “user centric” since being easier than the default NIT Hildon environment is like saying that someone is more intelligent than president Bush. Yes, it is easier but that ease has come at the expense of too many items that make NIT’s useful.

Again, it’s your opinion. If you ask the Canola users, the one who defined how it should works, I can make sure.. it was all based on the TARGET user. Not all users. So if you are a happy hildon UI user, and love it’s desktop visual, then again the message: canola is really not centered at you :) – the smile is to let clear that this is not rudeness or irony is just the thing. For example, iphone is not targeted at most of the Heavy users of NIT, or the Nomad player from creative is not target for the old FM radio freaks around here in Brazil, and like Slackware is not aimed at retards like me :) (ubuntu does the job for me, ubuntu is nice with me :))
And all the items that make NIt useful? they still there with the touch of one (hardware button) the home button! :)

And the last one :

Great info. I have a question though- As it appears that INdT has quite a bit of flexibility when it comes to the software it is developing, and given the success of Canola, what other software is in the works?

Well, the flexibility has one price : we are not inside the thing :) so you can imagine the installation madness :)
About other softwares : / sorry but I cannot tell about them. But there’s a lot of our work in the Bluetooth stack (blueZ) in python and so on, Canola and Carman are evolving and like in the Nokia car shown, they are being mixed, because… there’s a nice group of users that like to use canola for comuting! :) so we are hearing their critics since canola 1, and we have some incredible ideas for them. And believe: it’s more theme making then coding.. this is what I really feel proud about. To be able to have fast way to do nice things.

One area that users are begging to be addressed is Personal Information Management (specifically calendar and contact management). A quick survey of ITT would provide assurance that an effort by INdT to provide PIM software would be met with much enthusiasm.

Yeah, but I think this is not present in the Tablets since the beginning right? I thought the opened hand guys were doing something : / We are more multimedia when it comes to application, I think other guys would do a better work then us, and this for sure needs to be a great hildon works, to be fully integrated. But it’s nice to see somethings like the email client modest.. it really rocks.

So just to make clear, before people make assumptions, this are my opinions, as user and interaction designer focused on the NIT. Also, I believe in the NIT’s in more than just IT devices. I believe in the NIT as product platform. You can create other products from it. From remote controls to wine management to a security check tool, a in-car computer system and so on. :)

Hope people like it :)

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

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

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

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 :)