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.
So, you work like crazy you see you work buddies working weeks non-stop, hit a wall that was the wait to go message, and now the servers are down.
I know that I will start sounding like a “excuse-me” crying little baby, but again we are just out of luck. I think I have bad Karma. So I will start making a list of all bad design decisions I made in Canola to be a better person.
About the repositories: Apart from the Canola package, canola uses a lot of components from Maemo extra that’s why we didn’t placed in our own, and come guy… we didn’t expect it to be down : /
So for those who got to download it: Thanks for the email, I’m trying to answer everysingle one of them (actually a couple were not answered because no email or wrong ones were provided) so make sure you write it down. It’s not company bullshit but you will not be placed in any kind of spam list =)
Future: The guys are already fixing stuff, some of them during the vacations, but I think our schedule for the 1.0 will be able to fulfill most of the suggestions (of course that we already had most of them designed so makes it faster)
Known issues : I will also try to make a list, but I’m theorically on vacations so it can take longer.
Finally: I want to make my personal “Congrats dude” to the whole team. I really believe we made a great job in the deadline given, now it’s time to fix things and put the core team to work on Canola3.
So Google, after all the speculation about the gPhone is going even higher: Android is out and it’s the Google mobile, open source, and free? version of Windows. To be more specific, Windows mobile.
I know this is a pretty simple conclusion, (actually a comparison) why Google, heading the OHA, is aiming in nicely providing a lot of people a open platform, stack, or whatever to everyone interested on creating devices. Nice nice nice move google and more, after buying Android, expectable.
To imagine that Google is actually going to make sure all device made by the involved companies can run it’s web services nicely (in or without a browser like the Gmaps on iPhone) gives you a hint of how geniuses this can turn out to be.
“With devices built on the Android Platform, users will be able to fully tailor the phone to their interests. They can swap out the phone’s homescreen, the style of the dialer, or any of the applications. They can even instruct their phones to use their favorite photo viewing application to handle the viewing of all photos.”
Being honest, if Google manages to pull this thing off as it is bragging the world it will, and also if it can convice the actual manufactures to keep it open this thing can be a major blast at least in the smartphone world (Maybe HTC is tired of giving MS money and motorola cannot sustain it’s montavista linux prices) and really put Symbian and WM to work. But, really how they are going to pull this out :
Android does not differentiate between the phone’s core applications and third-party applications.
It can be, maybe with this :
…a custom virtual machine that has been designed to optimize memory and hardware resources in a mobile environment.
I like it. To have another good competition against WM for me is enough reason, and I’m all in for big players in the mobile world.
The best thing is to see that EVERYONE is jumping on the mobile bandwagon. Nice opportunities ahead.
And to end the post …
Breaking down application boundaries
Android breaks down the barriers to building new and innovative applications. For example, a developer can combine information from the web with data on an individual’s mobile phone — such as the user’s contacts, calendar, or geographic location — to provide a more relevant user experience. With Android, a developer could build an application that enables users to view the location of their friends and be alerted when they are in the vicinity giving them a chance to connect.
Please Google tell me how are you going to convince the manufactures and carriers (ok they are in the alliance) to allow developers (with certificate and signed code only?) to access people’s Agenda, Money (calling) and so on?
Ps: Oh yeah! I was almost forgetting this : Why do not take the Linux fragmentation from desktop to mobile also? =)
I know it’s in the beginning, but being quite honest: it’s quite poor and confusing ui :/ the way screens relate to each other is completely odd.
But come on, it’s a open device… so it will for sure evolve into something great in the future.
Well, I finally got to use the HTC touch, and the only word that came to my mind was: crap.
Why? simply when you look at the videos you expect a little more.
First disappointment was the sensibility. Ok, it’s a lot better then the N800’s but at the same level they wanted to sell the user the “touch” marketing thing, to face the IPhone touch style but it just doesn’t work that easy. I tried once, twice and finally was able to bring the menu up, that was when the second disappointment happened:
Not smooth as it should. When you activate the “touch UI” you get a grey looking big GRID that animates like my grandmother running a marathon. (Actually my grandma would be a lot smoother, as she’s quite healthy) Then you flick your fingers across the screen and get the famous cube animation (again more or less smoth) and can look at the 3 main screens. And this is my third and final disappointment :
Shallow. Only 3 screens (maybe more) but the most important critic : it’s just ONE layer. you click and you will see the regular windows mobile UI (yes, you know those old scrollbars drawn only with lines?) and it’s very very bad designed UI. So people shouldn’t take me for not saying about the others because I already criticized here the Nokia multimedia UI for giving us a incredible taste of wow (the N95 screen) but then killing our excitement in the first click.
Please manufacturers: NO SHALLOW RICH UIs ok? Better you should call it menus or launcher. Only that but you end up bothering more than helping users. Why? Not only users today need to deal with Rich IDLE screen that can already launch your applications but also not-so rich menus, shortcut keys and multimedia menus. A lot of ways to accomplish a basic task. Instead of help you create doubt and that’s BAD.
So, if you are not a Windows mobile die hard fan, I really don’t recommend the HTC touch. And if you are a WM fan, go with other windows mobile device!
These days I was browsing the korean site of IRiver and I was amazed by how gorgeous some of the devices looked. The company has set this website with what appears to be a collection of new concepts/devices that are just amazing design pieces. This is one of my favorites :
P10 is a new prototype using Irivers known UI on the device’s frame. Instead of using the screen. It’s a great idea for such small devices. Funny that apple has a full ui using the frame patented.
But this beauty is actually a pocket dictionary! : / such a shame =)
See more on the website, by clicking here or more shots after the jump Continue reading…
So I was reading apple’s news and saw this nice table comparing the Iphone with the other phones :
with the suggestive name of “Competitive data chart” The last thing I could see there as a fair competition. Apple of course is not dumb and choose only the features where it beat the others. Very nice of you. So I will make you a favor and put the rest of the chart here. So you can really see how much the iphone beats the others
My tiger default background… and the felling that only the finder is a truly new thing (with it’s fast preview and coverflow). A little bit disapointed… but maybe we will adopt it on launch time.
Ok this is something already old, but it’s great to see.
The thing that keeps me amazing about the IPhone it’s not the UI itself. It’s the company’s culture of molding th hardware to allow the software and not the opposite. It’s focusing on the user experience than in the hardware experience. That’s for me is human software. Of course being a UI designer makes it easier to say that, but again lan kay’s tagline is becoming more and more the extra-bonus for companies in such competitive markets:
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
And enter now the Iphone competitors…
Now, we will face the Iphone tsunami wave. There will be a lot of devices doing the competition. The sad part is that the in the beginning they will be just fake things. Why fake? Simply : they will be just “launchers” like HTC phones. They are just a set of screens to “wrap” the real application, but in the end, that UI experience is poor, because not all the UI was done like that. So, not that the UI for those guys is BAD, the problem is that it’s just a placebo.
This is what can be done when the company just add a better sensitivity sensor to it’s touchscreen, but doesn’t have the freedom or power to create the whole experience. Nice screens, but then…
In the end you get the same, old fashioned ui from Windows CE or the other OS host. So, it doesn’t matter that much if you managed to make a Cube transition, or a nice blocked photo based Address book. If in the end what you get is the old, ugly thing:
To close the matter… it’s time to push your requirements for products people!
Notice the young singer Céu, from Brazil on the CoverFlow UI on the Iphone AD! Nice surprise. Go to apple.com to see the AD is high quality quicktime movies.
