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…

Jeff Mancuso, dev of expanDrive :

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.

read the nice post here

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.

Hello everyone!

So we made it! If you have one of the following supported distros on your devices you can already install it quite easy going to the website and hitting install now. Just make sure you unninstall canola1, if possible reboot (to get rid of the canola scanner) and you ready to go.

While we do want to receive as many bugs (send them there) and suggestions / critics etc, I can already say some of the things that we know already, or wasn’t implemented because of time, and it’s already on the todo list:

1. Scrolling sometimes “stick” when I click too close to the right border of the screen.
   1. yes, indeed we placed a ” scrollbar ” like area there to allow you to scroll faster on bigger lists but unfortunately the device cannot handle pretty fast animation so theres no visual clue what’s happening. I found myself thinkting that this was a bug, when I realized that gustavo made it and I asked him to increase the area.
   2. Solution: for now trying scrolling a little bit more to the center of the screen.
2. First touch on main icon is slow to start the animation. Yes, We are hard working on this, as this is quite the first impressions. Just because too much things are being loaded in first use. After that is quite the speed we want.
   1. We will fix it =) don’t worry.
3. Scrolling sometimes looks ” locked ” : actually you’ve reached some of the limits, and there’s no visual indication of that happening (actually there is… the scrollbar but it’s easily missed)
   1. So we are going to implement some kind of bump (unfortunately) to show off that you’ve reached
4. There’s no 770 support YET. Sorry, 770 demanded a lot more work, but we are working on it and it will be supported. HE is ” theorically” a BORA distro, but we don’t want to mess if your device so.. please allows more time to test and make sure we are not going to screw your precious installation
5. The way we wanted to support the hardware keys are not yet implemented so also hold on on this one ( I’ve posted about it before)

So, there’s a lot of rough edges to polish and we promise that we will be working hard on this (of course after the parties) and the final release will be as complete as we promised.

We really need your feedback this time, and we count on you.

So hit the Canola2 site link button and make a hit

We are still fixing some issues to do not block the old site, but you can already access the website in the following address

http://openbossa.indt.org.br/canola2/

Bare in mind that this is a teaser =) not everything is there, and we have some nice surprises still for everyone.

Update at night: answering some comments

770 support: We actually tested in the Hacker Edition. Sorry but we really had no time for testing in the 2006. There was a little bit too much changes between the 2006 and the HE so we don’t know if things are going to run. But you will be able to test it pretty soon.

Different from the final product: Of course we are running to do everything you see plus more (actually theres things done that aren’t listed) but as gustavo pointed out, some little bits here and there may change, but now we are going to have a public roadmap. For the first update we will focus on fixes of course. Then we will have a little bit of work force to improve and create new features. Examples of possible plugins are: An Youtube browser - player, Integration with the Video Center, and a lot more that can be done by the developers. Even games they can do if they want =)

OGG support: As Gustavo commented in some other blog, canola scanner is open sourced in garage, and canola uses mplayer or osso-media player. So you can actually play your files, and even more if they are supported by those players. also, you can improve the scanner for some specific thing you may need =)

Click the image for more info.

INdT giving sequence to it’s software tech days is going to make another on november 20th and 21th in Joinville. This is a great opportunity to get in contact with Maemo development. Not only you will have introdutory course on developing for Maemo but also be able to attend small classes on Python for Maemo, Qemu and even the microBrowser extension courses.

the best part? it’s FREE! =) as in free beer!

Maemo may not be giving away 10 millions dollars, but it’s going near everyone to teach on person how to do stuff :) :

World Usability Day, Recife, originally uploaded by MarceloEduardo. Picture by: Fábio Caparica from UXRecife

Talking about User Centered Design (in Maemo) at World Usability Day using Canola 1.0 x Canola 2.0 as case

N810 image view, but you can also see the new task navigator, and a much better theme

This morning I saw the pictures of the brand new Nokia Internet Tablet on engadget. I was quite happy with the industrial design. It looks so much better than the N800 and it’s delightful to see the series evolution. Also the theme looks a lot sweeter than the previous “glowing” one. Of course not everything is heaven and looking from the pictures I can start talking about things that could be messed again in this released :

1) Camera looks again facing straight there on the left. This put the user in a not so comfortable position for video calling. You either tilt the device a little bit to the side or you try not bothering and do the call a little bit to the side your self. (can be a charm, come on)

2) Looks like the bevel framing the screen still high enough to bother a full finger usage BUT looks like wider.. so can be easier to you! Yeah!

3) The fullscreen keyboard with that HUGE backspace button still there. :/

4) The keyboard is really to close of the upper part that slides up. It’s not so easy to type on that :/ [4]

5) Still no centralized synchronization / media optimization software.

But of course good things:

1) Looks like at least some basic 4-way + 2 or more buttons gaming will be possible (while demanding a little bit of dexterity)

2) The whole body looks just a lot more compact and a little bit thinner than the n800 without that quasimodo hunchback. Cool.

3) if there’s really a built in GPS I’m on it (read my iphone review to understand more. Actually I will change to a link once I publish it)

4) The docking position appears to go even lower. That’s great for watching movies on today’s very very reduced user space on planes

5) The arrows (so criticized) were replaced by a small list (drop down menu) icon, and it’s not only on the application title, showing you that the menu is there, but also the same picture in the full qwerty keyboard.

6) That’s also nice to see: simplified (tray) and more lively(task navigator) not Tango-styled icons, in menu and also for the system tray. Thank you! and sorry but TANGO SUCKS (not the project, but the icon look and feel. 100% dull)

So let’s keep also an eye on this, and while this doesn’t come out check out some real life pictures from gizmodo :
1 2 3 4

And for sure the comment that was more then expected:

“An internet and media tablet with 2GB memory and 4 hour battery life for $479? Yeah, I know you should be able to get that a little cheaper, but whats the advantage over an unlocked 16GB iPod Touch for $399? Yeah the keyboard is nice, but the iPod is much sleeker, better battery life, MUCH better storage, I imagine better UI for media stuff…”
Click here to compare size with the iphone

He’s right in the better media UI, a lot more storage, a better browsing experience(only if we exclude flash) more battery. But he should also consider that :
exclude flash what is not possible nowdays in the web, so the N8xx series gives you real web.
You get a real GPS, not some “mockup”
You get a more flexible platform in sense of each kind of media and a good number of supported third party application
**you’ll get Canola 2.0 that will for sure be enough to satisfity the ipod UI need =) ***I wish***

So, I would advise the following : if you like tweaking, and is a power user, Nokia may suite you better. If you praise good UI experience and a descomplicated but “locking to certain applications” desktop to device experience you should go the apple way.

About Canola, we cannot say if the tearing problem is going to happen until we have a device, but if nothing was changed on the hardware side will be really sad :/. Apart from that it will be quite good to use the slide keyboard, maybe the smaller frame on screen, clean design, brighter screen, and of course an updated, optimized version of the Maemo platform.

If you always missed some good video management tool for all you internet video needs, here’s a good solution : The videocenter application.

The application is a hub for internet videos, local stored videos and in the future for other video sources, like mythTV (explained in arthur’s web site here). You are able to stream, download organize, and soon enough to do a lot more =)

You can check out a nice vide made by my buddy Arthur (Morpheuz) :

The application is already available as a beta in the garage website

As any application I think everyone involved would be pretty happy to receive feedback / bugs / suggestion so please help the team behind it.

Yes, this week will be pretty crowed attending the Ux week, but I believe that I will be able to gather a lot of insights and experiences from the sessions. Looking forward to not only talk but learn a lot about improving our indt team skills, and bring a lot of improvements to our Maemo projects (and the non maemo also of course)

If you’re around DC or Ny from 17-20 drop me a line =)

a very small portion of the paper prototype work

A update to this post:
* video now on youtube!
These mockups (in the video) are experimental. So forgive us for the typos, and even items with wrong icons etc. The information architecture, icons and final visuals will be done still.

I know it has been a long time since my last canola dev post, but I think things are starting to born here. So answering simple question :

1) Why is it taking so long for a new release?
A: Well, we kind of reach a good point with the latest release of Canola, but there was already a lot of mistakes that should be fixed. To only improve on the existing software leaving those errors behind would be a killer in the mid term, so our decision was to almost recreate the whole ui, even the components used for that.

2) Why EVAS (EFL) ?
A: I will not enter the technical aspects here but more the UI design aspects : SDL development of our designs was too slow and to restricted in a sense that we could not experiment too much (takes too much time) and we should try to hit the jackpot in just one attempt. EVAS, or more specifically EDJE gave us the ability that we need in a already proven to work way, as known in the enlightenment project. Many can say the opposite or be against this choice but for us was pretty logical to go this way, and we already have done a lot of contributions to the official project to make it run greater on 16bit based systems like the N800. To know more about it at INdT, check out Gustavo’s blog [1]

3) I saw a new keyboard on someone’s website? Why keep changing everything that’s already in maemo? Is this going to be on Canola?
A: While we do like the platform where we build on top of it, we need a little bit more freedom and also we think that the beauty of this open platform is the ability to improve what you may think is not working correctly. We used the iPhone visual of course to bring the attention to it, but our goal is of course to experiment alternative ways of inputing text without having to use a fullscreen (really fullscreen) keyboard that actually kills the context where you were typing, and also use “enter” as web page enter! submitting when you hit it. I understand the decisions behind it but I just do not agree (at the moment, who knows the future). Yes this will be on canola. I know we will face a lot of opposition agains having a third / or different keyboard, but we will do the best for our task cases. We will provide the users the best way possible to accomplish the task. So if we think looking at the web page while typing something is important at least to remember whether you are typing on the correct field, or just to keep the context clearer on user’s perception. But of course: it will not look like that, and if apple’s expanded patent covert that “expanded” key on the keyboard we may use a simple tooltip [see the green image] approach ( hehehe, it’s not expanding sir)

4) You talked about Carman integration at bossa conference

The changes
a: Yes, and it’s true. Actually Carman is also changing to adapt itself to Canola, but you will be able to choose if you want or not this kind of functionality. We will not push this for everyone. The question now is whether should we really change Canola a little bit more to adapt to the car or really go contextual and let the ui adapt itself in different environments?

check out the video we did yesterday here in the office (posted originally by gustavo)

We have been working hard to solve most of previous mistake with good scalable solutions, and I will share some of these with you. Maybe they will change before the release, but at least show a little bit of our approach and the path canola is going.

Canola configuration tool - Input methods / components

We didn’t have a configuration inside Canola, part because of resources, part of keyboard / input now we have it. We didn’t have a good way of letting the user enter data that was not a completely different experience, so I cannot guarantee that everything is going to change, but our plan is to fully replace the web based configuration, and let it maybe exist just to be able to open on your desktop. So more than just the keyboard we also need some ui components like sliders, etc to replace combo box and other desktop like elements.

Main ( home ) Menu & Submenus

The paper prototype for the new home - main menu screen

The solution for the home was quite a hack to fulfill one requirement of ” shortening ” the path to the now playing screen. Now things have become a little bit more complex, and a better solution was needed. So for now even having other options we went with a grid approach, that once you slide it opens the full range of sub-menu options in a iconic-graphical way instead of text. This is already working quite well with Evas and EDJE and we are going to experiment even more on the next iterations
.
So.. here’s a sneak peak in some of our experiments for the home screen, already working!
click here to download full (800×480) | smaller or try to watch here :

or

OBS: this is a video for the UI mockup, but it’s already working pretty good on the device using EVAS and EDJE. This is great news because it’s almost a “theme” so transitions / effects are being worked in such a great speed and we are able to improve it a lot more than in the past.

OBS2: this is under heavy studies / work so please don’t expect this to come out as it is today =)

UI “navigation” elements
Now the goal for the basic ui is to kill all the arrows, bringing back the code from the first canola internal demo (yes the kinetic scrolling, now made famous by the iPhone). once we have it working perfect we will enable it and try to kill all arrows and scroll bars that are boring and space consuming. As I talked in the lists way before the iphone even be announced, we tried to do it on the 770 but the touchscreen sensitivity was a show stopper, making it more an exercise than a user interaction.

Now a little bit from the project itself : Python
A sure thing is : as Konttori has showed, python gives you power to develop good software in a fast amount of time. His media player is a wonderful demonstration of python power and now it’s time for INdT, after porting the python to also make advantage of the great speed up. Porting Canola takes a lot of time, but once is fully done we will be able to delivery improvements in much better way, that was a little bit more painful to do with the fully C based canola. Along with Evas, and the python bindings provided by gustavo I think we already have a very nice option for rich ui.

and also of course : Future?
We are in the middle of the work, and we are already thinking on the future. How to really make a jump from what we have today to things really advanced? Our hardware is quite nice, but for example the tearing in the previous version of n800 were almost a show stopper. We expect to be able to squeeze a lot of juice from the n800 still, but it seems that will be complicated to keep it working on the 770 for the future. So forgive us a little bit if things are not quite good on the 770, we will do our best, but we will try to focus ahead not behind when thinking about the interactions.

Finally…
Across the week I will try to post / talk more about the small challengers that are appearing and how we are planning / designing the solution for them, like the multi-tasking / alt - tab interaction, the thumbnails and advanced transitions, the options keys that took the “confirm” key place and also more decisions on the list with gestures and other hidden features.

So please keep a eye on INdT’s work to improve Canola… you can follow our work by our blogs [(link in the end) , and we are working hard to put a central feed ( like a planet ) and a better website with all the info people could search for about the projects that we are running here.

Osvaldo provided the “planet” pipes, to access all INdT’s blogs click here

[1] Gustavo Barbieri : Evas / Python ( English )
[2] Osvaldo Santana : Python / Mamona (Portuguese)
[3] Etrunko ( Eduardo Lima) Carman and a lot more ( English )
[4] Kenneth Colligo (ex actually ) Python / EVAs ( English )

Just read the comment here, and this link deserves a post : https://garage.maemo.org/projects/maemo-quetoo/.
It’s a first release of Quake2 engine port to Maemo, and I will give it a try as soon as I have time!

*busy with wife’s family visit! Posting at 00:00!

Well, tomorrow the conference starts and I used the trip time from finland to brazil to do some things for my presentation on Canola. the only problem is that so much ideas came out that I really don’t know which focus to take. I think I will “feel” the conference tomorrow and guide my presentation towards that. If it’s to be more technical I can invite some of the team members like gustavo or andrunko to give a 10 minutes overview of the architecture and then talk about what I already said here and I believe will be one of the main drives for the Maemo platform: It’s not a software platform, it’s a product platform. And I’m not only talking about Canola or Carman, I saw already on the web people selling wireless security tools using the platform and even other simple projects.

So, I already know that the conference reached it’s limit, so we have full house and I expect everyone to have a incredible nerd time around here!

So, I was reading Murray’s review on Canola and after that reading also comments mainly from some guys in our Canola team, mainly trying to justify some of the things Murray thinks are without reasong. Simply ui design errors. As he was not the first one to talk about that, and of course our team is small, but has different background people, etc and even the interns talked about some of the things he complains, I kind of wanted to “talk” a little bit about the 2 more “controversial” issues in Canola: Web configure and not being able to select any item.

I will use his comment, but I could have used some other 4 or 5 guys comments as well:

So there is a separate Canola Configuration menu item, which starts a web page which connects to a local web server. There’s no reason for this to be a web UI, and no reason for it to be a separate application, interrupting the user experience.

Funny. Since the beginning we said that Canola would be simple, so our main goal is try to fulfill the common end user requirements(use with remote control, hardware keys, and no “movable selection”) and for that some sacrifices needed to be made. One of those was to focus on Stability, Speed, and the basic features working. So what kind makes me think is that Murray just said : “there’s no reason for this to be a web ui” where in my opinion he should at least have asked us “why did you guys did this damn web ui?” =)

If the developers want to get and set application configuration via a local http service then that’s fine

Again, we didn’t used the “client-server” paradigm thinking of that and then created a web ui for that. We did the web server because of the UI restrictions and developers resources to do so. Was the other way around.

The same goes for radio stations and podcasts. Please let me choose them from a list or wizard via the regular UI. At the moment they are even hidden under a “plugins” section in the web UI. Give me instant gratification now, please.

Well, I agree we should have a set of “default” rss / podcast enabled and also that the information architecture in the Config is crap. But again, we have the time constraint. This interaction with picking up good podcasts, ranking them, asking permission to include in the build, was not defined, and trying to “push” it in the end of development time would be a hell. This is however not an excuse, it’s a fact. A lot of things could be done better. But simply there’s was no time AND resources to do that. Imagine typing a RSS feed URL on Canola, UI even on the Thumbpad. That’s not user experience. The basic experience for that : is copy and pasting. It would not be possible inside Canola as it is today.

Those who were involved since the beginning knows that I’m always listening to people, and even more : I don’t criticize features, don’t say “just no” to them. I ponder, measure, rank, all of them and with those things I’m kind of able to decided what fits and what doesn’t in our roadmap for Canola. If you want to give a try in the tracker for example, sometimes we placed there our doubts and “problems”. So I do again the same here that unfortunately killed our “Configuration /Settings” items on the main menu:

1. How to enable input. This is the basic. How to enable users to input data, without breaking the user experience?
   We discussed a lot about it, and the only way was to develop a “Canola keyboard”. Remember then when we’re deciding this there’s was no thumbpad or whatsoever, and the 770 SDL application using GTK components is pretty complicated. But how much time would we need to create a usable, supporting international languages keyboard? As the UI designer I had a couple of ideas how to implement simple input, but for complete / usable input it was not enough.
2. With input plugged in, how much time would be needed to develop the widgets needed. Ok, I fully agree with you in the Theme change, but come on : I would place a new icon in the menu, just to change themes. The “configuration” icon was present in the menu until we reached the point of : there’s no resources to make a fully-canola-like configure screen inside Canola.

The point that I’m trying to reach here is : most of the basic Canola features available, can be used without the configuration tool, and that was our goal. It’s just a way to provide more control, without compromising the user experience. But something we in the team all agree:
It needs a lot of more work, to be at least good.

But the important question is:
Can we create the configuration inside Canola?
Yes we can and will do it. But SDL is not the wise way to go. That’s why our plans changed, and the boys are working hard with Evas. Evas will give us the flexibility we need to improve the UI. Not only with configuration, but also features that are out due to limitations in SDL.

I was writing about, Canola future, and I can at least repeat here : The only sure thing about it is that it will be simple. I know people will complain about X or Y, and of course we are listening, and improving it to fit most of the needs, but come on, there’s a limit and if we need to choose again between simplicity (less features, 2 ui) or complexity(1 ui) I would stay with the first one. I want to reach the point where the team will be able to do the 1 ui only, but we are unfortunately not there.

Others can do it? For sure! That’s the beauty of software development. Anyone with skills and 1 pc can do it. And we are not worried with that, we are just trying to create what we believe: simple software, easy to use, very stable and that regular users can really understand what’s happening. If it was for geeks only, I would make a lot of crazy things in the ui. Specially if I was the user in mind, 2 thumbs shortcuts, split scroll, gestures and motion direction detection and a lot of other crazy crazy things would be there!

Murray, this is nothing personal. I hope you don’t take it as so. It’s absolute the opposite. It’s to show that we are really listening, and that we are not blind, but decisions were made and to change them we needed a real rework, that is now happening =)

Well, I’m very excited to know that some incredible people are going to be at BossaConference in Recife, Brazil. This will be an excellent time to absorb a lot of information and also gather with some brilliant minds and maybe create some nice stuff for Maemo. I hope this become a annual event, and specially I also hope that more Brazilians get involved with it!

If you’re coming, drop me a comment or 2!

Conference website : http://www.bossaconference.org/
Conference venue : http://www.hotelarmacao.com.br/eng/index.html

Adam Curry, the famous dude has talked about our babies in his latest episode! check it out here

Canola Overview after the launch
Very relax launching. I said that because in the beta 1 we had a LOT of problems, and we stayed in the office for almost 8 hours in the morning.

Problems so far:
Seems to me that the only REAL and worrying problem is about some bug for those with older versions of canola installed. The new web-based configure tool keeps asking for the password, letting the users on loop. If you face this, please let us know, cause We’re really trying to track this bug but no success on reproducing it till now.

Feedback
Feedback has been great, both on Canola and Carman and I can see a bright future ahead of this 2 products. Maybe a convergence? Something like Canola Car Edition? That’s why we went with a more complicated but expandable architecture : we can now create more and more plugins for Canola and really add value when need, and only for those users who want it.

I will write later about the next packages that we will ad to the Add ons page on canola website and also about theming canola!