Canola beta9 is live
May 19th, 2008
Hello people! After a long delay we are back with a slightly bigger update, now even with a smaller team.
We managed to get the two most desired features into this release, but please bare in mind that they are
appearing for the first time, so we will need your help debugging and reporting problems so that we can
iron out the bugs.
Instructions:
Already a Canola user? Just click on the “Check for updates” button in the Application manager and wait for the Beta9 to appear!
Before running Canola, make sure you install all of the Canola related updates.
Most notable changes:
UPnP streaming is here now you can install the plugin that will allow you to browse UPnP capable media services and stream (photo, video, audio) as requested.
Canola is no miracle maker, so make sure that your videos are already in good resolution and your pictures are not insanely big to avoid slow performances over your network.
(1) A new icon with the name “Media servers” will show up at Canola’s home screen as soon as you have installed the UPnP plugin. (2) Inside Media servers, “Search servers” (3 and 4) will let you browse available UPnP devices.
Support for playlist creation! Simply press and hold a song in order to add to the dinamical
“On the Move” playlist later saved as a real playlist if you like. You are able to save as many playlist as you like, as well as edit them. More features will be coming in a near future.
(1) When you enter Canola’s “My music” section your whole song library is at your disposal. (2) If you press and hold a song the song will be added to the “On the Move” playlist. (3) The “On the Move” is found within the “Playlists” section of My music. (4) At the “On the Move” you also able to remove songs from playlists and even save your modified playlist by accessing the options menu.
Tune Canola2 using a new plugin Now you don’t need to use another application for managing cover arts and video thumbnails. The standalone 3rd party Canola Tuning application has been turned into a plugin that integrate seamlessly into Canola and give you more control over your cover arts, video thumbnails by allowing you to update and delete unused cover arts as well as select your cover art sources.
(1) The cover arts and video thumbnails can be updated simply by accessing an option found in the settings panel. (3) You can even choose your favorite place to download covers. (4) This feature can also be accessed directly from within the album art screen, found in “My music”.
Better List handling, in order to reduce miss clicks during scrolling : Please, let us know if it works better for you. We will keep improving based on your feedback.
Other Additions / Fixes :
- You can now change the volume using the hardware keys on your internet tablet, not just when using the player, but everywhere in Canola.
- Pre-added internet media is added in new installations, which will bring you a nice selection of photocasts, internet radio stations as well as podcasts. Enought to get you started, exploring these features of Canola.
- More stream URIs supported for internet radio, which allows more radio stations to be added.
- An annoying PNG thumbnail bug has been fixed, which should make some of you happy.
- Several dozens of bugs has been fixed during the release cycle, and Canola should be considerable more stable.
- Many interface gliches and corrections were made, resulting in API change. If you are a plugin author, you will need to update your plugin accordantly.
Note: If you have extra themes and plugins installed, make sure to update them as well, at the
Add ons section.
What’s known, and what’s coming:
We already know that UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) support is not top of the notch, so please be kind and share your problems with us, so that this component is able to evolve. Also, we highly suggest you to use streaming optimized media as well a good UPnP server.
We follow Nokia’s recommendation: SimpleCenter. It’s a free download and runs on Windows. If you are on Linux, FUPPES does the job, but you’ll need to organize the shared media to appear as good as possible. Missing points: the media has no thumbnails and it’s not possible to differentiate visually one kind of file from another. So make sure you have organized your contents into distinct folders.
Coming before beta 10:
- Highly improved YouTube plugin; sorted results, support for comments, log in to your account, leave comments etc.
Coming in beta 10:
- FM radio
- Search on lists
- Better list navigations (search, jumps, alphabetical grid)
- Simpler grid for photos and album art, to ease use by allowing alphabetical grouping and to improve speed in some cases
awesome!
I just picked up an N810 recently. I’m really impressed with some of the apps available for it — such as Xournal, Notecase, LXDoom, and of course, Canola. I’m working on utilizing the UPNP support, right now — trying to share the music off my laptop with my N810, when it’s in wlan range, of course ;^)>
I’m looking forward to using Canola on my Linux box, too. The interface, so to speak, it kicks the ever-loving buttsky of that infamous Granny Smith company. Rock on!
May 27th, 2008 at 9:08 amRe: UPnP service
I found a few links for a few projects developing UPnP media servers for linux, thought I’d share it here:
http://ushare.geexbox.org/ - GeeXboX uShare UPnP A/V Media Server (one nice note about that: Their media server provides its own web-based control interface, and if you must, a telnet-based control interface. I haven’t used it, but I think it looks quite promising)
http://mediatomb.cc/ - MediaTomb, fully web-based in the interfacing
http://freshmeat.net/projects/gmediaserver/ - FM info on GMediaServer; project homepage link available there. I’ve used GMediaServer, as of now, but I must admit that I was really not impressed with the quality of audio coming through it. I’m not sure what was at fault for that issue, perhaps it was a matter of the wlan interface, but I’d like to think it was the main software component in the thing. (Granted, the audio files I was listening to were encoded with Lame’s Variable bit-rate encoding. My iPod, since its most recent update, has developed significant problems in playing those files back, due to the bit-rate fluctuations inherent in files encoded with that method, such that the iPod can’t handle, with its power-management mux (so I hear) quite interfering with the playback. Unfortunately about all of my ripped MP3s are encoded with Lame and VBR. Ego, I was hoping the N810 could handle it, we’ll see :)
http://freshmeat.net/projects/ushare/ - UShare, another, I haven’t looked at it yet
on a different note:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/djmount/ - DJMount, it’s reported to allow you to ‘mount’ a UPnP media device so that you can access it, through the linux kernel, as like it was a normal filesystem. Perhaps it could be said to exist along some of the more technically low-level qualities of “interfacing”, that, and I think it’s quite intriguing.
Hope this is, at least, informative
May 27th, 2008 at 10:31 amHi,
I don’t have a Nokia tablet yet. Do you think it would be possible in the future to show the upnp content from a server (NAS box) in the respective categories instead of the extra “media servers” category? (E.g. music from server shows up in “music” in canola)
Thanks a lot and congratulations on such a great looking program.
Urs
P.S: Does canola2 run on the N770?
August 28th, 2008 at 6:34 pmUrs:
We’ve tried that. Theres one problem in that approach that we are not able to fix:
Servers are not implemeting correctly the standard, thus making it quite hard to make sure that a folder is a music / video folder.
Also, to have a dynamic list appearing in the middle of the other media categories doesn’t make too much sense, but this is minor.
But the main problem is really : there’s just trustable way to say “get my music folders” and also.. almost all the serve will create a similar structure like the music folder itself. So the user:
a) will se all the regular canola options plus : Shared media and then …
c) by album, by genre and etc sent by the server.
So in the end, the problem is to see how this could be solved but its not too easy : /
Marcelo
August 28th, 2008 at 7:52 pm