Handful of Nothing

Well, 1 week after releasing some canola videos I’m pretty excited with the feedbacks we’ve been receiving. Of course there was sort of “negative” ones but in a vast majority they were all encouraging ones.

The better of all this feedback is to see that we we weren’t wrong with some of our choices, and that we made some right decisions in the project to make it more stable and simple than in the beggining.

What we expected :

1) People telling us that is just a mere rip off of any other famous thing UI

2) People telling us that everything Canola does can already be done

3) People complaining about not being able to ………….. (put here something)

4) People saying that screen would be completely dirty if you use your fingers

So these things were said, and I’m very happy to be able to answer them all!

1) Well it’s not a ripoff. We needed a development mock up and the mockup was made of course to show off to managers that we’re trying to bring the “front row” feeling to the 770. You use your Mac or your windows media to browse the web, chat, blog like I’m doing right now and all other stuff, including all your work. But when you want only to browse all your media, and be able to control it with the minimum effort and maybe without keyboard shortcuts or mouse manipulations what you do? If you have used one of those media interfaces you go for it. That’s our case. We’re a not replacing Maemo’s ui we are adding more to the platform letting users browse their media with ease.

Now it’s time to finish and improve the real Canola theme visuals and show that we are not a rip off. To use it only in the screen, drag stuff around, touch on the things that you want to do and watch them do it it’s a lot of fun. Of course we are inspired by all sucessful media cases, and like any other company out there we try at least to make things a little bit focused on the device they are going to run instead of trying to rip some sucessful UI off and roughly adapt it to a new use case.

Also there’s a lot of thing In my humble opinion (IMHO) Ipod, despite of it’s out-of-this-world sucess has that are annoying. And we tried to keep ourselves out of problems with that. The not so funny thing is that some of this annoying things are OF COURSE very hard to solve and a lot of work or at least re-work was needed.

About wanted features : Well, I’m not a 37signals fan or something but I remember well something about “it just doesn’t matter’. It’s like that… not being able to bring down an asteroid just doesn’t matter. Not being able to input text? It just doesn’t matter for us… Just because since the begin we had a vision and that vision should be smaller never bigger for a first version. Why? Because if you cannot tell what your 6-8 months application will do in the first month and even more important: if you cannot tell how much time you will need to do it, you will never receive a “GO” signal from your boss. Simple like that. We needed focus, we did focused in our basic use cases and now we are very proud of being able to do it in the most solid way we can think off. Canola is solid! It does break, for god sake it’s a software that was never released to the user, but I can tell you that I’ve used softwares that are less stable than Canola a lot of times only this week. It’s the price we paid for having it stable : less features.

About dirty screen : well, who knows what can appears in the future right? =) some nano-technology that keeps your screen clean or even some very very kind company manufacturer that sends you a lot of screen protectors was a gift =)

So, does canola do what can already be done in the Maemo? Yes.
Does it do something that cannot be done in Maemo? Yes to.
OH! Is it a really out-of-this-world feature? No. Just some details! But I think they are going to be very useful to some 770 owners.

In the end, all I want to do is to finish this version, start the work in the next improved and more powerful version and for god sake’s : I wanna go on vacations!

=)