Handful of Nothing

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 )