Handful of Nothing

So we received the last test build friday and we got pretty excited because it’s already on release shape. So expect an update monday or tuesday :)

Why took it so long this time?
Compared with the other releases, yes it took more time, but some guys left the company (all luck to both in their brand new company) and we were re-organizing ourselves to deal with 3 new projects. The team responsible for the Canola, has actually grown, but Canola team doesn’t exist anymore :) Actually it has always been the “Concepts Team” and Canola and Carman were the only public applications. Before that you probably played the “Blocks” (tetris-like games), the port of Doom, the improved Chess bundled game, the first port of abiword and gnumeric, maemomyth, videocenter, Video Converter, just to name some of public projects, but across our small office.

Now the team needs to deal again (like in Canola2) with simultaneous projects so we needed help. Gathering together the buddies from another office (Manaus) we are now becoming a slightly bigger team, but the productivity speed will only come with time.

So, what’s coming?
Apart from the usual big package of debugging, we are finally deploying the test version (because it has never been public tested) UPNP support :) YES! The original project still far from what we needed, so Chenca took the lead and ported the old support to a Canola2 plugin format and now you will be able to use it. Please forgive us for the simplicity and the lack of controller profile but we did our best in the time available. Improvements for sure will come.

Also, we took a lot of the recommendations from the Users in the internet tablet talk forum and you gonna get a lot of asked features. Example being the youtube : Sort results, comments, log in to your account etc. Also better error handling, and fixed some situations that were not dealt before.

One of my favorite new features is the Canola tuning integration. Everything will be there. It’s going to be needed only to download the small plugin that “binds” the cover download to a source( Amazon, last.fm) the rest (id3, folder) will be already there integrated. Also the new list is being integrated and we expect to reduce the error when scrolling to the lowest rate possible.

There’s also a small effort in some improvements on the loading time, and more great things to come in beta10, like choice to change the picture view layout to simple grid (as well the cover art) and for those seeking speed the choice to see only 2 rows of pictures instead of 3, better navigation in the list (point to jump across the list) and finally a lot of small fixes to better support plugins. From the serious ITT posted bugs, we killed already the libseet0 problem and the battery problem described by HAL has been found and it’s being solved!

I hope everyone who uses canola enjoy this new upcoming update, and give us as much feedback as possible so we can improve for beta10.

Ok, enough of Canola2… Some links
Today, enjoy a full saturday of playing guitar and browsing the web between the technic exercises, I came across this nice desktop tablet concept that would really solve my problem of space. I think the foldable display is just genius when you want to move from digital do analog work (drawing?) and better yet if you’re doing other kind of activities just like old-style studies :).

Speaking of Concepts, looking at Frog Design’s new concept (the mask) brought my attention to the subject: how important or how relevant should be a concept? Of course when you think of Concept cars, they are there in expositions and they end up being implemented in some way (fully, only details, etc) but when you do some concept that is really far away and sometimes even worse: has been already described in some science fiction novel is it worth it? Or companies are just looking for publicity? I ask that because I really want to setup a blog for me and my team mates to post concepts (not like the mask) but a little bit more realistic ones. Are they going to start discussions on the concept itself or just bring some “this is not possible” comments?

I hope the rest of the year will be as good as the last 6 months. :) Now just 2 more years to reach mach 3 :)

After a couple of years working on a mainly developer based company, it has been quite nice to see the Design team to grow and show it’s value in the last year. But one problem has arrived for us here in Brazil: There’s not available professionals around.

I know nowadays everyone is facing problems in hiring good professionals but my point is that here you can always find only web-oriented guys. Not that there’s a problem in hire by talent, but I really see the day when I will hire a intern that did a lot of real user interface during his university. The courses in Brazil were first focused on graphic design, then on digital design (mainly web) and now I think that there’s a chance to influence the academia to the real interaction design, or even better to the user experience area.

For me it’s clear that UX is the umbrella of almost all design subjects thus it has a lot of potential of gathering interest from the students, but for sure they need some vision that there will be market for them to really dive into the idea.

That’s why I’m quite happy to be involved in some work with the Universities, that were only giving scholarships to Computer Science students and now is including the Design students as well.

It’s crucial to give the design students the same kind of challenge we give to the computer guys to prepare them better to the real life challenges in this increasingly digital and interactive market.

I think soon enough We can have some more interaction design oriented courses like there are already in some other countries. I will do my best to do my small part on this as good as possible.

By Krisse:

You see Canola as over-simplified, but I see Hildon as over-complicated. I think the reason we disagree is because we have totally different ideas about the kind of person that would be a potential tablet user.

I would just change that to not use the actual things, but what they represent : Canola would be replaced by a task / simplified user experience to the Hildon as “desktop-like more featured experience”.

Sorry for the prolific post before :/ Thanks Krisse, to point out everything in 2 lines.

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.

You were arrested in a foreign country by “no reason”… What do you do? you twitter “Arrested” then all your friends will call your embassy on the country you are to set you free faster than a bullet.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/16/twitter-saves-man-from-egyptian-justice/

I can’t imagine a better publicity for twitter than this :)

Ad ons video
Also, from my friend Marco Gomes the “impressive” demo from videoclix : here. Ok, are we coming back to hand (manual) indexing?

And last but not least:
I will do some publicity myself : http://www.hulu.com/ , While I do like the amateurish videos from youtube, or even the “to hell with ip” content I must admit : hulu.com looks just sweet. Oh god, I like clean designs :)

The post entitled Visualizing Fitt’s law is really a nice reading. Even if you have read that more than 5 times before, you will like the way it was written and illustrated. A nice bookmark for those who are “consulted” a lot in the Ux field :)

For those who are starting, and wanted more, maybe “real world” view of it : What about MS office ? and last but not least the graphical view at Mind Hack.

And in those links you will be able to find some small pearls, also worth bookmarking :
here (on Hick’s law, here on Gom and also this on the Power law of practice

This :

The 37signals’s post tells exactly what I was prepared to post. I just feel sorry for the probably competent Interaction designer who was the one to carrier the “I Don’t care! I want just like the IPHONE” task.

We are trying to hit beta10 :) this release adds the requested audioscrobbling and fixes a lot of previous problems. If you use Canola2 please make sure to update, update themes and then install Last.fm and youtube updated version.

Hope people like it :)

Changelog : http://www.openbossa.indt.org/canola/news.html

Developer tool : http://www.openbossa.indt.org/canola/developer.html

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.

Hei guys :)

I would like to say that this is coming, and if everything goes right you will have it at least for linux :)

Video :

It’s fully functional, has some small problems in fullscreen (some screens are not yet ready for fully scalable uis ) but you can test everything in windowed mode.

Also, there’s two more tutorials coming, and gustavo published one simpler one for those that were not too keen to try the more complex youtube source code :

Gustavo’s simple model tutorial for canola2 plugin development

We think that if we can release this tar file (the generation is also automatic, so it will be updated with each new release) it would be quite nice for developers that want to try out.

For windows and mac users there’s a solution (not a good one but..) you can run a live cd of ubuntu (in vmware client for example) and do all development inside, the same way you would do it on the device.

Kudos for fleury and the rest of the team, and I will now try to do what it takes to release this asap :)

Marcelo

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 :)

Grab yours here : http://openbossa.indt.org/canola/add.html
or just refresh the application installer :)

The flat simple theme goal is to speed up some interactions by using less transparency on several images. It really works