Tomas and his colleagues announcing the open sourcing of Harmattan UI Framework:
Harmattan UI Framework video

(Sorry video is unavailable temporarily)

Tomas already posted a blog entry for the open sourcing announcement so I am not talking about that in detail, you can see more in the video. You can read the blog post by Tomas Junnonen from here.

The UI Framework team members approached me if I could make a video for their Harmattan UI Framework Open Sourcing announcement. So here is what we came up with the pretty tight schedule for shooting and editing and this is why I did not sleep much on last weekend. Go to the link to see what they want to say.

We were shooting these clips on evenings to very late, up to around 22:00. The editing was enormous task too with about 400 gigabytes of material and rendering time being over 8 hours, but I think it was worth it, it looks pretty cool now.

Please remember to select either 1080p or 720p from Youtube to see the video how it was intended to be seen, in high definition.

And many thanks to everyone on the video for their contribution and thanks for the possibility for letting me to shoot this, while it was a really hard work, it was also a lot of fun.

I have enough material on the hard disk that I might be also able to make a tutorial video from the same material, so if you liked this video, stay tuned, I might post another a bit later.

A part of the tutorial is already showing behind Sergiy on this video.
Like the new toolkit libraries are free software, so is this video including its sound track (that I did by myself). The license is Creative Commons Share-A-Like.

Comments are open for 2 weeks in my blog for your feedback about the video. Your feedback is very welcome.

I have been thinking what is the major difference of Maemo compared to many other platforms, and I think it is that it offers native Linux for developers. Instead of living in the limitations of javascript, Maemo enables you to do much more and enables you to use the full computing power available from this little computer. I feel that the train went already for Java, I was in the middle of the previous Java-bubble that pretty much exploded in around year 2000 depression. Been there, experience it first hand. Needless to say I don't believe in Java or .NET or similar hypes anymore. The future is for mixed offering including both native and high level environments. And that is what Maemo exactly is today, you can use both high level languages _and_ more importantly low level languages.

I created another video (I previously announced Maemo summit video). This video is also from the Maemo summit trip, but features more about the Nokia N900 Maemo 5 user interface - if you haven't tried it yourself, it is something unlike anything you have used before, in a positive way - I liked this chosen Maemo-5 UI concept from the very beginning and I was happy to see it becoming reality. Try N900 in a Nokia flagship store or somewhere else if you are still thinking and not already an owner of the device.

The Bounce Evolution, desktop and browser were all filmed in a hotel room in Amsterdam. Then there are few scenes from the city and new scenes from the Maemo summit - featuring possibly some of those who were missing from the previous Maemo summit video. I intended to use the footage in another video, but I did not finish it. I found the reuse for it on this video. I hope you like it. The UI videos are not cut, just trimmed - meaning that what you see is what you get.

The video can be watched in Youtube in the following URL:

Nokia N900 in Amsterdam

Credits:
Video: Karoliina Salminen
Music: Karoliina Salminen
Music remix: Juan Manuel Avila

Few words about the music remixer artist: Juan is from Fin-music mailing list - it was a virtual gathering place a group of hobbyist musicians (which were specialized to electronic music and who almost all wanted to do some Jean-Michel Jarre) used to have while they were gathering around exceptionally talented artist that called himself Fin (Christian Worton). We were sharing our creations with each other and giving feedback and sharing ideas and tried to sound like Fin (Fin sounded superb by default). Juan was one of the active members on the list and luckily now Facebook has connected this group of fellows again. Juan also composes his own music (I have few of his CDs he have given to me) but he is also excellent in doing remixes. Many thanks for him for making a remix of the Maemo summit opening soundtrack (please see my maemo summit opening video if you want to hear the original to compare, you can find it on youtube, by looking the list of my videos, it should be there one of the first ones on the list as it is a quite recent video of mine).

I recorded quite a bit video footage at Maemo Summit 2009 which was held in Amsterdam, Netherlands. I did not have presentation there (because my proposal did not get approved (clutter app development)), but I recorded what the others were talking about, the people attending, the happenings around the Maemo summit 2009 and the place, Amsterdam.

I have been editing the footage for a quite some time now and finally decided to release the first my video about Maemo Summit despite I have only clips from perhaps 1/5 of the scenes I was filming at the summit. It is three and half minutes and features 720p HD video and music. No speeches, just audiovisual experience to deliver some feelings from Maemo summit 2009.

Be sure to click the HD and full screen buttons for a better viewing experience.

Maemo Summit 2009 Video

The video was shot with Canon EOS 5D Mark II + 24-105 4L IS USM at 1080p30 and edited afterwards with Final Cut Pro and then downgraded to 720p30 for Youtube. I hope you enjoy the short video. Please give me also feedback. Comments on my blog are enabled for the first two weeks after the release of the blog entry.

You have got new N900 but having hard time which ring tone to choose for your device and the songs you have are not suitable length and are not looping? Think no more, here is the solution:

Maemo Summit 2009 Opening video on Youtube

My computer just finished uploading the opening of 2009 Maemo Summit to Youtube. It features the N900 video and Peter Schneider's welcome. If you see embedded version of this video, please make sure you click the Youtube logo to see it in HD (after clicking HD, you can click full screen to get the most benefit out of it).

The video Peter Schneider plays features my music. The video content is from two Nokia N900 videos that I remixed together. I edited the soundtrack of this video so that the music part mixes sound from the event (same thing but poorer quality) and the original soundtrack so that the music has higher fidelity than what you could record on the N900 hall on Maemo Summit at Westgasfabrik. It was pretty hard to sync the two soundtracks together. I am not so advanced user with Final Cut Pro yet and it involved lots of handwork to do it (zooming and looking the waveforms closely on Soundtrack Pro).

Unfortunately I was kind of busy with releasing this (since people seem to be eager to see the videos now rather than later), so editing and filtering is not best possible and there is for example some visible noise on it. The film was filmed with Canon EOS 5D mark II with ISO setting (automatically turned into that) 25600 (the very high ISO explains why there is some noise in the video - in same conditions my old video camera would have turned almost black and white and greenish and would have produced quite low resolution video). The video was shot in the P-mode that automatically sets the ISO etc. values. I propably should have shot the video in the M-mode instead but I had too little time to set it up with the M-mode before the show started.

I do all filming nowadays with the Canon EOS 5D mark II, and have stopped using video cameras. The lens used was Canon EF 24-105 f 4 L IS USM.

Anyway, have fun with the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqsMAkKrXJ8.

There has bee a lots of interest around this new device and the Maemo 5 operating system. Lots of positive comments and then I have read some comments where people doubt that the transitions would be just some flash animations and not a real thing (which of course is not true). Well, this is a OpenGL hardware accelerated Maemo device, and all you see is real. Quim Gil just posted on Twitter a link to a new video showing how the Maemo UI works, if you had doubts, you can put the doubt aside and see by yourself. The user experience is slick and beautiful.

Our secret N900 "The Device" is no longer so secret as it just got announced. I can't though show yet my own videos about it (I will post them some time later, so stay tuned), but there is already plenty of announced material that might interest you. Others have already announced links to them I am sure. I really love our device and I am sure you want it too!

New site, lots of cool pictures and information:
http://maemo.nokia.com

There is a video in Youtube (not my video, but cool nonetheless):
N900 interaction documentary

I recommend watching the above video if you are eager to see (I am sure you are) how our completely renewed fancy UI works. It is very cool and it works!

I recently created a new song ( these can be found from my music blog from http://karoliinamusic.blogspot.com ) and here is a shortened version of it which I tried to make useful as use as a ring tone for mobile devices. It is a bit more equalized and bit more compressed also than the hifi-version of the song. By all means, you can use also the actual song as a ring tone, but this has been cut to start from the middle to be more useful - ring tones usually play only a short time and long intro part is not very useful on them then.

I have this on my N810 and also in my N95 and I think it works pretty well. You can in principle use it with any mobile device which understands mp3 format and allows you to assign these files as ring tones.

I am planning to do a measurement of the frequency response of the tiny speakers to equalize this better for them (now this has too much mid frequencies maybe for the tiny speakers, because this mix is still "almost hifi"). I haven't done that yet, I should dig my measurement microphone from storage to be able to do that (the Internet tablet / phone mix would be counter-equalized with that). However, this version already works on your device, so feel free to use it.

Download it from here:
Sky Party - ring tone version 1

The file bitrate is 128 kbit/s and the file size is 2188433 bytes which is around 2MB. You can install it by for example reading this with the N810, saving the file and then assigning it as a ring tone for the internet call. Alternatively you can download it with your computer, use the USB cable to connect the computer to the device and then copy the file to the device's file system.

If you are using Mac to download the file (instead of the mentioned Internet tablet for example), you may need to right click the file with CTRL + mouse button or otherwise the Quicktime starts to play it instead of downloading the file.

All feedback is welcome.

I am back, with a blog on another service. I attended the Akademy 2008 and Maemo Summit 2008 conferences. I have created a video of both of them. These are no presentation videos but rather attempt to record the spirit of the time and place to a collection of video clips which are presented in a sequence on these short movies. Both conferences were quite interesting and a success. It was great to meet new people, especially on the Akademy conference, I have been participating many years in the Guadec conferences, but this was my first Akademy.

Here is the Akademy video. Nokia gave devices for KDE developers and I have quite many faces who received one on the video. Have a look if you are interested:


Akademy 2008 KDE conference - Nokia gave out N810 devices for free from Karoliina Salminen on Vimeo.

Kate Alhola had linked to my Maemo summit video on her earlier post. Because of technical issue on her blog software, she embedded the Youtube link. The Youtube offers poor quality, especially the audio quality is severely degraded since Youtube only supports mono sound. Here is the same video in 720p HD quality and stereo in the Vimeo-service (by the way it is the best video service I have found to the date):


Maemo Summit 2008 from Karoliina Salminen on Vimeo.

If you go to the vimeo page, you can watch these videos in 720p HD when you click the full screen button.