I just found here in Oslo, at Qt Software, the newest participant of bossa 09!



tux is not dead! he is still recovering from a broken window :P

for those who don't know, fisl stands for "international forum of free software", it's the biggest open source event in brazil bringing together all segments interested in OSS: students, academy and companies.

in fisl 2008, which happened in april, we, at INdT, had the opportunity to organize the programming contest that happens during the event, called the programming arena.

it was a great event and the students really did their best to solve the proposed set of problems and win the prize of 1 N95 + 1 N810 for each member of the winning team.

the competition was divided in 2 days: the first phase was to solve a problem set programming in python for series 60 and the second phase was to develop an odf reader for maemo.

below is a video produced by casa de cinema de porto alegre, which shows a bit of how exciting this whole competition was for all the participants.

For the lasts 3 months we have been working hard on the QEdje project, a bridge of the Edje declarative language (from the EFL - Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) to the Qt world. In the next week we are going to travel to Belgium, where we will have the opportunity to present, on Tuesday 12/08, this work at Akademy!

Edje has been used on Canola, Carman and various other applications with great success, simplifying the work of designers and developers. So we are really excited about the opportunities of using Edje together with Qt!


below is the abstract of our presentation:


Edje is a declarative language that simplifies the development of complex interfaces separating the UI design from the application logic, by providing animations, layouts and simple scripts in a very small memory footprint.

The main purpose of the QEdje project is to build a bridge among components that proved to have great value for open source developers: Edje and Qt. This will extend the Qt toolkit with the flexibility of a declarative language, such as Edje, and also enable Qt widgets to be embedded into Edje UI design.

This presentation will show more about the QEdje project, current status, future plans and also present some canvas benchmark's and improvement possibilities, taking Evas (which is recognized as a very fast and optimized canvas) as a reference point.

the new beta 9 of canola is out! in this release the main new additions are the UPnP plugin and the "On the Move" playlist.

I find these two new features extremely useful: now you are able to create and edit a dynamic playlist on the go and access your media from your local network seamlessly.

besides that, there is also the new canola-tuning plugin, which enables you to get the cover arts and video thumbnail from inside canola´s settings (no need to run the canola-tuning app anymore).

one really old bug that was finally solved is the PNG thumbail generation! this was a long time on my todo list, but with low priority. the fix included a patch for epsilon, the EFL thumbnail library, and I took the opportunity to send some patches for epsilon upstream.

hope you enjoy, there is more to come ...
br

we are now working at full speed in order to release canola 2.0. a lot of new features are being implemented, and unfortunately we are not having much free time to report back to the maemo community our work in progress.

I have been working since the beginning of the project with the download manager, the new canola media player, code-named "atabake" and more recently with the UI of the photos screens.

next week we will start posting some screenshots of the features of canola 2.0: podcasts, media player and photos browsing have been through a major "ramp up"

and despite the new look and feel and the features added, canola 2.0 keeps the original spirit: a simple, yet powerful and sexy portable media aggregator.

hope you enjoy the outcome of this project!

hi,

after a long time without updates on this blog, I will give an overview on my current tasks involving the new ramp-up of Canola.

there is a lot of work going on around Canola, as you can see in various posts from Marcelo, Barbieri and Kenneth! That´s an exciting time for good changes and new features :)
Besides the adoption of evas and edje as the UI toolkit, Canola is being rewritten in python and being reviewed from an architectural and functional point of view.

in the first semester I have worked on a cache and download manager for providing easy access to offline content, such as podcast and images, etc. Now I am working together with Artur (MoRpHeUz) on a media-engine for Canola. The main purpose of this media-engine is to provide simple access to multiple backends, such as MPlayer, GStreamer, the current Osso media server and others.

we all know that the default media-player has a lot of restrictions to supported formats, that´s why we believe that multiple media-backends is the way to go for applications that want to maximize the features for the end user. The new media engine will be able to select the best backend automatically for each mime-type, combining MPlayer, for open formats, with GStreamer (we are still waiting for playbin2 to come out) or the current media-engine for proprietary formats and DRM protected content.

in addition to support a wide range of media formats, this new engine will also manage sessions, allowing applications to save/restore state, such as remembering the last url played along with the position. Moreover, the session architecture will end with today´s mess of various applications using and confusing the osso-media-server.

what all applications want is a simple and reliable method of managing the playback of their media and that is what we will do!

BR