So Nokia bought Trolltech and brought Qt into the fold. Really surprising to most of us, but also very exciting. I had never used Qt before, though heard lots of nice things about it from my team at the German Aerospace Center. Actually, I have never been much fond of KDE, and 4.0 also didn't make me that excited, though I must say that the same counts for GNOME these days.

It has been some time since my employer INdT has released a new version of our car application, Carman. Carman is a OBD-II analyzer for the Nokia Internet Tablet, that presents various car information (via the onboard debug II interface) to the user, such as engine rounds per minute, calculated load value, vehicle speed, cooland temperature etc.


Carman isn't dead though, and a new, much-improved, version is about to be unleashed :-) still fully opensourced! The new version is similar in architecture to Canola and provides a whole new user experience. As Canola, Carman is now based on the EFL framework and spots an integrated touch-based interface, full with animation, maps integration as well as trip reporting!
Marcelo Oliveira has a post, explaining the details and showing off some of the cool new artwork! Though, not yet integrated with Canola, we are definately toying around with the idea, as well as hoping to be able to release Canola as opensource.

Marcelo did a nice post on running Canola in vertical mode and has a video demonstrating the result:



The vertical mode is possible by using Xrandr, which has been ported to Mamona and the Chinook version of Maemo (os2008) by our [INdT] Mamona team. Really cool stuff. Great work guys :-)

Now let's hope someone has the time to adapt the interface for vertical usage.

PS: Leo reminded me to tell that not one line of code was made to the Canola2 before filming this video :-)

If you didn't have the privilege of joining our Bossa Conference last year, now is your chance. It was the first INdT sponsored conference on Mobile / Open Source Software and it was a huge success.



To quote some of our attendances:

"The best Open Source conference I had the pleasure of attending."
Zack Rusin
KDE/MESA/Gollium3D

"The Bossa Conference was an awesome event. For me it was the best open source conference in 2007. Don't miss the next one..."
Marcel Holtmann
Bluez Maintainer

"Sand, sun and small devices. BOSSA was the perfect conference to discuss the future of Linux on embedded platforms."
John 'J5' Palmieri
Red Hat/OLPC/DBus

"Best conference I've ever been to. DON'T miss this one."
Carsten 'Rasterman' Haltzler
OpenMoko/Enlightenment



To sum up: Bossa Conference '08

Come and enjoy a innovative conference on Open Source Software for Mobile Embedded Platforms. Located in Porto de Galinhas, one of the tropical paradises of Brazil, the Bossa Conference will happen during 16th to 19th of March at Summerville Beach Resort (www.summervilleresort.com.br). The perfect combination of developers, pleasant environment and good ideas.

Let's go! We're waiting for you.


Information and registration: www.bossaconference.org.

So, after a long time working hard on getting the new Canola2 ready, the first beta is now officially out the door. I would like to congratulate the whole team, the high spirit and INdT for making this project possible.



Canola2 is, in my eyes, a very different product than the former version. The basic principles are the same, easy media consumption, but everything has been rewritten and Canola2 is definitely a more mature product. It comes with support for playback of local media such as video and audio, as well as a new way of watching your photos.

But, now that Canola2 is a product for the Nokia Internet Tablet, we haven't neglected internet connectivity, and as a result Canola2 is shipped with support for internet radio, podcasts as well as photocasts (Flickr and Picasaweb have been confirmed to work).

If the new beta makes you as excited as I am, I would suggest you to have a look at our new product site,

http://openbossa.indt.org.br/canola2/

where you will find screenshots, videos and more or less all there is to know about the new beta.

So, 9 days to the launch of the first Canola 2.0 beta. We are all very excited and we want you to be too, so we launched a teaser site so that you can already have a look at what you can expect. The site can be found at:

http://openbossa.indt.org.br/canola/index2.html

A bit more information on what the first beta will contain please consult the latest blog entry by Marcelo.

On a related note, Eduardo posted a video of Canola 2.0 running on the N770... pretty amazing that it runs as well as it does. Don't just throw out your N770 yet ;-) Also, Marcelo has written a nice entry about the photos view.

So our Canola posts yesterday created a long thread on InternetTabletTalk.com and Marcelo has been really busy answering most of the questions that have come up.



Artur wrote a blog entry giving a bit of light on our new media framework Atabake, as well as posted a screenshot of Canola playing back an episode of the Office (screenshot above).

Last evening there was a little hackaton here at work. Andre had spend the last week writing a new input framework(*) for EFL, much in the spirit of, and inspired by that of GTK+ and QT, and just couldn't resist trying to port Gustavo iPhone like keyboard to it.

It is currently only possible to write input methods in C, so Andre ported Gustavos code and made it into a real input method. Later, together with Gustavo and with input of a lot of excited co-workers we modified the interface and hooked the keyboard up in Canola.

Though, we are not going to use this exact keyboard, it shows what is possible, and if we find it worthy we might consider develop a new Canola integrated keyboard based on this code ;-)



(*) This work was done, in order for us to use the Hildon keyboard from within Canola.

It does, and it is really smooth :-)

Have a look at this video. It is not the latest version, but it demonstrates the responsiveness of our user interface.



High quality version at Marceloeduardo.com
High quality version at Blip.tv

So Marcelo Oliveira posted a video to YouTube of him demonstrating Canola at the World Usability Day here in Recife. The video shows one of the concepts that we have used to develop the new Canola, more specifically the photo view and the new player view (including cover arts). It also shows our kinetic list, which has evolved a bit since our prototypes.


High quality version at Blip.tv

Most of what is shown in the concept is already implemented and fully working. I especially love the photo view, and when the concept was first presented to me, it rocked me away; but it also left me scared for a moment.


How to implement this in a way that it is usable and fast of the N800 device? Lots of problems came up as anticipated, but Leo Sobral has been working hard and has come up with a lot of clever solutions, and I must say that his work has been bearing fruit - the result is just astonishing, and it is now a joy viewing my photos on my N800!





The audio view is also quite nice, especially the cover view, which lets you view your music by album, showing tracks and album cover. The actual player has also evolved, and it now feels a lot slicker.

Though, it mostly looks the same, all of the code is new, and Artur Souza has been hard at work making sure that everything works smoothly and fast, but he will tell you a lot more about this in an upcoming blog post.



During the last week, I have been busy working on adding support for podcast, but now I'm back at working on the mapping view for at least a week. Afterward, I will try blogging about the podcast support.

Oh, and now to forget...



...our new framework provides scaling with very little work; imagine what the future might bring ;-)