I've been cooking this post for a couple of weeks, but due to many reasons, I was not able to publish it; until now.

Since Feb 19th, I have left my job at INdT. I remember as if it was yesterday. Almost 5 years ago, I was moving from the Central region of Brazil to the Northeast, 2.500 km away from home, in search of new challenges in my professional career and also in my personal life. I was leaving a very good job in the technical center of one of the biggest (if not the biggest) bank in Brazil to try something new and very exciting.

The proposal was to join a selected group of highly skilled people, whose task was to ramp up an arm of Nokia here in Brazil, focused on research and development, which I had never heard about before. That was how I met the Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia, or simply, INdT. The thing that really caught my attention was the possibility to work directly with FOSS, while getting very well paid for that. What could ever be possibly better than that? ;)

By the time, besides of being a Linux user at home and having programmed using Open Source Software since the college, I had never actually contributed any single piece of code, documentation, translation or whatever, to an upstream project. Mostly because I had not yet understood the actual dynamic of developing software in the open. I was simply afraid of what was waiting for me on that corner.

I think those were new seas for INdT as well. Some of the guys that joined by that time, already had prior experience on the area, but a big part of us didn't. For this, and many other reasons, every day at the office was a different, joyful and exciting learning experience about the FOSS universe. That is something I am very thankful for.

As it happens very often with any company, it is necessary to make important decisions and focus on given areas. Unfortunately, and important to say, in my very own point of view, I realized that my piece of contribution to INdT had already been given. I really hope that it was useful somehow.

Time has come to find new opportunities, motivations and challenges in both professional and personal life. I'd like to thank very much and wish all the best to everyone I had the opportunity to work with during all this time. See you around!

Hey there. I've been extremely busy working on a very important project which is driving me and almost half of our crew mad. :P

Although it is true that the development of Canola is happening in a very slow pace, it doesn't mean that we have left the development behind. Actually many interesting things have happened lately, including of the closing of Google Summer of Code program. My very special thanks to all the people involved, students, mentors and administrators.

Coming back to the subject of this post, now that the new device is officially launched and all its features have been widely discussed all over the internet, I can share with you these pictures I've been holding for a while: Canola running on the N900.





It's still early work in progress and it is quite unstable, but I must say that it runs very smoothly, almost compared to Canola running on a regular computer. And it fits very well with the reduced size of the N900 screen.

It took me a lot of work to push all the dependencies to the extras-devel repository, always keeping in mind the backwards compatibility with Chinook and Diablo. We're still missing the proper package for Canola itself, because I wanted to make sure that it really worked before pushing it to the repositories. So, thanks to all the python goodness, it was just a matter of copying the source tree to the device and running it from the X Terminal. :D





Now back to work.

Warning! Long long post ahead!

Again, some late news, but I thought it would be of interest of the readers of Planet Maemo. This post in MobileCrunch reveals a lot of details, including release dates, of the so expected next generation of Internet Tablets.

If I understood correctly, by reading the article you'll see the most unexpected and exciting news, which is of course, the cellular voice, which turns the N900 in the first phone by Nokia running Linux. How cool is that? Now the oFono.org launch makes perfect sense.

More links:

Engadget
Discussion thread on Talk

UPDATE: Boy Genius Report points to CellPassion which shows a lowres photo of the new tablet:

This is just to remember the students interested in participating in this year edition of Google Summer of Code that the deadline for submitting new proposals is today (Friday, April 3rd) at 19:00 UTC. If you want to develop a project related to the best software platform for mobile devices out there ;), becoming part of this exciting community and after all earn some money with it, this is your last chance. (At least until next edition of GSoc).

We have already received more than 30 project proposals, some of them very well written and complete. High quality stuff that may soon will be available for all Internet Tablet users.

Thanks to everyone involved in this effort, especially Valerio and all other guys that are willing to mentor the projects. Let's make Maemo rock this summer!

As seen on Engadget Mobile:



This is the new phone by LG, named GD900, first presented in Barcelona during the Mobile World Congress in February. By the time, they only did not have pictures showing the UI, only the piece of hardware with that shiny transparent keyboard.

But let's take a closer look on the UI, especially the icons:



The UI is named S-Class, and it is kind of familiar to me. You still didn't get it?? Let me help.



Did we influence the design? Hard to say, but who cares? :) I prefer to think so. This is a sign of the wonderful work of our design team. Thanks so much Patrícia and Marcelo. She had a nice presentation about the disturbing relationship between designers and developers during Bossa Conference this year. She even gives some examples of how things were decided during the development of Canola. A must see.

By the way, this is how the Canola main menu looks like from now on. If you've already downloaded and installed the software you may have noticed it. In fact we want to know the opinion of the users, if they prefer this kind of approach, with one access to all plugins or the other one, with categories for the plugins. Please post it in the comments.

Thanks Marcelo for pointing this out (via twitter).

I'm pleased to announce that I've just closed bug #3881, which means that from now on Canola and all its components are licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.

The source code of the former closed-source packages, Atabake, Download Manager, Terra and Canola, has been uploaded to our gitorious server a few hours ago.

The canola-devel mailing list for developers is already set up and working on garage. Everyone is very welcome to join us in the development of the project. For documentation, such as installation instructions, build dependency, and so on, I'm setting up a wiki that should go online by the end of this week under the openbossa.org domain.

With all this, Canola officially leaves the beta status. The packages of for the final 2.0.0 version will be uploaded soon, together with brand new Maemo-EFL.

Last, I'd like to thank everyone for supporting the project even before the very first release and especially for providing feedback on the various releases we had since December 2007. If today we were able to release Canola as Free Software, consider yourself responsible for it as well.

Another edition of Bossa Conference finished and it was great as usual. I must admit I was really tired by the end of the event mainly because I had to switch between recording the presentations and actually preparing my talk.

One great thing is that Glaubert prepared a presentation template using the new maemo.org logo/style and I was able to use it in the slides. I promissed to Andrew I would start a new page on maemo wiki and upload the images I used so we could have an unified template for anyone to use it. (Haven't had the proper time/mood to do it yet though. :P)

So, back to the subject of this post, we recorded all presentations given during the event. Actually some of them are already available at blip.tv in the openBossa show page. Many many thanks to the guys that helped me somehow on this tough task. You know who you are! It would not be possible to do it without your help.

I'm still working on importing/converting/editing the remaining videos but you can already watch some of them.



Don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed so you can get automatic updates in your favorite feed aggregator as soon as new videos become available.

A year has already passed since the last edition of Bossa Conference and this years edition will happen in only a few days from now. Woohooo! I just can't wait for it to start.

Following the tendency of the previous editions, this year agenda brings a mix of many different subjects around the development of FOSS for mobile devices, from the basic platform components to the bling brought by the modern application development frameworks. Highlights: Kernel, Connectivity, Python, Qt, Webkit, Security, Enlightenment, Licensing, UI Design and Maemo.

Regarding Maemo, we'll have three presentations about it. Kate Alhola will give us a glimpse of the features of Freemantle with some live demos. Raul Herbster will talk about development for Maemo using the ESBox and Pluthon plugins for Eclipse. Definitely cool stuff. And finally, myself, for the first time presenting in Bossa Conference.

I will be wearing my hat as a member of the Maemo Community Council and my talk will focus on the Maemo Community, answering some questions such as: Who forms the community? What is it for? Why do we need the community? How to get involved? This is also the first time I'm presenting something on a non-technical subject and I hope to do it well.

I'm also trying to get some colleagues involved in the organization this year so we can get the presentations recorded on video and hopefully uploaded to the openBossa channel on youtube. Rock on!

Just in case you haven't seen it yet, I'll post the video here so it get aggregated in Planet Maemo. Yesterday at VMworld conference, VMware's CTO demoed the mobile virtualisation platform, using a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. The video shows it running Windows CE and Android virtual machines at the same time with impressive performance. Check it out:



If you can't see the video, just click here.

More information in ITPro (here and here), also in Gizmodo and WindowsForDevices.