Adobe is just insane.
I'm again having some time and space in my mind to look at the world around me. A huge work related milestone was reached today. Something ended and something starts. It's a really big shame that the things that do succeed in my new position are definitely something I would not be able to share for a long long time with anybody outside of Nokia.
I wrote some time ago about how insane the flash 11 is for 3D support with a very concise representation compared to that of html5 and silverlight. Now, adobe really has done it. Adobe alchemy allows conversion of c/c++ code into low level actionscript bytecode. Secure execution at native speed. Full GDB support, compiles with gcc, supports all the tricks c++ has in its sleeve. Just insane. The bytecode is now running at 40% native, wiht high hopes to get it to 80% native speed before alchemy is launched. You also get finally direct access to converted c++ libraries from AS code. All existing code assets are finally browser compatible.
If you are interested in where online gaming is heading in the future, look no further.
As a demonstration, Epic has converted the >1MLoc unreal engine with alchemy. Watch this whether you are or are not not a coder.
If you are a coder, you need to reserve 45 minutes and watch the video. I am serious. You *have* to watch it.
This is bliss. Triple-a -level games coming to facebook ;). Then push button conversion to adobe air application for your favorite i or android device. I wonder how this will work for windows phone in the future.
Planet maemo: category "feed:a92c474e7b83a19eb5ea3d097fbe66bc"
I'm fell for it again. Long period of silence. It doesn't mean that things have stood still.
Somehow, in the flurry of figthing to get N9 out, I missed Adobes latest big thing.
Through unimaginable hardships, we managed to pull a rabbit from the hat and get N9 done.
Schedule was just insanely tight, we got blows from all directions: Vanjoki leaving us, Ari leaving us, Elop dropping of meego from strategy, key developers leaving the company when we needed them the most.
Swipe UI, that we are now admiring, required every single application and framework to be rebuilt almost from scratch. All the blows and all the work in the course of 9 months. I never knew how much sweat and tears there needs to be to get this baby out.
What I want to say to the people who beared all that: Respect. You have my utmost respect and admiration. We didn't just do our best, we crafted the software to near perfection. Simplistic UI is easy to imagine, but extremely hard to execute. And execution includes design. Devil is in details and temptations are many. Keeping the boat steady on course needed a lot from you design and product management.
It's nothing short of miracle that the fruit of our labor is now admired by millions.
I am extremely proud of what I am holding in my hand right now. As a user, I'm loving every minute of using it and wouldn't change it for a thing.
All of maemo: I salute you. Job well done. Be proud.
Schedule was just insanely tight, we got blows from all directions: Vanjoki leaving us, Ari leaving us, Elop dropping of meego from strategy, key developers leaving the company when we needed them the most.
Swipe UI, that we are now admiring, required every single application and framework to be rebuilt almost from scratch. All the blows and all the work in the course of 9 months. I never knew how much sweat and tears there needs to be to get this baby out.
What I want to say to the people who beared all that: Respect. You have my utmost respect and admiration. We didn't just do our best, we crafted the software to near perfection. Simplistic UI is easy to imagine, but extremely hard to execute. And execution includes design. Devil is in details and temptations are many. Keeping the boat steady on course needed a lot from you design and product management.
It's nothing short of miracle that the fruit of our labor is now admired by millions.
I am extremely proud of what I am holding in my hand right now. As a user, I'm loving every minute of using it and wouldn't change it for a thing.
All of maemo: I salute you. Job well done. Be proud.
Title says almost all.
I've been toying a bit with idea of adding a very lightweight http server to n900 to serve the primary data of the device so that development of the UI can be done nicely on PC while still accessing the real data. One might argue that just pulling the data to PC would solve this and using the existing APIs. Well, yeah, but that's also laborious if you are not linux developer, whereas this approach works beautifully for any web runtime developers as well as developers of qt quick apps.
Doing this on web paradigm allows reuse of many learnings from my past life and creates a very flexible middle layer between the data itself and the UI.
As the first thing to serve as the proof of concept, I created an ATOM image http service on the device. It follows directly the format of flickr, so any code written to show flickr images can be converted to showing n900 images - either on the pc or on the device itself. Data is retrieved from tracker and thumbnails are also trackers pre-generated thumbs.
And here's the beef of course. Once the UI code is working nice and all, it can be just copied to the device and it'll just work. As a demo, here's vanila n900 (no overclocking) running both the server and qt quick application without any noticeable lag. Of course the devices thumsbs suck, as they don't have an aspect-ratio retained version available.
Web server also works as a very nice access control layer between a runtime that can be now very sandboxed. Not that I care.
I've been toying a bit with idea of adding a very lightweight http server to n900 to serve the primary data of the device so that development of the UI can be done nicely on PC while still accessing the real data. One might argue that just pulling the data to PC would solve this and using the existing APIs. Well, yeah, but that's also laborious if you are not linux developer, whereas this approach works beautifully for any web runtime developers as well as developers of qt quick apps.
Doing this on web paradigm allows reuse of many learnings from my past life and creates a very flexible middle layer between the data itself and the UI.
As the first thing to serve as the proof of concept, I created an ATOM image http service on the device. It follows directly the format of flickr, so any code written to show flickr images can be converted to showing n900 images - either on the pc or on the device itself. Data is retrieved from tracker and thumbnails are also trackers pre-generated thumbs.
And here's the beef of course. Once the UI code is working nice and all, it can be just copied to the device and it'll just work. As a demo, here's vanila n900 (no overclocking) running both the server and qt quick application without any noticeable lag. Of course the devices thumsbs suck, as they don't have an aspect-ratio retained version available.
Web server also works as a very nice access control layer between a runtime that can be now very sandboxed. Not that I care.
A quick peek at the next nuvofre is out in case you want to try it out.
I'll fix an issue in calendar coloring before I will put the next version of theme maker out.
Theme is using the nice bundled tahoma font, icons are oxygen icons from kde (kudos guys), transitions have been tuned to feel more flowy.
Download: NuvoFre_1.08
As said, grave issues with calendar, otherwise it should rock.
A few shots:
I'll fix an issue in calendar coloring before I will put the next version of theme maker out.
Theme is using the nice bundled tahoma font, icons are oxygen icons from kde (kudos guys), transitions have been tuned to feel more flowy.
Download: NuvoFre_1.08
As said, grave issues with calendar, otherwise it should rock.
A few shots:
I have moved now away from Fremantle to Harmattan and Meego. This doesn't mean that the maintenance is stopping for Fremantle in any way, just that the coordination effort on OS & MW has lessened and my presence is not needed so much anymore.
The first maintenance release is out. What you can see as the biggest news items is that application manager looks quite a bit different, and Ovi store is out. These two things go hand in hand. The work on application manager is on improving the user experience for installing applications from Ovi store. In addition to that, it's on improving the user experience of installing content from the community and nokia applications catalogues. Application manager is now fast enough to use - if only maemo.org would be updated soon, then so would the community catalogues.
This is just a quick blog reply to requests to show the code of the Calculator of my previous blog post. I would gladly share the source in a nice zip as well, but maemo.org wiki doesn't allow zip uploads (DOH!), so you'll have to accept badly commented wiki page.
Here be the WIKI.
Here be the WIKI.
Some thoughts about QML
QML reminds me a lot of Adobe Flex on Flash - my personal favourite tool for creating anything. Only difference is that QML is more suited for application development, as it allows full access to all system components - and is easily extensible with pretty much any normal qt components.
Read more on the snapshot:
http://qt.nokia.com/doc/qml-snapshot/
and from Kenneths excellent blog on the subject:
http://kenneth.christiansen.googlepages.com/DUI.html
Anyway, intro aside, I have also started doing a bit of coding now on QML and I really love it. It has nice separation of the declarative part (QML) and the logic part (either qt components or javascript). You can easily embed javascript to the qml code, but the clever guys at qt labs have made sure that you can only have tiny snipplets there. A welcome separation.
What has also been fun is that I have done ALL the coding on the pygtkeditor, so no coding on the mac, and all the coding on n900. Well, I did work on some button gfx a bit on mac, but that's it. Painting is not coding ;)
Anyway, take a look at the result of less than 400 lines of code. And the code is clean, sweet and easy to extend. Check out those transitions! They are 10 lines of code for the advanced, and about the same to get the fancy glow effect done to the buttons.
What I am really eagerly waiting for is a chance to see a proper flash-like editor for qml.
QML reminds me a lot of Adobe Flex on Flash - my personal favourite tool for creating anything. Only difference is that QML is more suited for application development, as it allows full access to all system components - and is easily extensible with pretty much any normal qt components.
Read more on the snapshot:
http://qt.nokia.com/doc/qml-snapshot/
and from Kenneths excellent blog on the subject:
http://kenneth.christiansen.googlepages.com/DUI.html
Anyway, intro aside, I have also started doing a bit of coding now on QML and I really love it. It has nice separation of the declarative part (QML) and the logic part (either qt components or javascript). You can easily embed javascript to the qml code, but the clever guys at qt labs have made sure that you can only have tiny snipplets there. A welcome separation.
What has also been fun is that I have done ALL the coding on the pygtkeditor, so no coding on the mac, and all the coding on n900. Well, I did work on some button gfx a bit on mac, but that's it. Painting is not coding ;)
Anyway, take a look at the result of less than 400 lines of code. And the code is clean, sweet and easy to extend. Check out those transitions! They are 10 lines of code for the advanced, and about the same to get the fancy glow effect done to the buttons.
What I am really eagerly waiting for is a chance to see a proper flash-like editor for qml.
Now theme maker is on the Beta level. You can actually consider creating themes with this one and give those to your friends and not only to your enemies.
What really was improved:
1. Optification - Theme maker theme deb files are optified so they don't eat any root
2. Icons are also optified
3. Fonts work again (and are stored in user home, which is as good as optification)
4. Theme selection works now without need for device reboot
What is missing:
1. build-deb needs to be added - not a biggie
2. Icons need user to restart the device - it's a bug in the launcher code, that is being fixed by Nokia tam .
3. Application manager new icons are not yet themable - doh! - I cannot release features that haven't officially been released. Damn!
4. Theme based transition tuning is not yet part of theme maker - see above
I guess the bottom line is that I'll be releasing a new version soonish, but you'll at least now know what is going to be in there. I'll probably make a 1.2.6 version that fixes at least the part 3. by having a copy of the icons from the base theme.
Download here: Garage
Have a test with nuvofre in the same location.
I'll upload some shots later on. Carry on!
EDIT: You Must delete your old theme folder for theme maker to be able to optify the content. So extract that zip to a new folder and start there from scratch. Never re-use old theme maker folders.
What really was improved:
1. Optification - Theme maker theme deb files are optified so they don't eat any root
2. Icons are also optified
3. Fonts work again (and are stored in user home, which is as good as optification)
4. Theme selection works now without need for device reboot
What is missing:
1. build-deb needs to be added - not a biggie
2. Icons need user to restart the device - it's a bug in the launcher code, that is being fixed by Nokia tam .
3. Application manager new icons are not yet themable - doh! - I cannot release features that haven't officially been released. Damn!
4. Theme based transition tuning is not yet part of theme maker - see above
I guess the bottom line is that I'll be releasing a new version soonish, but you'll at least now know what is going to be in there. I'll probably make a 1.2.6 version that fixes at least the part 3. by having a copy of the icons from the base theme.
Download here: Garage
Have a test with nuvofre in the same location.
I'll upload some shots later on. Carry on!
EDIT: You Must delete your old theme folder for theme maker to be able to optify the content. So extract that zip to a new folder and start there from scratch. Never re-use old theme maker folders.