Hello everyone.

I haven’t posted updates of my work for quite a long time but now I finally have enough time to fulfill your interest by showing you some of the upcoming projects that I’ve been working on. So let’s start with something you’ve been quite familiar with all these years and that got a complete overhaul to step onto Harmattan platform. It’s OMWeather and this time it’s not just a tweak of good ol’ weather widget – it’s a completely redesigned application so we had to choose some more “marketable” name for this OMWeather successor. Let me introduce you: MeeCast.

1. Branding

MeeCast absorbed all key features that you’ve loved in OMWeather like extreme customization, detailed settings, icon sets, GPS tracking and more. But now it has evolved from just a weather widget on your home screen to full featured open source cross-platform solution for developing weather related applications all thanks to Qt and QML. Right now we’re focusing on delivering MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan application as fast as possible but we’re also cooking something really extraordinary for you and I hope we’ll soon be able to show it to the world. But that will happen later this year, right now let me give you a sneak peek on what’s coming up for Nokia N9  (and of course for N950 ninjas too :P)

2. Concept

Since Harmattan got rid of home screen widgets of all sorts ( or is it? ) we’ve decided to mimic the “instant access” experience of the widget in our stand-alone application. So we’ve designed an app that will load as fast as possible and show all necessary info without carpet bombing your eyes with fancy special effects that QML allows us to do. So here’s the home screen:

There’s nothing much to describe, everything looks pretty intuitive (for me at least :P). Your location along with basic but most valuable data right in front of you. Day temperatures are color coded along with the background to give you instant “feel” of the outside conditions. Not so representative with boring Moscow weather but still :)

The “Day details” view shows you all the info available at the moment for chosen day. We’ve decided to use text labels instead of icons for maximum readability in all languages (and we have 8 different locales. If you wish to help with adding your native language – feel free to email us at vlad[at]gas.by). Also day and night parameters are now divided in two tabs for additional comfort.

All for now, but stay tuned, there’s still landscape mode and testing package waiting to be revealed :)

Thanks for reading.

Since I’m not a big fan of boring lectures, tribunes or formal declarations of any kind, I’d like to introduce new format for my talk at the San Francisco conference, which, in my opinion, suits the idea of open collaborating community much better. I want those of you, who want their application to be re-designed in a fancy way, to send me links and descriptions of your work and I’ll do it not only for free (as always :), but using techniques that I’ll be talking about on stage. And I’ll use your particular application to show things in real world. To my mind it’s a totally win-win solution. I’ll have great examples to show during the talk, much better than imagining fake ones, and you’ll have nice UI/UX mockups to use (or not to use if you’d like to) in your application. Actual presence in the room during my talk is a great bonus :)

So don’t be shy and post your applications right here in comments!

P.S.: No commercial software is allowed. Sorry, folks.

Hello all.

Since I’m not a big fan of boring lectures, tribunes or formal declarations of any kind, I’d like to introduce new format for my talk at the San Francisco conference, which, in my opinion, suits the idea of open collaborating community much better. I want those of you, who want their application to be re-designed in a fancy way, to send me links and descriptions of your work and I’ll do it not only for free (as always :), but using techniques that I’ll be talking about on stage. And I’ll use your particular application to show things in real world. To my mind it’s a totally win-win solution. I’ll have great examples to show during the talk, much better than imagining fake ones, and you’ll have nice UI/UX mockups to use (or not to use if you’d like to) in your application. Actual presence in the room during my talk is a great bonus :)

So don’t be shy and post your applications right here in comments!

P.S.: No commercial software is allowed. Sorry, folks.

Fellow Maemo and MeeGo developers. Dear Nokia lovers.

Lot’s of things have already been said around the internet, both apocalyptic and joyful, about this agreement between Microsoft and Nokia. But mostly people somehow felt “betrayed” or something like that.

Let me ask you a question: would you like to see your favourite company dead? I really doubt it. But you still want Nokia to devlop only their own products, without realising actual states of them right now.

1. Symbian. This is a long story, this OS has both pros and contras, but it has one only downside that ruins the whole story – right now Symbian is the syninim to “Old”. You can argue with that as much as you want, but it’s true. And it’s suicidal for marketing to have “old” OS onboard. You just won’t be able to sell it to ordinary people, who just watch the ads and listen to their quasi-geeky friends.

2. MeeGo. MeeGo is a great and abitious start, but it needs money and work to make it useable for casual user. Meanwhile Nokia needs to sell something, anything. Maybe you’d suggest just not to develop any high end smartphones untill MeeGo is ready, but that not sounds  like a great plan for #1 phone manufacturer, eh.

So, Nokia needs to sell devices and it needs to sell it right now. I don’t know why the developement of symbian is taking so long, but right now it’s clear that Symbian is being developed much slower than competitors. And that will make a gap between them even wider.

Android is really the worst choice possibe and the reason has already been discussed thousand times.So there was pretty much one option – WP7

As for connection between Mr Elop’s past in Microsoft and current actions – I see pretty clear sense in it. He needs to do something right now, today, with no “dating” period for him and his future possible partners. So he started to work with people that he already knows well enough to do business. If I’m starving to death and have nothing to eat at home – I won’t be riding to some unknown grocery across the city.

And right now Nokia has only 3 things to eat at home: haribo bears, very old donut and half baked wedding cake.

So please, don’t feel betrayed when your favourite company is trying to breathe in to continue their marvelous work. Nokia still does the best hardware on the market, it searches for breakthroughs in every direction, it tries to do something with this difficult situation in software. Nokia does, Nokia will do.

Thank you.

Hello everybody.

After pretty long pause I’m happy to announce that our team is alive and still rocking hard for your amusement. And today I want to tell you about some really hot stuff for your Nokia n900.

Initially started as a project for FRUCT application competition by Tanya Makova, new name in the maemo.org community and Vlad Vasiliev, who is well known as an OMWeather project leader, this application has evolved into one of the most shiny pearls on the scene. Thanks to these two people you’re now able to amaze the audience with your n900 like never before. Instead of showing static wallpapers on your desktops, now you can set almost anything from video files to XScreenSavers. Let me introduce you – Live Wallpaper. Project details with screenshots and video are after the break.

Here’s a quick look on what is already done now and what’s planned for the nearest future. First of all Live Wallpaper is already available in extras-devel repository so you can go and get it right now. This application adds one more option to your settings menu. Also, statusbar applet is planned for quick on/off toggling (to conserve battery life, for example).

By clicking “settings” you’ll see main layout window that shows you all your 4 desktops with your settings. Tap any of them to view its details. Also you’ll be able to donate to the project via PayPal, which is highly recommended, considering all this awesomeness that you can do with Live Wallpaper.

Settings window is pretty straightforward. Here you can disable Live Wallpaper for specified desktop or chose one of your favourite from available. All wallpapers are divided into categories: Video, Live Wallpapers or XScreenSavers. Each of them has its own settings. For example for Video you can chose the file to play and enable looped playback.

Here are some examples of what you can expect with Live Wallpaper installed. Screenshots doesn’t show all beauty, so you can scroll down for the video.

You can also find a lot of “n900 ready” videos in this thread on talk.maemo.org. And feel free to add your favourites too.

To see all XScreenSavers available you can visit its homepage.

Well, that’s all for now, don’t forget to report any bugs or wishes in Live Wallpaper discussion thread. Some more cool news will come soon, so stay tuned and thanks for reading.

Hello there.

Hello everyone.

As I promissed, today I’d like to present you my first, and lets hope not last, theme for Fremantle and also the default theme for Mer called Marina.

Dark, a bit glossy but calm blueish theme, packed with loopable wallpaper. First 3rd-party theme to be designed from scratch, every UI element is hand drawn (except for loading “flower” and navigation icons :). I really wanted to give it a finished professional look, hope you’ll feel it.

Right now it’s heading to Extras repository and you can vote right here to promote it even faster. You can also report bugs (if any) here or in the t.m.o. discussion thread. But I hope I’ve cleaned all of these, even though it was a tough experience without actual devic, thanks all of you who helped with them.

Anyway, I hope you’ll use it, thanks to Xisdibik some screenshots are waiting for you after the break.

And thanks for reading.

Hello and good evening. The year is almost over so is 2010 user Interface countdown here. I was thinking bout that final post for some time. And finally, instead of another Mer improvement or application interface concept I’ve decided to thank all those people that I wanted to thank the whole year. No breaks.First of all Vladimir Vasiliev and Pavel Fialko – great developers and great guys that allowed me to make a user interface for Other Maemo Weather – probably that brought me here where I am now. Also I want to add some kind words about Max Usachev – great passionate young developer that brought you Mnenosyne for Maemo. I want to thank Carsten Munk a.k.a. Stskeeps for his extraordinary administration skills and bright mind. I want to thank Valerio Valerio aka VDVsx for his support and honest will to help.I want to thank Marat Fayzullin that he allowed me to finaly give something in return for stolen long ago VGBA emulator and for just being such a cool guy.I want to thank Ed Bartosh from Nokia – you’re great and you know it. I want to thank Nokia and Forum.Nokia. All that doesn’t kill us – makes us stronger. I’m really sorry if I forgot someone personally. I want to thank all of you for working with me, reading my blog and discussing my ideas – this is the greatest motivation for me to continue. Sometimes life punches me right in the face but you always can keep me on track. See you all.

Good evening everyone.

3 days before 2010 and we’re close to the end of 2010 user interface countdown. Today I’d like to show you another concept for Mer operating system. As you probably remember, I told that the main goal for Mer interface is to be as much hardware independent as possible. That’s why it needs proper onscreen keyboard. I have some ideas how to make typing experience a bit more deep and they are after the break, as always. Take a look.

So. The main problem for touchscreen finger friendly (and it should be finger friendly anyway, cause we have to think about capacitive screens too) keyboard – the main problem that comes to mind is space. You just can’t fit any key you want on the screen. Some of them should be placed under tabs, some should be sacrificed. But then I thought that touchscreen can understand not only simple taps or double taps but gestures as well, such as tap and flick. Currently, on most devices it’s used for typing capital letters but since they all have shift there anyway – nobody uses it actually. (You are? Comment ) So let’s use it for real action, not fictional one! There you go.

As an example I’ve added “Tab” sub-label to the “Shift” button. Just tap and flick your finger up to press Tab. It can be “Caps-Lock” as well. You can also notice two arrows on the language switcher – these are copy and paste sub-labels. Flick up to paste and down to copy. And this white row in the middle is word auto-completion suggestions zone (a bit like in Illume keyboard).

This gestures system will also be very useful for non-english layouts, russian for example.

Now you don’t need to dig into tabs to type a letter – just flick it.

Well, that’s all for today, I hope you enjoyed this small article, thanks for reading and see you tomorrow to see the last article in this series.