Happy New Year

A happy New Year to everybody!

Obscura Photo Manager

As I have already mentioned earlier, I'm working on a photo manager application for the Nokia 770. Obscura (lat. camera obscura) is getting better and better every day, as the date of release draws nearer. So let me tell you a little bit more about it.

Obscura is not just another image viewer; it's a photo manager. This means that the application was designed for handling big images (one or three megapixels or maybe more) in digital photo albums. A photo album is a collection of several pictures, where each picture may have an annotation. The order of pictures in the album can be changed anytime by dragging the thumbnail preview images around. You can also drag pictures from one album into another.

Obscura's picture viewer component was made for being controlled with your fingers, so scrolling and other functions will be (literally) at your fingertips.

Have you ever tried scrolling a 5 megapixel photo fullscreen zoomed by 800% or more on the Nokia 770? Most likely not, and I think Obscura will be the first application on the device that can handle this kind of stress test! :)

If you're interested in the code (it's Python) or want to help, you can visit the project page on garage.maemo.org. I'm going to upload the code there soon.

The first version of Obscura will be released some time this month, so stay tuned.

See the pictures from unboxing the N800. The N800 looks like the device that was named the 870 by various sites.

Can't wait to hold it in my hands!

Update:

I did some googeling and found this: nokiausa.com/support/contact_us select Phone Product and Feature Information, press GO, and you will get a list of devices ... the list allready includes the N800.

Looks like the successor to the Nokia 770 internet tablet is about to come out, called the Nokia N800. Here’s the unofficial announcement from several places:

• engadget pix and specs
• flickr pix
• ring nokia pix
• carrypad specs
• carrypad pix
• carrypad more pix
• tokash thoughts
• tokash specs
• tokash pix
• tokash video of the N800 in action
• tokash’s blog (has lots of stuff right now)

So here’s my idea: since there’s a program that makes either one into a bluetooth keyboard, I’m planning on getting a N800 and using my current 770 as its keyboard. Damn, that’s probably the most expensive bluetooth keyboard there is out there (even more expensive than this one).

2007-01-07 10am: Update: added one more link to pictures
2007-01-07 11:15am: Update: added several more links and rearranged links

There has been increased Technical interest over the weekend at what appears to be a scoop, ahead of an official announcement of the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet at CES.

I am not going to review and re-edit information from posts made by others to give the impression I know all about the Nokia N800, just provide a few useful links to blog and forum items have found talking about it's comparison for example to the earlier Nokia 770 (with pictures)

Here we go then :-

• John Tokash's Blog (Includes N800 YouTube Videos)
  
• John Tokash's N800 Pictures
  
• itT Forum News: The Nokia N800?
  
• ThoughtFix's Blog
  
• CARRYPAD Journal
• N800 Pictures, 5th Ave. Productions
• LinuxDevices.com
  

This post will be edited and updated as I find more useful information over the next few days.

Thank you to all the guys in North America taking time to provide early Nokia N800 information to all and users of a currently available Internet Tablet such as the Nokia 770. Lets hope the Nokia N800 is available soon in Europe and the rest of the world.

Nokia have just released a new Internet Table. This time it is called N800. The hardware has been improved. It has now 128 MB RAM and 256 MB flash ROM (to store the filesystem). The memory card system has been switched from RS-MCC to SD cards, which are quite cheaper, and it now has two card slots. Memory cards may be up to 2 GB. Among the new features, we find also a web cam, with a resolution of 640×480. It is apparently intended to make “video” calls using Google Talk, although this is something that should be confirmed as soon as the new lucky owners of the gadget test it. The rest of features are the same than in the 770 (wifi, bluetooth and so on).

N800

Originally uploaded by TuomasKuosmanen

Must join the mugshot herd!

Obscura Photo Manager

The first release of Obscura is to be expected soon. I have already set up a project at garage.maemo.org for this. The code can be downloaded from SVN. An installer package will be available soon.

I have been asked about what will happen with Obscura now that Nokia has released the new Internet Tablet N800.
Obscura was designed to live with the limited resources of the old Nokia 770 and will thus certainly make a good citizen on the N800, too. In other words, Obscura will be developed for the Nokia 770 but should also work very well on the N800.

If you decided to give the heck on what Steve says on his keynote soon, and got a nice iPod nano, and horror of horrors, Linux doesnt make it work out of the box immediately like it does for the older iPods, check out this patch and instructions to build yourself a new HAL.

If the apple iPhone is as good as it appears in the promotional videos and images on the new iPhone web page! (Technical Specifications)

I thought I would add the mov URL's to an RSS Feed in my webjay account newappleiphone.xml

The RSS Feed and video playback works well on my TV and Philips SL300i via TVersity (Transcoded from mov to mpeg1 for my SL300i but TVersity transcodes to other formats such as wmv for the xbox360)

Alternatively you can view the videos normally on your PC via the new Apple iphone page

Let's hope the iPhone is not totally AV crippled by DRM like the MS Zune and is able to link with Media servers such as TVersity.

I thought I would prepare this post in my blog to illustrate how easily webjay can be used to create an RSS Feed playlist of Internet available AV URL's that can be shared with for example the TVersity Universal Media Player Community.

Here is a low quality video from the BBC of Steve Jobs talking about the iPhone at his 2007 Keynote speech

---Edit---Here is the full iPhone demonstration, Steve Jobs made during his 2007 Keynote speech in QT mov streaming only format!

I recently heard the call made by the Canola Media player development team, to in their words...... " Guys, if you want to contribute with canola, here's an opportunity! Translate canola into your own language! "

Click to read 1624 more words

Any word on whether you can videoconference from an n800 to anything besides another n800 right now? (I only have a 770, so I can’t test).

Undoubtedly (I like positive thinking) the skype client will take advantage of the webcam api to provide video connectivity to skype users on win/mac (since the regular linux client doesn’t do video AFAIK). It’ll be a good thing, because my parents use skype on windows and my girlfriend uses skype on her mac. So they’ll finally be able to see me. Not that they have webcams, mind you. But once it does work, I’ll have an excuse to get each of them a webcam.

I have recently become a little disheartened by all the talk that the Nokia Internet Tablets are not a good for general Internet surfing using the provided Opera 8 Browser. So last Night whilst lying in bed I quickly fired up my Nokia 770, connected to my Wi-Fi network and the Internet and visited a few sites.

Below are some captured Nokia 770 screen grabs to illustrate the ability to open various sites and work within site almost completely normally and as you would expect to on a typical PC.

1a) Google Maps: Location 28027 Madrid, normal view. (Full 800x480 view on Nokia 770)
1b) Google Maps: Location 28027 Madrid, Satellite view. (Full 800x480 view on Nokia 770)
2a) Blogger2: Dashboard.

2b) Blogger2: New post where using Opera 8, I am unable to enter the Title & Link fields.

2c) We are able to clearly see and edit the HTML of the post, although the edit html, compose and preview options do not display correctly? (Like Title and Link options above)

2d) Adding multiple images from Nokia's Internal or external memory works great.

2e) Images uploaded to the draft Blog post.

2f) Saving the draft blog post with the uploaded images.

3) Gmail. (Full 800x480 view on Nokia 770)

4) BBC World. (Full 800x480 view on Nokia 770)

5a) Editing text using the virtual keyboard designed for the stylus. (Earlier screen capture from a few days ago when using old blogger)

5a) Editing text using the Finger & Thumb keyboard.


I am well aware and I do agree that there are real issues using the Opera 8 browser on the Nokia 770 and Nokia N800. With regard to sites with heavy Flash usage, there are definitely problems with the Nokia 770 which uses Flash 6; but even the new Nokia N800 with Flash 7 and more onboard memory, the problems have not been fully resolved.

However to say that the Nokia Internet tablets are not a good Internet Surfing device when on the move is just plain wrong !

Maemo users now can update their python compiler. Python 2.5 is now available for Maemo 2.1 (Scirocco) and Maemo 3.0 (Bora).

Fig 1) StatCounter: Bar Graph of last weeks visits

I have been utilising StatCounter almost since the very start of my AV Media, Anytime, Anywhere! blog back in early February 2006. I find the visitor information it provides about my blog to be very interesting. (Even though I only make use of the free version)

It's great to add a post to your own blog, then over a few days watch how a particular post increases interest and visits too your blog. For example the peak Wednesday of last week in the fig 1 image above, was the day after my post about the Iphone

Fig 2) StatCounter: Recent visitor map, zoomed into a visitor of interest.

Over the last few weeks, using the Google visitor map facilities of StatCounter, I have been enjoying the visual mapping conformation of just where my visitors come from wherever they be around the world.

I have taken special notice of a regular visit to my blog from somewhere in the South Atlantic and I am inquisitive to who this is and wonder, is this an oil or gas rig in the ocean or what exactly?

Fig 3) StatCounter: Recent Visitor Activity sample.

There are many different ways to review visitors to your website with StatCounter, where I have very quickly skimmed the surface with this particular blog post.

---Edit 01/18/2007 21:00:00 PM---

Fig 4) My mysterious visitor? Reading my blog post about StatCounter today.

In research group, I am collaborating in a project that intends to test some libraries on the Nokia 770/N880. As a first step, I wrote a little tutorial to install the Maemo development environment, based on the official tutorial.

Following with my last post, in the project I am collaborating with, we are interested in making VoIP calls using our libraries in the Nokia 770. We are going to explore the possibility of using Ekiga, a VoIP and videconferencing client for GNOME. Furthermore, as I will probably buy a N800 in the next days or weeks, I am getting ready to test videconferencing with Ekiga on the N800 .

My first impressions, it is going to be a little hard to have a fully functional Ekiga on the 770/N800, but so far sounds work, calls work also, and video hardware I think it will work.

Here you may find some screenshots of Ekiga running on the Maemo 2.1 environment.

These are the instructions to compile it. Pay attention to the options passed to the configure scripts, otherwise it will not compile. Follow strictly the order of my instructions to install all the libraries needed by Ekiga.

• Login on the scrathbox environment, and select the profile:
  • sbox-config -st SDK_PC (or SDK_ARMEL to cross-compile for ARM)
• Download LDAP sources
  • openldap-2.3.32.tgz
• tar zxvf openldap-2.3.32.tgz
• cd openldap-2.3.32
• ./configure –disable-backends –enable-shell
• make depend
• make
• make install
• Download Ekiga sources
  • ekiga-2.0.3.tar.gz
  • opal-2.2.3.tar.gz
  • pwlib-1.10.2.tar.gz
• tar zxvf pwlib-1.10.2.tar.gz
• cd pwlib-1.10.2
• ./configure && make && make install
• cd ..
• tar zxvf opal-2.2.3.tar.gz
• cd opal-2.2.3
• ./configure && make && make install
• cd ..
• tar zxvf ekiga-2.0.3.tar.gz
• cd ekiga-2.0.3
• ./configure –disable-doc –disable-gnome –disable-avahi –disable-sdl –with-pwlib-dir=/usr/local –with-opal-dir=/usr/local
• make
• make install

Now Ekiga is compiled and installed in the scratchbox. You can test it, by following these instructions:

• Launch Xephyr (follow the instructions given in this post if needed)
• af-sb-init.sh start
• run-standalone.sh ekiga

Ekiga will launch now the configuration wizard. Although it will not be properly working (very big fonts, the virtual keyboard interferes with the windows, etc), I think it could be adapted to work on the 770/N800.

It's worth mentioning. When you try to setup scratchbox for maemo you probably ended up with googling and looking for this :

Xephyr cannot open host display. Is DISPLAY set?

I am almost sure that you use gnome, so enable TCP connections in GDM setup.

Unfortunatelly I resolved this weird issue while my user's scratchbox account started to acting up so obviously I need to reinstall scratchbox.

Hello all.

A lot of changes in my life since my last post in this blog.
Now I have a new job, I'm working at Fluendo since September that's the reason why I've been really busy last months. Now I've to drive a pair of hours each day moving me from Igualada to Barcelona, less time for personal projects :(.
The new job is really interesting. Improve gstreamer and codecs for embedded and desktop platforms are mainly my tasks at Fluendo.

My first Nokia 770 is one year old and I want celebrate it with you, a new release of Nethack is an appropriate present. This was my first developing project for that toy.

Some promised features are now in Nethack, but I haven't tested it completely. Who can play games when is more interesting write the code :).

New features (look at the screenshots):

- Finally I finished the pad whit a nice look thanks to Christophe Dumas.
- Context menu for actions on objects at inventory dialog.
- Different flavours of nethack, now you can choose between graphical or ascii views.
- Some minor fixes.

That's all, thanks to everybody that does maemo an amusing experience every day.

My N800 projects

Nokia is currently choosing 500 lucky people who will get the N800 for 99 EUR. And I was in the first wave of invitations. Many many thanks to Nokia! :)

Of course I have some plans with this device. First of all, I want to make sure my Obscura Photo Manager will work on it. Obscura is an application for the 770, though; I won't abandon that platform.

Then, we'll give gDesklets a second try on the internet tablet. Unfortunately, the 770 was too low on RAM to make good use of gDesklets. But now with Cairo available on the N800, it should be no problem to get the 0.40 developer version running there.

Obscura Photo Manager

It looks like Obscura Photo Manager already caught some interest even before its first release. Special thanks go to Jiri Brozovsky for beta-testing and for giving valuable feedback on the UI. And thanks to Teemu for making some advertising already. :)

There's still one week of January left, and the first release will make it these days.

After the first initial impressions about the new Nokia N800, here comes a full review.

Some news on OS 2007 for the 770

I was looking for an handled device that allowed me to do things I could never do with other devices and with a good development kit.

After a long waiting, finally I choose Nokia 770.
Beyond the trust I've in Nokia for a long time, because of its good products, this device had a particular thing inside that convinced me to buy it: it's totally based on Linux and all its software (except for Opera, Flash and some drivers) is opensource.

Even if N770 is produced by Nokia, it's not a phone but an Internet tablet that can be used to browse the web, chat with friends, read emails, make VOIP calls, watch a video and listen to mp3.

Connectivity is one of the points of strenght of this device: it has Bluetooth and WiFi 802.11 b/g. Connection configuration is so easy that everyone can do it.

As I said before, the most interesting thing of this device is its operating system: Linux. More in details, it's an ad-hoc version called Maemo based on the Debian distribution. Maemo is developed and supported by Nokia and by a very large community of developers and geek users thatday by day develop new application or port existing one on this platform.

Nokia 770 graphical interface is based on Gtk library and it's called Hildon. You can develop application in C or Python language but recetly also other languages are available: Ruby, Mono/C#, Perl, ecc...

Developers have a real development kit that, thanks to the Scratchbox enviroment, gives you the opportunity to test application on the normal PC, then cross-compile them and finally install them on the device.

My next objective is to publish here in these pages a simpla tutorial that will explain how to install and configure the Maemo development environment on your PC.

I think Nokia and Maemo is a very good platform to develop applications. The release of N800, after the success of N770 gives us good news about Nokia future plans about opensource. I really hope it's not only a trend of this moment and that Nokia will move even more towards opensource.

OS News wrote an extensive review with many pictures of Nokia N800.

The device is really nice to hold in the hand, it feels steady, well-manufactured. It looks sexy too with this modern metal that it’s made of. However, there are two things I dislike in the design. First, the retractable/rotate-able video-call camera: It is so far away from the screen, that only 2/3s of myself appears in the picture when I hold the N800 directly in front of me. This is a problem if you are in a video chat session with someone because you have to constantly adjust yourself in an uncomfortable position so you are in the visible viewing field in your friend’s screen. Instead, the camera should have been placed directly above the joypad, and be rotate-able the same way some cellphones have it (e.g. the LG U8500 and the Samsung D820). Additionally, the camera can only be used with other N800 GTalk users for video-conferencing and no other application can use it so far.

(Disclaimer: I really like the N800! Yet, I’m going to collect a few minor nits about Maemo and the N800 in this little series…)

While it’s wonderful that the N800 now supports BT keyboards out of the box, the BT settings are odd. You can easily make the BT icon disappear, and you have to dig deep into the control panel to make it reappear.

It would be nicer if the BT icon didn’t disappear, but just turned inactive/gray when bluetooth is off.

(Disclaimer: I really like the N800! Yet, I’m going to collect a few minor nits about Maemo and the N800 in this little series…)

Maemo comes with a central account settings controlpanel, but it’s not that central, actually: It only contains the Jabber settings. The Mail client has its own account settings menu. Both account settings are found through completely different menu paths on the device and it’s not very obvious where to look when you want to create or change one of your accounts.

It would be nicer if accounts for all online applications such as Jabber and Mail were stored in the control panel.

I just got my Developer Program Device, thanks Team@Maemo!

I tried my IpHome applet and it installs and works on my N800 just fine. In the coming days I will of course try my other applications and ports, and fix them accordingly.

For now everything looks cool and it seems to be a real nice second generation device!

More to come...


PS: Feel free to video call me on my N800: collin@jabber.org

TabletPCReview does a review of Nokia’s new N800 model:

My first impressions are fairly positive. It has some nice new features not included in its predecessor, the Nokia 770, like a built-in web camera, dual memory card slots, stereo speakers and a stand.

The Open Force has an article on Nokia Internet tablet development program and provides an overview of it:

All of the source code for the N800 is available under open source license at Maemo.org.  There’s also a decent SDK, documentation, APIs, various hosted projects, applications and blogs.  And there appears to be a growing community of Nokia-toting internet addicts who are out to build new apps for the N800.

now that I know that many of my applications work on Bora aka. the distribution on the N800 I setup a bora repository. Over time I will fix the other applications to make them work on bora and put them in this repository.

maemo 3.0/bora repository settings

web address: http://www.mulliner.org/nokia770/repository/
distribution: bora
components: free

maemo 2.0/mistral repository settings

web address: http://www.mulliner.org/nokia770/repository/
distribution: maemo2
components: free

while riding the train home after the weekend I rebuild my bluetooth software (btaudit, sobexsrv and xkbd-bthid) to turn on the N800. The packages are now available in my maemo repository. Also I found that the N800 now comes with it's very own obexserver so maybe sobexsrv is no longer needed.

No this is not another review if you have been looking for one go here. A few words...

Things I like: The overall look of the device, the faster CPU (ARMv6 320Mhz), more memory (128MB), more storage (250MB) and 2 SD card slots, bluetooth 2.0 EDR, the kick stand and last but not least the new pen/stylus.

Things I don't like: the missing display cover (this was really cool on the 770), the kick stand covers the USB port (which makes it hard to attach external USB hardware), the quality of camera seems to be pretty low (but who really cares?).

The software seems to be in something like a very late beta state (e.g. windows don't redraw nicely), but I guess the next update will fix a lot.

All in all I like the new device and I will give my best to come up with a nice hack specifically for the new hardware.

Just some advertisement today... :)

Obscura Photo Manager 0.10 released

The Obscura Photo Manager for Nokia internet tablets has been released in version 0.10.

Obscura Photo Manager is the companion for your digicam. Organize, sort, annotate, and show around your photos with your internet tablet.

Obscura works with Nokia 770 ITOS 2006, and is believed to work with Nokia N800 ITOS 2007, but this has not been tested yet. Please report success or failure on the N800.

Special thanks go to Jiri Brozovsky for beta-testing and valuable UI-feedback!