Ok, it has been some time since my last post, in the meantime i changed a lot to the plugin, especially in the last 3 weeks (Those of you who are subscribed to the RSS-Feed of my Gitweb page, might have noticed allready. ;-)), it is almoast too much to go into every detail, so i will just post the current changelog since the last release here:

Nokia has a product launch event with a countdown clock. My dear friends in PR tell me that there will be an opportunity to put questions to the Nokia team on the Nokia Events site after the big announcement. These questions will be answered at in two sessions: the first at 9:30 GMT and the second at 17:00 GMT.

We know darn well that Nokia is giving us an Internet Tablet with HSPA connectivity, higher-definition cameras, and a fast OMAP3 CPU. What we don't know: WHEN.

The FCC gives me nothing. Anyone who'd have an inside leak is tight-lipped. I think Nokia cracked the whip on leaks in this product line and it's working. Like everyone else, I have to wait.

To be honest: I don't think we'll see the new tablet unveiled tomorrow. I'm predicting one or two new phones and some fantastic accessories. I'd put money down on a new online portal that will do what MOSH tried to do except actually integrate Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, and others instead of trying to compete. These are pure speculation based on market movement. We'll see.

First the awesome news unrelated to the Nokia Barcelona event: My favorite Internet Tablet site, InternetTabletTalk.com, will become part of the official maemo ecosysem and be talk.maemo.org. Read Reggie's announcement.

Now on to the Nokia event:

I am still watching the live webcast of the Nokia event. They've announced the N97 mobile computer (which is also a phone.) The feature set is far and away beyond anything on any current phones:

• Large 16:9 tactile response touchscreen
• QWERTY keyboard
• 32GB on board plus up to 16GB microSDHC
• 5 megapixel high def camera
• Widget home screen
• GPS, GSM, WiFi, Bluetooth, HSPA
  
• Symbian OS

This takes everything that was promised to the tablet in Berlin and wraps it up in the phone. The 550 Euro estimated retail price (around US $700 depending on when you do the conversion - putting it on par with mid-range laptops these days) will be a hard sell.

With this out - the Internet Tablet line will need to come in at a very low price point to give users a reason to buy them instead of buying a maemo tablet. If Symbian was still closed-source, the maemo architecture would make the tablet line a stand-out product. When produced next to this monster of a phone, what is the future of the N8xx line?

I am sure of something: They just recently hired more maemo staff. SOMETHING is up their sleeve.

After saying all of that - I totally want one. If I had $700 for a device right now, I'd plunk it down on an N97 before any netbook, MID, UMPC, or computer upgrade. I don't have it, though. Not many will in the very near future. It's a tragic case of timing too: If the software is properly implemented - this does for the Internet what the 770, N800, and N810 tablets set out to do back in 2005.

Today's N97 launch reminded me of a big mental difference between using Nokia or Apple phones: with Apple, you're merely a consumer, where Nokia's devices allow you to participate in the information flow, to be a producer. Back in 1932, Bertrand Russel wrote:

The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

The whole N series of devices seems dedicated for allowing you to take that active part: decent cameras, video recording capability, reasonably good keyboards. Not so with the iPhone.

With Apple, you're given the role of a consumer: browser the web, watch videos, buy music from huge corporations. Just don't think different.

Comparing my current iPhone and previous N95, on the Nokia I uploaded a bit more data than I downloaded, on the iPhone, I've downloaded ten times more than uploaded. With difficult text input and no background applications, the device simply seems to push users into the consumer mindset.

Two years ago we handled the whole Death Monkey Rally experience using three Nseries phones. They took our pictures and video, all blog entries were written and published with them, and they recorded our stories to the YleX radio show. Try doing that on an iPhone!

As a product, N97 looks very promising. It has pretty much all features I want from my universal communicator, except one little detail: it doesn't run Maemo.

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, nokia, n97

As a followup to my last post: I slept on it, read the comments this morning, and got some good feedback from others over GTalk. I was a little hasty in that judgment of the N97 and it's place in Nokia's Nseries ecosystem. Yes: it does include the features that Internet Tablet users have been waiting for. It's still not a replacement.

Internet Tablets still have that sweet 800x480 display. They're still more hackable and customizable. They still are focused on being a SECONDARY DEVICE that can be left home while a cheaper phone goes traveling. Personally, I'd think twice before I brought an N97 to a rowdy concert or any event where it could be in danger. Would you go rock climbing with a US $700 phone? My older N95-3, while expensive when I purchased it a year ago, is much less of a "loss" if I were to damage it. My iPhone 3G is even less important to me. I keep that around as my "just kicking around" phone.

While the convergence market is trying to cram everything into a single device - sometimes it's just better to have two. The N810 is far closer to a "laptop substitute" than the N97 and that's where it should stay.

Reggie Supildo announced today something that we’ve been talking about for a while now - ITt will be coming under the maemo.org umbrella. Internet Tablet Talk, for those who don’t know, is a community-run forum where members have always been unfettered in their praise and criticism of Maemo, and of Nokia’s running of the project. And they will continue to be unfettered - as part of maemo.org.

This is very exciting - the ITt forums have always been a kind of world apart, and to be honest it’s been hard to follow what’s been going on there. There are hundreds of contributors, and dozens of new posts every day, on all matters related to Maemo and Nokia’s internet tablets.

We’ve been getting progressively closer for the past few months - ITt news items are syndicated in the Maemo news feed, and we have a recently added Karma plug-in for ITt posts. This is a logical next step. Of course, ITt will continue to be run by Reggie and Roger, and aside from retheming the site to match maemo.org, users will hopefully notice little in the operation of the site. But my hope is that ITt users will feel a little more like part of the Maemo community, once the forum is on maemo.org. This is one more piece in Maemo’s journey from a Nokia-run project to a Nokia-sponsored, community-run project.

I regret to say that I will be unable to escape from my new job to cover CES this year. The last two years were fun and my feet hurt until nearly Valentine's Day each year.

The good news: I'm only a few miles away from Nokia's Mountain View office and other major Silicon Valley offices. I hope to do more in-person work in the near future.

So, after three years I finally made a new version ttb, my teletekst viewer, which is especially interesting for Dutch-speakers and linguisticly-inclined people studying West-Germanic languages. The new version brings user-help and some cosmetic updates.

The program is listed as the 'official' client for Linux by the NOS (state television), and I'm getting quite some mails -- but interestingly, not one single bug in three years. To be honest, there is a bug remaining: there is too much bad news in the news section. I am working on that one, but it might take a while.

I am also preparing a Maemo-version. Interestingly, I had a version running on an 770 in early 2005 at LinuxTag, but I never got to packaging it. Anyway, the work has to wait until after my trip to a friend's wedding in the Eternal City of Rome, where I'll be flying.

As if all of that were not enough, I started a blog with tips for emacs-users; the idea is to have frequent small posts that show one useful trick: Emacs-Fu. Let's see if I succeed.

Nokia World Event has finished, and the N97 (pdf/160 KB) was announced, but, what about Maemo? Any news about new Maemo device/s? It seems not, but…

• It seems that Ovi is the great services strategy for Nokia for next year, so I suppose that any new NSeries device will integrate these services (specially after seeing Niklas Savander keynote)
• The N97 user interface might be showing some ideas about what can we expect from new Maemo user interface
• New Maemo devices will be OMAP3 based, but it seems that N97 comes with other processor (Unconfirmed)

And some regrets after all. I’ve seen/hear a lot of time the word open in the presentations but:

• There isn’t yet a Nokia PC Suite for open operating systems
• The Nokia Ovi Maps site ask me to use a right web browser, when it should ask me to use other operating system, to download an .exe file

And this event has left a great keynote, the one from Ray Hammond, and a great quote from Anssi Vanjoki:

I want to surf the entire internet, not just some pieces of the internet

Me too, but my desktop computer is not the same that my mobile computer, so I can’t expect the same user experience in both machines, but I can expect an optimized user experience for the context I am using my computer (whatever my computer or context are). But, that’s another story…

It has gotten quiet around Maemopad+ lately, but there are some nice features in SVN that should be released with the next release, most notably: a search entry in the toolbar that will highlight matching memos.

This will come in handy for users that use the checklist feature for all kinds of lists (Someday/Maybe, Ideas, TODOs, shopping lists, etc.). Obviously the search feature won't work on the contents of sketch notes, but text memos and checklists work fine.

What are you missing in Maemopad+ that would make you much more productive with it?

Reading Symbian-Freak about next nokia full touchscreen device, I’ve found a presentation from Nokia for Capital Markets Day showing a N810 but with different UI. Nice conceptual user interface… It seems a promising 2009!

Nokia is well known as creating killers for their phones. For instance, they released the wonderful N96 at the very same time as the N85.

Now they release the best phone ever: the Nokia N97. But do not tell me you maemo lovers that the concept of that phone does not remind you of our beloved N770, N800 and N810.

Of course, we maemo (and, in general, Linux) freaks are waiting for the promising evolution of the N810 and the next step of our favourite mobile OS (maemo Fremantle) and, if we find the money, we will buy it. But it is not a phone, while the N97 is… and besides, it also has a touch screen (with more resolution), it also has HSDPA access (as the next Nokia MID will have), it also has a QWERTY keyboard… and it will also allow to run an open-source OS.

What do you OMAG people and rest of the maemo community think about that? Feedback wanted

[...] A surefire way to get operating costs down is to incorporate more and more open source tools into the systems backbone. This includes Linux on servers and the desktop for starters. Purchasing Maemo Linux-driven Nokia internet tablets to replace desktop phones (using Voice over IP, or VOIP) is a good next step [...]

Ok, this is a long one.  This was floating around my brain for a while, and it is time to lay it to rest.  Get a coffee and make yourself comfortable.

People have started asking when the new gPodder version for Maemo will appear. Installing Scratchbox is tedious, and I've re-installed a few weeks ago. A new release should be out soon, and I'll be rolling a new Maemo package then. And we have fixed some annoyances in the new version...
First, you complained about us having hardcoded the download folder to /media/mmc2/. Well, gPodder still uses this as the default download folder, but you can now simply move this folder from the SD card to your the external card (mmc1), to your home folder (/home/user) or even to an attached USB key (you can do this with a special USB female adapter). So, when you want to download podcasts to the exchangeable SD card on your N810 (or the external card on your N800), you can do so now :)
Another problem that people did not like was the fact that gPodder stored its settings and subscriptions on the SD card. This means that the Nokia Backup application didn't backup these things. So, the new version stores its settings in the user's home folder. This means that Nokia Backup and Restore should take care of you gPodder settings and subscriptions :)
All this awesomeness (or rather "less uglyness than before") will get to you with the release of 0.14.0, which should hopefully be out this coming week.
You won't get the sexy, human-readable folder names just yet. We have to work out some issues with the patches, but we are currently working on it. In the mean time (this also works with the current version!), you can set the "experimental_file_naming" advanced configuration option to "True" in order to get at least good file names (good for episodes that do not have ID3 tags).
Also, please don't hesistate to report any bugs and feature requests for gPodder to http://bugs.gpodder.org/, so we can help you and you have a better podcasting experience on your Tablet.
Another plug: Try Panucci with your podcasts if you have not already done so.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2008-12-01 through 2008-12-07

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2008-12-01 through 2008-12-07

I was at the Berlin office on Friday meeting our trainer (Daniel Elstner) and two new trainees: David King and Michael Hasselmann (not Mathias). They should all blog more, at least when they start in January.

I am very positive about these guys. I stressed how we want them to develop good habits based on empathic consideration for the users and developers who will use their code and real understanding of the languages and APIs they use. We want to build excellent developers who are an example to others. Character and communication was a major issue when choosing these trainees via email and they show that in person.

This is an important step for the company. It makes it easier to predict when we will have new developers available and helps us to merge those developers into a cohesive culture. It also means that we’ll have more full-time people to help out with unexpected extra work. I’m proud that we’ve stuck to our 35 (productive) hours-per-week rule instead of pushing our people to be stressed and unproductive, and now that will be easier.

The Berlin office is coming to life too, with 5 people there. Overall we’ll now have 11 employees (3 part-time), which feels substantial to me.

So it is no secret anymore that Rygel will be part of maemo platform. If you are interested in contributing to maemo, here is yet another chance. I have a big pile of TODO for Rygel so if you are interested, do contact me. In case you prefer IRC like I do, I am always on #gupnp on irc.gimp.org.

Maemo SDK+ team is happy to announce our Release Candidate 1 (RC1). This RC1 release has better support for debugging with gdb and valgrind tools. We have also made several improvements mostly to the maemo-sdk tool and Scratchbox-2 core components and also fixed a number of issues that were in the previous release. In this release we also provide a [...]

I've spent this Saturday on reorganizing the structure in Maemo Bugzilla (this was planned for several weeks). From my point of view, it will make it much easier to add future components/products without cluttering too much. For interested Nokia developers, it should be easier to track bugs (by e.g. adding ...

Mobile Tablets! is pleased to present this interview with Peter McDermott, CEO and founder at embedded Linux consulting firm NthCode. His company recently made news at Internet Tablet Talk and Engadget over the porting of Android v1.0 to the N810. Peter is originally from the United States but has been living in Beijing since 2002 and founded NthCode there in 2005.

First, a history lesson

Back when Maemo was first getting started, it lacked a strong central repository. When a developer wanted to distribute software, yes, they could jump through all the hoops to get their package into Extras, but to what benefit? It wasn't as if Extras had all that large of a user base at the time, it was difficult to get upload access, it was difficult to upload packages, and there were no helpful tools available to do automated sanity-checking for you. So most developers took what most people would call the sensible route and instead of wasting valuable time getting their packages into a repository for little or no benefit, they simple opened their own repository and began distributing their software right away, hassle-free.

Just released gPodder 0.14.0 today, packaged it for Maemo and promoted it to Maemo Extras. Highlights: Improved the responsiveness of the UI, so gPodder does not freeze so often. Also: The "Never download" button in the new episodes dialog might come in handy. Please report all bugs you encounter, so we have a chance of fixing them! Waiting for your feedback. -- Thomas

Here is a video showing off gst-openmax on the beagleboard. It’s a 720×400 MPEG-4 video at 24 fps. Essentially gst-openmax is using TI’s OpenMAX IL implementation, which is using the DSP on the OMAP 3530 to decode the video. The CPU usage on the ARM side is about 10% which leaves plenty of room to decode audio [...]

Mobile Tablets! is pleased to present this exclusive Q&A session with maemo.org's Andre Klapper.

Click to read 4000 more words

Google made changes (Why didn't I get an Email about this?) to the redirection for blogger.com causing tabletblog to be down for a few days. Lovely, huh? It's back!

So, if you haven’t seen it via Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, or — heaven forbid — word-of-mouth, I’ve recently completed my latest Portfolio Reel…

Check it out:

Tim Samoff – Portfolio Reel from Tim Samoff on Vimeo.

And, again for the Maemo peeps, thank you for entertaining my slithy cross-marketing spam. Bury me or not. I will still love you.

So, if you haven’t seen it via Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, or — heaven forbid — word-of-mouth, I’ve recently completed my latest Portfolio Reel…

Check it out:

Tim Samoff – Portfolio Reel from Tim Samoff on Vimeo.

And, again for the Maemo peeps, thank you for entertaining my slithy cross-marketing spam. Bury me or not. I will still love you.

I am using Vagalume to listen to last.fm on my N800 that is hooked up to the stereo. During that time, I'm sitting at my lappy doing random things. When a song I don't like comes up, I have to get up and hit the "skip" button. Not anymore! Enter "vagalumisierung.py"...

This little Python script sets up a little HTTP server on port 8242 (that's "VAGA" if you type it on your mobile phone), receives song changes from Vagalume and can carry out basic operations like play, skip, ban, love, etc..

How to use? Copy it to your tablet, install python2.5 and python2.5-dbus and start it in background (with "python2.5 vagalumisierung.py &"). Then, point your browser to http://yourtabletshostname:8242/ (a good time to set up Avahi correctly, so you can use "tabletname.local"). You can now see the currently-playing song and remote-control Vagalume via HTTP over your Wifi-Style connection!

Oh, and here's the link to download the script: vagalumisierung.py

If people love this, I could enhance this a bit and put a GUI around it and create a Maemo package.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2008-12-08 through 2008-12-14

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2008-12-08 through 2008-12-14

So, the last month and a half I have been porting WebKit to the EFL libraries. It has been something that I wanted to do for a long time, but due to other projects I never got around to it. It has been a very interesting last month and a half and it is very gratifying having something that is already usable :-) I hope that now vtorri (from #edevelop on freenode) will be very happy as he have encouraged me to do the port for I think about half a year.

Some of our Manaus-based guys were already looking at doing the port so I went one month to the tropical rain forest to get the port really going. A lot of things are already working, some things ain't, like keyboard input, but we're looking into that. Just be patient :-)

If people are interested the code lived in the kenneth/efl-port branch of git://code.staikos.net/webkit - and thus shares place with the Qt port.

Now begins the work on improving the code, getting it reviewed and sometime in the future getting it all upstream!

EDIT: Keyboard input now works thanks to Diego Gonzalez!

Should I be worried about software patents?I have thought about touch screen user interaction for a long time now, and have written numerous visualizations and interactive controls over the years.I have a kickass collection of functions and algorithms for all areas of the system but I have never specialized in one specific place.This year I have started to open my source and release these little ideas and have sent coded up implementations into the wild.Some of the code is novel, some of it is mundane, other pieces are just weird but give a pretty effect :)I've found a nice home within the nokia maemo linux community and my software has been well received amongst its members and beyond.I bet somewhere I've stepped on somebodies toes and have their patented algorithm in my code.In reading up about them this evening I find out that the chances are, if you have done anything more than hello world you will have too!How would I find out what patents I have in my code?Should I be checking every single function I write against the central registry?

Should I be worried about software patents?I have thought about touch screen user interaction for a long time now, and have written numerous visualizations and interactive controls over the years.I have a kickass collection of functions and algorithms for all areas of the system but I have never specialized in one specific place.This year I have started to open my source and release these little ideas and have sent coded up implementations into the wild.Some of the code is novel, some of it is mundane, other pieces are just weird but give a pretty effect :)I've found a nice home within the nokia maemo linux community and my software has been well received amongst its members and beyond.I bet somewhere I've stepped on somebodies toes and have their patented algorithm in my code.In reading up about them this evening I find out that the chances are, if you have done anything more than hello world you will have too!How would I find out what patents I have in my code?Should I be checking every single function I write against the central registry?

For the next version of gPodder, I plan to have a better suited user interface for the tablets. For this, I needed a finger-scrolling replacement of GTK+'s ScrolledWindow. libmokoui2 provides just that, and it's now available in Diablo Extras.

The package is based on Ubuntu's libmokoui2 source package, but I have removed the doc package and the Vala bindings, because you can read the docs on your computer or online, and I didn't want to mess with Vala (yet).

It also did not build on Chinook, maybe someone can have a look at the build logs? It's working fine on Diablo, though. Example code in Python is also available.

So first I would like to thanks everyone for their interest and support for the EFL-port of WebKit. People have been asking me for some screenshots, so I made one.

It doesn't look like much as our test browser doesn't even have an address field yet, but at least it shows that I have logged into my google account and that it is possible to use Google Reader :-)



Later I hope to do a nice browser demo using Edje, if someone else doesn't step up and does it.

Anyway, we also got our first patch today from Cedric Bail that fixes some crashes he had running on his system. Really nice knowing that people are already playing around with the code!

EDIT: People asked me how to get and compile the code, well it is easy:

• git clone git://code.staikos.net/webkit webkit
• cd webkit
• git checkout origin/kenneth/efl-port
• ./autogen.sh –with-port=efl --enable-web-workers=no
• make

In order to test, you can run the test launcher:

• Programs/EWebLauncher http://www.enlightenment.org
  

A new update for Os2008 is available for Nokia N810. The released version is 5.2008.43.
You can upgrade it OTA (over the air):

• connect to Internet
• open the Application Manager
• install updates

Thats's all! Enjoy and test the new updates!

I received a call from a recruiter last night, just as I was telling my brother that the current job hunt had turned aggravating. The recruiter asked if I would be interested in a contract job that required a bit of regional travel and involved visiting client sites to record equipment diagnostic data [...]

Every component in Bugzilla has a default QA contact (a virtual email address with the suffix @maemo.bugs, not completely implemented for Website bugs though, but finished for software bugs). To find the corresponding address for a component, go to the overview page, click on a product, and get the list ...

for those who don't know, fisl stands for "international forum of free software", it's the biggest open source event in brazil bringing together all segments interested in OSS: students, academy and companies.

in fisl 2008, which happened in april, we, at INdT, had the opportunity to organize the programming contest that happens during the event, called the programming arena.

it was a great event and the students really did their best to solve the proposed set of problems and win the prize of 1 N95 + 1 N810 for each member of the winning team.

the competition was divided in 2 days: the first phase was to solve a problem set programming in python for series 60 and the second phase was to develop an odf reader for maemo.

below is a video produced by casa de cinema de porto alegre, which shows a bit of how exciting this whole competition was for all the participants.

Just released from Nokia Beta Labs:

Download it here

And YES I know it’s been MONTHS since I posted here …

It’s been long time since my last publication about using Giac/XCAS in embedded devices (in 2002 HPCC archive) and my presentation about the idea of a linux handheld calculator at HPCC Conference (see image of 16MB monochrome ipaq running it). But today, Nokia Beta Labs has turn one of my dreams true. They have released a handwriting calculator for Nokia’s touchscreen devices (Maemo devices and Nokia 5800 Xpress Music Edition).

I’ve tested it, and it looks nice, but I miss a lot of mathematical features. I hope I could join the project somehow, because I have several ideas about how this can be improved

Explaining how to Vote for a bug report, as I've read a few complaints in ITt and in private mail.Voting is helpful to identify the main issues that the Internet Tablet users and maemo.org community members have. Log in to maemo.org Bugzilla and go to your favourite enhancement request or bug ...

In 2008 we have gathered some general experience with hacking on the OpenJDK, but until now we never made the step to integrate it into the jalimo project. Now we got the great chance to work for BugLabs in order to get the OpenJDK working on there nice devices (see there announcement). As always: our way is to work on an OpenEmbedded integration, which brings us support for all of our target platforms. The first steps are already done: On the picture, you can see the OpenJDK running a SWT application on the Openmoko gta02. The support for the Bugs, Maemo as well as all the other OpenEmbedded distributions comes along with the integration.

So, whats the state and what can we expect? We can build and run the full OpenJDK on all of our ARM/Linux platforms. The build receipts are in our SVN. The OpenJDK is not very fast, because there is currently no JIT-compiler support for ARM in the HotSpot runtime. So, there is much work left for the next year: JIT compiler, downsizing the JDK, testing it with SUNs TCK and perhaps name it Java afterwards

Much thanks to Robert Schuster and Ken Gilmer for all their great work!

Because it seems that Canola2 beta10 will not be released before christmas, i am now announcing the second official release of the Flickr-plugin for Canola2 beta9, it was just uploaded to extras-devel and also promoted to extras. I decided to set the version number to 0.1.0 instead of the planned 0.0.4 because it now has a lot more features than 0.0.3, is way faster and it seems much more stable than before (it still crashes Canola from time to time, but they should not happen very often).

it was exactly 12 months to the day since my nokia internet tablet arrived. I've started to bring together the ideas and principles I've thought about for many years into a cohesive and compelling touch based framework. I'm coding in C again! Its so different to the visual basic I've spent the last few years using, but its kept my mind sharp by having to think in extremely optimized units. Best of all this year I've made loads of new friends and been to new places and I've learnt about all the cool things we can do in linux and talked about everything we want to do in the future. What a year its been! I'm really looking forward to the Christmas break to get some time to spend on liqbase, theres a lot to do but the classes are gelling together nicely. Merry Christmas everybody, hope you are safe.

it was exactly 12 months to the day since my nokia internet tablet arrived. I've started to bring together the ideas and principles I've thought about for many years into a cohesive and compelling touch based framework. I'm coding in C again! Its so different to the visual basic I've spent the last few years using, but its kept my mind sharp by having to think in extremely optimized units. Best of all this year I've made loads of new friends and been to new places and I've learnt about all the cool things we can do in linux and talked about everything we want to do in the future. What a year its been! I'm really looking forward to the Christmas break to get some time to spend on liqbase, theres a lot to do but the classes are gelling together nicely. Merry Christmas everybody, hope you are safe.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2008-12-15 through 2008-12-21

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2008-12-15 through 2008-12-21

Hello there. It’s been a long time since we’ve met last time, and many things happened. But I think most of themes were already discussed in many blogs and forums, so it’s not necessary to mention them here. What I want to do now is to conclude this very productive year with a series of 10 [...]

So, for those of you that don't know yet, I left INdT and joined Collabora this month.

I had been working for INdT for almost four years and decided that it was time to try new things. I would like to thank everybody on INdT for all these years and say that it was a pleasure working with all the guys there.

From now on I will be working with Telepathy Qt4 library. It's meant to be a convenience library on top of Telepathy spec. I've spent the last 2 weeks on Cambridge and had a great time there. The whole team seems really motivated to make this library rocks. It's still in its early stages, but things are progressing really fast.

If you are interest in the code, you can check it out from here.

After INdT guys released Webkit-EFL port last week some E hackers started to work an user interface on top of it, with Raoul creating a prototype called “ewww”.

I joined the hacking by creating my git repository with patches on top of Raoul’s, refactored some bits and made two smart objects: one for the scrolled webview and another with controls. Graphics and layout should be read from EDC descriptions and it looks like this:

ewww ui prototype

This screenshot shows no scrollbars, but they exist on the right and bottom sides, they’re indicators only and will fade away after 1 second they’re displayed (usually by movements). Movements can be done by keyboard, mouse wheel or panning (drag on an “blank” area). Progress bar is under location text, like Safari. You can notice some details like smooth shadow on the viewport.

It is still very preliminary, Webkit-EFL needs lots of interfaces exposed and some bugs fixed, but we hope this can serve as a testbed for development and gather requirements. After some more work we’ll move it into E’s SVN under PROTO, but the name should change to something else since not everybody likes ewww. The good thing is that many people have ideas with regard to browser UI for embedded systems, raster wants to implement it as a little dragable icon that expands into full contros. I want to have each browser tab as a separate process and reparent its X window to a master process window/tab manager, much like Google Chrome. Let’s see how it works out in real use.

For those which would like to test:

    # if you don't have webkit-efl port, check it out: WARNING: this is HUGE!
    git clone git://code.staikos.net/webkit
    cd webkit
    git checkout origin/kenneth/efl-port
    ./autogen.sh –with-port=efl --enable-web-workers=no
    make all install

    # checkout my ewww:
    git clone git://git.profusion.mobi/users/gustavo/ewww.git
    cd ewww
    ./autogen.sh && make all install

EDIT: ewww repository missed “.git” extension.

EDIT.2: to get ewww you need git clone instead of git checkout.

On Thursday I got package from DHL courier (one note for future: if you need to send me something by courier service avoid Fedex). Inside was nice box with BugLabs logo.

After unpacking I got BUG, or to be more precise:

• BUGbase
• BUGview module
• BUGmotion module
• VonHippel module
• BUGlocate module
• external antenna for BUGlocate GPS
• power supply
• SD->microSD adapter
• 2GB microSD card

This is how modules look:

VonHippel is interesting module as it gives access to I²C, serial, I²S, DAC, ADC, GPIO, SPI, power signals. It is named after MIT professor Eric von Hippel (because he thought of it!) author of “Democratizing Innovation”. This module allows to connect just about anything electronic to the BUG. Interview with professor can be seen on BUG Blogger website.

Size is comparable with Nokia N810 tablet. Would be nice to get 800×480 screen for BUG (i.mx31 has OpenGL acceleration).

This is usual configuration when I work with device (just screen and VonHippel):

There is 64MB of flash in device but by default it boots from microSD card (2GB one was in package). This allows for easy rootfs tweaking/updating. Kernel flashing takes lot of time but we plan to work on other methods of booting kernel.

With all modules plugged in it starts to be thick… You can notice 4 function keys on left side, joystick and button on right and monochrome screen between. By default it shows clock and icons of plugged modules but with joystick some system menu can be used.

Whole device is powered by BUG Linux which is based on Poky ‘pinky’ release with some updates. Access to all modules is only from Java at that moment. But that not mean that it is closed device — everything in BUG and its modules is open and free. There is a WiFi module (not released yet) which uses chipset from “libertas” family (same family as the one in OLPC).

I am curious what will future bring for this tool.

Related posts:

1. Bug Labs and their BUG device
2. Serial cables for BUG
3. First days with Nokia N810

And as I promissed - second Fremantle wannabe UI improvement! Maemo Menu. In current and older Maemo iterations there is UI element called “Sidebar”. It’s pretty handy for quick launching apps and web bookmarks. Also it acts as small task switcher as well. But the bad thing is that it wastes too much screen space, that’s so [...]

Mozilla just announced the release of Fennec alpha 2 for the N810, you can found the release notes and how to install this browser in your tablet here.

After a few tests it seems a little bit faster that the first Fennec release,  but it still a little bit far from the MicroB performance in my opinion.

Fennec Alpha 2 Overview from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

Fennec alpha 2 has been released for the Internet Tablet and I gave it a quick spin today. While it still takes longer than I’d like to get going it’s starting to look quite nice.

A bug definitely worth noting is that some of the Google sites (like Gmail and Reader) may be hard to use with this release. Unfortunately without Reader, the browser is worthless to me. I think it’s still worth exploring here as it’s likely we’ll see some real progress with Mozilla on Maemo – at least that’s my hope!

Implementing GTK+-widgets and other GObjects in C requires quite a bit of boilerplate code - that's hardly news. One obvious way to deal with that is to use a different programming language. If you're into C++, I can recommend the excellent GtkMM C++-bindings for GTK+. Programming GtkMM feels very natural and follows the C++-idioms; it's easy to integrate with std:: and friends. Also, it's LGPL and pure C++.

Another option is Vala. If you haven't heard about it, Vala is a programming language in its own right, with similarities to C#, but specifically designed for use with GObject. One very interesting thing about Vala is that it compiles to plain C-with-GObjects (as an intermediate step). Thus, you write in Vala, with no 'libvala' needed, with code which is just as fast as handwritten C. Vala also supports many other libraries, which can make them easier to use, compared with plain C. Using Vala, writing GObject/GTK+-based applications becomes a lot easier. Vala Overview.

Finally, my truly low-tech solution is spuug. Spuug is a little GObject code-generator that I wrote in 2006 to learn some Ruby, and to save myself some time. And boy, has it saved me some time! Now, finally a new version. The credit for this go mostly to Viktor Nagy (many thanks!), who submitted some patches.

spuug usage is quite easy; for example:

    $ spuug --class=FunkyFooBar --namespace=Funky --parent=GtkWidget

will generate funky-foobar.c and funky-foobar.h with 150 lines of boilerplate code, as a starting point for some FunkyFooBar-widget.

Of course, spuug works well for Maemo-code, and I know of a number of programs that are using it.

There are of course some disadvantages to using code-generators. But the advantage of spuug is that it doesn't require you to learn any new language. Also, after using it, you're not depending on spuug - the output is perfectly readable C code.

It’s Christmas Eve, everybody making last preparations for great holiday, and I have 2 improvements for today! Why not only one? You’ll see it after the break. Flicks.First of all I wanted to add some dynamic into device controling process. Button pressing is nice and handy, but it’s slightly boring from time to time. And not [...]

Merry Crhristmas to all my readers! Hope you’re enjoying that day and Santa have a small present for you - one more improvement. But now it’s not UI modification - it’s way cooler and super-handy! Check it out after the break. Today I’ll show you significant hardware improvement that will dramaticaly improve user experience. One of great [...]

Vagalume, one of the applications I am using most often on my Nokia Internet Tablet N810, besides the well known applications for browsing the web, reading email, reading rss feeds, watching movies/series and reading PDF documents!

Vagalume is a GTK+-based Last.fm client. Although it works on desktop PCs, laptops and netbooks, it is specially designed to work in the Maemo platform, the one used by the Nokia devices such as the N800, N810 and N810 WiMAX.

A few of the most important features are:

Ofcourse, it plays Last.fm radio streams
It support for different radio stations (personal,neighbours,loved tracks,...
It supports marking tracks as loved or banned
It can tag artists, tracks and albums
It can send recommendations to other users
It can add tracks to your playlist
It can download free tracks to your hard disk
It scrobbles tracks so they appear in your Last.fm webpage
It sends Now Playing information

The latest version is Vagalume 0.7, released on 01 Sep 2008. Vagalume is sponsored by Igalia and is being developed by a team led by Alberto Garcia with some contributions from people around the world.

And what some people will say, what the hell is 'Last.fm' ?

Last.fm is a music service that learns what you love...
Every track you play will tell your Last.fm profile something about what you like. It can connect you to other people who like what you like - and recommend songs from their music collections and yours too.

…and as you use Last.fm, you make it better for you and everyone else.
When you recommend some music to a friend, or you tag it, or you write about it - even just listening to it - you shift the song's importance on the site. It'll be recommended to different people, because you've listened to it. It'll move up our music charts and maybe more people will hear it because you thought it was good.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

The Auditorium building

I own a Macbook on which I’ve been running Linux 99% of the time for over a year now. Although a Macbook is not necessarily the best choice to run Linux, I made that decision because installing Linux on a Macbook is very well documented. However, as far as you can get, it’s always difficult to get a configuration you are 100% happy with (no subwoofer support, flaky suspend…). With recent advances in virtualization technologies, both in software and hardware, I’ve been willing to test running Linux and Windows (the guest OSes) inside Mac OS X (the host OS).

Working on a metadata DBus API for E-mail clients. I have started a wiki page proposing the API for an implementation in Evolution.

Let’s have a light break today, after good Christmas party :) Today I won’t show you any crazy UI mock-ups or even hardware schemes. Today I have a simple thought, that develops previous idea with “hot swap” battery. And I will not even hide it under “more” tag so everybody can read it and share [...]

I added the Theora support back to ogg-support and uploaded the source packages to extras-devel builder.

I didn’t change the mimetypes though, so all *.ogg files are seen as audio files even though they may contain video streams as well. I quickly transcoded the Big Buck Bunny video to lower resolution ogg containing Theora video and vorbis audio. The Media Player was able to show it although I should have used even lower resolution (and lower audio bitrate).

Comments are welcome.

Have you seen this feed reader for mobile devices? Handles efficiently feeds of text, images, audio, video… Connects regularly for updates and small data transfers. Downloads volumes of data when Wlan is available. Basic usage through desktop plugin. Well integrated with with browser (and media player?) Smart syncing with my other devices & online services. [...]

Finally, after several months of work I have now released MediaBox 0.96, which was really overdue... ;)

A lot of people were very helpful and regularly tried out the code fresh from SVN during the last few months and provided lots of feedback. Thanks to you all!
Special thanks also go to Hugo Baldasano for his work on asynchronous networking and for good help with UPnP event handling!

The long wait is now over and MediaBox 0.96 is available in the maemo-extras repository for Chinook and Diablo. The .deb packages for users of OS 2006 (yes, that's Nokia 770) and OS 2007 will be made available soon on the MediaBox homepage.

UPnP Streaming



UPnP/DLNA is a great technology for streaming music, videos, and photos to your
tablet. Simply put an UPnP media server in your home network and MediaBox
will discover it automatically for browsing and streaming its contents.

Playlists and media bookmarks

Playlists can be created and edited and are saved automatically. You can reorder the items at any time, and you can mix audio, videos, and images in a playlist.

You can now also set media bookmarks in any (seekable) file to mark the best spots and to find the place where you stopped listening to your audio book or podcast the last time. Simply click on the star-button to set a media bookmark for the current position.

Shuffle and Repeat

I don't think I need to say much about these features anymore, except that MediaBox can do it now, too.

Car-Mode


Car-mode is what I call the fullscreen mode of the music player because it's very handy to use while driving a car. Big buttons for previous, next, and play/pause, along with big cover-art and a big title label make MediaBox perfect for this situation. I use this mode frequently with a shuffled playlist when driving.

Themes



It seems like every media center these days needs to be themable. MediaBox follows this fad so you can give it a new skin by downloading themes from the maemo-extras repository.
The first extra theme available is called "DarkBox", and hopefully others and betters will follow. I'm going to give more details on theming and building theme packages later. It's really easy, so get your GIMP or Photoshop ready! :)

Plugins



MediaBox can be extended with plugins, and I'm going to cover plugin development later. Some plugins are already available for download:

• a FM radio (for the N800),


• a YouTube browser


• and internet radio with SHOUTcast directory.

After a long break, I’ve finally managed to continue working on the Ruby-Maemo project. For those that are not familiar or have forgotten, it is my attempt to port the Ruby Programming Language to Nokia’s Internet Tablet platform aka Maemo. The project currently provides packages for:

Ruby Core

• ruby1.8
• libruby1.8

Maemo Integration

• libatk1
• libconic
• libgconf2
• libgdk-pixbuf2
• libglade2
• libglib2
• libgnomevfs2
• libgstreamer
• libgtk2
• libhildon1
• libosso
• libpango1
• libsqlite3
• libvte
• libxml2

• ruby1.8-maemo (Meta-Package)

These packages will in future be available from the maemo-extras repository, but can be downloaded directly from here. All comments, requests and suggestions are welcome, please let me know what you think about the latest release.

You may notice that some of the libraries that were available in previous releases are missing, this is because I’m currently updating them. They will be uploaded as soon as they’re ready, which should be some time over the next week or so.

Hello there. Today I’m continuing to post about UI and I want to talk about one of the most important things for UI (and basicaly most other types) designer - guidelines. Every big project have its own guide(brand)book. No matter if it’s OS or Oil Company. As company always have some special designed things like cars, [...]

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2008-12-22 through 2008-12-28

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2008-12-22 through 2008-12-28

Hello again, hope you’re not bored with my series cause I have 3 more things to show you :) And they would deffinetely be last but not the least.This post would be about my vision of ideal applications menu. Right now Maemo have too big applications menu. You can ony have 36 items for quick access [...]

Unfortunately embedded Pastie code doesn’t get aggregated so anyone interested in seeing the code example has to view my blog directly. I plan on putting these “snippets” into a catalog of their own at some point, so keep a look out.

no

Hello and welcome. Today I’ll show you one of my favorite concepts in this New Year Series. I’ll show you my vision of task switching. So. Let’s think what we should see in the ideal task switcher. It should allow you to quick manage all your open software, no matter how many apps you’ve opened or [...]

Here is our teamwork results for Qt Software "Pimp My Widgets" Developer Contest:



Hacking was fun as always! Telling more about this later, but now: Happy New Year for you all!!!