Canola Update Alert!

[Reggie]

Remember the iNdT team's sketches and mock-ups of the next version of Canola? iNdT's Marcelo Oliveira (aka handful) has just posted an update (vide0) on the progress of Canola. Marcelo shows Canola's new gorgeous Picture Viewer and Music Player interface with kinetic scrolling all around and their version of cover flow. The new version of Canola will have all the settings integrated in the app. Marcelo also mentioned that they plan to have other developers extend Canola by creating plug-ins to stream other types of content. Expect to see the first public beta to be released sometime the first week of December. Marcelo also hinted to watch out for another release in 2008 as they add features to Canola, having something to do with the Webkit.Read the full article. (http://www.internettablettalk.com/2007/11/20/canola-update-alert/)

[zeez]

This is going to ROCK!

[mobiledivide]

The animations look really smooth, the UI looks great AND they are using mplayer as the video player for better compatibility. They really took the version 2 to a different level! I can't wait.

[efb]

This is totally crazy, I am going to go from door to door of all my friends' to show-off this little piece of coolness. The UI seems so responsive in the video. Canola guys are doing some really good stuff. Inspiration to the others? ;)

[amigokin]

wow.. just WOW!

December is gonna be a great month for N800 users: new OS, new Canola... YES!

[anidel]

Let's hope it is as smooth as the video shows when we'll run it ON the real tablet.

[handful]

Hi anidel, It is really smooth, we couldn't be more happy with it. Actually we could if there was no tearing but this is a limitation in for all the application not only canola : /
I will release to you a video of it running in the real device quite soon =)

But hey : I think reggie made a small typo : there's no 3D is pure software using enlightenment foundation libraries (EFL - EVAS) that we ported to 16 bit and did all python bindings!

[dkwatts]

he said what???

[handful]

Hi anidel I think you are not the only one imagining how it would run in the device so here it goes :

http://www.marceloeduardo.com/18012007015.mp4

Smoother than that? There's not even need for more CPU / GPU, just no tearing =)

Hope you like it!

[El Amir]

this really makes me proud to be a NIT owner....Apple can go to hell ! (to be polite ;) )
hopefully we'll see a great follow up of plugins !!!

[handful]

El amir : we are preparing : screencasts, full documentation and some example plugins to allow people to supply most of their needs. Just make a model to gather you data and use some of the views to show them or the players to play them! Bam! =) simpler = impossible =)

And from our side, we will be looking at user's plugin helping them to get in good shape (no leaks etc) and publishing in our site the best ones chosen by the users!

Also : monthly releases of new oficial plugins with nice additions =)

[anidel]

Hi anidel I think you are not the only one imagining how it would run in the device so here it goes :

http://www.marceloeduardo.com/18012007015.mp4

Smoother than that? There's not even need for more CPU / GPU, just no tearing =)

Hope you like it!

Downloading it right now... but I believe you :)
Thanks..
Can't wait to have it ...

[zeez]

....Actually we could if there was no tearing but this is a limitation in for all the application not only canola : / ....

I can't belive this is still not fixed. Makes it completely uninteresting to finish my apps that use the screen edgewise...

[handful]

Zeez : Well we need to workaround it while still present. I think it was for a greater good, the screen resolution is too big (the iphone does all the bling bling but on half resolution) so, if you plan like us to move stuff around.. please try to speed up the animations not going to slow, and if possible uses vertical scrolling (we didn't ) shame on us : /

[handful]

Blip.tv version of the real version running on the device :
http://blip.tv/file/494477

Feel free to repost everywhere.

BR

[anidel]

I saw the high quality (but out of focus :p) video.. impressive (a part from the tearing)

[handful]

Anidel : yeah, sorry for that : / hehehe was just to be able to show performance wise =)
here pictures from the dev version (running on linux)

http://codeposts.blogspot.com/

=)

[rhouge]

Bom trabalho, amigos!

Does this mean that Canola (at least the new version) will be working with OS2008? This is my must have app for my n800!

EDIT: Nevermind the OS2008 query, I just watched the video clip and it looks like you are running on a n810...mas bom trabalho tmbm!

[Reggie]

Sorry about the 3D engine thing. Article fixed.

[zerojay]

I find that Canola's just growing into so many just plain random things that it doesn't make any sense, such as the car monitor... and webkit? WTF. The project has no clear vision anymore.

[handful]

Hei Zerojay :

I understand what you've saying.. but I didn't forget my post from the past :
1) Canola stays simple.

Why ? Because the version that will be launched is exactly the SAME as the old one, improved :
Music. Video. Photos. Shared (UPNP) and Media
the only difference is to workaround a major problem...(upnp servers) we separated it in it's own menu.

Carman, webkit etc, are just "experiments". Why? Because for selected people (interested) in use Canola in their car, Carman makes sense. Instead of installing 2 applications, go to the website and install a simple plugin (but canola remains basic)

Webkit? We don't care about browsers.. we just want to be able to draw on the screen the PODCAST description, or even another kind of html rich text, that is a standard today. Unfortunately the only way to render html text / info is to have a runtime. We are just playing around with the one that eats less memory, because the use is pretty simple.

So please =) there is no play random things, everything has a reason when we are showing experiments... the real thing is only the basic media player, evolved to fit the request of the users.

"album art", "podcast download", "picture thumbnails", "better scanning", "less cpu usage", "less memory usage", "no web configuration" etc.

So the vision stays quite clear :

To be a simple, finger driven environment to consume multimedia and internet content on the nokia tablets.

*if it's in the car? =)

**Forgot one thing: that HUGE amount of balls you can see in the second video are actually duplicated just to make sure the menu is correct, is not meant to be a menu like that. but if we end up with only 10 features or so, we can throw away the sub menu and be even simpler =)

*** I think Patricia ( who designed the icons) would be quite happy because a lot of icons would just die hehhee
:D

[ClockworkCar]

Is there even an outside chance the new Canola will run on the 770?:confused:

[mobiledivide]

Is there even an outside chance the new Canola will run on the 770?:confused:
According to Marcelo they have a version running very well on the 770.

[handful]

Well, to be REALLY honest, we did almost all the development not testing on the nokia 770. We thought "Dude this is so cpu intensive, it's never going to run on the 770" but we did test it and it was really nice. But we didn't do a full test (doing right now) to see if everything goes really really nicely as in the n800. But It does run there and with less tearing =) so it looks sometimes even better than in the other devices.

My concerns are with the picture application ( lot's of reading / displaying images) and scaling them sometimes can make the 770 sweat a little bit more, so for example multi tasking can suffer.

There's one REAL problem though: the screen sensitivity is quite low when compared to the newer devices, so it can be quite hard to use with the fingers : / But I think pressing a little bit harder can help.

Let's see how it goes on that, but we would be really happy to fully support (at least the HE edition)

BR

[ClockworkCar]

Thanks for the fast reply Handful and for the ray of hope too. I'll keep my fingers crossed - and maybe start saving for an N800! It was the picture viewer I was most looking forward to:(

[Texrat]

Ok, thanks for the followup to zerojay's post marcelo. Makes sense to me now, at least.

[icerabbit]

I'm looking forward to this. Especially the image viewing aspect.

Newbie questions:
Did you use scaled down images in the demo?
And does it generate a thumbnails database?
Or work on the fly based on the files present in a certain folder?

By any rate, a big two thumbs up for all the great work :)

[fpp]

Actually what this seems to mean is that the new Canola is an alternative framework and runtime environment for Maemo apps. When the plugin architecture and the widget set have matured there will be a new option for Python developers on the tablet.

Today we have :

1) use pyGame and do pretty much everything yourself UI-wise,

2) use Glade to describe the UI and PyGtk, the Hildonized API and widget set, for a traditional windowed look.

Tomorrow there will be :

3) write a Canola plugin. This means using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries tools :

- describe the UI in Edje syntax (or some design tool that exports it), probably using some high-level Canola widgets,
- code the behaviour using the Python bindings to ecore/evas created by the Canola team.

The 1-to-3 numbering also reflects these orders :

- from platform-agnostic to platform-specific (Any/Hildon/Canola)

- from slow and memory-hungry to fast and lean. If you've tried the two demos available in maemo.org/extras (especially the iPhone-like soft keyboard), you'll know what I mean.

So Canola may end up being used to host apps that have nothing to do with multimedia (like Carman), just like Nokia used Mozilla and XUL to build the recently released IT Video Converter, which has nothing to do with Web browsing... could be fun :-)

[kingka]

this looks amazing

[handful]

Fpp:

The possibility(*) is just that. because in the end what we saw was: People wanted a lot of features and fixes, and we needed a way to develop the neat UI's as fast as possible. Pygame / sdl are som simple that it wasn't enough to what we needed. So what was the goal :

Create a infrastructure that makes pretty easy to do crazy stuff on top. This crazy stuff today is our media application.

EFL is just great. We got pretty close to Rasterman since bossa and that was crucial to define that EVAS was really what we need. For those who don't know edje is incredible flexible, fast and easy to build rich uis (of course can evolve a lot) and evas is fast. So put this 2 guys together with a lot of optimization work (Opensource) to convert it's software rendering to 16 bits and all the python binds to fit your needs what you get is a REALLY nice tool to work with. The best part : whole thing has 600k memory footprint (approximately) and yes, FPP is right we are consuming a lot LESS memory than the old canola, and a lot less memory than any other pygame-sdl based application.

I'm really thrilled to see this "speed up" in development in practice in the last 5 weeks, and more excited to think that people will now be able to use the whole thing in their own plugins.

But the simple thing remains from now : From us, canola still a media thing =) if you want to make it more, it's up to your, but the real end user gets the simple part of it, that we will make sure it runs nicely, smoothly and most important : this time we will not be quiet, Canola will have a very fast and responsive dev team, with new features, bug fixes being deployed in scheduled dates in small time frames.

As we think that people can use some of the same tools: we already released the plugin we use to export psd layers to edje_editor (so developers don't need to go there positioning and write edje verbose code and worry about pixel position) we just finished the version of the plugin for photoshop (great work by miguel btw) and this will also be open to those who wants to experiment. Along with that we also giving away some real nice icon templates, theme guidelines, and tutorials on how to compile it.

There's more on canola than you have seen on the video, and it's only possible because we realized that although SDL / pygame is quite nice, it's just not flexible enough to the thing that is really important in great UI design / development : late change.


That made, (took a lot of time) now we are just "putting pieces" together, and to be able to do a smart work we are doing everything the way that we think is pretty organized and has a great re-use potential.

What we have learned: Rich ui demands a complete different thought UI toolkit, and we didn't want to revolt against anything or fight to change something that has other goals ( GTK ) so we looked for something that was created with rich ui in mind.

We will have those who want to play with canola plugins, and for sure see what can be made, but like you said Fpp : it's quite easy to do crazy stuff with EDJE + Evas and python. Now it will be time to have those applications for 2 purposes :

1) to supply the author's needs for something (or his friend.. or of a group)
2) to put out framework to test and to identify future needs.

We are so simple that we cannot predict what users will need, but with plugins coming out we will be able to at least to take a glance on what's really hot for the future!

*update: I forget to wrote the * : I wanted to point out that because we needed a nice framework to work on (with) python it was a happy consequence to have the same thing available for developers.

[fpp]

Thanks for the confirmation handful ! I for one am more than ready to try something newer than good old Web or Gtk UIs, just as long as it's in Python, so I'll definitely join in trying to make Canola do things it wasn't supposed to :-)

[handful]

Fpp: We had in mind that : (if becomes quite slow, let's use C) but believe it or not in the UI there's no need for C coding. The only component that needed C love was the scanner. Because we heard a lot about taking so much time to read etc etc, and scanning up to 8 gigas is too much for the python to do in record time. So the scanner is being rewritten in C but almost everything is pure python + edje code!

please send me and email, so we can send you a earlier build to test the plugin development as soon as we are ready for that (at least 1 week before the launch)

Thanks for the support, I'm really prepared to get a lot of stones thrown in us, critics coming etc but I also new that a few people would enjoy the efforts and recognize that we are not only working hard, but we want to make the Nokia tablets even greater, call the attention, show that we can be eye candy also.

=)

[Sobral]

I'm looking forward to this. Especially the image viewing aspect.

Newbie questions:
Did you use scaled down images in the demo?
And does it generate a thumbnails database?
Or work on the fly based on the files present in a certain folder?

By any rate, a big two thumbs up for all the great work :)

hi,
canola is using epsilon (an application from EFL) to generate thumbnails. these images will be saved under the standard ~/.thumbnails/normal path. the thumbnails will be reused if they are already generated or created on demand, if needed.

br

[loaderr]

Man this looks amazingly good! much props to marcelo on this beautiful interface! Iphone/touch eat your heart out LOL

[sachin007]

I have always loved canola from day one. my question is will it have a2dp support?
with the last version everytime i started my n800 or removed my memory card there used to be a process called canola-conf which used to take 90% of the cpu cycles. will that be fixed and i will canola let us play all sorts of video files mplayer can play??

[morphbr]

Regarding canola-conf we are looking forward a new daemon aiming to decrease this cpu cycles that you talked about, but it's important to keep in mind that it's very hard to scan for medias very fast (this problem is not solved even on the desktop). So it will take a while to scan media but you can be sure that it'll be fast enough ;-) .

You'll also be able to play all your videos because the new Canola Media Engine (Atabake) uses mplayer to play movies, so video experience will increase a lot (playing videos locally and remotely also).

About a2dp, we'll support it as well. =D

[peterjb31]

Do we have ogg support including id3 tagging.

[handful]

Sachin : Gustavo would be the perfect guy to answer, but this has been such a common topic that I can also answer :

1) Scanner ( the dreaded Canola conf ) is being rewritten to avoid all these problems. It will also support "specif" folders for each kind of media (photo / video / audio )

2) We didn't use mplayer in the first version, now we are going to use so yes we will suport a2dp.

3) Even using Mplayer you don't have to "leave" canola to watch the movie / audio.

4) we will do our maximum to debug faster the scanner to avoid any cpu problems. and to avoid this startup and removing card problems, we will try to make it more "manual"

What was the problem : if you remove the card we need to make sure canola will not try to access a non-existing media, so a "refresh" was needed. for people with maemo mapper and a lot of media this could be a drag.

The first release will help us identify those problems and we will fix them ASAP if they appear. But we are "old school" now with those problems =) hope we don't make them again

[sachin007]

great guys. just cant wait for december.!!!!!

[handful]

So to simplify and to answer again zerojay =)

What we really did was to listen to people's suggestion / critics and try to really solve them in the best way, not doing hacks on the old canola =)

Wait to see the podcast support (very criticized on the past version) =)

[slip]

Handful-

Excellent work. This continues to be a leading UI framework for the Maemo platform.

In watching the video, I had some thought about the menu UI. Using the grids is a great enhancement to the previous methods of interface. However, once you are in a sub-menu (2nd level), the UI goes back to "arrow" interface mode again--the icons on the left and right of the screen go to the next and previous sub-menu (2nd level). This is certainly better than simple arrows, since it give the user information about which menu will display next.
But...I wonder if you can make it even better. Instead of two icons (left and right), can you make a smaller grid or maybe a column of the icons from the top-level menu? I can imagine a few ways this could work:
1) "Parting the Red sea" method: The top-level menu icons get shrunk and split to two columns on the left and right of the screen, with the sub-menu displayed at full size in the middle.
2) One-side/"dock" method: The top-level menu icons get shrunk and positioned on one side (or along the bottom, like a dock)
This technique would allow the user to get directly to the menu they wish, rather than (potentially) having to click the left/right icons multiple times.

Another idea would be to have a "home" type button on all menu screens, which would jump the user back to the top-level menu, instead of having to press "Back" multiple times. (Yes, this idea is similar to the iPhone "home" button, but it would a UI-button rather than a hardware button)

I must admit that I do not yet own a N800/N810 (though my birthday is coming, so I think that will change! :D), so I do not know if these ideas are practical given the small constraints. Obviously, the more icons in a given menu, the smaller the shrunken versions would have to be in the lower-level menu. But it seemed like most menus would have a maximum of 6 icons in the grid, judging from your prototypes.

[handful]

Hi Slip : (thanks for the suggestion )

I will try to explain the whys and answer some of the points =)

1. Actually you can always hit "back" on any submenu to go to first part.
2. You also can hit home (in the hardware menu - the menu button does this work)
3. you can also hold the back button (hardware or software)

***the only problem that appears here is that in the N810 nokia placed the menu button on the keyboard ( :( ) and I really don't wanna mess with the maemo home button. So I really don't know what to do with it.

And I need to agree not only with you but with something clear : a home button is something global, and should be hardware. why? imagine you.. needing to reserve a good space ( touchable, easy, and with no danger around) to home in EVERY screen.
yes, we did that and it sucket a lot on first one. Thats why there's no visible home.


About the "arrow mode back" It's actually just a short cut, if you by mistake touched the wrong ball (it will be side ways) you can just touch the correct one without needing to touch back. So we do not intend to make people actually cross the whole interface using it. it's more like
"spreading wings" menu but still gives you access to the neighborhood items =)

If this becomes a failure : / we can remove it with no problem :);)


how the whole thing works :

We wanted flexibility, if not for canola for the menu component it self. So theres 1 menu with 2 levels righ? The main menu and sub menu.

The main menu can scale up to 12 items. the inner menu can scale up to 10 items. This would give us a whooping 120 item ready menu. WE ARE NOT GOING TO USE IT. but this flexibility is really nice to have (if we need to reuse the component in any other of all our projects)

So, the ideas is to have like page with sub pages, and you just need to hit back if you don't want that.

You approach, yes great indeed but will not scale too much for more items, and worst if you reduce to anything smaller than 50px square is already a error magneto. We want precision in most of the screens, so after a lot of testing we found the best relation between size x successful hits.

So take a look in the seconf video to see a 12 icon screen =) but

as you said :

This technique would allow the user to get directly to the menu they wish, rather than (potentially) having to click the left/right icons multiple times.

This is exactly the point : you can go home, and then choose a category (main menu) and your application. We could have killed the second level menu and placed list but we felt that the 2 level could be better this time, and provide a cleaner entry point.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm not =) but you will be able to use it and make your decision! I hope you like it, and I can guarantee : we did so much menus this time... =) but we really don't want to collide with any screen now and in the future, so this approach seems nowadays quite nice for our problems.

I will try to find some of the sketches of the menus like you said (I think the dock version we did) but not the "Parting RED sea" good naming on that =)

Thanks for the suggestion, I think we are really happy to see you guys contributing before the thing comes out (actually it was almost made on top of feedback).

BR

[handful]

As requested by Gustavo (lol) Just to make sure that I don't promise here something that will not be delivery on december =)

Canola will be the simple version (with the old version + configuration inside canola) that's it! everything else is a pluy! eheheheh

That's it Gustavo : p

[Beni]

AD2P Support and AVRCP Support Please...

[Sobral]

- from slow and memory-hungry to fast and lean. If you've tried the two demos available in maemo.org/extras (especially the iPhone-like soft keyboard), you'll know what I mean.


Andre did yesterday a quick test hack to integrate the iphone like keyboard with the new ecore input method framework of EFL into Canola 2.0, check it out here:
http://andrunko.blogspot.com/2007/11/iphone-like-keyboard-on-canola.html

[devaler]

Wow. I so want that keyboard.

[Reggie]

Ah, nice! N800 owners would like that keyboard!

[sachin007]

So is there 3d acceleration on the n800/n810 and will it be ever used??

[zerojay]

Ah, nice! N800 owners would like that keyboard!

No, thanks. Rather the original.

[Reggie]

No, thanks. Rather the original.

Why is that?

[handful]

Hi Again Zero :

The default keyboard is the original. We are not crazy =) To do a fully usable keyboard takes a lot of time, and of course in our case help to support foreign languages (we do have pro-level on Pt_br)

So don't worry with that. And actually that's a developer's demo, there's not UI work on it, and I can make sure to you : the final keyboard (maybe only next year) will be 10x better then this demo =) But of course keyboard is almost like a habit, if people like the old one, they have the option to stick to it without leaving canola (settings -> General -> keyboard)

Reggie : I think a lot of people will prefer the bigger keys instead of context.

For me, I really like context and I know some people also do, to enable more UI experiments the new keyboard is needed, and will be available for those who like to experiment the new things.

=)

[fpp]

When I tried out Gustavo's demo, I thought it achieved a nice balance between key size for thumb-typing ease, and leaving enough screen real estate to also see what you're typing : a middle approach, in a way, between the small and the full-screen Maemo keyboards.

[jer006]

I love canola, the new release looks great and I cannot wait to install it on my 770 and start playing! One question though, how is the configuration database going to be stored, my one frustration with the current version is when you flash the device with a new OS you lose all your configuration settings and have to reenter them again. I also think I read somewhere that it would come preconfigured with a lot of internet radio and podcasts, is this true?

[handful]

Hi Guys, just got out of the plan, little dizzy cause I couldn't get any sleep but here goes the answers :

@fpp : Yes, definitely the size is nice and we are working on the graphics and a little bit better positioning (and some missing keys) to complete the experience. What I really wanted when talking to gustavo was to have context. He then at the time surprised me with that keyboard in his spare time (actually he did more patches to evas then code for the keyboard). So I think it's again a nice option to experiment different usages on the NITs.

@Jer :
You have written something pretty interesting. What we really wanted to do was to be able to have an application on the desktop that could take care of synchronizing / backing up everything but this is just impossible for us now (we tried in the past with synchropated but it didn't went to far because we focused on Canola)

While I cannot promise anything I think Gustavo will agree that this could be solved with a simple (backup settings to file) and then you can just copy the file back to canola folder or something, but this is dependent pretty much on time and we lack this. Anyways is one of the best suggestions for sure. I will talk to gustavo today about this, but as he asked me I will not promise anything.

For podcast / rss we learned that typing sucks. Having to copy the feed from a browser to the other browser window etc it was a drag and a lot of users could not grasp it. We have a plan to solve this, but if it comes to reality will only work in the new browser (the mozilla based one) with extensions.

Yes, we do plan to ship with a selection of podcast, radios and if possible a little bit more media.

=)

[Kozzi]

Yes, we do plan to ship with a selection of podcast, radios and if possible a little bit more media.

=)

I have been following Canola development after seeing some videos of it on Youtube and I must say that you guys did a great job, with Canola and VNC there is no reason to "not" get an IT.

Thanks very much to the team.

[handful]

Kozzi,

Thanks for the word (on behalf of the team) and I repeat here what people might also have forgotten :

Our main goal, is above canola. Is to make Maemo a great platform for the IT and the IT then get a LOT of applications that brings a LOT of users. this generates market, then IT will evolve even more, and we have a open and incredible platform to hack on!

In the end, is all about choice: you can use UKMP (it's opensource, has party mode, reflections, even deleting tracks) or even Kagu (I think it's the same feature set) or Canola, there's another media player coming. I wish this "variety" were present also in the other applications.

While this happens, we also keep python in great shape (so UKMP and Kagu and Canola can trust it) carman is evolving a lot (LGPL) mamona is a nice experiment platform based on maemo, we still have some small games since the 770, we helped on Videocenter, media converter, and a lot more. So please, send all the critics, we really like nice words (it's the fuel) but critics are the basis to find / categorize and solve the problems.

BR

[Beni]

Hey handful, well the new release have AD2P support and AVRCP support if possible? This would be really useful to me. I prefer Canola to Kagu and UKMP, but I really want bluetooth headphone support.

[chrno]

So, when will Canola be free software (in the FSF sense)?

[borghal]

Sorry if this question was answered before (it has already been asked in this thread): Will there be ogg support?

[Kozzi]

Is it possible for Canola to auto-download missing covers/Cd-labels from Internet, i.e Amazon for media files ?

[handful]

Hei guys,

@Beni : Ad2p is available indeed (actually is not Canola or any Softwares job, mplayer takes account of that) as we officially supports Mplayer, so we do for the ad2p. The only thing is that you will need to play music also using mplayer (like in the other softwares that :"support" a2dp

the AVRCP seems to be missing in the bluetooth stack of the platform, so seems that in this one we will not be able to help (now, but we do have guys working hard on bluetooth), BUT if there's a possibility to support AVRCP we will try to do it as fast as possible (as it is really nice and useful for those with stereo bluetooth headsets)

@Chrno : The "dreadful" question. If you read about this in the previous Canola you probably saw a lot of "managers" don't want we to do it right?

So Canola is not going to be FS. BUT if you take a look in what we did, you will realize that most of canola is more than open source, and better is giving back everything to community, not recreating stuff, or trying to create communities around things.

1) EVAS 16 bits / EFL / ETK + python bindings for all of this : completely open, commited straight to the E project source.

2) Scanner : it was canola only and gave some people some headaches : also completely open, and actually the other media players will be able to use it and improve it.

3) Canola is almost totally written in python =)

4) the closed part will have fully documented API to support FULL support of independent plugins.

As I said, there's choice, so if OS is crucial for someone, we are sorry to not be able to fulfill it, but we do have commercial plans (not related to canola but to it's new framework) and if we release it we are not able to make money that actually keeps canola project, and canola alive. But we are not only opening what we can, but also try to maintain the other projects as open as possible (like Carman - lgpl, Python, Mamona and so on )

I know it sucks, but the reaction to this already happened : people created open source alternative to it, and now people have freedom of choice.

The only thing we can guarantee is : we are 100% ethical with Canola, so no malicious software / logger or anything exists or will. About not being able to supply people's need is also going to be over : not only we will maintain Canola alive, but also user requested will be developed as plugin based on request number, and the best :

If you have something you want to use, you can actually do the plugin to use it easily. We are not going to "limit " the 3rd party plugins.

@borghal : MorpheusZ is the best guy to answer : but again : Ogg support is actually external to Canola in most of the senses, but we do have changes this time that you don't need to rename them to play like in the old Canola. So if you have ogg support installed, you can play ogg on canola.

@Kozzi : Take a look at the video =) the first one, the final part. Sorry it was in portuguese but here goes how it works :

While in the Album art view , if you don't have an album art, just drag the album art to the right, and we will dowload suggestion for you ( for those cases that the same music / album has multiple versions / singles etc ) and you can actually choose the correct one.

I personally don't like the "mass album art download" that the other players uses because :

1. it's quite heavy
2. brings a lot of wrong thing (sometimes even porn)
3. doesnt allow you to change if it's wrong.

So you can download, change etc easily.

To watch this : http://blip.tv/file/494477 1:54 approximately.

*actually this changed a little bit (and it's on the album view not on the player) the player will show the music listing on the player.

Hope this answers =)

Marcelo

[jer006]

Hey,
thanks for thinking about the backup/media setup for Canola... Would it be possible to allow configuration of canola to be also done on a PC/remotely where you could then upload/import it to your tablet taking the emphases off of data entry within the tablet initially - currently its done through a web page, you could potentially connect the browser on the PC to the tablet and make all changes easily?

The copy and paste method of setting up internet radio stations and podcasts works pretty well for me (even on a 770) it just sucks to have to reenter it after reflashing your device - would be nice to have a DB already configured upon installing Canola initially...

P.s. the new keyboard looks great, it will be interesting to see all of these changes within canola. Big time looking forward to the beta release!

[borghal]

handfil, thanks for your reply, this is great news indeed. :)

[sachin007]

handful
more ghan anything i really like your enthusiasm!!

[peterjb31]

Ogg support sounds great, this might replace my cowon d2.

[handful]

hi guys : the buddies in the team did a video of the 770 running the new vesion.

I personally think it's better than we actually expected, but you can see where small "cpu hogs" happens (photo mainly)

But in other sense you can see how smoothly the animation becomes when the tearing is gone. This is actually good news for us, because it shows that a slower cpu does the trick, and in the newer devices is not cpu usage that makes the "flickering"

http://www.marceloeduardo.com/blog/design/user-interface-design/canola-20-on-the-770-original-post-on-void-from-etrunko

[fpp]

A copy/paste of my comment on Etrunko's original blog post :

"Looks fantastic ! This Evas+Edje+Python combination seems incredibly efficient... Now I know what my retired 770 is going to be used for ! :-)"

Also, Eduardo just promised Canola2 as a Christmas present :-)

[handful]

Yeah, I will not lie, the team is really tired, but we do keep our word (actually last year we were delayed 11 minutes) this year we will not be delayed.

Ah forgot to say that : you can actually see that the screen sensitivy is really problematica.. so I asked the guys to add some more hardware control (basic scrolling / music controls) that if they make it to the release it will really help the use on 770.

Well, another good news now approved by the "man"= )

We are going really to have public roadmap for at least 2 versions ahead. So in Launch date, you guys will already now the improvements on january and february version. Of course january we will not go too big on features because there will be bug fixes and we will focus on those, but february is going to be a nice addition of features that we really want but the deadline unfortunately will let it out.

BR!

[weatherman]

I just turned on to this Canola thing and I'm really excited to see where Canola2 is, and that it's being released in just a little more than a week. Very exciting stuff. I'm most excited about the podcast support. Anyone know if Canola2 will support auto-downloads? What about video-podcasts?

[handful]

Hi Weatherman!
The podcast we are tailoring to be a complete podcast app. So please forgive if some crucial thing is missing in the first release, but we will be fast in providing fixes for this. Podcast is a crucial feature and we will improve this as much a needed.

For now, I don't think we will place the auto download options, because you can be connected to GPRS which can generate costs, but we will try to give you a configuration setting to allow you to set up that in a really near future.

Video podcast are going to be in a very brief future release. But anyone can actually do one so fast with python, that I believe someone is going to do it faster than us =)

I know it's sad not having this things now, but that's really now the reality of being a beta, and once we have the basics quite solide (and for that we need user feedback) then we are going to make more solid podcast, and new features will also appear.

As I said, we will have an open roadmap, so please let us know what you guys want, bugs you find, because this will drive the roadmap.

BR

[weatherman]

Podcast support of any kind is much appreciated, and from what little I've seen C2 will do most things that I want right out of the gate. My thought was just that ultimately it would be nice to have an auto-download feature like the PSP has, where it wakes itself up at a specified time and downloads the latest podcasts and vidcasts if there's a wifi connection. But that's a pure wishlist item, and I understand that there are a lot of features already in there and a lot more that are probably charted already on the roadmap. I'm happy to wait for future releases.

Keep up the good work!

[handful]

Yes,

I think it's just a fact of not downloading if charges the user =) but I think this will be easy (to identify) if it's wifi or bluetooth gprs connection =)

But for sure, It's great to hear request, as they help us a lot =)

[mrp]

I'm really excited waiting to see Canola 2 in my 770. I really am glad that you still consider 770 worth keeping up to date, though it must give you a lot of extra work. Thank you for that.
I now use 770 for Vagalume (last.fm), controlling MPD on a Debian Slug connected to my stereo and Canola for Internet radio and mp3 streamed with Twonkymedia. Is there any support for MPD in Canola2/ could MPD support be added to the wish list?

[handful]

Hi MRP,

For sure. I cannot not guarantee that we will have time to do it, but I can add to the final website once the developer's documentation is there. And once theres is already a python library for it, I really believe it could be quite easy to browser and play something.

We also have plans for Last.fm (first audio scrobbling, using maemo scrobbler) then more, but this will be added after a solid fix is made =)

there's so much thing that is out of this first beta that you wouldn't believe.

But we still excited. The dev team is quite tired, they will get some rest but they will come back with a lot of surprises.

Br

[nilchak]

Well, its time for release, and lo and behold .... no download still.

Come on all this countdown and all, and then back to the old fashioned 'sorry we cant release as yet, not ready' notice on the website .... dissapointing.

So why have a countdown at all - might as well have stuck to the old fashioned verbiage - "we will release when we are ready".

Well wait some more ...
Just dont take it otherwise, but my post is idicative of how much we looked forward to Canola release and how dissapointing this news is..

[Reggie]

The launch has been postponed due to license issues. Check the update:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/2007/12/11/canola2-beta-launches-tomorrow/

[handful]

Nil :
You have the total right to complain, exactly because we placed a counter on our pages. And the only thing I can say about that is : that we not only really believed that the day would be kept, but we also worked like crazy to meet that crazy deadline. If we knew one week earlier I would have asked the counter to come down.

We actually don't have marketing dep, or any kind of this, so I asked one of my team mates to do a teaser, and because I "confirmed" twice the launching date ... I thought "well, let's make a small countdown" because when there's a dead line we really keep it. Like we did last year.

Then this "outer" force came and paused the launch. I assume 100% of the guilty for the counter and the whole issue, because the Devs were really focused on delivering and we just wanted to make them proud of the website.

So again: Sorry for that, and lesson learned. If we cannot triple check a release date, we will not display any kind of date anymore. Just like you said "a coming soon".

BR

Marcelo, On behalf of the team

[nilchak]

All apologies understood and accepted in good faith, handful.

But more so I appreciate the spirit of openness from you guys and the dialogue with the community. The fact that you explained in so many word ... I am floored.

Allbest and I am still behing Canola and waiting (with a better feeling)
:-)

[jer006]

Any estimate on an ETA? Disapointed in the delay but still really looking forward to a great product! Or are you reluctant to go there again??

[Rebski]

See this thread for more infor
http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13017&page=8

[WFT]

When it comes out, will you need to install other software to make it work, or will it be one click to install and you are done?

[zeez]

I *think* one click install should be fine. Also be advised to install mplayer for best results!!
(Aslo if you have Canola1 installed you have to uninstall it first and reboot)

[handful]

@Jer: I really don't want to guess. But of course we are taking the time to fix whatever we can find.

@WFT : We worked right to have no dependencies issues like the previous release, but of course we cannot try with all the user's repositories possible. So maybe some weird thing for those with too much alternative repositories.

The only thing you need to do after done is go to settings and setting what folders you want Canola2 to watch for each specific media (photo, media, videos)

While I think this is pretty straightfoward, there's still one issue (the linux-style folders) are appearing what can mislead the no-so-linux oriented users in the realm of the /media/mmc1/ etc. But basically you just hit the eye button and the folder is watched.

[ghoonk]

Hi handful

First off, I would like to thank you and your team for being so committed to bringing this crazy user experience to the IT. The fact that the interface is theme-able has impressed the heck out of my colleagues who have the iPhone and iPod Touch, and I love the way it handles my podcast subscriptions.

I have not been able to get two things working so far, and was hoping you or a member of your team could point me in the right direction:

a. album art is not showing up in C2. In Windows Explorer (on Vista), the album arts is displayed, but they do not show up in C2.

[UPDATE: Found this - https://garage.maemo.org/projects/canola-tuning/ and it worked like a charm, exccept that Global Underground 20 album art couldn't be found. But the other 8 albums came up fine :) *yay*]

b. Photocasts don't seem to work, at least not with RSS feeds. Is this normal? Have you guys got any photocasts to share?

I'm more piqued by the non-display of album art, so if you guys had any idea how I could get this working, it would really make my day :)

[munky261]

ive written a guide on how to manually download and place coverart in canola 2 so it is displayed correctly

[handful]

Ghook:

Use Flickr feeds to photocast. It's still not working the way we planned, but its possible to use right now.

BR

Marcelo