Re: Some things I don't understand
 

Is that true though? If I look on the PCWorld webstite I see combined scanner/printer/copier machines for £50 with wireless networks.
Also a large number of people have wireless networks and printers, so thus have wireless printers.

Nokia have just spend considerable resources implimenting WiMax. How many people can use that? Is it greater or fewer than the people who can print to wireless printers?
I don't know, but I know what my guess would be.

What, sending stuff down to a printer? That is hardly any effort. In that case why not get rid of sound - that will take developers away from other things too!

basic support is quite easy though. Assuming it is built in. If it isn't built in there is not much chance of doing anything. You cant really impliment a third party printing framework.
The eee seems to manage it anyway.

I would say it is very important. There are a lot of people to whom it is no use without printing support. I say that as someone who wishes it wasn't so, as I work in electronic publications. The first thing we always get asked is 'how do you print it'

Re: Some things I don't understand
 

I don't know: I'm not in the printer business. I do know that out of the many, many, technical and non-technical people I know; I'm the only with a printer connected to a network at home, rather than directly to a computer.

That doesn't follow, unless you mean being able to print to a SMB-shared printer connected to a full-sized computer.

A good point. One could argue that WiMAX gets slightly more press attention and joint-ventures that being able to print.

I'll ignore the sound point as it borders on the edge of facetiousness ;-) (it's positioned as a multimedia device, after all). However, printing is more than just "sending stuff down a printer". Perhaps that's true, if you want to print plain text in the printer's built-in font: that allows you to eliminate the protocol issue, and you're then just into the transport problem.

However, printing even simple graphics, or even text in a font of your choosing, requires overcoming the transport problem ("how do I get the data to the printer") and the protocol problem ("what data do I need to send to this printer").

I suspect you've never tried to implement the latter: it's often hard enough when you're only targetting one printer; but in a consumer device you'll have to support hundreds of models and variants; all speaking different protocols.

You can implement a third party printing framework - there's nothing intrinsic to Maemo which means you can't install CUPS (say). Indeed, CUPS has been ported. The problems are threefold:

1. It's large. I mean seriously large.
2. Printing to a modern printer requires quite a bit of processing power. So it's slow.
3. You can't print from the built-in apps.

(1) could be solved by splitting the package up into a series of bundles for different manufacturers, but that doesn't help you with (2) and (3). (3) would be helped if there's a built-in printer framework, but there's nothing stopping third-party apps (especially if they're ports of existing software) having a "Print..." menu item which drives CUPS.

Different beast: much more storage, much more processing power, ships with an office suite and "proper" USB ports. It also comes with a proper keyboard: printing's a much more natural fit.

It may be important to you (and others). Personally, PIM functionality's important to me (and others).

We can safely assume that given the budget, staff, resource and time available to the ITOS team they're delivering as much software - at as high a quality - as they can. So, which bit of the existing software stack should be cut out to deliver an integrated printing solution?

Re: Some things I don't understand
 

This is what I mean. If you have a computer connected to a printer and a wireless network, it is easy with basic instruction to print from that device.

Agreed, but is it more important for the usefullness of the platform?

As I have said, i do electronic publishing so I have spent many hours implimenting printing in all manner of systems.
I was refering from an application point of view.
If for instance I want to print something within an mac application, I call the print message on the view. If I want to print in an old C++ program on windows, I make an printing HDC. Obviously these work because the manufacturer thought about this.

and that last point is the symptom of the problem. You can impliment all the third party printing frameworks you want, but without it in the standard OS, there is no way to put it in the application.
Therefore anyone who wants to make something you can print from can't. So wont.

It doesn't need an office suite and usb ports and more storage. The newton could print with 1MB of rom, the palm could print with less, the pocket PC can print with 16MB of rom. My phone can print. What is so uniquely complicated about printing that all of a sudden it is so much harder than it was 10 years ago?

Clearly not pim software, or printing, so I guess just more software to play mp3 files and videos.

And so because they are delivering as much software as they can, they must be right? From the outside I would say they are just running with it to see where it goes, it doesn't look particularly well planned.
I am happy enough, I like gadgets, but I don't think it can ever be mainstream for non-geeks, or people who don't need to be on the net all the time.

Re: Some things I don't understand
 

Ok, searched for a method to kill that sucker. Ok so this is a highlight to more whys:

- what the hell is "metalayer-crawler". None of the threads explain it adequately.

- why is it being a pain in OS2008? Why would something as stupid to drain your battery faster (and in some cases cause sd card probs) be added in OS800?!

- Why can't it be turned off in a simple method other than using cli? An average user wouldn't know how to do that. Gen. Ant says "find what is cause it" ... uh sure, how? most users don't know how. Is there a built in process viewer not cli?

Re: Some things I don't understand
 

What it does and why remove it:

"Reading through the forum, I see lots of people complaining about their batteries draining after flashing to the latest OS2008--it turned out that the buggy metalayer-crawler process was hogging up cpu/ram and draining the battery.

"If you disable the daemon from starting up, you won't have the problem of dead battery. However, the downside is that, as generalantilles pointed out, your built-in media player won't be able to automagically find your media (music, movies and whatnot) residing on your sd cards. You CAN still open your media files manually from within the media player. This is why I'd recommend that you disable the metalayer-crawler daemon. You not only save your battery, but also get more memory space and less wasted cpu cycles. On some forum discussions, some people have reported the metalayer-crawler seizing up 60 MB of RAM and 100% CPU."

and ...

"metalayer-crawler is the media search daemon of the built in media player. You can do well without it "

How (one way):

"Disable metadata-crawler
sudo gainroot
/etc/init.d/metalayer-crawler0 stop
mv /etc/rc2.d/S99metalayer-crawler0 /etc/rc2.d/K99metalayer-crawler0"

The whining part of your post I can't really address.

Re: Some things I don't understand
 

what? the part about why nokia would use something as stupid that takes up to 90% of your cpu? or drain your battery in an hour? And why can't the problem be managed better in a method that is easy and gives the user control? Sorry but that is a legit question and concern.

Re: Some things I don't understand
 

huh? I still get decent battery life leaving the 'stupid' thing running as designed. way more than an hour, never a problem. I'll worry about it if it ever does as you've said. Then I'll do something about it and still be happy.

Re: Some things I don't understand
 

Yes, I've never had an issue with metalayer-crawler in more than 2 years of tablet ownership. It's certainly not a universal problem for all tablet users.

That said, a GUI option indexing method probably wouldn't hurt (though I'm not sure of the best method for keeping this non-threatening to new users).

Re: Some things I don't understand
 

Some points on the recent discussion:

1) I've sent images off the tablets to my networked printer via bluetooth, but it's very crude. No control over the results, just a pure image dump. There is a thread somewhere here where I mentioned that some time ago.

2) On one hand I agree with my fellow rat: networkable printers are certainly becoming more common, and thus more potentially useful. How many people are using that feature is up for debate. I'm betting I'm in the very small number of folks who stuck a USB bluetooth radio onto their HPC6168... but then, I was using hand-me-down jetdirect print servers to network my printing yeeears ago. ;)

3) Bugs are rarely, if at all, intentionally designed-in (that comment was for gigabytes)

4) Any printing infrastructure added to the tablets shoud not care if the means of data conveyance is wifi, bluetooth or usb. But I agree: it should be there. It NEEDS to be there. I have no direct knowledge of any effort in that area but do hope it's at least under consideration.

Re: Some things I don't understand
 

Sure. I get that. I read a ton of problems peope have with their GPS units in the maemo mapper thread. I never had any of those problems either. Same with the Canola threads.

Mostly it's just a show of frustration. Most non developers (normal folk) like me sometimes find simple answers to questions like "what does it do? and can I turn it off" not so simple. Most of the time our frustration is aimed at the faceless Nokia Developers who don't give the same feedback as forum members. To some of us even voting for bugs doesn't seem like it accomplishes much.

But you one of the people I do find very helpful and concise. I tend to use your responses more. Just find the "Diablo will solve that" thing a bit ... I dunno hehe I just hope it lives up to expectation.

Sure. Sometimes we just need to vent.

I just take for granted the amazing amount stuff we can do with the ITT is "pushing the limits" of what the ITT was initially intended to do.