Re: Canola does not live up to the hype, suffers from usability issues.
 

"I think it sets a standard for graphic interfaces that many other apps for the Nx series would do well to follow."

I've been saying this for the longest time. 90% of 3rd party app userinterfaces are rubbish. this includes most of the media players. sure it "works" and the interfaces are intuitive enough. but from a design/aesthetic perspective it looks very amateur. get someone with a professional design background to work on the front end. not some guy who downloaded photoshop of the innertetz and calles himself a designer. the first thing people notice and is attracted to is design, but what keeps people using the program is how well it works. canola is right on the mark, for the most part for design. and now they are in the process of ironing out all the kinks.

after a novelty of a pretty media player (thats buggy as hell) wore of, I'm back to using the default media player for mp3s. can't wait for the official release.

Re: Canola does not live up to the hype, suffers from usability issues.
 

WOW!

What hype are you talking about? :confused:
I thought that it was pretty clear from the initial posts about C2 that this release would be a user BETA.
What were you expecting; a finished product?

The licensing issues, JPG album art, and the repository issues were beyond their control.

However, based on the thread title, and now the fact that you are steering your own bogus topic toward privacy, security, and your personal expectations...

Well... all I have to say is:

All in all I am going to stay away from threads started by suryavanshi...

:cool:

Re: Canola does not live up to the hype, suffers from usability issues.
 

I'm new around here, having bought my N800 about 4 weeks ago. When I first joined the forum trying to find a decent media player that works on OS2008, it seemed everyone was waiting for Canola2. Perhaps my memory is fuzzy, but I do not recall initially Canola2 being announced as a Beta. It was not until a week or so before the launch that one of the developers blogs wrote what to me seemed like they were trying to lower expectations (ie; they ran out of development time, lots of expected features would move to the future, etc.). After I read that blog, I realized Canola2 was not going to live up to the hype. Considering the current state of the beta release, I would guess there is probably still 3-4 months of work to go before there is a decent media player. Hopefully we can get some decent features in there. Right now for me, its a huge letdown.

Re: Canola does not live up to the hype, suffers from usability issues.
 

Ah, this is because you're new to Nokia internet tablets. Canola1 had 2 official beta and even some other updates to those, more than a year and is still flagged as Beta, although many people use it as their primary media player. If you go back in time around 1 year, you'll see that our first beta also had lots of problems, even if we did lot less than we do today and we just had one hw version to support at beginning (for beta2 we had 2 already).

That's not an excuse, if it's not up to the level you want, let us know what parts and why, that's the point of this beta.

Re: Canola does not live up to the hype, suffers from usability issues.
 

Yes, most of Canola developers also do, and Amarok was an inspiration for us! It set a high level that we want to keep. Some ideas we even borrowed, like the lightmediascanner keeping 2 processes to avoid the one that actually open the media and read to crash and bring down the whole app. (LightMediaScanner - LMS is open source, btw).

Any application that runs locally as your user have access to all your data, not just media applications.

INdT is a serious company and would not do such a bad thing. Making it close is not related to that and not even users, it's just the way they find their business. HOWEVER, I understand what you mean and I know this (saying indt is not evil) will not help you in any way, but I feel bad one thinking such things about us.

Yes, we understand some usability problems, Marcelo (handful) even replied to some of your concerns, some are really design decisions and most people like, but some are really bad or bugs, and will be fixed.

As for staying away from Canola due some factors, it's your choice and no way to change that, I understand and respect, that's all... Richard Stallman, for example, doesn't use web browsers and people respect him as well.

Re: Canola does not live up to the hype, suffers from usability issues.
 

I think people are spoiled because all these "web 2.0" sites call their finished product a beta. Today people expect a beta to be a fully functional product, not what a beta used to be...

Re: Canola does not live up to the hype, suffers from usability issues.
 

No other software BIG (Maemo Mapper for eg.) or SMALL has ever required its own support forum on ITT before Canola. Either it speaks for the intuitiveness of other apps or speaks about "suckiness" of Canola. Either way the outcome is "Canola is not usable" Enough said.

When you release an app for public scrutiny, expect feedback. And if you get such negative feedback and a truck load of usability queries, it is advisable to go back to the drawing board. Who cares if its alpha, beta, rc or final! Public feedback was asked, public feedback was delivered.

But if I had the source I would know that my data is NOT being misused. With Canola Who knows, why should we take your word for it, when there is no privacy policy either with the app or on your website. Google keeps saying they are not evil, I do not believe them why should i believe you?

Re: Canola does not live up to the hype, suffers from usability issues.
 

There are a lot of interesting media players out there; Canola doesn't get a free ride any more than anything else does, and I don't think its developers expect one. For various reasons, it has been the best media player for the particular things I do, so I will probably use it more than anything else. Yes, Amarok is nice, but I haven't seen a version of it for my N800 so mentioning it is rather sci-fi...

As far as data being collected by Canola, I guess there could be giant repercussions if people learned that most of my listening is devoted to the audio version of the Economist. (Oops, now the cat is out of the bag!)

Re: Canola does not live up to the hype, suffers from usability issues.
 

suryavanshi, I think you have a really big mouth for someone with ten posts and not much of any use in them. What exactly have you contributed that legitimates your attitude with people who do ?

BTW, I also believe that Reggie had a good idea in creating the Canola forum. Creating more such could maybe help with the present mess on ITT. As you mention Maemo Mapper : it is a fantastic piece of kit, one of the best native apps for maemo (like Canola), if not the best. Yet it is not without problems or users in need of support ; there have been many huge threads created over the past two years devoted to it, and some of the info is really hard to find now.

A dedicated forum for Maemo Mapper would probably help all parties, and would in no way reflect negatively on the quality of the software itself.

Re: Canola does not live up to the hype, suffers from usability issues.
 

It finally installed after all the "corrupted file" messages of the last few days. No album art downloads and the video playback is so poor it is unusuable. I will uninstall it and hope that these probelms get fixed. What a shame because it has a great interface, it just doesnt work well at all. Bummer.