Re: What do we know about Diablo (Maemo 4.1) ?
 

I use CUPS to print from my N800 ALL THE TIME - photos, pdfs, code... But I have to do it from xterm in most cases. Your use cases are probably a sub-set of what is typical for many people. For example, it appears that you have a 'networked machine' in addition to your N8x0 (isn't yours networked?) that is your primary device. The N800 IS my primary device, as it is for many people. The 'I don't use it so no-one else needs it' argument doesn't work.

Re: What do we know about Diablo (Maemo 4.1) ?
 

I could really use printing support; but a more practical option is to permit export as pdf. It's trivial to print pdfs automatically upon saving them in a "print box" directory. and they're more generally useful. A paper-less way of working does imply some replacement method of publishing documents for exchange, and pdf is the most prevalent method. If we could export pdfs natively, the printing and spooling aspects could be left aside for user installation.

More functionality at lower cost looks like a win to me.

Re: What do we know about Diablo (Maemo 4.1) ?
 

Think he's referring to a machine networked to the N800; are you printing to a USB printer directly connected to the tablet? If not, you're sending it to a networked machine, too. Only difference is where you run the spooler.

Re: What do we know about Diablo (Maemo 4.1) ?
 

Platform... that sounds so awesome. I really can't wait till there are loads of Maemo devices around. Can you really imagine the community that was built around such as small thing as the 770 becoming so large as to encompass so many devices and... I hope to see different manufactures use the platform *goosebumps, said it again* that the house of Nokia has built ;)

Re: What do we know about Diablo (Maemo 4.1) ?
 

I print to networked printers; they have no host PC.
The idea of using pdf as an intermediate print format is fine. But it doesn't solve the problem I mentioned: many applications do not have export to pdf as an option.

Re: What do we know about Diablo (Maemo 4.1) ?
 

Which is also highly atypical and outside of the use case Nokia has positioned the device for. ;)

Printing support is a bit heavy to bundle, which is part of the reason why we don't have printing functionality in applications (the others being the product's intended purpose, and time), but Print to PDF seems like an excellent compromise to me. Gets rid of the need for a heavy implementation of CUPS or something similar and gives users a fairly straightforward method to get stuff to a printer.

On a related note, how heavy (feasible?) would a Bluetooth printing implementation be?

Re: What do we know about Diablo (Maemo 4.1) ?
 

That's a networked machine, then; and many (most?) networked printers actually run a spooler, so you only need a client on the N800.

Yes; I'm suggesting that should be added rather than the print option, as it still works without the weight of a spooler, and adds more utility. But I agree something should be added.

Re: What do we know about Diablo (Maemo 4.1) ?
 

I would agree with this idea.

Lots of printers can have the file obexed to them but even for the K750 I had before my W810, it came bundled with a little java application from HP that could print out your photos, calender and contacts. It had the choice to save them as EMF (I think) on the memory card which the printer would recognize if you inserted the memory into it. Or it would do straight bluetooth print. If a K750 with MIDP (forget full java) could do it, surely our N8*0 can too?

I think Pictbridge support would be nice too.

Re: What do we know about Diablo (Maemo 4.1) ?
 

Personally, what I'm looking forward to most with Diablo (or however the April-ish point release to support the WIMAX N8xx will be called) is a newer build of the Gecko engine for the web browser. The current build is a fairly old pre-release snapshot of Gecko 1.9, and with Firefox 3 getting closer to release (now at Beta 4), Mozilla has made substantial speed and memory usage improvements to Gecko since. There have been some improvements in the cairo graphics library (which Gecko 1.9 heavily relies on for rendering) as well.

While Gecko is a lot more capable than the old Opera engine, we did lose quite a bit of browsing performance in the move to ITOS2008 (in particular, trying to scroll complex pages before they're fully loaded can be really painful). With a closer-to-release Gecko build, we might get that back. Firefox 3 Beta 4 is a lot speedier than older Betas, at least. This post on memory usage improvements is a nice read as well.

Re: What do we know about Diablo (Maemo 4.1) ?
 

It sure seems like bundling is about the worst thing that can happen to an application. Before MicroB was bundled, we had nice updates every few weeks. Now we only get them once every few months, and tablet-browser has to comply with Nokia's seemingly unending and absolutely braindead ******ed UI specifications. Worse, the interface is not only forced to be ******ed by Nokia, but the interface as we have it now is locked down for a while, so the major overhauls within the aforementioned ******-spec (and, thus, improvements) can't happen but once a year or so.

I dunno why people are always clamoring for more Nokia-supported software. They're really only good at making things more painful for their users and developers in the name of corporate software specs. <_<

But, yeah, I, too, am ready for some MicroB updates.