[Canola] Canola does not live up to the hype, suffers from usability issues.
 

Amidst the hype and downed servers, Canola 2 Beta was launched. This was Canola teams first mistake. Either it should have been released before or well after the release of OS 2008. The server debacle should have been expected and anticipated by the team

The iphone / itouch hype contributed to the Canola team concentrating too much on eye candy, with usability taking a complete backseat.

1. Adequate help documentation
2. List of known issues

The above may have helped a bit with usability issues but is are unavailable.

Animations - Choppy.
Album Covers - No idea how they are downloaded.
Images - Landscape ?
Podcasts/Internet Radio - Cutting and Pasting URL is not easily done
Albums - Gets repeated for each song in the album

Looking forward to more concentration on usability and cutting choppy animations for smoother user experience. Better end user documentation

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

Nice attitude.

This isn't Microsoft you know, this is a small team working their butts off. Oh wait, Microsoft isn't perfect either, even with hordes of programmers.

Oh yeah, and Canola cost you how much?

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

I am neither a Microsoft user nor do I care about how microsoft does business.

I am a Linux user and I truly believe that open source model of development provides the best solutions, applications, documentation and support. Thats is the reason I bought the N800.

Canola might have had done better if it were open source with people like you and me contributing to documentation, feedback, etc.

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

Personally, I'm grateful for ANY free software.

I'm not saying your comments aren't worthwhile, but why beat the guys down prior to offering your suggestions for improvement? If you had paid for it, then maybe you'd have some justification for griping about the state of the release, but that's not the case here.

In the spirit of open source, maybe you'd like to offer the Canola team your time to improve on the things you are complaining about?

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

This is a BETA release. If you have substantive, particular complaints, document them in detail, suggest a prefered behavior and submit them to the authors. The Canola team has been working their butts off and they are quite responsive to community feedback.

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

if canola was open source i would have!

also I am sick and tired of this philosophy that some how open source is inferior to any proprietary crap. firefox, ubuntu, apache, php, mysql, and so many other apps prove contrary to this philosophy.

For a closed source project, all i can do is give feedback after release, which is exactly what i have done.

if they can take the feedback and act on it, i will try and use the software, otherwise i am quite happy with opensource alternatives like UKMP

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

Meh. You have legitimate concerns, and I absolutely agree with you that whether you're a small fry or a big software house, whether your software is free or for a fee, you should have the same standards when it comes to usability and being error free. But I have to agree with Rocketman - as beta software your comments are better suited to a developer's feedback forum and your tone should be one of helpfulness not *****ing and moaning. Oh, and give the open-source-horse a rest; it might be in their best interest to set the source free, but it also might not. Just because it's not open source doesn't mean it's evil.

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

Right - guys.

Canola have a great dev team who are only too open and happy to hear about our concerns as long as they're voiced well enough - and I don't personally see any issues with what suryavanshi has said. I'm sure critique won't be taken in any negative light - quite the opposite really - it helps build better software.

I think some of what suryavanshi has said is true. Beta or not - there are usability issues that need to be addressed and its better to address those now than later.

suryavanshi: there's a feedback form on canola's page where you can voice your issues.

Also - there is #canola on freenode where you can voice concerns, issues, etc to the team directly.

I was on #canola yesterday for the first time and I can tell you they're a great bunch of guys who WANT feedback! Positive or not!

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

=)
Critics are way more welcomed than compliments for the simple fact that they test my arguments =)

So let's go :

I will start with one thing: Usability taken a back seat. Sorry it didn't. This was the driven, and we changed the things were wrong in canola1, we improved them, we make things more consistent and everything in my sight is better now.

examples:
1) no scrolling arrows in home screen (in our usability studies people didn't saw those)
2) outside of application configuration (too complicated for end users)
3) no indication of what was a folder, what was an item (it's already on the configuration part will enter the regular part)
4) no shuffle / repeat easy way to do
5) no way to create playlist (already designed going into final version)
6) no way to generate properly video thumbnails (ready to go in the final version)
7) REAL, usable, not a batch download cover art : READY, more usable than that I can doubt (take a look at my videos at WUD in marceloeduardo.blip.tv ) you slide the cover you get meaningful suggestions you choose, and if you're mistake.. duh you can go back and change for that specific single version.
Now the real problem : we are a small company and thus we need to comply with legal rules and it's illegal to download album art (or lyrics as one of our plugins did) so they were unfortunately removed. We are thinking a way to override that.

that said, I can tell you that usability was more than that.. we entered Ia did a lot of research with the deadline we had, but we still a pretty small team, and the deadline was not set by us. So the beta is 80% complete, we needed real feedback (I believe in users really using it no lab tests) and we are going to fix what we think is really a matter for our UI / interaction vision / goal.



Amidst the hype and downed servers, Canola 2 Beta was launched. This was Canola teams first mistake.

- It was not our decision. But we cannot say that it was not a mistake. But please don't blame the messenger.

Either it should have been released before or well after the release of OS 2008. The server debacle should have been expected and anticipated by the team

-most of people knew our plans (dec 12th) unfortunately things changes. That's the deal.

The iphone / itouch hype contributed to the Canola team concentrating too much on eye candy, with usability taking a complete backseat.

- Answered on top. I really really disagree, and we did it with all the care, avoid exagerations (like reflections, 3d and whatsoever)


1. Adequate help documentation
- It's our way, it's a beta and we have only videos and 1 to 1 help. like you can browser on the forums and see almost every single doubt answered. I am on vacations and have answered hundreds of emails that goes in my personal inbox, because for me.. each case is a case. And I also don't believe in help documentation .. if you need it you really did something wrong in the usability matter. The things that would be missing for those are the ways of downloading this or that... but this is out of the scope. Users, the ones we want to reach more,. don't read that much manuals, so our videos are the manual for the crucial things. Of course learning is a iterative process and just for the emails I already know what needs to be documented or not.


2. List of known issues
- we are writing, and there's a section for this under the development. was taken because is empty. And again: people don't read it that much (our comparisions access x email sent says that only 25% reads those kinds of plus info) and I can guarantee you a lot of people with Maemo devices don't know what a "repository is" and I think they have no need to do so : )



Animations - Choppy.
- We are pushing the hardware limits, using python and working as hard as time permits. There has been no real time for optmizations and some screens fails a little bit more (photo thumbnails) but the worst part is also tearing. it helps make things look worse. But I will not argue. I will just say : we are going to update it and maybe still a little choppy. but we prefer this than static.


Album Covers - No idea how they are downloaded.
- answered above. They were removed because of legal issues. Here goes what you said : you really should keep your right of choice and go with Kagu and UKMP that are great software powered by (Python - ported, fully binded, optimized by who? US) =) and I will still be very proud of this.

Images - Landscape ?
Yes. We want to be different, I knew that some people would hate it, but you don't like it, but you can browse the history and see how many people were really happy with it. and I am also. If you're not talking about that but that most of picutres are appearing in landcaspe : / yeah.. it's a bug :/ will be fixed.


Podcasts/Internet Radio - Cutting and Pasting URL is not easily done
- this is true. I asked a MBrowser extension to my browser buddies and will be done, if the user wants will appear "add to canola" cut and paste is not a good solution but we don't want to take the users flexibility to do not add to canola if they do not like it's podcast..etc. But Agreed is way beyond were it should be.. but we are VERY aware of that. We use canola =)


Albums - Gets repeated for each song in the album
- unm.. seems like a bug : / if it's not being fixed right now will be.

Looking forward to more concentration on usability and cutting choppy animations for smoother user experience. Better end user documentation

- Ok, if you didn't noticed.. what we want is smoother animations =) and we running against a cpu and a video bus that doesn't help us that much, and we removed a lot of them, but for example do the test with have with canola with your version of UKMP =)
put 1000 albums (album arts) and scroll. then do the same in canola. Tell me the results.

I think you just missed one thing in this whole thing : we are here to push the little bit, we pay a price (choppyness) but we are figuring out how to solve them one by one. But I really believe that most of the cases is already ok (not GOODDD) but ok, and it will improve=)

anyways, this was the best feedback, and I needed to agree with somethings disagree with others.. but in the end.. I think it's really helpful and put also my concepts in test. Of course I will not be able to please everyone with my ideas, but then I got happy to know that you guys have choice (and a open source choices)

BR

Marcelo

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

To help Canola to improve please add a bug report for things you would like to see, you can check first as it may have already been been added at. https://garage.maemo.org/tracker/?fu...=125&atid=1989

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

I'd add that Canola provided and is based on a LOT of open source components, so if it's all about open source or not, some bugs you found here can be fixed by fixing those and this can actually benefit some full-open source projects to come.

For example, animations are mostly done in Edje/Evas... what we call Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. If you find them choppy (missing frames), then just cvs checkout it and start hacking... I (and the whole E team) did my best to improve it, INdT wrote the 16bpp engine, but we still know there is room for improvement, so if you are really interested in helping FS, then help us there! Lots of project use it, not just Canola, and I'm sure with this release even more projects will start to :-)

Another example is LightMediaScanner (http://lms.garage.maemo.org), it's open source and is the heart of Canola Media Scanning (that just listen for media removal/insertion and call LMS). If you find duplicated albums, mp3 not being parsed right, ... just svn checkout or git clone and start hacking! It's free, it's open and it needs you.

I could go through lots of libraries we use, and even platform components, like X11, but I think you already got the idea...

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

I am 98% in agreement with what you say here, but just to play devil's advocate for a moment, if we had the source for Canola, we could see what bits are being used where, and target specific bits of the other libraries that impact performance the most. :p

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

Actually no. You can run using OProfile and it will point you to most demanded points.

Even python debugging is available, you just need to run canola with "--profile" and it will use hotshot if installed.

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

Oh, neat. Okay, 98% -> 100%. :D

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

Yeah, if someone could PLEASE fix this for reading WMA files, it'd be awesome. I know nothing about programming so I can't do it myself but if someone could it'd be very much appreciated.

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

What the hell are you talking about ? This is by far the best application for the tablet. As a matter fact it was one of the reasons why I bought my 810 in the 1st place and it doesn't disappoint.

Did you pay anything for it ? No. How often do you see free software that is that polished ? Also, this is BETA, so some bugs were to be expected, but even with its shortcomings and things left on the to-do list, I use this software every single day for hours.

You can always use something else if you don't like it, but at the very minimum you could show a bit of gratitude. I would hate to be on the team of developers of Canola and read this BS.

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

E-motion, thanks for your love :-) But seriously, we don't need protection against "this", and calling what one say "BS" won't help either. Also, I (as most of devs) are open source guys and we do fight to open source it, we do believe open source tools are great and we fight against this "it's free (as in beer), don't say bad things about it".

I just replied to make the guy understand we do release open source, just not one part, but don't hate us for that... we're not evil in essence :-D

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

I usually do not pay for software. I use open source software.

I use Amarok on my desktop and I have never seen a media player more polished than Amarok. Canola as you said is still an immature beta (very definition means unpolished). Amarok is just an example. I use free (as in freedom) polished software all the time.

This is precisely my primary concern. A media player has access to a lot of private data. Whats behind the closed code worries me from using Canola? What are the coders hiding in the parts that are closed? It also raises doubts because only part of the source is open.

My feedback on the usability is also real. I have not made them up. You can see the same issues raised in these forums by other members.

All in all I am going to stay away from Canola.

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

oh, btw, suryavanshi, how's your n810 media player development coming along? kthxbye

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

Indeed not! Far from it! I have begin by saying *thanks* for this delightful program!:) To begin with, I think it sets a standard for graphic interfaces that many other apps for the Nx series would do well to follow.

Another tip other developers can take from the Canola team is how to take (and use) user feedback. The open attitude is refreshing and encouraging and I laud the team for that.

Let me make it clear, though, that just because the software is 'free' doesn't mean that it should be immune from criticism. In fact, as handful and you and others here have pointed out, it's just the opposite.

The Canola team is watching this forum closely for the feedback they need to improve their product, and without critical comments, they will not get it. And guess, what, neither will we! If we let them know what works and what doesn't and why, well, dang, think what Canola3 will look like!

Having said all that, I do not, at the moment, have enough info to offer any opinion other than my superficial one about the gui, above. It appears to be elegant and intuitive. I have yet to have sufficient time to play with it, but I will tomorrow and I'll post my comments for the team asap!

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.

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

On the whole I've found Canola2 to be very good after I ran the album art and video_thumm python scripts (with a symbolic link from ~/.canola/covers (from memory) to by internal media card music directory).

Issues I have and would like to be improved:

1. MPlayer sound out of sync with picture. Other than that I find the Video UI to be good.

2. Caching of photo thumbnails doen't seem to be working as if I scroll the tumbnails too quickly they are shown as blank until it stops and then redraws... Once the photo has been thumbnailed it should remain available.

3. Clicking on the main video button takes you to a menu with only one item. This menu should be removed unless there are more than one items. In which case the 'My videos' page should be shrunk horizontally and the to smaller (Photo and Audio) buttons added.

4. Album covers should be grouped by artist then album rather than album name. Indeed, I think the 'Album covers' option should be removed and the covers shown (as an option) in each of the other groups (Artists/Albums/etc).

5. On the 'Album Art' screen the Group should be above the album art and the album bame below. This would free up the right hand side for a much larger list (10 would be preference).

Other than the above improvements I feel that Canola2 has met or exceeded my expectations.

Keep up the good work.

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

Removing MPLAYER makes Canola use the default MEDIA PLAYER so that part is now fixed (thanks to Reggie for the tip). Funny, Canola sees my album art as pictures on the device but it does not associate them with the music files. UKMP made the assocaitions automatically. Wonder why.

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

Your limbs is not longer just because you have had them for a longer time. Similarly my number of posts only reflect the amount of time i have had my N800.

Any attempt to relate number of posts to intelligence or quality of posts, defeats the purpose ;)

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

Just because the source is available for a program doesn't mean that the distributed versions are using that exact source. It'd be really easy to sneak something malicious into precompiled packages. Or do you go over the source of everything on your PC with a fine-toothed comb before compiling and installing it yourself? And your tablet as well? (Hey, if so, any chance you could compile python2.5-edbus without the N800/N810 optimizations and package it up for me? :P)

These guys have done all kinds of good open source work related to the program that everyone can benefit from and contribute to, and I don't think there's any real reason to be lambasting them over the fact that the source for just the absolute core isn't available. The only thing we can't do with the app is change the core UI. But once the plugin documentation is there we'll even be able to extend the app ourselves. So it all works out, IMO.

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

PJE -- I am only 2 weeks with the N810 (and with Linux). If I could ask a favor of you -- could you explain this process you describe above in a manner that a Newbie like me could implement it? I would love to see this succeed but I do not understand the steps needed to accomplish this.

Many thanks if you would.

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

Read Open Source philosophy before making silly comments as such.

But snides remarks like this are taking away from the core issues
1. Canola is unusable
2. Canola raises privacy concerns

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

Hei guys,

first of all please don't take this to not polite situations. Sruyavanshi has his point, has the right to think that the software is crap, and say that is not usable etc. As gustavo pointed, we are quite aware of our problems (I know people are not supposed to do it, but we have been writing a lot about them in my blog, here etc).

So let's clarify some of the points

WTF: yes, Video player (Mplayer is having problems, not canola, unfortunately) and what is missing is the option to set what player to use. The whole maemo platform suffers a little bit with video, actually now days I think video on linux is always a little bit more complicated than it should be for the end users (but we all know why)

Album arts, etc: unfortunately we removed the support. We already explained. There are legal issues for that. But you are right that we didn't recognize yours. Well the point is that( we are actually listening from the users also) theres a lot of users profile :

1. heavy users (linux savvy, that actually can make scripts to export from his box to canola all his album art)

2. Linux user (he will be able to run a couple of commands, keeps his music organized)

3. the windows power user (while not used to linux CL, will propably have a organized music collections )

4. windows regular users, that can or cannot have organized music (just a folder with a lot of files)

While we can :

1) support embedded + cover.jpg/png inside de artist folder this would still leave out the people that doesn't use folders. and for us they are really important.

The thing is.. we don't want to be itunes( reorganize his music collections) but we do want to provide them covers, (downloading) and as this was the first one that we did but got removed.

So the plan in my head (Gustavo can say if someting can block us) is to have:

1) Embbedded album art support (for the real power users)
2) cover.png / jpg in a folder (but this can generate erros for a lot of people)
AND if possible downloads (legal block)

this would be the ideal. Maybe some third party developer makes the plugin for the download.

Issues I have and would like to be improved:

1. MPlayer sound out of sync with picture. Other than that I find the Video UI to be good.
>> we saw that : / it sucks, we will see if we can help the mplayer team. and also provide a options to choose the video player engine.

2. Caching of photo thumbnails doen't seem to be working as if I scroll the tumbnails too quickly they are shown as blank until it stops and then redraws... Once the photo has been thumbnailed it should remain available.

Well.. it does. The problem is : remember that you are in a limited platform, with limited RAM and we don't want to eat all your resources. While your albums can have 100 photos, to load 1000 thumbnails on the memory would be a killler.
So the white thing is actually intentional to give you the scroll feedback instead of "chopping" even more the animations because we're don't have more memory and you know that happens then. So it's actually a a trick to consume less memory and give you more freedom (believe me you will need it) to use other softwares while canola still running. so that delay is actually ours,



3. Clicking on the main video button takes you to a menu with only one item. This menu should be removed unless there are more than one items. In which case the 'My videos' page should be shrunk horizontally and the to smaller (Photo and Audio) buttons added.

>> I wrote about that in my blog. I also wrote here =) The menu is empty because some of the features are not that. I asked " please forgive this for this beta" The second part of your suggestions kills the whole design for the main menu =) imagine scrolling with a button there? no =)... but don't worry with the new apps for videos this will be improved.



4. Album covers should be grouped by artist then album rather than album name. Indeed, I think the 'Album covers' option should be removed and the covers shown (as an option) in each of the other groups (Artists/Albums/etc).
>> this is a new view in our opinion, but I think your suggestion is valid, I will add to my "pool" where I control what was more asked and etc( actually this was the guide for canola2)


5. On the 'Album Art' screen the Group should be above the album art and the album bame below. This would free up the right hand side for a much larger list (10 would be preference).

>> well this is your preference. We have a grid for the layout and we are maintaing it. So we only break it if really needed and all others screens keep the alignment. But thanks for the suggestion and I will try it out in the image edition, to see if fits to the grid and really gives this " addition" I really don't see more albums fitting because of this,
(actually do you mean on the 3 album view.. or on the thumbnail view? after reading again I was confused - sorry I'm in the balcony, in a freezing night here)

Other than the above improvements I feel that Canola2 has met or exceeded my expectations.

>> Thanks, I think now.. it's time to really put everything on the software that was meant.. there's a lot of things to be improved (like ANY software around)

But now my comment for Suryavanshi :

Hei, I was think today that you placed your critics etc. (not a problem with them) and now later you said (there's a lot of complaining from the users etc) but in your first post you didn't say the only problem that is appearing (I have the emails also not only here) that is the scrolling x clicking and our " invisible scrollbar" that makes people fell that they are not scrolling.

So, actually thinking that you would probably talk about that made me think even more about the users concerns and how we will be able to change some things as they want to increase the usability. While we are not opensource, we do listen, (actually we are not opensource also is explained in several posts around here) and this release will improve so fast next year that I think we will be able to at least reach our target users expectations.

But again : I really don't have a problem, but please lets keep this as polite as possible. We (INDT) have most of our work opensourced (Python, EFL, Carman, Mamona, LLVM, Games, BlueZ, MaemoMyth) and only a thin layer of Canola is closed not because of canola but actually because of the company business case. We do have others projects (commercial ones) based on canola that pays the bills. As gustavo pointed we t
urned from a full closed release to a fully community oriented release (EFL + python bindings + media scaner ) where everything was done in community CVS, and we are not taking.. we are actually giving everything back. So please do critic us, but see the background first. I met Urho Konttori and told him in person that we were so proud of UKMP because we are python lovers, and he was the first one to push the limits and show how great is to work with python. Now people have a nice opensource alternative. Canola has a difference vision, and we do take usability for serious (in our concept) and maybe this doesn't fit your vision of usability but come on, we do tests, we do listen to people we do late changes to improve and our focus is on usability. Transitions and eye candy are part of a pleasurable user experience, and in the end I will repeat myself:

We want to promote the platform. Not compete, not be closed because of this or that. We believe on the openness of maemo and we want to show how far can you go with it. Canola doesn't use any "secret" from the platform, is a pure python + EFL application, and in the end we want to see maemo growing. And having nice applications for several types of users is crucial for it's success.

If you want, please send me a private message, and I will also discuss any design decision with you, listen to any comments and like we do in the office " discuss" pros and cons of each alternative and see what fits best. IF you want to do so. I know you problably don't because it's closed but you have a personal invitation to do so.

About the forum : Reggie offered us, and for me (and gustavo) makes life easier in this stage where (like you said) there's a lot of issues to be solved. I gladly accepted so we can keep answering as much as possible without losing ourselves in that huge thread.

BR

Marcelo

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

Hey Suryavanshi : please place one thing after your comments to be more accurate :

1. " In my and some others opinion " ... canola us ususable

Why I say that? Because while I do respect you and your opinion, please read the blogs, read the threads, I think the amount of people who's using it and like it is bigger than the ones that don't. Come on! you can throw how many stones you want but don't be blind of no seeing that people do have requests, and wanted things better (and it will be soon) but most of the comments are positive?

But now if you problem is personal, (which I would for sure wonder why) then you can talk by the others. for now I think you should make the critics like the others, for yourself, about your opinion not the others.

2. We are a closed source software, and the part that deals with your data is fully open source. The visualization layer is closed and will remain as such, but apart of that I don't see where those concerns can exist. (ok you can doubt etc etc etc - but we are not working in several fully open source projects with privacy damaging strategies in mind.

BR

Marcelo

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

...and especially:

3. You are a d---b loudm--th.

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

Hei fpp, please : / don't do that.