Hi, I expect to be more "precise" in a couple of weeks,
but canola is coming in second half of december =) so it will be a christma's gift =) Hope people like it.

The bad part is that some small "veeeery" nice features are for sure not to be polished enough for release, but but but...
we will send versions to most of you (as most of you are testing the beta earlier with us) and we already have plans to release
a new plugin (at least 1) but the plan is to release at least 3 features in january and more in february.

We are working non stop, but very excited because when we saw running on the 770 we though "damn, it's fast even on this guy" of course, I shall remember every time, the tearing sometimes brings the felling of "crap animation" but I think is better to do the animations with tearing than not doing it at all!

I'm preparing release material, "solid" news next week!

*ps: now we are really frozen to suggestion =) but I guess we have taken more than we actually capable.

*ps 2: I think I already said that, but the custom keyboard is going to be out of this one. We don't have time to make all the internacionalization / auto complete features, but the work on will go on. It's just a little bit more demanding to get it right.

Br

So for now, Canola 2.0 release date is 15th of December =)

I'd like to just say two things:
1st, awesome job on Canola, it is exactly how apps should be made to take advantage of the input-output for the device.

2nd, Your enthusiasm is contagious, to hear you talk about Canola in such a positive way makes me want to use it even more.

On my N800 my divx files (Naruto and Bleach fansubs, in divx-esque format) run too slow in Canola. I'm not saying it is Canola's fault, just that I can't switch to watching them on the N800 (from our dedicated fansub laptop). With the boost that the 2008OS has, and the improvements that you guys are making I will totally revisit that. (thanks!)

I am a UI guy by trade, and I've got to say that you folks working on Canola have hit the nail on the head, awesome UI, great interaction design. Once the videos work well, you really have made a home run for the n*xx series (and N770?) to be a portable media player (and the $230 is worth that alone for many folks), and a home media player served by a NAS.

Thanks and congrats, because hitting that sweet spot is not easy to do!

Hi Peblanc!

Thanks for the nice Words. The excitement is really due to that fact that it improved so much (interaction design wise, code wise) that every one is crazy to release it asap. It's funny to see a small group of coders working like crazy just because they are really "eager" to see that nice thing out there and get the first bunch of bug reports. Also we are dying to see what people will come up with the plugins (pure python, plain easy) this is the only reason we are going to make it happen this year.

I please ask you to take a look once it's out, and see the work behind it:
there was work from january-june purely to make Evas (EFL libraries) run fast on the device, and in july a lot of bindings to python, the core rewrite restarted and fortunately some other guys joined to help.

This other guys are actually the ones that matters to you =)

The video part was clearly bad, in all points of view. For example we know that people really into video is using mplayer. We did release a late plugin for mplayer but was a hack. This time is done right. We replaced the calls for the media engine (that also gave you and us a lot of small problems) to a small media engine of our own,( we do not intend to keep it to run against nokia's) it's just to be there while Nokia fix the other (they're are doing, but they have the whole platform to work on). So now, using our "atabake" engine, you can actually fully use mplayer, or the maemo media engine and we even did experiments with libxine. Why?

I really wanted to make sure gapless playblack would be in the next canola. But then the problems appeared. It's just not possible today with the current gstreamer there. And still a small gap between the music happening. LibXine showed that it could be done with it, but unfortunately it's a huge lib, and it will take more time to "make it fit" in maemo. So for now, only mplayer and media engine backends for Canola. But this improves a lot the video playback from the past, and of course, bring canola back to the fight, as the great guys behind UKMP and Kagu did a lot of stuff that Canola 1.0 didn't, and really needed. that's was the whole point, we don't think competition, and we decided to drop the old version that could not scale to create a really "scalable" application.

I really wanted to have a infra that gave me the chance to play around with media like the UI in the iphone does with video and music :
- scale video in realtime (I know it's eye candy only, but it just fit's better to see you video smoothly scaling than the screen blinking and blanking looking like something has gone wrong just to take you to fullscreen)
- Draw the buttons (components) on top of the video screen : so you don't need to leave fullscreen to control the playback, but again not possible due to some components :/

So, instead of waiting, we are actually going to go for it =) But please forgive us that takes a lot more time because the team is rather small, and while we do Canola, we do paralell projects to pay salaries =)

to close: I really share you thoughts, and I really believe a nice ui can make the difference, and 2.0 is going to be a huge step, but still far from where we want to go. I know some people will complaining about scrolling on horizontal on pictures and album arts (tearing and chronology), but we are just focusing on our devices (horizontal screens) and trying to not copy the apple guys, but actually trying to give ITT users a made for ITT application, that really makes you to use it more.

For the opensource part of the talk: We need to make money =) but don't worry we are not going to charge in the future for Canola, and we focus on other projects to make the money, but using the new Canola infra, so we have a huge time saver. That's why it's closed. And now, we did what I think is right: all the real, heavy, and time demanding work is opensourced, and available for any project (on EFL) the 16 bit EVAS version, python bindings for everything on EFL, the UPNP part(Brisa), the possibility of using plugins to extend (really) the features, and the most important : most of the work is python, so you get the point =)

Now I really want to see what you, the power, ITT users will think of it =) let's run for the first "complete" version so we can send to you.

I kindly ask here the help on that: if you are interested, in testing canola, and has the following requirements :

- a regular camera, to shot a video
- are not shy to talk (can be behind the video)
- a small amount of time to send us (the lots of bugs, suggestions)

I would like to request an email (handful dot lists AT gmail dot com ) , so once we have the complete version (will be unstable ) I will send to you, and if you can record the first use (from installation - to really digging thought media) even without testing if you media works (just pick a card with all kinds of media) It would be great.

hope to get some emails!

Marcelo
on behalf of the team =)

Hi Guys,

Just to let you know that I have posted some design decisions on my blog, and also the main menu video (from kenneth) with the Carman feature. While this is not too much, it's a nice glimpse at the real thing running on the N800. You can see how smooth it is. =)

Here the post


See you soon!