Notices

@ilia :

Well, if it was for me I would release it tomorrow. But being quite quite honest, it's a lot of work ahead, and we are trying at least to make the basics working so nicely that people will have no major or minor problems of any sort.

I can tell you that we would be quite happy to implement a lot of other stuff (specially the equalizer ) - what I can imagine we could use as " pre amp " also. And more. I also think that we the third party plugin coming a lot of good things will surface.

That was the point, we realize that we are really small to do everything is need : / thus we are doing a great developer support to aid us on this

Timeline : We have at least one more big update for march, we will release youtube and last.fm first (they were actually developed as example for the developers), and after that, I'm planning how much we are able to do in the other sprints. So imagine that we will try really now the 2 or 3 weeks interval (testing is taking a huge amount of time) so I see some of these features coming in the 2nd and 3rd sprint after the following one (beta7)

@fido : check out my blog (upnp is under working since the beginning, but it has a lot to improve( loading time, compatibility with the servers etc) Canola1 did that but we needed to rewrite the support to be able to not only be a UPNP client, but also a UPNP server and controller. ( http://www.marceloeduardo.com ) the last post is a video about that.

Mibi: in this demo we tried to come up with the testing of the menu system. It's fully flexible (up to 10 or 12 main items with 10 or 8 sub items for each ) that's why you see that Upnp and My Apps (location for third party) is coming so you can spect a more crowded screen.

@briand : we are trying to do that, but MPLAYER overrides the event system, and its actually using it's event mapping for the keys that are really weird (FF AND RR are in the up and down on the hardware : /) we have the code, we are now trying to fix mplayer to allows us to control the ui. We REALLY want to do that.

Cheers guy,

Marcelo

preamplifier:
the player I used until yesterday : YouAmp - lightweight media player (that unfortunately only supports media WITH ID3 tags )
yesterday, it stopped launching (for unknown reasons - waiting for an update). I swiched to Xmms - a winamp clone with enough addons to make this a great media player.

thanks for promising much; the only question I have left is: when can I expect this (1 month or 1 year)?

good luck

Ilia

Timeline : We have at least one more big update for march, we will release youtube and last.fm first (they were actually developed as example for the developers), and after that, I'm planning how much we are able to do in the other sprints. So imagine that we will try really now the 2 or 3 weeks interval (testing is taking a huge amount of time) so I see some of these features coming in the 2nd and 3rd sprint after the following one (beta7)


Hi again,

Well, I was and still am checking all your releases (missed the 4th one since I was disconnected from the world), and I can see a lot of improvement. I am quite curious about the last.fm plugin, and am wondering if it is better than vagalume. If so, I am switching to canola, promised

I just remembered about another (quite simple by its looks) add-on: button(s) mapping.
Since I use media players mostly (as much as possible) with a bluetooth remote control from my cell phone, the only input canola was able to get was "next track" and "previous track, defined by the left/right hardware buttons. If I could map the up/down buttons to volume, comfort would be GREATLY increased.

Btw, you said :
Does this mean that your team is lacking force to complete the task it agreed upon? Or does it mean that you are lacking funds? if so, I wasn't able to find any "donate" section on your website - a must for such promising projects

Please, if you are going to change the settings of MPlayer, PLEASE warn the users! Oh, and if so, the uninstallation should return those settings to their previous values (a feature Canola is lacking - after uninstallation, all my audio codecs "disappeared"...)


about the testing:
1) automated scripts?
2) releasing builds every 2-3 days for users to test? I'm sure there would be a lot of enthusiasts - me included!

Keep up the good work

Ilia

youtube plugin

(looks at watch) [unpatient smile]

good job guys and keep at the good work. i love how uguys fixed the lock-touchscreen bug. now i can live without having to pause it and plan everytime i lock the screen!

Some lyrics plugin, who knows...?

Salomc: if we could release our real idea for lyrics/covers/more you would really like it, but we can't. But I think sooner something will appear

@illiaden :

Button mapping : we have been talking about that a lot, but of course you will not get the full thing, as canola will not have " selection " moving around but in my website you can find the explanation of how button map will work, and the 2 states planned for that (scroll and playback controls)

Actually we are kind of ahead of what agreed upon. but to do more and more stuff takes more time and we have deadlines to met also, even to a open project (remember we are a small company, we need to do other projects to pay the bills). We don't work for donations, don't worry about that.

Oh, you got it all wrong. We don't want to change your mplayer settings at all. What I said is that when embedded on Canola, instead of leaving the events to Canola, mplayer gets them, thus creating some strange behaviors in the button mapping. It's actually the opposite of what we wanted. So what we want to do is see if theres a need for a patch to make mplayer behave correctly when embedded. Just that.

ALSO: we do not, at any circunstance touch anything that wasn't installed by us (or the activity dependencies of canola) Mplayer, its codecs we NEVER touch it. if this is happening something must be pretty wrong and I certainly would kill the guys (kidding)


Rich interaction software testing It's a little bit different from the system that you can automate test like you are imagining to do that to canola, I believe would waste more time than help us.

We have the builds, and we don't think users are ready to give the class of feedback you need on daily released builds. Sometimes people just complain that thing doesn't work. Don't fill bugs on garage. Sorry, not happening until we feel people really want this, and it's also ok (doesn't break our daily code routine) just to release it. We want a little bit more of freedom while we can

BR

Marcelo

Sorry, I must be blind since I can't find it. Mind posting a direct link there?

Hey, no one is blaming you! most of us are thankful for what you are doing, not the opposite!

So, if I understand correctly, when one plays a video in Canola, the buttons mapping switches to MPlayer's settings? I don't see any problems with that; what did you want to correct it to?


Please tell this to my codecs, they don't know it yet

Seriously, this occured when using the canola-cleanup tool on Beta5 (didn't yet remove the Beta6...). Sure, all the codecs are part of dependencies of all major media players, so they were reinstalled with any other install. Wonder if that was fixed in Beta6.



About the builds - yeah, that's true: you would spend too much time on sorting what feedback is good, and which is plain spam, so it wouldn't be productive.
As for the automated tests - I mostly have experience working with the server part, not the client. For the server, it's usually quite easy (relatively) to automate some procedure to run the same test (written once) on every single build.

Also, another request just occured to me regarding Canola - if possible, and not really hard (which I doubt), please add support for non-unicode encodings. Most of the russian, french, even spanish tags I have display only the standard latin characters correctly. the rest is changed into hieroglyphic symbols

Ilia

P.S. - bought new earphones: now Canola works perfectly for me, even without any preamplifier (although that feature would still be nice). It's now my main media player.

P.P.S. - just out of curiosity, does the flat black theme actually helps save power? I just like it for simplicity and contrast.

No. The trouble is not that a key mapping changes; that would be bad, as it yields inconsistency.

This is even worse; mplayer is supposed to be embedded, and only receiving events that are trickled down to it; instead it's seizing the keys for itself.

If I understand right, anyway. If I'm wrong, please correct me.

So, if I understand correctly, when one plays a video in Canola, the buttons mapping switches to MPlayer's settings? I don't see any problems with that; what did you want to correct it to?

Simple : putting seek to the up and down keys is totally a developer solution with no knowledge of basic usability /semiotic or anything.

They have the feature and just want to push somewhere. (ops I just found a empty key, nice)

Canola has design rules, and this is breaking them. why it should work like this only when playing on mplayer backend, which the user isn supposed to known in fact?

Seriously, this occured when using the canola-cleanup tool on Beta5 (didn't yet remove the Beta6...). Sure, all the codecs are part of dependencies of all major media players, so they were reinstalled with any other install. Wonder if that was fixed in Beta6.

That the point, we don play media, thus we don change anything there. Anyways, it can be a unfortunate bug and I will ask the guys to investigate it. But it for sure shouldn touch applications that we don actually develop. Mplayer and default media player we talk to them only via Dbus or other means, never directly.

Automated test for rich UIs don work like you are used to. Sorry, but this is a huge subject, anyways you can try taking a look. there has been a lot of advances in this areas, but we do have automated tests where it can be done, but the REAL test, the user finger print on the screen needs to be done in every single build, we need to generate random events that only a user generate and cannot be efficiently mapped to a test case. It more similar to "gameplay" test in the game industry. You cannot automate gameplay, because the results are more than just visuals. It the users reactions to each feedback that are taken into account.

Strange, because we did add. What you need is the FONT. We don send you a font that make this. so what you can do substitute the font with a font with the characters from the languagens. But remember: french should be working we are Brazilians, we have exactly the same characters and accents.

Send us the music which is displaying incorrectly because this can be more a matter of the scanner mixing up in your tag version, that not supporting unicode. (you can send a Private message I will send you my personal email )

Glad to hear that you are really using canola now I can see that you will be sending us more bugs and we will improve it even more.

The black theme don help save power It was meant exactly for that : simple, fast and really high contrast

Benson: you got it perfectly and we are restless we will see how to change this, and fix mplayer not only for canola but to any player.

MArcelo

Just a couple of quick things I wouldn't mind.
I have a 770, and I wouldn't mind an option for disabling the screen blanking when I'm in full screen, like maemomapper. I know, it eats more battery, but I've got a 770, so I can just cover it to blank the screen.

Also, and I don't know if this is possible, when the 770 lid is closed, I wouldn't mind having a few buttons active. Like volume, and maybe a pause. So I wouldn't have to open it to adjust it.

Just a few thoughts,

Keep up the great work.

desiv

Desiv :

well, your requests are quite "individual" : / and focus on a device, that we are supporting as much as we can, but we don't want to create specific features for devices : /

Hope you understand, we do have a lot of critical things to do first : /

Marcelo