Hi all. I'd like to post this to someone of the Canola team, but just tried to comment the Beta 2 progress on Gustavo Barbieri blog, and saw that it needs to be registered to wordpress (which I'm not) to comment...

So hopefully the guys read the forums here, and also I'd like to know if someone of you experienced my same problems.

First of all, I'm happy that most of the "bugs" i wanted to complain about are already fixed (the database locking the 770 at boot-up, the ordering by ID Tag title instead of the song number).

The only other thing I still have difficult with, is that files and directories (i.e. in the picture library) are sorted alphabetically, but there is no way of knowing which line is a directory and which is a photo, actually...

Shouldn't you be reporting Canola bugs/enhancements in Garage?

Hi,

sorry for that, is already in our track since beta1. I called the ticket "action" icons that should indicate what is a folder and what's not.

Gustavo if I'm not mistaken added [] brackets to what was folder, but I don't know if it made it to the final release, as I'm very much against it.

But my worries is : how to keep the UI simple. Is it REALLY, really needed to have one more indication in the already crowded list view? can we have an alternative way to do that? I'm really studing a lot of UI problems, this is one of them, but we really have only a small amount of "work force" so choosing what is going to be done is a tough decision! :/

Br

Marcelo

One way to keep the UI simple and yet also include a wealth of features is to make it context-sensitive. Yeah, I realize canola is to an extent but maybe you can take that further. The touchscreen allows you to get out of the "windows widget" box and implement all sorts of new interface aspects-- a la Apple iPhone. Just wondering-- does the API support touch acceleration detection, etc?

Read the full article.

Cool! and what a coincidence, seeing as how I just tacked on to one of maxilogan's old canola improvement request threads...

EDIT: heh... they misspelled "tuning"...

EDIT 2: oops! I see that you actually moved maxi's thread. I also see they took my advice on the contextual improvments. That was quick!

Guys this interface is awesome.

But something aside the interface cought my attention: the TV button. Is it supposed that the plugins for MythTV are also ready to work?!

Hi Guys =)

I think I will be a lot more here from now on as I was before canola release =)
So first some considerations :

@texrat : Yeah, sorry for my crappy english. The item actually doesn't exists ( it's carman or the car part of it ) but I never wrote it right so our flash dude wrote just like me. My mistake =) I need to find time to finally take some English lessons.

Also on the contextual : Actually the contextual interface ( car - home - work) was our goal since the beginning, but was quite hard to convince the managers with what we had at the time, and I was the only in the ui work, taking not only canola but all indt's project. Now with a slightly bigger team we are able to produce a lot more, experiment a lot more and propose! Expect more than these experiments. A lot more. Along with Canola's next version I think we are working with something people always asked. Let see how we managed to do that, and once we have a mockup (even in flash) usable enough I will pass it to some of our great beta testers friends to say what they think and try to involve the users as much as possible in the process.

@maxilogan : The MythTV tv thing is real =) if you take a look we did gmyth, some maemo mythTV experiments, and now Why not plug it into canola? The plugin was ready for the current version but we didn't have the UI for the channel navigation ( EPG actually). I would like actually to be able to provide plugins not only for MythTV but for almost any PVR that has an open API or upnp support.

also for max : the folder thing will become a folder icon with name, so this will solve the problem I guess =)

So, this is just the tip of (I hope) our best iceberg =) we have a lot of improvements on multitask, gps, pvr, mplayer / other players support, web configuration going inside canola (at least the most usable part of it) and a lot more.

as I said it's finally time for us here at INDT enjoy the speed that python give. And because we maintain it we are fixing all bugs that appear in lighting speed. Python and evas will be our not-so-secret weapon, to make canola a nice user experience.

Thanks, and I will keep in touch!

Marcelo Eduardo
Openbossa Labs @ INDT
Recife Brazil
--------------------------
www.indt.org.br
www.marceloeduardo.com

Awesome, Marcelo!

Hmmm....with the new OS just released I can't even install Canola anymore. Not even from the command-line. It's choking on on one of the debs.