Notices

spice3D : I think it was said in different words, but don't worry :
You mean : if you are looking into a list of artists, you want to see a album art icon besides the name right (not the grid correct) ?

But genres? if we do that we need to pick a random album art? that maybe cannot say much about the genre? sorry but I really disagree of the use here.

Albums make sense, and they are already by album art, but maybe what we can implement in the future is the album art by artists. I think that is missing for sure.

Br

Marcelo

well we have some tests on the tablet. It uses the same ffmpeg codecs (if I am not saying ********) but the goal for us is a easier to use API. if the performance is better than the default media player is alright still I want to speed up loading time, control better, have more control over bugs and be able to fix / patch it more often.



We will not force canola to connect. this was an early decision and we don't want to force this for now. But the need to restart canola is a important thing. I will talk to the guys to fix this.

Marcelo

Several other issues (more general, not tied to Beta7):

1. Battery usage. Mplayer shortens battery life, I wonder how xine is doing in that field. While I don't like default Nokia apps they hit one thing perfectly - power usage. Built-in media player is very power efficient. Would it be possible to switch to it automatically for supported formats?

2. Another issue bothering me for long time. When "escaping" from track I land into playlist/album view and don't know in what part of playlist I am. IMO currently played track should be highlighted AND for few seconds slider should be shown for better orientation. Current track should be placed in middle of screen or second to show context.

3. To identify albums Canola uses combination of album title AND artist which leads to absurd effects. For example soundtrack of Shrek 2 is shown in Canola as 13 albums! The same applies to albums where are invited guests etc.

4. Scrolling is erratical. Everything works well with light load of device, but with anything going into background (or sometimes even just playing) IT has problems with detection of events and the only way to scroll without accidentally entering selection is use of "safe zone" on the left. Problem is this area is too narrow to comfortably use. Sure, it is wider than corresponding widgets in rest of Hildon interface but it is narrower than similar elements of Canola. This area should be wider AND on both sides.

@vvaz : It already does that automatically. It only uses mplayer as default because it has better performance for video. There's a atabake .conf file on your home folder ( .atabake/.conf if I'm not mistaken) that does the mime type associations.
Audio : most of formats play with default media player because it's more efficient.
Video : most formats play with mplayer because of better performance.

You can try setting up the basic video formats to the default media player.

2. Actually we have this since the first design, and it became a programming / performance issue. I asked for the icon to show that that particular song is playing, but there's some problems with implementing that now. It's on our list of fixes for the list component. But I agree with you that the scrollbar should stay a little bit more, and we will do that, actually it was talked in beta7 that it should be at least semi-transparent most of the time. We are prototyping that to see the best solution.

3. Please, read the threads the multiple album solutions out there a based on "players" on the desktop particular tags. To avoid that we became "agnostic" to those and tried to do the most generic / id3 compliant solution. EVEN with that there's a small feature in the settings part ( multiple album entries ) that willl fix this automatically for you allowing you to merge any album that shows duplicated. It uses not only the principles you said, but others.

I know most of people never read it (myself included sometimes) but it was already on the canola "manual" : http://www.openbossa.indt.org/canola/using.html#mlib

If there's a solution that 100% for all cases, we will implement. while this do not appear we will slowly improve according to the standards of each tag implementation.

ps: we tried a lot of possible combinations, and there's always a case that fails.

4. This was widely discussed in several threads, and I explained not only the design decisions but also the whole concept decision why there will be not a wider area there, and so on. So, again as I said before: if you don't mind... use "it would be nice if.." and not "should". We are doing our best following our concept / goal for the application. It's unfortunately impossible to please everyone, and I will personally not change the plans I have for it for now.

The good part is that the IT provides lot's of choice, and as we don't charge any money for the application you can change without loss to the other applications that implement that kind of thing. I know it's a high price to pay to lose a user (and I really care about it) but I do not think we compete with other players, with complete each other. Kagu has a simple 2 click solution to avoid miss click, media box has a simple "play" are on the item to avoid miss click and they are all nice applications that does what we do... (and they are done in python, which makes us quite happy because we are python advocates ) and can guarantee that you would at least solve this problem.

Did you try with the flat themes? they speed up things and behave better in heavy load cpu situations.

Anyways, your point 2 is really valid, and help us improving Canola and also validates what we thought was wrong. We thank you very much for the time / effort on using reporting the problems to us.

*ps: i hope you don't take my words as rudeness, in the opposite we are all searching for a nice user experiences, so if we cannot fulfill it we for sure give alternative ways to do it.

Cheers,

Marcelo

how can i find and back up (or play with another player) the youtube files.
i couldn't locate them with the file manager...

i ran into the same "out of space" issue too... i moved the nokia demo
video and could load a few more youtube files...

Well, it would be nice if app like Canola provided the same interface for whole experience. With such narrow "safe zone" it is impossible.

Rude would be "naked" RTFM without any further explanation

And flat theme is real improvement in terms of performance. Thanks.

Hi vvaz,

We do provide it, and like I posted in several threads, the scrolling thing is "variable" there's users with problems, there's users with no problem, there are users that have not "grasped" the way to scroll safely, and so on. The thing is, that was not even supposed to be a safe zone, it's a happening. The right side is dedicated to widgets and to the important matter of showing the bar indicating where you are.

So, if things are like this I would really provide the same experience, removing the safe zone, but I don't consider this to be harmful as for example it works for you at least a little bit.

Again, canola suffers also from one evil : we tried to be a "capacitive-ready" ui on a resistive touch device. This is our sin, and to fix that we would need to deeply redesign, and as I'm looking more into the future, and future evolutions I think it was worth the experiment to have this, even with failures. My team and I have learned a lot about the scrolling issues, scrolling technics, and we will be prepared for the future / future projects because our goal was really to be different, be equal means to use some of the concepts of the others players, but if you have them I should we do the same... that's what's nice about maemo : freedom of choice, and we are more than glad with the outcomes, and I think we will be able to improve it a lot more to even make you happier with the scrolling thing

If we had a "canola" device (I know 'if' is a easy resort) there would not be that much thing bellow blocking the interaction like in your case, but I can promise you one thing : we are not stopped, let this get worse .. we are trying and experimenting with everything possible to improve it, in the coding level. In the design level we will not change unless is really necessary in some points

Eg given of ITT suggestion that changed the design :

a) the accidental hit of delete button in the settings, now it will hide automatically
b) lack of some user feedback in several interactions
c) changes on the album art size, text movements etc
d) changes on hit areas of elements to improve success rate
e) changes on the scrollbar, made numbers bigger, gave more space to back and option buttons
and a lot more, trying always to cope with the basic concept

I'm glad you didn't find it rude. Yes, a RTFM is a little bit too much. And as I don';t like to read it, I won't write it for others

Anyways dude, just your time of talking to me, pointing out your ideas / comments is already taken as a great thing for us. And as you know it's nothing personal / against users but more a thing of knowing that the fix is not as simple as people think when looking from outside. We have a small joke inside from devs to interaction designers that is something like that :

"Please Dev, do that for me... it's probably just an 'if' on your code "



Cheers dude,

Marcelo

Ah! So Youtube plugin uses Mplayer?
I was wondering why it worked with my bluetooth headphones.
While Youtube doesn't have stereo (or is it me?), it was pretty good experience.

After that, of course, I immediately started regretting that a2dp hack doesn't work with Canola...

Oh, and I'm really glad to see new themes. My favorite so far is Deep Blue.

P.S. This is my first post here.

Hi Dmitri,

We wanted a2dp since the beginning, but as you know canola is cpu intensive in most of interactions (scrolling mainly) using today's a2dp support would make the experience totally crap, then we went to do the right thing :

We had one guy working just to improve the performance of the a2dp profile straight in the blueZ project (the bluetooth stack for linux, used in the tablets).

We had excellent results, the performance is now very very nice, and once the new blueZ is on the tablet (next release we think) we will put the support on Canola by default, with controls

It's our way, we don't like that much "hacks" I know we pissed some users off because of that, but you can do a hack on canola : set mplayer as player of everything (audio and video) it is not recommend but will give you today's a2dp hack a chance

I hope with the testing environment + the web service for compile themes + the design sheets, more themes will appear

cheers, and welcome!

Marcelo

OpenBossa Labs Team,

First of all thank you for a great application (Canola) and I look forward for the next release. But, I have some suggestions that I would like in Canola.
I use Miro on my PC and I'd like some of the functionality implemented in Canola.
Like the following:
- Auto delete podcast after preset number of days
- Ability to keep the podcast after until user decide to delete the file, a button on the playback screen will be handy while driving
- Auto download NEW podcast from preset feed

These functionalities will be a must in the desktop version.

Thanks again,
Jacques