Canola 2.0 Photos Screens

the feature that most catched my eyes when I saw the first canola 2.0 presentation from the design team, was the pictures screens!

lucky me that had the opportunity to take part in the challenge of transforming a beautiful and smooth flash animation into a real usable application on the maemo platform :) I worked on the three photo screens that are previewed below:


these screens push the hardware (memory and processing) capabilities of the maemo devices to its limits, but that is a good thing!

wait for some videos of these photos in action (these screenshots are from my desktop)

br

Fullwork at Canola 2.0 pre-release

we are now working at full speed in order to release canola 2.0. a lot of new features are being implemented, and unfortunately we are not having much free time to report back to the maemo community our work in progress.

I have been working since the beginning of the project with the download manager, the new canola media player, code-named "atabake" and more recently with the UI of the photos screens.

next week we will start posting some screenshots of the features of canola 2.0: podcasts, media player and photos browsing have been through a major "ramp up"

and despite the new look and feel and the features added, canola 2.0 keeps the original spirit: a simple, yet powerful and sexy portable media aggregator.

hope you enjoy the outcome of this project!

Web Trend Map

the folks at iA, Information Architects, in Japan created this very interesting map of what's going on in the web. the tubes are based on Tokyo's subway lines, that represent categories of the current web buzz.

in the major stop places there are weather forecasts (msn and yahoo are under heavy storm) with a number that is the Web classification (0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 2.5): Facebook is rated as 2.5, whilst useit.com (from Jakob Nielsen usability guru) is still in the web 0.5

you are placed in the center of the picture, right in the comfort of the Emperor's palace :)

Brazil, Winner of the Imagine Cup 2007!

Congratulations to yet another great participation of brazil in the imagine cup 2007! The Team formed (from left to right) by Carlos Rodrigues, Ivan Cordeiro, Andre Furtado (from UFPE) and Eduardo Sonnino (from USP) got the first place in the Embedded Development Category!!!

a great achievement for these guys, establishing brazil as first class competitor after successful participations in the last 3 editions of this competition. another brazilian team (Papa) also conquered the third place in short film design!

excellent work, let's hope that these great results will inspire even more young talents here in brazil to participate in the imagine cup 2008, that will be hosted in paris.

afterall, brazil has much more talent than just soccer and samba!

Work in Progress: New Canola

hi,

after a long time without updates on this blog, I will give an overview on my current tasks involving the new ramp-up of Canola.

there is a lot of work going on around Canola, as you can see in various posts from Marcelo, Barbieri and Kenneth! That´s an exciting time for good changes and new features :)
Besides the adoption of evas and edje as the UI toolkit, Canola is being rewritten in python and being reviewed from an architectural and functional point of view.

in the first semester I have worked on a cache and download manager for providing easy access to offline content, such as podcast and images, etc. Now I am working together with Artur (MoRpHeUz) on a media-engine for Canola. The main purpose of this media-engine is to provide simple access to multiple backends, such as MPlayer, GStreamer, the current Osso media server and others.

we all know that the default media-player has a lot of restrictions to supported formats, that´s why we believe that multiple media-backends is the way to go for applications that want to maximize the features for the end user. The new media engine will be able to select the best backend automatically for each mime-type, combining MPlayer, for open formats, with GStreamer (we are still waiting for playbin2 to come out) or the current media-engine for proprietary formats and DRM protected content.

in addition to support a wide range of media formats, this new engine will also manage sessions, allowing applications to save/restore state, such as remembering the last url played along with the position. Moreover, the session architecture will end with today´s mess of various applications using and confusing the osso-media-server.

what all applications want is a simple and reliable method of managing the playback of their media and that is what we will do!

BR

Bossa Conference

I am very excited for the next weeks! The reason why is that the first edition of the Bossa Conference will be held in Recife from the 12th to the 14th of March. Actually the event will take place in Porto de Galinhas, a wonderful beach in the southern coast of Pernambuco. Here is the conference site and the agenda.

Many experts of the Linux Community will be present focusing on Embedded Software in three main categories: Connectivity, Multimedia and Platform.

Besides the invited speakers, the whole INdT from Recife will also take place in this event, gathering and disseminating information about its projects and the maemo community in general.

It will be an excellent opportunity to share knowledge and to build new ideas!

Canola 1.0 Beta 2

So finally the second release of Canola is out! There are several new features in this release, including a version for the N800. Here is a cool video of thoughtfix using Canola in his car:



Now I am working on the next Canola release that will focus on architectural refactoring and creating new plugins for expanding Canola horizons. In this context, I am currently working on a plugin for Mythtv for accessing live tv and recorded content from your N800, based on the gmyth frontend library.

So what are you waiting for, go grab your N770 or N800 and give Canola a try here!