Thoughts

N9 on sale in Finland ... and a few other things

2011-10-13T13:00:00.000-07:00

I'm fell for it again. Long period of silence. It doesn't mean that things have stood still.

First of all, a very close friend of mine died. Gary Birkett, lcuk to the community, lost his life a few weeks back. For this, for me, world suddenly stopped in its tracks. He was truly an inspiration to us all. I wish all the best to his family while they seek to cope with the tragic loss. To Gary I raise a pint of Guinness. Rest in peace my friend. You will be missed, time and time again.

N9 finally shipped. I was in my earlier post saying that it was a swan song for Nokias Meego efforts, but as faith put it, it is likely the swan song for Meego proper.

It's hard to put into words the feelings we have been having during the late summer/early autumn time. Software has been complete since summer, but some surprise issues had been helding the sales start for some time.

That's business as usual, but not very pleasant ever. We did a few touches here and there all the time until the release, but it was just polish really.

While the agonizing wait was ongoing, software teams worked furiously on making the experience even better. First update release is complete, we will be distributing fruits of it to developers soon and end users a bit further down the road.

Improvements are a legion. This is due to the fact that many teams stopped the sales release work already in spring time and set their sights on the first update release. I counted around 3500 improvements (fixes or features) to be in the release.

Out of interest, I tohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifok a look at the git activity of meegotouch.
http://meego.gitorious.org/meegotouch/libmeegotouch/commits/Harmattan_1.0
11.8.2011
http://meego.gitorious.org/meegotouch/libmeegotouch/commits/Harmattan_1.1
23.9.2011
http://meego.gitorious.org/meegotouch/libmeegotouch/commits/Harmattan_1.1.1
28.9.2011

Of course, those dates do not mean that the versions were finalized on those days, just that those were the days that last tags of meegotouch were made. For example meegotouch theme for 1.1.1 was update just today, so, it probably isn't ready yet.
http://meego.gitorious.org/meegotouch/meegotouch-theme/commits/Harmattan_1.1.1

Now it's time that we are going full steam ahead with the 1.2 update release, where work is proceeding nicely.

Back to other topics. I have been "grinding" the triple A title games that I have missed, with most recent being the portal, and modern warfare 1&2. After all the hype, I was a bit disappointed about portal. Sure, the mood was pretty OK, but writing was amateurish and the "hidden" marks of the previous lab rats (you?) didn't tell enough story to me. SUmmarising, it was fun, but didn't really pull me in so that I would have to start portal 2 immediately.

That was not the case with call of duty modern warfare. When the very first mission started in random boat in the middle of Atlantic, I was totally hooked in. This was totally immersive game and I really had to drag myself away from the game two times. I didn't even touch the multiplayer after playing it though, just went to steam and bought the second in the trilogy.

Unfortunately, second was this time not as good as the first in the series. It was generally ok, but the events felt very detached from each other. Action was still good and level design was fun to play, but it wasn't such a holistic experience of being there as in the first. If you haven't played those games yet, do yourself a favor and don't start at 10 PM, but 9 PM. Games last only 6-7 hours and they are total adrenaline rush. You won't fall asleep after playing.

I have also been playing with windows 8 a bit. Truly, a leap for Microsoft. Both on the base OS side (it boots so fast that it should default to hibernation rather than standby), as well as UX side. Metro UI is clear, simplified in a good way and beautiful. I'm not a fan of the Metro home screen concept though. I think it was barely adequate for windows phone, but it is too limited for tablet use. Clutter really. However rest of the tablet & phone UI is a jewel. It's so easy to use that even my 2,5 years old daughter is able to power it on, unlock it with the picture password, open metro home and start drawing with the paint application. Not all rosy though, apps start horribly slow, they crash all the time, perform really badly and seem to be generally been given at most a few hours of effort. I hope they are there to set an example that you can do better. Fortunately, there is always the full OS behind that makes the tablet pretty OK even though it's just a developer hacking device.

I was asked recently where I failed during harmattan. I answered that I didn't resist enough the pressure and the temptation of doing the events screen to home. While it serves its purpose well and performs (especially in 1.2) much better than the apps pushing data to it, I think we should have left it out. It's a bit of clutter in the same way as metro home is clutter and cost us a lot of development and management time. Time we might have spent elsewhere better.

But now that I was thinking of windows 8, I think I would revise that. The biggest thing I failed to understand to need a push was replacing backstacking with horizontal paneling.

N9 home is clearly a single layer where you move horizontally between the three different views. On top of home, you have application layer. But with back stacking, applications themselves start to visually have many layers on top of each other. Leaving menus and dialogs aside, I think it really doesn't suit the UI paradigm.

Correct and clinical (like my friend Otso would say) would have been to keep applications in single layer. Lock screen sits on top of applications, applications sit on top of home. All views, move horizontally to show different aspects of the layer. Virtual KB, menus and dialogs are ok to float on top of anything. As back button is not needed anymore, need for toolbar overall diminishes considerably.

Back button really has held the UI design. Swipe would also have been strengtened as a concept by becoming the navigation tool also within the applications. Windows mobile 7 devices have the back as a physical button allowing the UIs themselves to not need a toolbar-alike construct for consumption views, only for productivity views.

I'm kind of signing myself away from the meego also with this blog. I have started already working part time in the smart devices organization (that's windows phones in nokia terms) in forward center. Work that I'm doing now is at the moment revolving around hardware problems now than software. I assume that to change a bit more as we start getting a clear picture on where we want to be going with hardware in the future.

It is very exciting work indeed. We are looking at the devices coming out in 2013 / 2014 now and the tech for that time is something mind boggling. For a long time, it seemed to me that invention was stalling again after apple iphone 4 came out. iphone was revolutionary, but 4 didn't bring anyting big on top of 3/3gs, just nicer looking, more power and a bit more resolution. 4S doesn't seem to be bringing much new either, just better and faster than previous model. Android has been mostly fixing the flaws it has had all the time, and trying to make the platform vaguely performant.

When I'm looking at the next generation of CPU/GPU combinations, I'm almost speechless on what could be done with them. We were stuggling so much with N9 to get the 60 fps possible on the 848x480 display (have you guys noticed hidden 16 pixel rows by the way? <- hackers take a peek and gain a few thousand pixels more) with the limits that we had. These limits are now totally gone. There is no limit for 2.5 D view rendering performance neither on CPU or GPU side.

2013 onwards, industry will make a huge leap in CPU and GPU power and start being close to PS3 & Xbox power levels. It's so fast that even Android can start innovating new things. ;)

This leap of power will usher a new age for mobile devices - if we play our cards right (I mean, as the industry, not only as Nokia). Display technology is advancing at immense rates. Transparent and flexible OLEDs seem to raise so many opportunities that it makes my imagination just tingle of working to set the playground ready for the next innovations on the software front.

If you see issues in n9, don't hesitate to contact me. I'm still well connected to nokia meego and there is a lot of talent working on making it all the time better.

Perhaps it's time to call it a day.

Molehill - Flash 11

2011-08-18T13:30:00.000-07:00

Somehow, in the flurry of figthing to get N9 out, I missed Adobes latest big thing.

I have always loved pretty much everything adobe has been pushing out, but this one is just insane.

New Adobe Flash 11 will contain support for 3d acceleration, totally abstracted from opengl/DirectX/OpenGlES or lack of any acceleration.

Guys at Adobe have done outstanding job at abstracting the GPU acceleration to work the same on all platforms (MS, Linux, Osx, Mobile) - yet, you still get to code shaders all the same for all of them.

One of course immediately compares Stage3D to webgl and Silverlight 5. Silverlight 5 looks to me like a nice first try for MS. Webgl, while nice as an idea of pulling it all to browser itself, lacks the compatibility between browsers, and does not even try to protect code copying.

One of the most interesting, and perhaps odd things about the stage3d/molehill, is that adobe somehow resisted trying to crete their own development & design tools for 3d. It would have been a futile effort to do it the whole way from 3d object modelling to animation crafting in a way that pleases all, so they decided to stick with doing just the 3d abstraction layer and do it par none. Having been testing it a bit, I must applaud for job well done.

By not doing the toolset, they have in effect taken all existing adobe 3d engine creators to come onboard as well as converted some of the other engine developers like Unity. While Unity says this is not the end of their dedicated web based player, I don't see any reason why they would keep two competing implementations alive.

For Unity, you code your game with normal c#/javascript/boo, which gets converted to actionscript. These days scripts are mostly running game decision logic, and pretty much all of the heaevy lifting is done on shader programs. So, not a whole lot of perf is lost by sticking completely to actionscript.

For most of the other Stage3D based engines, it's business as usual, use maya/3dmax/whatever makes you tick to do the meshes and place the textures, use the 3d game RAD tool to get it all together and actionscript to control it all.

Let me give you and example of how the code looks for a simple triangle with color slides between the vertices between the three competitors:

WebGl (note that I have dropped shader creation completely -> read from source) source : Source


//Vertexbuffer

    triangleVertexPositionBuffer = gl.createBuffer();

    gl.bindBuffer(gl.ARRAY_BUFFER, triangleVertexPositionBuffer);

    var vertices = [

         0.0,  1.0,  0.0,

        -1.0, -1.0,  0.0,

         1.0, -1.0,  0.0

    ];

    gl.bufferData(gl.ARRAY_BUFFER, new Float32Array(vertices), gl.STATIC_DRAW);

    triangleVertexPositionBuffer.itemSize = 3;

    triangleVertexPositionBuffer.numItems = 3;



    triangleVertexColorBuffer = gl.createBuffer();

    gl.bindBuffer(gl.ARRAY_BUFFER, triangleVertexColorBuffer);

    var colors = [

        1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0,

        0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0,

        0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0

    ];

    gl.bufferData(gl.ARRAY_BUFFER, new Float32Array(colors), gl.STATIC_DRAW);

    triangleVertexColorBuffer.itemSize = 4;

    triangleVertexColorBuffer.numItems = 3;

//Shader creation 

//--> Read from the source, it's far too long to express here

Ms Silverlight 5 Source Full source :


   vertexBuffer = CreateTriangle(); 



// Shader creation: 

   Stream shaderStream = Application.GetResourceStream(new Uri(@"TriangleSample;component/Triangle.vs", UriKind.Relative)).Stream; 

   vertexShader = VertexShader.FromStream(resourceDevice, shaderStream); 

 

   shaderStream = Application.GetResourceStream(new Uri(@"TriangleSample;component/Triangle.ps", UriKind.Relative)).Stream; 

   pixelShader = PixelShader.FromStream(resourceDevice, shaderStream); 



//Vertex buffer

   var vertices = new VertexPositionColor[3]; 

   vertices[0].Position = new Vector3(-1, -1, 0); // left 

   vertices[1].Position = new Vector3(0, 1, 0);   // top 

   vertices[2].Position = new Vector3(1, -1, 0);  // right 

   vertices[0].Color = new Color(255, 0, 0, 255); // red 

   vertices[1].Color = new Color(0, 255, 0, 255); // green 

   vertices[2].Color = new Color(0, 0, 255, 255); // blue 

             

   // create graphics device managed buffer 

   var vb = new VertexBuffer(resourceDevice, VertexPositionColor.VertexDeclaration, 

                vertices.Length, BufferUsage.WriteOnly); 

 

   // copy vertex data to graphics device buffer 

   vb.SetData(0, vertices, 0, vertices.Length, 0);

Adobe Flash Stage3D Source :




//Shader creation

   context3D.setProgramConstantsFromMatrix(Context3DProgramType.VERTEX, 0, modelMatrix, true );



   var vertexShaderAssembler : AGALMiniAssembler = new AGALMiniAssembler();

   vertexShaderAssembler.assemble( Context3DProgramType.VERTEX,

     "m44 op, va0, vc0 \n" + // 4x4 matrix transform from stream 0 (vertex position) to output clipspace

     "mov v0, va1 \n"    // copy stream 1 (vertex color) to fragment shader

   );



   var fragmentShaderAssembler : AGALMiniAssembler= new AGALMiniAssembler();

   fragmentShaderAssembler.assemble( Context3DProgramType.FRAGMENT,"mov oc, v0);" // output color 

  



//Vertex buffer

   vertexbuffer.uploadFromVector ( Vector.([

     4.-1,-1,0,  255/255,0,0,              // red

     5.0,1,0,    193/255,216/255,47/255,   // green

     6.1,-1,0,   0,164/255,228/255         // blue

     7.]),0, 3 ); // start at offset 0, count 3



   context3D.setVertexBufferAt( 1, vertexbuffer, 3,Context3DVertexBufferFormat.FLOAT_3 );

What I find interesting is that at the same time, Stage3d example code may look a bit more complex than the other, but that's the efficiency and concise presentation talking.

Silverlight stays the most readable of them all, but mostly because shader program is in separate file.

I think this is the new platform that games developers for facebook and mobile will embrace. It will be the basis of new wave of creative coding frameworks, ditching openframeworks and alike.

While also silverlight 5 seems to have a nice home for indie game development for 360+WP7/8, I don't believe it to have as significant impact on gaming as a whole as Stage 3d from adobe will.

I'm in awe.

Now, take a look at how Adobe presents this:

Don't mind about how "very very exciting it is"

If you want a hands on, try the max racer yourself:
http://www.molehillgaming.com/label/stage3d

First install Flash 11 Beta, then open the game.

Respect

2011-06-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

Through unimaginable hardships, we managed to pull a rabbit from the hat and get N9 done.
Schedule was just insanely tight, we got blows from all directions: Vanjoki leaving us, Ari leaving us, Elop dropping of meego from strategy, key developers leaving the company when we needed them the most.

Swipe UI, that we are now admiring, required every single application and framework to be rebuilt almost from scratch. All the blows and all the work in the course of 9 months. I never knew how much sweat and tears there needs to be to get this baby out.

What I want to say to the people who beared all that: Respect. You have my utmost respect and admiration. We didn't just do our best, we crafted the software to near perfection. Simplistic UI is easy to imagine, but extremely hard to execute. And execution includes design. Devil is in details and temptations are many. Keeping the boat steady on course needed a lot from you design and product management.

It's nothing short of miracle that the fruit of our labor is now admired by millions.

I am extremely proud of what I am holding in my hand right now. As a user, I'm loving every minute of using it and wouldn't change it for a thing.

All of maemo: I salute you. Job well done. Be proud.

NuvoFre 1.10

2010-07-17T02:45:00.001-07:00

NuvoFre 1.10 out with nice summer feel to it.

I'll add it to devel soon.

Direct link: NuvoFre 1.10

QML photoviewer demo on n900 with data from on-device webserver and tracker

2010-07-17T02:18:00.000-07:00

Title says almost all.

I've been toying a bit with idea of adding a very lightweight http server to n900 to serve the primary data of the device so that development of the UI can be done nicely on PC while still accessing the real data. One might argue that just pulling the data to PC would solve this and using the existing APIs. Well, yeah, but that's also laborious if you are not linux developer, whereas this approach works beautifully for any web runtime developers as well as developers of qt quick apps.

Doing this on web paradigm allows reuse of many learnings from my past life and creates a very flexible middle layer between the data itself and the UI.

As the first thing to serve as the proof of concept, I created an ATOM image http service on the device. It follows directly the format of flickr, so any code written to show flickr images can be converted to showing n900 images - either on the pc or on the device itself. Data is retrieved from tracker and thumbnails are also trackers pre-generated thumbs.

And here's the beef of course. Once the UI code is working nice and all, it can be just copied to the device and it'll just work. As a demo, here's vanila n900 (no overclocking) running both the server and qt quick application without any noticeable lag. Of course the devices thumsbs suck, as they don't have an aspect-ratio retained version available.

Web server also works as a very nice access control layer between a runtime that can be now very sandboxed. Not that I care.

NuvoFre 1.0.8

2010-06-13T12:03:00.001-07:00

A quick peek at the next nuvofre is out in case you want to try it out.

I'll fix an issue in calendar coloring before I will put the next version of theme maker out.

Theme is using the nice bundled tahoma font, icons are oxygen icons from kde (kudos guys), transitions have been tuned to feel more flowy.

Download: NuvoFre_1.08

As said, grave issues with calendar, otherwise it should rock.

A few shots:

Harmattan + Meego Here I come

2010-05-05T09:33:00.000-07:00

I have moved now away from Fremantle to Harmattan and Meego. This doesn't mean that the maintenance is stopping for Fremantle in any way, just that the coordination effort on OS & MW has lessened and my presence is not needed so much anymore.

I would like to take just a sec also to address the comments about the leaked firmware. It is indeed not the final Pr1.2 firmware, and there are reasons for it. So, if you find severe issues in it, don't be surprised. If it only had minor issues, it would have been published already. We are often finding still some new major issues in the stabilization phase. It's normal for big projects.

So, what am I doing now then? I am looking after the Harmattan Maemo API to make sure we have a solid 3rd party API and there is a clear continuation path for everything that would change for Meego. At the same time I'm working as a catalyst for the Harmattan software program. This catalyst role is naturally a bit vague and I'm often afraid whether I'm doing more harm than good after being so long time away from Harmattan development, but it looks like I'm able to pick issues every day that do push us a clear step closer to the target. Let's see how long this continues. But what I really focus all the time is the Maemo API.

What does the Maemo API work mean in practice? It's about defining together with the architects the Application development APIs and the platform APIs. The distiction between these two is that every single API of the former should stay the same in Meego and maintain API and ABI compatibility. For the latter, we yield that they are needed for development of many applications but we deem those may be subject to change for various reasons (be that that we know a better one is around the corner, the API is unstable or even that we just happen to be uncertain what will happen to the API in the future), and thus if you use those APIs on your app, they might need tuneups before they work on the Meego handheld platform.

In addition to only the pick and mix work of selecting the APIs, I'm also actively trying to look for issues we might have in the APIs that restrict certain types of development. It's a common case that we have been looking solely for our own needs (or Intels) on many cases, but we have forgotten that small detail that would mean the world for some 3rd party developers. I would be naive to think that I can somehow find all the issues and get them miraculously fixed. Indeed not, but I have some talented help and I'm sure every improvement is a step to a better direction.

I'm not exactly certain if I can discuss about the inititives that I have started or the issues I have found, so I'll leave discussion on those until I have chatted with Quim Gil about it. In the meanwhile, please do contact me if you find issues in the APIs that has been published in the SDKs or in the open repos like gitorious for Harmattan Maemo API.

Oh, why is it Maemo API and not Meego? Well, we are still using the low part of the stack from maemo and haven't merged to meego lower levels, we use still different packaging system, and tons of other reasons that have been voiced out probably many times before.

Retrospective on 101

2010-01-11T11:30:00.001-08:00

The first maintenance release is out. What you can see as the biggest news items is that application manager looks quite a bit different, and Ovi store is out. These two things go hand in hand. The work on application manager is on improving the user experience for installing applications from Ovi store. In addition to that, it's on improving the user experience of installing content from the community and nokia applications catalogues. Application manager is now fast enough to use - if only maemo.org would be updated soon, then so would the community catalogues.

Ovi store content is not visible in the application manager installable applications. This is intentional, as we want the official Ovi store front-end to be the only place to browse for the great applications, backgrounds, ringtones and wallpapers. For this reason, the red pill mode was removed as well.

Here's a look at the application manager categories list (In finnish - it's time you all learned it ;) )
.
Great work from Vilja on the icons. Kudos! And for Gabriel for turning it to reality.

What you don't see immediately on the outside, is the work on preparation for the next big update. We have been working hard in making sure the OS update really works cleanly over the air and that it can be done with as little free space avaiable as possible. The end result is something to be proud of. I would like to thank especially Lokesh, Victor, Mario and David for the hard work, long days and tiresome weekends that resulted in the flawless update experience you guys are about to embark on. Without these guys raising to occasion when the going got tough, we would probably be pretty shaky about how the big updates will work. Now I'm content it will work great for all of you out there.

So, this is the step 1 only, you should be able to enjoy it and the Ovi store applications while waiting for the big update coming your way soon.

Hildon icon cache has been removed and update-icon-cache is now a no-op. Reason is that it was consuming vast amounts of space on rootfs and it was too slow to use on opt. Dropping has no human detectable differences in anything, so I'm sure it won't be missed by anyone. Computer measurable startup difference was within some percents give or take for most of the apps, but media player is 30 % faster without the cache, while maps is about 20% slower. Anyway, a good trade off.

Another thing that was removed is the red pill mode, as we didn't see any particular need for it anymore.

A word of warning: The next big update will require 45 megs of free space on the rootfs. This is pretty difficult for an end user to understand, so I'm calling all you developers who might have wasted end users rootfs space: please do what you can to optfy end users devices for every byte you can spare.

Read more detailed comments on the application manager work from here:
http://blogs.igalia.com/vjaquez/2009/12/14/shinning-new-ham/

Enhanced Calculator demo code

2010-01-03T11:58:00.000-08:00

This is just a quick blog reply to requests to show the code of the Calculator of my previous blog post. I would gladly share the source in a nice zip as well, but maemo.org wiki doesn't allow zip uploads (DOH!), so you'll have to accept badly commented wiki page.

Here be the WIKI.

QML Hello World (or calculate world)

2009-12-29T11:55:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts about QML

QML reminds me a lot of Adobe Flex on Flash - my personal favourite tool for creating anything. Only difference is that QML is more suited for application development, as it allows full access to all system components - and is easily extensible with pretty much any normal qt components.

Read more on the snapshot:
http://qt.nokia.com/doc/qml-snapshot/
and from Kenneths excellent blog on the subject:
http://kenneth.christiansen.googlepages.com/DUI.html

Anyway, intro aside, I have also started doing a bit of coding now on QML and I really love it. It has nice separation of the declarative part (QML) and the logic part (either qt components or javascript). You can easily embed javascript to the qml code, but the clever guys at qt labs have made sure that you can only have tiny snipplets there. A welcome separation.

What has also been fun is that I have done ALL the coding on the pygtkeditor, so no coding on the mac, and all the coding on n900. Well, I did work on some button gfx a bit on mac, but that's it. Painting is not coding ;)

Anyway, take a look at the result of less than 400 lines of code. And the code is clean, sweet and easy to extend. Check out those transitions! They are 10 lines of code for the advanced, and about the same to get the fancy glow effect done to the buttons.

What I am really eagerly waiting for is a chance to see a proper flash-like editor for qml.

Theme Maker 1.2.5 out - Fremantle Beta

2009-12-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

Now theme maker is on the Beta level. You can actually consider creating themes with this one and give those to your friends and not only to your enemies.

What really was improved:
1. Optification - Theme maker theme deb files are optified so they don't eat any root
2. Icons are also optified
3. Fonts work again (and are stored in user home, which is as good as optification)
4. Theme selection works now without need for device reboot

What is missing:
1. build-deb needs to be added - not a biggie
2. Icons need user to restart the device - it's a bug in the launcher code, that is being fixed by Nokia tam .
3. Application manager new icons are not yet themable - doh! - I cannot release features that haven't officially been released. Damn!
4. Theme based transition tuning is not yet part of theme maker - see above

I guess the bottom line is that I'll be releasing a new version soonish, but you'll at least now know what is going to be in there. I'll probably make a 1.2.6 version that fixes at least the part 3. by having a copy of the icons from the base theme.

Download here: Garage

Have a test with nuvofre in the same location.

I'll upload some shots later on. Carry on!

EDIT: You Must delete your old theme folder for theme maker to be able to optify the content. So extract that zip to a new folder and start there from scratch. Never re-use old theme maker folders.

On gaming on n900 and the newly found lack of arrow keys

2009-11-22T08:12:00.000-08:00

Everybody who has seen the n900 with english/generic keyboard thinks all keyboards will have arrow keys. Well, they don't. And this sucks big time for any gaming applications, as they cannot assume that keyboard has specific direction keys that would actually work. In most of the keyboards, there are only left and right keys. While up and down are behind fn+left/right.

Only thing we can really do to fix this 'great kb layout design' is in my opinion:
Forget that we ever even had the arrow keys and start using the usual WASD combo for the default direction controls. And to balance the AB,XY buttons, we should probably use the I,O,K,L buttons. All of these buttons are the same in all kb layouts that I know. This is a pretty balanced layout, but again, not so easy to discover. Grr.. I hate the kb layout mistake that we made. Sane solution would have been to move the extra letters behind fn key.

Otoh, I have finnish kb on the device, but I have switched to english layout so that I can have a sane d keys on the device. But it feels confusing.

On a whole different note, I just read an interesing articles on DUI, the UI frameworks of Harmattan written by Zchydem:

Part one:
http://zchydem.enume.net/?p=128
Part two:
http://zchydem.enume.net/?p=149

I'm eagerly waiting for part three.

We are also preparing for a small update for the N900 owners to come really soon, which is going to keep me busy next week in preparation of it. Let's see when we can deliver it to you guys. After we have released that, I'll start blogging a bit more on what is up for the end of the year update and what is brewing for the other near future updates.

Theme Maker 1.2.4 released

2009-10-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

A new version of theme maker contains a few more icons, fixes bg issue with media player bg, add new bgs for clock, call-ui and app manager, has better example files, now also PSD files are included, of which an example above, showing the cut layers and the example layers for the backgrounds template.

What else. Linux version now is also able to create debs, but seems to need a bit more mem that the shell script gives, so first build your theme, then close theme maker, reopen it, and the click on make debian button. I'll check if I can sort the memory issues at some point on linux as well.

There is a short suggestion text document included on how windows users can develop until I get the debian creation working on windows again.

Oh, link: Garage downloads section

[Edit] Always rebase your theme template, icon and background files on top of the new ones. I have again changed the resolution of the bg template.

Snes on n900

2009-09-29T09:42:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the great developers of nrnoksnes, we have now snes running on n900 fullscreen. Wiimote supported, as well as tv out.

take a look at the video:

[Edit] I ported wiicontrol on the weekend just to get this awesomness up and running. While it's great that you can play games on the go and to be able to continue later from your couch with wiimote, you can also just bring your wiimote with you and use that to play games. It's just perfect.

And kids, don't pirate games.

Theme Maker for N900

2009-08-29T12:43:00.001-07:00

N900 is now out and we all want to make it even cooler. Even more My device than it already is. To the majority of the world that probably moot point as you don't yet have one, but you will. Soon. And then you want to make it more You. Enter Theme Maker N900.

I have updated Theme Maker (from now on, TM) to fully support N900 Theming. Not only can you convert the buttons, toolbars, all the widgets, but TM themes also convert the fonts, the icons and bacground images.

Wwhat is so different from before. Base theme template is larger than before. It's mostly legacy support stuff and you only really need to touch the right third of the template if you are lazy. In addition you will have two new templates: icons and backgrounds.

Lemme show these to you:

The icon template contains all the apps you have by default in the launcher and also for different mime types, devices and some control panel items. I'll be adding a few more later on. Ideas for good candidates are welcome. The reason these are not Nokia icons is that we need to have a CC basis for the icons so that you can work on top of them. Nokia Icons are of course strictly copyright Nokia, so I just used these beautiful Oxygen icons to set a good example for you.

Backgrounds contains on the top part a full 4 screens wide image (3200x480), so you can easily put an image that pans nicely on the device. Under it there are / will be some bgs for some additional apps.

So, even if you don't have N900 yet, I urge you to download theme maker and the example tempaltes and start hackign for a new theme, because you will surely be able to install it on your beautiful N900 very soon.

Theme Maker comes with two default templates, one for dark themes and another for light themes. This should set up the basis nicely for your new theme.

Link to download:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=36

[Edit: Forgot to mention that theme maker requires bigger java heap on linux than by default. OSX app handles it nicely, just doubleclick to open, but on linux you need to start with -Xmx1024M parameter. I'll add a .sh script to next release to easen the pain of linux users. Windows version will follow soonish. You can edit the theme template anyway already and that's the most important thing. ]

Maemo 5 is out

2009-08-27T04:05:00.000-07:00

It's out!
http://maemo.nokia.com

I'm so proud of what we have achieved in maemo team.

Album Art in Fremantle

2009-04-27T06:49:00.000-07:00

Most of the media players need album art. So, ever application does the handling of the art by themselves (just like getting the metadata). For the metadata, we have tracker to get the metadata - one less headache. For the album art, we have tracker, hildon-thumbnailer and a standard to help alleviate another headache.

Standard? In Fremantle we have finally agreed on a standard on how to store album art and media art in general. This means that applications will be able to share the files, so album art is stored only once, retrieved from the internet if needed and a thumbnail suitable for list views is stored in common way.

We also worked together with Banshee team to make this a standard on linux desktop as well (Kudos to Philip van Hoof for it). You can read the spec in http://live.gnome.org/MediaArtStorageSpec

So, what does this mean in practice?
1. Tracker and hildon-thumbnailer do a lot of work for you in advance
- Tracker gets the embedded album art automatically
- Hildon-thumbnailer makes the thumbnails in advance in freedesktop.org standard
- Heuristic search is used in tracker and hildon-thumbnailer as specified in the media-art spec.
2. You can extend hildon-thumbnailer with content source plugins that download missing covers from the internet.
3. You can handle the album art all by yourself and just save some time if the condition 1. has hit its mark.

The option 2. is of course the preferred way of handling the album art, but heck: this ain't a perfect world, and I'm doing things a bit dirty, so I'll go for route 3. If the condition 2. would apply and an internet download plugin is available, I would change ukmp to depend on that package and thus, the following code would (mostly) not be needed at all.

However, quite a bit of it is useful. First of all: How is the album art filename (to the full version) calculated? I have nice copy paste functions here. Feel free to use them as is under any license.

You will need unicodedata and md5 as non-usual dependencies, so:


import md5
import unicodedata

Then the functions. First we create the album art filename as specified in the standard. The following function handles that conveniently for you. Now, it's up to you on how to use that. You can either just depend on whatever tracker and hildon thumbnailer have created for you (with or without the plugins), or, as ukmp does, which is, that if first checks whether the album art exists, if not, it downloads it from the internet.


coverlocation=homedir+"/.cache/media-art/"

def getCoverArtFileName( album ):
    """Returns the cover art's filename that is formed from the album name."""
    albumString=dropInsideContent(album,"[","]" )
    albumString=dropInsideContent(albumString,"{","}" )
    albumString=dropInsideContent(albumString,"(",")" )    
    albumString=albumString.strip('()_{}[]!@#$^&*+=|\\/"\'?<>~`')
    albumString=albumString.lstrip(' ')
    albumString=albumString.rstrip(' ')
    albumString=dropInsideContent(albumString,"{","}" )
    albumString=albumString.lower()
    albumString=string.replace(albumString,"\t"," ")
    albumString=string.replace(albumString,"  "," ")    
    
    try: 
        albumString=unicodedata.normalize('NFKD',albumString).encode()
        albumString=albumString.encode()
        print albumString
    except:
        try:
            albumString=albumString.encode('latin-1', 'ignore')
            albumString=unicodedata.normalize('NFKD',albumString).encode("ascii")
            albumString=str(albumString)
            print albumString
        except:
            albumString="unknown"
    if len(albumString)==0: albumString=" "
     
    albumMD5=md5.new(albumString).hexdigest()    
    emptyMD5=md5.new(" ").hexdigest()
    albumArt=coverlocation+"album-"+emptyMD5+"-"+albumMD5+".jpeg"
    return albumArt


def dropInsideContent(s, startMarker, endMarker):
    startPos=s.find(startMarker)
    endPos=s.find(endMarker)
    if startPos>0 and endPos>0 and endPos>startPos:
            return s[0:startPos]+s[endPos+1:len(s)]
    return s

Ok, great, now we have the full version. But, as ukmp needs mostly the thumbnail version, we need the filename to the thumbnail itself.


thumbnailLocation=homedir+"/.thumbnails/normal/"
def getCoverArtThumbFileName( album ):
    artFile=getCoverArtFileName(album)
    thumbFile=thumbnailLocation+md5.new(artFile).hexdigest()+".jpeg"
    return thumbFile

If it happens that the thumbnail does not exist (e.g. wasn't created, has been removed or whatnot), you have a few options:
1. you can create the thumbnail yourself (I'll give an example soon for that)
2. you can request hildon-thumbnailer to create it for you

For the first option, you can just call hildon-thumbailer on the dbus:
https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/haf/trunk/hildon-thumbnail/daemon/thumbnailer.xml

I am not using the method myself at the moment, so here is a quick example. The method is not blocking, so proper use would need to also receive the finished signal from h-t with the thumbnailHandle property. Of course, you can also be polling to see when it has been generated. Usually in non congested situation, this is going to be some tenths of a second. If there is congestion, the content is handled lifo fashion in h-t.


import dbus, time
filename="file:///user/home/.images/01.jpg"
bus = dbus.SessionBus()
handle=time.time()
thumbnailproxy = bus.get_object('org.freedesktop.thumbnailer','/org/freedesktop/thumbnailer/Generic')
thumbnailHandle=thumbnailproxy.Queue([filename],["image/jpeg"],dbus.UInt32(handle))

I'm scaling inline in ukmp. I'm using PIL to scale down the image. It's slower than using pygame (or h-t), but looks better, as it has good anti-aliasing. Anyway, it's once in a lifetime happening, so it's ok to take a while. Here we are also using the above created functions (wehey). I'm using freedesktop org standard size: normal, which is 128x128. Be aware that the media player in Fremantle uses 124x124, so I might switch to that resolution as well. The coverlocation will then also switch from '~/.thumbnails/normal' to '~/.thumbnails/cropped'.


import PIL
thumbFile=getCoverArtThumbFileName(album)
fullCoverFileName=getCoverArtFileName(album)
if (os.path.exists(fullCoverFileName)):
    thumbFile=getCoverArtThumbFileName(album)
    fullCoverFileName=getCoverArtFileName(album)
    image = Image.open(fullCoverFileName)
    image = image.resize( THUMBNAIL_SIZE, Image.ANTIALIAS )
    thumbFile=thumbFile
    image.save( thumbFile, "JPEG" )

A little tracking for the people waiting for Fremantle

2009-04-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

I haven't been blogging much about Fremantle yet. But, yesterday there was a question on the maemo developers mailinglist about what files are indexed to the trackers metadata database, so I though to clear out that issue and also to tell a bit about how your app can use tracker.

So, to answer that question first: Tracker tracks the user home and any mounted media that is attached to the device. For the memory cards, it retains a stack of 3 cards in it's database, so, you can change card A to card B, and back to card A and tracker won't need to reindex the content of the cards. And yes, you can be then swithing to B, to A, to B and you won't lose any data. The amount of cards to support is a configuration option, but by default it's set to 3. So, internal card=1, external card1=2 and then you have the one more as exteral card2. For a third external card, the device will need to flush the oldest seen card away from it's indexes.

There was some concern also as to whether applications can put sound effects and pixmaps into the cards and to make sure they won't be indexed. Well, to this, we have two solutions:
1. put the files to a folder that is hidden (so, it has a "." in the beginning of the folder name) - tracker won't index any hidden folders by default
2. Add the folders to trackers blacklist file

I recommend the solution 1 for multiple reasons.
1. it's simple.
2. user doesn't have any reason to see application data anyway, so this way it'll be also hidden in the file manger. Just make sure your app will flush the data on uninstall of your app.

Ok, then a bit on how you can use Tracker.
As you probably have read, I've been on paternity leave, from which, I've taken a bit of time to integrate ukmp to the new Fremantle stack.

So, first thing I did was, I replaced my own indexing code with code to load all music metadata from tracker database. Loading of this data on startup takes almost no time and tracker also does sorting of the data really easily for me. Not that sorting would actually be any issue in python, nice anyway.

On startup, I hear you saying? Why not on demand? Sure, that would be an option, just happens that how ukmp was built, it's easier for me to get all the content on startup and not on demand. Both are fine. I could write a small comment on how to do stuff on demand as well, but let's start with this.

We'll need to use two interfaces: search and metadata

Corresponding dbus introspection files are: search and metadata

You can find the whole dbus introspection from here

Let's start with defining the needed proxy objects:


import dbus
bus = dbus.SessionBus()
searchproxy = bus.get_object('org.freedesktop.Tracker','/org/freedesktop/Tracker/Search')
metadataproxy=bus.get_object('org.freedesktop.Tracker','/org/freedesktop/Tracker/Metadata')

#Ok, let's then get all music files and for those, the artist, album, title and track# sorted by artist

metadata=searchproxy.Query(-1, "Music", ["Audio:Artist","Audio:Album","Audio:Title","Audio:TrackNo"],"", dbus.Array([], signature='s') ,"",False,["Audio:Artist"], False,0, 40000)

#Now that we have the data, we'll just add it to the internal structures

for songItem in metadata:                    
              fileUrl=songItem[0]
              artist=songItem[2]
              album=songItem[3]
              song=songItem[4]
              track=songItem[5]        
              self.appendSong(track, album, artist, song, fileUrl)

Nice and simple. Now we have the data. This saved me about 300 lines of code, plus multiple library dependencies and tons of headache.

Of course, with my approach of loading everything on startup, I need to update the data when the data changes, but for this, tracker provides a really nice signal that looks like this:


signal sender=:1.15 -> dest=(null destination) serial=403 path=/org/freedesktop/Tracker; interface=org.freedesktop.Tracker; member=ServiceStatisticsUpdated
array [
       array [
             string "Files"
             string "2320"
      ]
      array [
            string "Music"
            string "543"
      ]
]

I won't show the implementation on how to keep the data update on this blog post, I'll save it for a future blog post. I'll instead now tell how to keep Tracker up-to-date on usage of the files. All media players on Fremantle should either use MAFW or do the following so that we would all be happy campers no matter which media player user uses.

When you are playing a music file, please notify tracker of the play event. I do so at the end of a track, but your heuristic may vary. Firts we get the current playcount, then we add 1 to it, then we set the new playcount and the curren playtime. We set the time in GMT in UTC format, which is rather easy to get in python.


import time
currentCount=metadataproxy.Get("Music",currentPlayFile, ["Audio:PlayCount"])
newcount=1
if len(currentCount[0])>0: newcount=int(currentCount[0])+1
currentTimeUTC=time.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ", time.gmtime())
metadataproxy.Set("Music",currentPlayFile, ["Audio:PlayCount","Audio:LastPlay"],[str(newcount),currentTimeUTC])

Ah, now we have the data in tracker, we are able to update the playcounts and playtimes so that all music players can benefit from the data. In my next blog post, I'll tell how the album art can be handled in common way across the platform. I'll tell you how you should do it and I'll tell you how I do it now (which might not be the case I will do when the device has been out for a while).

Then I'll make a blog about how to make dynamic lists, e.g. to list most popular tracks, most recently added and the most recently played tracks.

Then, to top this, I'll let you know how the signaling can be used to keep your internal data structures up-to-date, in case you are not using on-demand loading of the data.

edit: fixed typo as noticed by timeless

I'm a daddy!

2009-04-20T06:25:00.000-07:00

Almost exactly a week ago I became a dad of a very sweet little girl. Her hello world message will be coming a bit later on when a name has been bestowed upon her.

I am the happiest man on the planet.

UKMP 1.83 released to repositories

2008-11-27T10:07:00.000-08:00

A week of tuneups and I feel confident putting the portrait ukmp to maemo extras. It's there now available as update to previous users of ukmp.Album art downloading was greatly improved on version 1.82, so 1.83 will remove your existing cover art upon install. 1.83 added the final touches like play/pause button to work properly and some layout tuneups. Shuffle logic is still horrible and I really need to revisit that for the next version.

Other known irritations are that only fisrt 35 songs are visible on each album, so if you have e.g. Rolling Stones top 500 songs as one album, you'll be very dissatisfied with ukmp. I'm trying to bridge the gap between what is now and having 500 songs on an album, but it's not going to work on the next release. Also, everyone should be plesed to notice the exit button on top right corner, with me being the most pleased, because perhaps this will stop emails to me asking how to close ukmp. 1.82 also came with proper support for collection albums. Now the song artist is displayed in the song list view for collection albums. It's simple, yet very rewarding feature.

No more words: Click here to install .

Oh, I'll be posting a new video for the next version. Check out my previous post for the 1.80 release video.

UKMP 1.80 and Zen of music player

2008-11-22T13:34:00.000-08:00

Long time in the making bears fruit. I'm publishing ukmp 1.8 now. It's beta, I have worked today six or seven hours on it, which is probably more I've done to it for a few months. I've been doing some testing, but as you can imagine, it needs a bit more tests before I feel confident putting it to maemo extras repositories and download pages.

However, what is there is something I'm pretty proud of. It's now the music player I always wanted it to be. Very easy to use, very smooth and now that it's in portrait mode, it's finally usable with one hand. Mind you, the optimal hand is left hand.

What is so very nice of this portrait mode is that it works without any support from the X. I made it with the xrandr support initially, but later coded the version that doesn't require the x changes, because I know only a handful of people who have it installed (even though I do love the portrait mode on most of the applications, especially the browser).

Ah, back to ukmp. Well, Here is a camera grab playing on n800. And of course, it's always nice to give you guys a short video as well. I'm really a bit tired, so I only made a one shot presentation. I hope you guys forgive the shaky cam.

If you want to try the latest ukmp, please install first ukmp 1.7 from: Maemo Downloads

and then update it with this link: ukmp 1.83

(or check if later releases already exist: ukmp releases )

Zen of UKMP

UKMP is trying to be a great music player with as little features as possible in the limited space a mobile device has. There is one way to access your music : by album. All music is sorted with one criteria: artist. This way all of albums of one artist are next to each other. Music collections are bundler as artist VA (various artists).

When you open an album, there is again just one sorting criteria: song number (that is, the original sort on the CD),

If you click on a song, it starts playing. Simple.

Sure, shuffle mode needs to be there. Check.
Party mode / queue needs to exists. Check.

What this model gains is that you are at most two clicks away from playing a file. This is quite different from overly generalized music players. I'm not saying there is anything bad about having to do 8 clicks before a song starts playing, It's just not my cup of tea.

There is work to be done for sure. Volume should be more obvious ( + and - buttons on your device), there should be an exit button. Nothing more really comes to my mind now. Please comment your ideas.

An extra one that might need explaining is delete on click. This mode is convenient for e.g. podcasts or for weeding your music out of filler songs. Don't bug me if you delete accidentally something. It is for a reason the only colored (red) widget in the otherwise black and white UI.

[edit] added the maemo.org dl link
[edit] modified link to point to 1.81 version. Will blog about 1.82 probably at some point. Will publish 1.82 to repositories. Please let me know of any bugs in 1.81.
[edit] modified link to 1.83. Please let know of ny 1.83 bugs. Perhaps 1.83 or 1.84 will go to repos.
[comment] ukmp code is pretty bloaded. 3500 loc.

Desktop search hackfest 1st day

2008-09-21T05:51:00.000-07:00

First proper day of desktop search hackfest behind. We had good progress on the most important areas already and we are making now similar progress on the second day. The biggest one was that we agreed on the ontology changes that have been raised with variable solution candidates now for a year. The solution is clean and simple. It is future oriented by allowing proper object relations in the ontology, but still retaining the possibility to be efficient on the cases where you are only interested in a lablel-like property of the relationship rather than the actual object in the relation.

Check out mikkels post on the subject

Today we have also been able to extend the query api to reflect this ontological change. We also agreed to add proper support of nested queries that truly makes the search api powerful. Biggest issues remaining currently are in the area of live queries. Here is a very good example of a real world ;) use case. By the way, using Gobby (gnome application) makes document collaboration astonishingly easy.


<!--
Maybe we could try to draft a spec as well? Maybe just some notes?
Because it's still not really clear what everyone up to because everyone is up to slightly different things.
-->

<!--
  Match all documents with keyword "biology" which author comes from the
  same country as any person with name Jim.
-->
<query content="xesam:Document" hitFields="xesam:title, xesam:author/xesam:givenName">

  <and>
    
    <equals>
      <field name="xesam:keyword"/>
      <string>biology</string>
    </equals>
    
    <equals>
      <field name="xesam:author/xesam:country"/>
      <field name="xesam:author/xesam:birthdate"/>
      <query content="xesam:Person" hitFields="xesam:country, xesam:birthdate">
        <and>
          <equals>
            <field name="xesam:givenName"/>
            <string>Kim</string>
          </equals>
          <equals>
            <field name="xesam:gender"/>
            <string>male</string>
          </equals>
          <greaterThan>
            <field name="xesam:birthdate"/>
            <date>1979-12-24</date>
          </greaterThan>
        </and>
      </query>
    </equals>
  
  </and>

</query>

Cairoclock out

2008-09-16T13:06:00.000-07:00

Khertan was kind enough to package the cairoclock and put it to extras repository. Now we can all easily install the magnificent clock on diablo/chinook.

What makes it so great? Well, it's much better looking than the default clock. You can resize it as you see fit. It's simplistic and looks good.

Take a look at the screenshots below.

Also, what is truly great on that is that it's a python applet and has a very nice and clean code to serve as an example to anyone interested in making cairo based applets for the device. I do encourage giving it a go. You'll get good control over the content and cairo seems to be drawing quite fast even on larger surfaces.

As some sort of future update, the clock could be setup to have option to not to include the seconds.

Link to install is at maemo.org downloads

Theme Maker 1.1.7 now with support for icons

2008-09-08T12:20:00.000-07:00

Theme maker now includes support for icons. Sure, it used to have the support earlier on as well, but now the support is proper and the icons are actually made into an icon gtk theme and the theme is then referred in the actual theme as the themes icon theme.

Confusing? Well the good thing is that no-one needs to care. Just open theme maker, set your theme name (no spaces), set your name, select bg file, select template file, select icon file, set theme version, top bar height (I recommend 60 - remind myself to put that as default, now it's 45), then set font sizes, font names, add a .ttf font if you want to install new font to the system. Click on the build theme and again on build theme on the next page and POW! You are done. Your own theme with your own font and your own icons. Currently only the home screens four icons are supported, I'll add the rest on later versions. Anyway, you still need to make the theme look your own, but to do that, all you need is photoshop (or any other similar tool) and a little patience. I've myself been especially using the fonts to get some sweet new fonts for my fbreader sessions.

Link to download: Download at garage

As you can see, I forgot to change the version number on the theme maker view. Will be fixed for 1.1.8. ;)

Please note that the icon template seems to be mandatory in this version. Looks like 1.1.8 is coming sooner than I thought! ;)

Tracker and vala goodness

2008-09-01T09:58:00.000-07:00

I was just today looking at some examples of tracker use and stumbled on hum-gtk - a gtk music player that combines three very-close-at-heart projects together: gstreamer, vala and tracker. It's a simple app, the picture speaks louder than any description:

But the true greatness comes when you look at the source code of it. I dare you - do take a look at it:

http://hum-gtk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

You can see that you can make a decent music player (yeah, it's the 0.1 stage, so no-one is expecting a miracle) with just tiny amount of code.

Oh, by the way, I've published a new version of theme maker that has lot's of good fixes and font support and I'm now working on including icon support to the diablo.

https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=36
[edit] The screenshot is from the 0.1 version that was written on c. The code is still very neat, but not just vala. http://hum-gtk.googlecode.com/svn/branches/0.1/src/

Wiicontrol for nokia n810 / n800

2008-05-04T04:20:00.000-07:00

Let me start by telling you that wiicontrol is just marvelous piece of software. I allows you to pair your wiimote with your tablet. Result: Perfect controller for games and really nice controller for media applications.

So, emulators are now usable, doom / quake: check! pengupop / bomberman. Yeah baby! I cannot take credit of the wiicontrol, as it's really a project JL Diaz started, I just pimped it a bit. It's based on wiimote by Will Woods. GPL2+ for wiimote and gpl3+ for the wiicontrol.

Hey, please take a look at this video to see how very simple it is to use. If you toggle the gyro, it will currently produce wasd events when the you rotate your wiimote. Nice for e.g. strafing in quake/doom. Anyway, this is the first version and I'm sure me and JL will be bringing some cool configuration options and perhaps even mouse cursor support in the near future.

EDIT:
Link to install it is in here:
Wiicontrol 1.04

Theme Maker 1.1.3 out

2008-03-24T09:36:00.000-07:00

I took a bit time off to polish the Theme Maker. The latest version, 1.1.3 now supports also background images. Background images will appear in the image list of the the 'select background image' dialog.

So, what is the Theme Maker anyway?

It's an easy to use tool for creating themes for the Maemo devices like N800 and N810. All you need is a image editor program like gimp of photoshop and a little patience. It works on OSX, Windows (all versions) and Linux. You'll need java from Sun to run it.

Basically, it's all about editing one single image file like this (this is a small part of a theme template only):

and then setting the theme details in Theme Maker like this:

And Clicking build in theme maker. It will produce a nice installable .deb file of your theme. Just copy that to your device (or publish it ... whatnot) and install it as normal. Now just set your theme on your device and it will transform to something like this (well, for NuvoPearl it looks like this):

And, as stated in the first paragraph of this blog, now themes also include the backgrounds so that your theme is more complete. Icons are still not changeable, but let's see what I can do about them in the future...

If you have a bit of artist in you, please try out the theme maker (install java if needed):
ThemeMaker1.1.3.zip

And if you liked NuvoPearl theme pictured above, you can install the latest version from here:
NuvoPearl

Sneak peak to ukmp 1.8

2008-03-18T15:16:00.001-07:00

A quick taster of how splendid the latest ukmp looks. Of course, an image is not enough to show how nice UI candy it contains, but it's a taster. As you can see (and deduce the rest), vanilla SDL and python are able to do some pretty nice stuff. Oh, even though there is the reflection, fps is still nice and above the blitting limit of the device.

Theme Maker

2008-02-25T10:40:00.001-08:00

I completely forgot to talk about theme maker in my last post. Yes, I finally gave into the dark side. I moved to use Nokia official template for theme maker. This is good and bad. Bad in that if you had made something on the old theme maker, you'll have to port it to the new template. Good in the sense that you'll get all the features in exactly the manner god of this device intended (nokia).

Above, you can see the first test theme that I made with the new theme maker. It's there to also test out how 'light' themes look. As you've noticed, pretty much all the current themes are very dark. So, to balance the 'turn to the dark side', here is the latest (1.2) iteration of the nuvo theme.

So, many people probably don't know what theme maker is. It's an java application for windows/osx/linux that makes a theme out of an png file. So, you open the png in gimp or photoshop, edit it out, open theme maker, specify the theme name, font size and click on make theme. Wait a minute or so and you have a .deb file of your newly created theme. Current version doesn't set the bg, but you can't have it all on day one.

If you are interested in Nuvo, dl it from here:
NuvoPearl 1.2

and for theme maker:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/3418/ThemeMaker1.1.2.zip

When you have new themes, please put them to the maemo.org/downloads for all the world to use!

Just to show the nuvopearl a bit more, here's a screenshot of file manager. Smaller font makes it much nicer looking as well. (and usable)

USBControl and Theme Maker

2008-02-21T10:25:00.001-08:00

Just a quick short blog post

As requested, I packed in the weekend USBControl as a seprate package. I also upgraded it so that it works even after a reboot. LOL. the previous one actually only worked until you rebooted the device and lost the access to edit your USB mode after that. LOL indeed. I didn't realize that, as I really don't reboot my device too often. Kudos to nokia for the stable device.

Anyway, the new package runs as sudo, so it's able to edit the file even later on. (security people can now cry iik!).

You can install it from here (yo need to have python installed before though):
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/3443/usbcontrol-1.0_all.deb

I'll put it to repos in a few days time, but before that, try it out and let me know how you like (or dislike) it.

Current version also tells the status of the usb as well as the devices attached to your tablet.

USB OTG the easy way

2008-01-31T10:55:00.000-08:00

Some people have been writing about the USB OTG use with need to hack the cable by soldering a few wires together. Even Ars technica went the hard way of soldering a cable. This is not the way to do it my friends. On a computer-like device, the way is to 'solder software', not hardware. I found the instructions on software solution from muru and then thought:"This is still just too hard". So, what to do? Make it easy, of course.

Enter USBControl

I thought that this is worth a full hour of my time. So, today I put together a new application that you can use to switch the device (N800 or N810) between USB Host and USB OTG modes. All you need, is an USB Female-Female adaptor like this:
http://www.amazon.com/USB-Type-Female-Coupler-Adapter/dp/B000I97N0S

So, remember, that is USB A female to female adaptor. Costs pennies. Well, almost.

After you have the USB adaptor, just install ukmp from here: Garage

That version is beta. You may need to install ukmp first from here: maemo.org

ukmp is my media player, but it now comes bundled with uktube (youtube downloader) and USBControl.

Finally, open USBController from your extras menu. Click on HOST. Attach USB cable and e.g keyboard to the other end and.... There you go. Nothing else needed. Open notes, xterm, whatnot and start typing. Or, remove the kb and attach a memory stick. For me, even wireless keyboards work just fine without any powered hub. Same for one memory stick, but another memory stick needed more juice than the device had.

If your peripheral needs more juice, just put a powered hub in between. Simple, huh?

UKMP for N810 and N800 now in the repositories

2007-11-19T14:05:00.000-08:00

I was up quite long on friday. Yeah, I know what you must be thinking: partying. Nope, I wish. I was duking it out with ukmp and maemo extras. I finally gave the decisive blow at around 4 AM. I got the ukmp uploaded to the extras repositories for bora and chinook!

I decided on friday that I won't rest until it's there. With hindsight it was a bad decision, as I was pretty wasted the whole saturday. Did manage to go partying then though. However, I'm very pleased that the update support structure is there now and that the new n810 owners will also be able to ge the new UKMP.

So, what is new with the 1.70 release compared to 1.6 series? Layout has been changed a bit, covers are bigger, reflection is done on the fly. Things just look a bit better. Also, the kinetic scrolling has been tweaked quite a lot and the progress bar (although a bit buggy) allows you to skip to correct place. I actually also had really wicked ligting effect at the place where your finger touches the screen for a while. As it was mainly eye candy, I dropped it for a while. It may be making a come-back soon, as it was really neat looking effect. I just want to add a bit more 'fun' to it.

Next up will be a few minor update releases that address the bugs and startup speed issues. And now that ukmp is in the extras repository, updating will be an easy operation for you - the users.

For developers interested in helping out, I've been switching to 'proper' practices and the svn is now up-to date all the time.

So, os2007 users can find ukmp from:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2007/ukmp/

and os2008 users can find it from:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/ukmp/

Simple, eh ;)

Urho Konttori has Started working for Nokia (update - UKMP concept image included!)

2007-09-07T23:30:00.000-07:00

Probably some of the people have been wondering how come I've been laying so low for the past two weeks. This is due to the fact that I began working at Nokia on monday. I've very excited about it and people at Nokia have been really great. I am sure I can contribute even more to the device now that I'm part of the process as an insider.

Will I stop developing for the community? Nope.

Out of context, I just read GeekPenguins blog about the media centers for the internet tablets.

It's a quick comparison of Canola, Kagu and UKMP.
http://geekpenguin.blogspot.com/2007/09/onboard-media-your-way.html

EDIT:
Quick photo of UKMP 1.7 concept here as well to show on the planet maemo page:

I'll try to do some development this weekend on ukmp. At least I'll try to fix some bugs and if possible there will be bigger changes as well. I have such a great plan on how the interface should behave. The basic idea is this:
In the cover list view, I'll move to a bit more cover flow (iphone) like mode of scrolling from left to right. Covers themselves will be bigger (160x160). Covers will be in two rows. 160X5=800, so you will be able to see 10 albums on screen at a time. This is less than the current of 12, but I think it's worth the hassle.

I'll move the progress bar to be displayed on the top part of the screen all the time, along with easily pressable buttons for previous, next, play, pause. Also, this will mean that the 'currently playing' view won't probably be needed anymore in the future.

As you can see from the list of changes that they are not minor. It will take me probably 12-20 hours to do. What this means in calendar time will depend on how much I want to finish GTA San Andreas. ;)

Anyway, I'll now start making the sketches and bug fixes. There will be a bug fix release hopefully today. If it happens, I'll blog about it.

EDIT:
Took just a bit over an hour to make the 'proof of concept' image of the new cover interface. You know, I really love to work towards something specific. A plan has to be in place before any coding should start. And everyone (in this case: me) has to have a common view on what to aim for. In most of the cases, an image tells the best story. Worth more than thousand words? Definately!

Anyway, this is a concept sketch and once I add the party mode toggles and whatnot, it'll change a bit, but this is what I'm aiming for. If you have comments on the positioning and stuff, please let me know asap!

Oh, and I'll add the artist names in pretty much the same manner as in the previous versions. The lower row will have the name in the reflection and the row above will have the artist name above the cover. This should be good way to not to confuse the user.

EDIT: Alternative interface where buttons are positioned at the bottom. Also, note that the scrolling will be from left to right, not from top to bottom.

Edit 3:
Added exit button, lamp for keep screen lit - mode and repositioned things a bit. It's becoming a bit cluttered already. I'll have to think about the icon positioning a bit more. Anyway, I'll next move to implementing the new cover artwork behavior and then proceed to sideway scrolling and finally focus again on the buttons. Anyway, until then, keep comments coming. It'll probably be the latter part of next week until I have anything solid to test. Could be even longer.

uktube bugfix version released

2007-08-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

Thanks to guys at internettablettalk, I noticed that youtube had changed the way video files are referred on the page source code. Thus, uktube stopped working until this problem had been fixed. I was just able to fix and test it a few minutes ago and I wanted to let you all know that the problem has been fixed and there is a new version for you to download.

So, once again, thanks for letting me know of the uktube bug. UKMP 1.62 only fixes uktube bug in downloading youtube videos. So, don't expect any fixes related to ogg files.

It seems that ogg installation at the moment is missing ogg demux for some users. I'll try to get oggs working again in ukmp for the 1.63 release some time next week

EDIT: LINK FIXED

Download here:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/ukmp/

UKMP 1.6 is out

2007-08-16T05:54:00.000-07:00

I've finally come back from the summer vacation and I've had the time to look into UKMP again for a while.

Well, many new thing have happened since the last version.

1. Exit button
2. Maemoscrobbler integration (scrobbles to last fm)
3. Automatic thumbnail images from video files
4. Currently playing -screen
5. Progress bar
6. Touch to seek functionality in the progress bar
7. Full M4A support, including cover image from the m4a files
8. Larger video thumbnails

Here are two screenshots to illustrate a bit:

All right, a bit deeper explanation on each one.
1. Exit button.

Just click to exit. You can also press back-button and keep it pressed for about two secs to exit.

2. Maemoscrobbler integration

Maemoscrobbler is an excellet program made by disq. Install maemo scrobbler, insert your login details to last fm in the control panel application and from that on, whenever you have net connection, ukmp will scrobble your music to your last-fm account.

3. Automatic thumbnail images from video files

UKMP uses mplayer to retrieve the thumb images from the video files that you have on your device. It will take the first frame and use that. If you have an idea on how to get an image from seeking 30 secs into the video, let me know.

On the down side, this feature needs the latest version of mplayer, so please update your mplayer. It's great to do that anyway, as the latest mplayer version is at least 30 % faster than previous one. Well, that's my subjective impression anyway.

4. Currently playing screen

This is the first iteration of the screen. The most important thing about is the progress bar. I will also add a bookmark feature to this screen in the future.

REMEMBER that you can use back-button to switch between the views at all times.

5. Progress bar
A pretty cool looking progress bar that shows the time played, song length and your position on the bar.

6. Touch to seek functionality in the progress bar
You can just click on any place in the bar to seek to that location. Pretty basic stuff, but worth mentioning IMHO. So many people listen to long songs / audio books.

7. Full m4a support
If you have converted most of your music to m4a format, then you'll really like this one. Pasi Keränen has done a wonderful job of integrating m4a support to ukmp. It is even able to read the images from the audio files. However, if you happen to have such files, bear in mind that saving and converting them will take quite long time, so your first startup might be a long one. Thumbnails will be saved as smaller images so it won't take THAT long in the future.

However, this also means that you have to have Pythin imaging library installed. Which sadly only comes in the latest python version. So, that's a requirement now as well.

8. Larger video thumbnails

I noticed that the thumbnails were a bit too small still, so I modified the thumbnails to be a bit larger (from 125 pixels wide to 143 pixels wide)

Summa summarum:
A great update, but you'll have to update to latest python version. If you have python 2.4, you need to unistall it first. To do that, you have to uninstall all python applications and then uninstall python 2.4. Sucks. Yeah. I know. I hope you all have python 2.5. If you have python 2.5. Just go to application manager to update.

The light theme is not quite ready yet, so I didn't include the desktop file to it. You can test it out from xterm with command:
ukmp altskin

You can download the latest version of UKMP and UKTUBE from here:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/ukmp

and remember that you need to have python and mplayer installed. If you don't have them, install them first from here:
Python
mplayer

I will be in Iceland from Friday to Wednesday, so I won't be able to respond to questions during that time.

EDIT:
If you need ogg support, you can install ogg to your device from here:
http://ogg.garage.maemo.org/ogg-support.install

I've also updated the ukmp to 1.61 after fixing some bugs.

Seems like it's semi stable now. So, have a great weekend!

UKMP 1.51 combined with updated UKTUBE

2007-08-03T06:49:00.000-07:00

UKMP 1.50 release was a bit hasty one and I missed a few real annoyances. Well, 1.51 version is a bug fix version and should fix the most critical bugs.

1. Clicking in the album works ACTUALLY selects the album you clicked on and not the one above or below it. (Yeah, how did I miss that? I have no idea)
2. If you have less that 16 albums, song list allows you to scroll (It actually didn't allow you to scroll in 1.50)
3. 1.51 consumes almost 0 processor time when idling. Previous version only went to energy saving when it was doing something and went to full 100% power use when it was idle. Just a small mistake of using == instead of != in one place... An example of why not code after midnight.
4. Because of the number three, smooth scrolling is smoother, as it's not in processor saving mode when it's scrolling ;)
5. Press and hold back button to close the app works.

All right. So, it's in a usable state now. I've been using 1.51 for a few days now for listening hours and hours of music and it seems stable and a joy to use. Next version will have exit button and optimized startup time.

UKTUBE has also been updated to support logging into youtube account as well as it tells you if a download fails instead of crashing. Most of the time if a download fails, it's because there is a age check in youtube. Just insert your login credentials to uktube to le uktube to login and tell youtube that your are not underaged.

Next uktube version will store the credentials and I will probably clean up the interface a bit.

You can download the latest version of UKMP and UKTUBE from here:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/ukmp

and remember that you need to have python and mplayer installed. If you don't have them, install them first from here:
Python
mplayer

UKMP 1.5 is out and it's looking sweet

2007-07-24T03:00:00.001-07:00

Big thanks to Roope Rainisto from Nokia for helping out tune up the interface. The song list now sports thumb interface for selecting songs. Looks better too, have a look at it yourselves:

Another big thing that's been asked for is kinetic scrolling. After trying it out for a while, I am very impressed by it. Yeah, I know, here is another developer again boasting his ego, but I am not applauding myself for that. Kinetic scrolling is really sall thing to add technically once you have smooth scrolling anyway. But the thing I've been thinking about now is that Nokia should implement that same thing to the web browser. It would be so much better to use that to scroll around the page. Let's say you've read the article through. Wan't to go up to the beginning of the page? No probs, just flick the finger quickly and it will scroll to the top in a split sec. Want to scroll in a controllable fashion, scroll with your finger and stop it before raising it from the device surface.

One more thing I have forgotten to write about is that this version also supports wma files and might also support aac files as well as some bug fixes related to continuous playback.

You can download the latest version of UKMP and UKTUBE from here:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/ukmp

and remember that you need to have python and mplayer installed. If you don't have them, install them first from here:
Python
mplayer

As always, you can check out the new features from the video below:

UKTUBE 0.6 out, UKMP 1.4 out (in beta)

2007-07-05T04:42:00.000-07:00

UKTUBE 0.6

Uktube 0.6 adds support for streaming of videos. You no longer have to wait for the video to finish downloading, as UKTUBE will just buffer the first one megabyte and then start playing.

I also added delete, which deletes the file, takes it out of the dropdown and selects the next video.

UKMP 1.4

UKMP 1.4 has major feature of supporting video. Now, basically that means that it also needs mplayer. As UKMP and UKTUBE are bundled together you would need mplayer for uktube anyway, so I don't see that as too much of a problem. What makes this really beta quality is that ukmp cannot make thumbnails of the videos by itself. It relies on UKTUBE to make thumbnails for the videos it downloads. If Serge (ssvb) can compile mplayer with support for -vo jpeg, I can add the thumbnails automatically on start.

Have a look at the video to see how watching videos works on UKMP at the moment.

About the release:
I managed to squeeze out the major bugs from UKMP 1.4 and UKTUBE 0.6. I'm about to leave for a week long vacation, so I felt that even though I would have wanted to give both of the apps some more polish, I just didn't have the time to do it. In any case, I'm relatively happy on how the new features turned out.

1.5 of UKMP will focus on improving the UI to look better. Thanks Roope Rainisto for a very good suggestion on the songlist part. I will implement that to the 1.5 version.

You can download the latest version of UKMP and UKTUBE from here:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/ukmp

and remember that you need to have python and mplayer installed. If you don't have them, install them first from here:
Python
mplayer

UKTUBE 0.5 out

2007-06-28T05:04:00.000-07:00

UKTUBE 0.5 is a nice small step for internet tablet users. Have a look at it:

Ok, since 0.3, there have been many great features.

Supports dailymotion videos
Allows you to play downloaded videos (there is a dropdown for those)
It's much faster in downloading
Paste link (now, that's hot) - you copy the URL in browser and then just press that button.
Allows you to also just download (if you don't need to watch it immediately)
Videos are automatically added to the list
If you download a video, after you've downloaded it or watched it, just press show in widescreen / normal to replay it. No need to select the same movie from dropdown.

So, there are two ways to copy the URL from youtube and dailymotion. The traditional is to navigate to the page where the video is located and click on the address bar and then select copy, like in the image below.

The second option is to hold your finger / pen over the link to the movie and keep it pressed for two seconds or so. Then a menu appear from which you can select copy link location, like in the image below.

Then you just open UKTUBE and click on the paste button.

URL address will appear in the text field and by clicking either of the show buttons, the video will be downloaded and displayed immediately after download is complete. If you press only download, it won't play the video.

UKTUBE works in 770 and N800.

Download UKTUBE 0.5 from here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/1677/UKMP-1.3-uktube0.5.deb
and remember that you need to have python and mplayer installed. If you don't have them, install them first from here:
Python
mplayer

UKTUBE 0.3 out

2007-06-26T05:17:00.001-07:00

0.3 version of uktube out. I think this is what Ari Jaaksi meant by Release early, release often. Ok, perhaps not this early and not this often, but I thought you guys might enjoy the latest additions even though it means you have to download new versions this often.

So, 0.3 brings possibility to open file in 16:9 mode, which crops the video to use the entire N800 screen width. This is especially suitable for those videos with black borders. So, if you want to view the video in 4:3 mode, click on the 4:3 button and if you want it to be seen in 16:9 mode, click the 16:9 button. Simple!

Also, you can opt to not to save the file. It will make a temporary file though and next time you save something, it will be overwritten. Also, as a nice new feature, the application stall less. Maybe that's more of a bugfix and less of a feature.

I had a test and it seems that playing partially buffered video is completely doable, so that might be interesting to do next.

Download from here:
garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/1667/UKMP-1.3-uktube0.3.deb
and remember that you need to have python and mplayer installed. If you don't have them, install them first from here:
Python
mplayer

UKTUBE 0.2 out

2007-06-25T03:01:00.000-07:00

I just released a bug fix version of uktube.

You can download it from:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/1664/UKMP-1.3-uktube0.2.deb

It handles youtube clips better than before (seems to download all clips while the previous version had problems with some of the clips).

Files are now stored with the video title instead of the youtube id. This makes it much easier to access the archived files in mplayer.

nl.youtube.com and others are now converted to use www.youtube.com address. Thus, you don't have to manyally change the url.

Video playback is now smoother than before and it uses the default mplayer config (you can seek, access mplyer menus and stuff like that).

Files are now stored in mmc1/Videos or mmc2/Videos.

UI stalls just a little less than before ;) - still, don't press the download button twice!

If someone knows hot to (or if) make mplayer crop the playback video, I could add the option of playing clips in 16:9 mode as well. Now all videos are played in 4:3 mode.

So, to wrap the install instructions, you need to install python and mplayer for uktube to work. Here are the installer links:
Python (as ever)
mplayer

And again, the updated uktube:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/1664/UKMP-1.3-uktube0.2.deb

Here is the initial uktube release video in case you missed in the last time.

UKTUBE - smooth playback of youtube files

2007-06-21T01:30:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a few Nokia guys some time ago and they asked what was the single thing I would change for the tablet immediately. I said: make a proper D-pad (direction pad). Get one from the n-gage team. They said, yeah, but software wise. I thought for a while and said: calendaring / PIM. Almost every review complains about that.

But now, after a few weeks from that, I've been thinking again. Nope, the answer is playable youtube. Make the device web 2.0 compliant. It has to be able to play youtube movies smooth as silk. That's just the way it goes these days. Jittery playback is not an option.

So, yesterday I though - well, if no-one has made that app so far, no-one probably will. That is, unless I do it. So, I scanned the net a bit for youtube info, got some scripts to start the project and had a working application that plays smoothly youtube clips in fullscreen.

Then I went to bed.

Now, I put two hours more and the user interface is adequate for end user use and I've packaged the program as part of ukmp 1.3. Why part of? I didn't have the time to make a separate package. It's holiday time, midsummers fest is about to begin.

All right, so what do you need?
Python (as ever)
mplayer
ukmp-1.3-uktube

So, how does the app work?

Go to a youtube page.
Copy the url of the page.
Open uktube

paste the url to a field.

Press Play clip (only once, even if the app may seem to stall).
In a short while, it'll tell you the download size and progress. Once download is complete, it'll use mplayer to play the clip.

Files are stored on MMC1 in the root, so you need to have the front panel SD /MMC inserted.
On the very bright side, the files can be player later on as well from mplayer.

UPDATE:
I just added a youtube video that demonstrates how it functions. Have a look at it.

EDIT: ALSO WORKS ON 770!

UKMP 1.3

2007-06-20T03:09:00.000-07:00

Another wednesday, another release of UKMP.

Major features in this release are: faster startup and delete song functionality. 1.3 uses a database file that is stored in covers directory. Basically what it contains is the id3 data of mp3 songs on your system. By using this file, ukmp doesn't have to scan all your mp3 files on startup. It'll just check which files you have on your system, then retrieve them from db or from id tags if it doesn't have them on the db. On my music library of around 400 songs, this dropped mmc scanning from 21 secs to around 3 secs. Nice improvement, huh?

Delete song is just that, delete. You enable it by pressing the mode toggle. First switch is party mode, second is delete songs mode. Once you are in delete song mode, just click on a song in the song list and it'll delete it.

This version fixes a few bugs from previous versions, most notably the cover.jpg bug.

Download from here:
http://downloads.maemo.org/product/ukmp/

as always, you need to have python installed. Install python from here:
Pymaemo

As always, here is a video that demonstrates the new functionality (also shows the light theme).

UKMP 1.2

2007-06-13T12:57:00.000-07:00

It's Wednesday and as promised, I'm launching UKMP 1.2.

The major reason why you should upgrade to this version is party mode.
WTF.
Party mode is basically a queue of the songs you want to be played next.

Let me demostrate to you.

Install 1.2
Open UKMP.
Click on any album of yours.
Looks a bit like this:

At least if you chose Norah Joneses new album (very good - highly recommended).
Ok, what's new in this picture. You see on the right a button: Continuous mode. Click on that and it will switch to party mode. Now, click on a few songs and after each click the song you clicked will get a play order number at the end of the song name. Like this:

Also, the button will tell you that the queue size is at the moment 8. All right, I also chose songs from another album in the mix. Yes, you can switch back to cover list, click on another album, choose songs from there, add them to the mix and in a few minutes you have DJd yourself a sweet mix of music and you are ready to transform and roll out ( - if you are a transformer - if not, maybe just take your n800 to your car and don't worry about clicking while driving. It's dangerous. Just listen to your set of relaxing and antistressing tunes while driving in the traffic).

And that's not all. There's also support for using your existing collection of cover images. It works the same way as canola. Just put a cover.jpg a folder containing mp3 files. It will then default to that image for all albums in that folder.

Also, by popular reques (yeah. I requested it myself), UKMP will skip any folders titled: Maps. This improves living besides maemo mapper.

And last but not least, accidental clicks in cover view are now handled a bit better.

I may post up a video demonstration tomorrow.

Ahh... The links.

Remember, you need to have python installed. If you don't have it, you can install it from here:
http://pymaemo.garage.maemo.org/installation.html

And UKMP you can install from here:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/ukmp

If you need ogg support, you can install ogg to your device from here:
http://ogg.garage.maemo.org/ogg-support.install

I was able to make a quick one take video and put it on youtube. It demonstrates the functionality in a quick manner. I wish I had the time to make these things in a proper manner.

Theme Maker 1.0 Ready

2007-06-12T12:51:00.000-07:00

I took some time to get the theme maker to a 1.0 condition.

Great things about this 1.0 compared to previous betas:

Colors are embedded in the image itself
Full set of buttons and widgets (well... almost)
User customizable postinst and prerm
You can make a black theme

Here's proof of the 4 th improvement:

Cool, eh?

While testing the 'blackness', I also made a NuvoBlack theme as pictured above.

For part two, I give you keyboards from theme NuvoPearl:

And don't worry, the theme template hasn't become any bigger or more complicated than in previous versions. I also included both NuvoPearl and NuvoBlack as template images, so that you can easily modify them to make your own theme. Seriously, making a theme takes fifteen minutes if you use those templates as a basis.

Download theme maker and NuvoBlack /NuvoPearl from here: Garage
Please Note that installing NuvoBlack / Pearl will change some of your icons as well. They won't change until you reboot. Uninstalling theme will put back the original icons.

Lastly, to try to get more people to create exciting themes, I put together a two minute tutorial to theming and uploaded it to youtube. Have a look, it's really simple. Sorry for not narrating the tutorial. I hope it's self explanatory even without it.

Oh, and in case anyone of you needs to take screenshots on your N800, the only screenshot utility I found that works is gnuites:
load-applet-run_0.4.3-2_armel.deb

Bear in mind that you have to go to control panel to add the applet to your toolbar.

UKMP 1.1

2007-06-06T13:16:00.000-07:00

Usually 1.0 versions need a quick 1.01 version. Quite surprisingly this was not the case for UKMP release. I didn't receive a single critical bug report. One seemingly annoying bug that was reported was that some people didn't have much luck with the album cover downloads. This has now been greatly improved for the 1.1 version. Yes. 1.1 is now ready for public consumption. Both, the accuracy of the cover images, as well as the quality of the images has been improved.

A single most often asked improvement was support for OGG files. This may be mostly due to me specifically asking no-one to say anything related to playlists, partylists or queues of any sort. Where was I? Oh yes, OGG support. A rather good first step support has been added now. UKMP loads ogg files and can play them as well. Album data for OGG files is based on the folder file is located in. This is not a long term solution, I will add proper tag reading for ogg files soon enough.

If ... no, WHEN you install UKMP 1.1, installer will ask you if you want to clean your cover images. I strongly recommend you to do it if you haven't perfected the covers yourself. As many of you already tried the 1.0 version (650+ downloads in a week from garage), you probably noticed that the first time you open UKMP it takes a while to download the cover images. The process was boring and only displayed the progress in a manner of showing the downloaded album name. 1.1 improves this by also displaying the cover image below the album name. So, slighly less boring first time. Ok, maybe it's a 'second time' for some of you if you opt to clear the archived cover images (which I still recommend).

And lastly, the code has been cleaned up slightly, resulting in a tiny bit faster functionality than 1.0.

While I've been writing this blog, five people have downloaded 1.0 version. I hope they don't mind downloading the 1.1 while they are at it.

1.1 is available from
Garage download page.
It needs python, so if you don't have it, you can install it from here:
Python maemo

If you want to have OGG support, install OGG libraries, which have been ported by Tuomas Kulve.

An installer for them is here:
http://ogg.garage.maemo.org/ogg-support.install

UKMP 1.0 out

2007-05-30T05:20:00.001-07:00

UKMP is a music player for the Nokia internet tablets 770 and N800. It focuses on ease of use of graphic way of accessing your music.

It comes out on two skins: light and dark. This is mainly in the interest on supporting theming in the future versions and currently just to work better in sunlight. The dark skin is a bit too dark to really work when you are on the move, so the light skin is better for those situations.

Here is a screenshot of the dark skin:

It took much longer than I anticipated to get the ukmp out. This has mainly been because of problems playing mp3s that have cover data in their id3 tags.

New in this release is the support for all mp3s, a bit modified layout and support for seeking forward and backward in the song.

You can download ukmp from here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=234&release_id=658

It needs python, so if you don't have it, you can install it from here:
Python installation

If you have never heard of the payer, have a look at this video I conjured for your pleasure: Link to demo video

UK Media Player Community Release Candidate 3 out

2007-04-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

If you thought iPhone had nice and smooth scrolling and had tested earlier release of ukmp, you must have felt a bit down afterwards. Is this all the device can do? Or is it just the coders messing up of things.

Fortunately it was my bad.

Smooth scrolling was probably like half a frame per second in the RC2, worse in the earlier ones. So, I decided to make some manual profiling on osx and found that one frame update in smooth scrolling took 0.0133 seconds. Wow, that's a lot for a dual core computer. Must be something wrong with the code. A little tinkering with the surface blitting flags and it was down to 0.0068. 2x improvement! I was stunned. Anything else I could do? Well, some more profiling and the next hot spot was found. Updating of the covers position (and some other random stuff related to that) on the screen was culprit of 0.003 secs. So, some tuning up and phew, a frame took only 0.0034 secs to render on osx. Quite an improvement from 0.013 to 0.003.

So, now I can honestly give you smooth scrolling on UKMP.

Other improvements are not so noticeable, such as improved sorting on all fronts, shuffle that works and tons of small fixes.

I can honestly say that this is worth the upgrade.

https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/1286/Urho-Konttoris-MediaCenter-1.0RC3.deb

You'll need python for it to work. If you don't have it, fetch it from here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/1182/python2.4-runtime.install

Oh, a word of warning: mp3s that have images in the id3 tags, seem to crash the player when played. Working on that still.

Theme Maker updated to support N800

2007-04-22T08:56:00.000-07:00

I've just released a new theme maker version. It is available from:
TM_1.0_beta2.zip

It will produce themes that work on all nokia internet tablet devices and firmwares (N800 and 770). I had to drop support for background image for this version. It will come in some form in a near future release.

Notice that the template image size is a bit bigger than previously and the colors are now in the image itself, on the very right side of the image. For the colors, thanks goes to tigert and mdk who work at nokia. Give lots of kudos to them.

There is also an example theme that you can download and test, nuvotheme: download here.
NuvoTheme.deb
I think it's pretty sweet and I use it myself these days. It's nice and simple. And uses a font size that *I* like, which probably means it's too small for the most.

I'm also like *this* close to being able to support Bora template images that Nokia has created. But I'm missing the time to debug what is wrong in the current state of things.

Media Converter 1.42 update

2007-04-16T10:44:00.000-07:00

After some feedback from folks and good tips, I updated the resolution settings for media converter just a little bit.

640x384 resolution is now set to 13 fps. It's a bit low, I know, but it doesn't drop frames. If you want to, just edit the resolutions txt and change the rate to 14 or 15.

I added a new resolution of 480x288. It's splendid looking and runs at 18 fps without frame drops. Thus, it's a very nice balance between good looking video and smooth playback.

Also, there is a wicked 800x480 resolution for mplayer users, mainly for those videos that need to look just picture perfect.

It seems that bit rate affects the default player a bit, thus you get a bit smoother playback at 512 kbps than at 768 kbps.

Download here:

MediaConverterLinux.zip
MediaConverterOSXPPC.zip
Media_Converter_Windows_1.42_setup.exe
MediaConverterOSXIntel.zip

Media Converter Optimized for N800

2007-04-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

I finally installed the latest firmware to N800 a few days ago. Video Playback had been improved immensely for that release. Kudos to the Nokia team for making it happen. It's spendid!

Sadly, I noticed that video stretching no longer worked in the same manner as it used to work in the previous firmware and most of the videos encoded with Media Converter no longer worked on the new one. But this was nicely balanced by the fact that I noticed that resolution of 640x384 worked in the new firmware. While testing it later, I found that balance of roughly 14 fps on that resolution was pretty much perfect between frame drops and normal smooth playback. Thus - a new MC release.

I also settled on 768 kbps to be the best default (anyone care to comment on this), as the idea of using such a high resolution means you want a good image quality - and that can't be had on low bit rate.

For demonstrative purposes, I give you the following in 640x368 for N800:

30 sec clip from Oceans 13.
30 sec clip from Sunshine.

They are made on the optimized mode, thus the cropping. Optimized mode just looks so much better on N800 than the movie aspect 2.39.

Convinced?

Though so!

Download here for:
Windows
OSX PPC
Linux
OSX Intel

I Accidentally released first a version that didn't have the fps set correctly. Thus the latest version is 1.41 in garage.

UKMP Community RC2 out!

2007-04-12T14:27:00.000-07:00

Phew!

I found almost two hours of free time to work on UK MP today. And going through the bugs in the RC1 was smooth sailing this time. Album navigation works now as it's supposed to (you can navigate the other albums while playing one. Press next button and it will play next song in the album that you were listening to ... Yeah, that wasn't the case before).

I also installed latest firmware to my N800 and found out some crash bugs from that, which I Naturally, fixed. Next, I got info from dev of coherence project on how to setup the volume in the app and tuned the + and - buttons to work for the volume. Immediately I noticed that it's missing some sort of graphical hint on what level it's currently on. Well, won't happen for 1.0 release.

All right. Is that it? Pretty much. I feel that UKMP is very much ready for prime time. So, grab it and run it. You shouldn't stumble on many bugs anymore. Oh, make sure you have network open if you need album artwork to be downloaded. It'll cache them, so it's a one time thing.

https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/1224/Urho-Konttoris-MediaCenter-1.0RC2.deb

If you don't have python installed, grab python 2.4 form here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/1182/python2.4-runtime.install

On a sadder note, I tried to install NuvoTheme on the device after flashing, but it wasn't installing. Oh well, some bug hunting to be done in the weekend.

UK Media Player is nearing first public release

2007-03-31T04:28:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to fix all those zillion bugs found in UK Media Player preview versions 1 through 14.

Now I'm no longer hearing reports. I don't know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.

What I do know, is that the most popular version is still preview 9 with 305 downloads, while the latest version, 14, is not that far behind with 194 downloads. The versions have been changing so quickly that I don't wonder at all that not all people have the time (or even have noticed) that a newer versions have shipped each day (well, more like twice or three times a day).

I just released preview version 16. It includes Shuffle functionality. It's not a fully working shuffle, although not far from it - next version will include fully working shuffle. Anyway, have a look at the current layout (yeah, Arctic Monkeys totally rock - buy their album now!):

Shuffle icon is a bit too big at the moment, I'll scale it down a bit in the future and maybe move it to a different place. I tried to make it nicely big so that it would be easy to press with a finger. But even a slightly smaller one would probably do.

By the way, did you know that you can use arrow up and down in both views. In album list view (the one with many albums), it scrolls down a line of albums and in the album contents view, it moves do display the songs of the next album. Oh, and left and right arrows move to next / previous song and middle button is play/pause. Top + and - buttons will control volume once I get that working. Full screen button does what it's supposed to do.

Anyway, for those interested in roadmaps, here is my intended schedule, which may be overly cautions, but it's better that way than the other way around.
- shuffle (this weekend - final fixes)
- Release 1.0 final (next week)
- volume control (within a week - if someone helps me with gstreamer calls for this)
- Chinese letter support (within a week - if possible easily)
- experimental ogg support (within two weeks)
- Party list (within two weeks - man, I'd love to have this sooner)
- Play lists (within a month)
- upnp support (experimental within a month)

Bugs are welcome to garage project:
https://garage.maemo.org/projects/mediaconverter/

New Media player for N800 / IT 770

2007-03-26T01:52:00.000-07:00

I have finally decided that my media player is ready to emerge from the darkness. It's been bit of an under the radar project, as I've only had the time every once in a while to dedicate to it. Nevertheless, I am quite pleased on how it turned out. I call it for now UK-MP (Urho Konttoris Media Player), but that may change.

Here, have a look at these two screenshots:

As you can see, the interface itself is pretty simple. I've emphasized visual aspecs, ease of use and touch screen navigation on the interface design.

On the album view, you can see a list of all albums on MMC1 and MMC2 on your device. You can use rocker up and down to scroll the list up and down. Also, you can use dragging the screen with your finger to scroll up and down. It's not quite something I'd call smooth scrolling, but I'm pretty sure I can get it to run about twice as fast as it's running now, which should provide an almost smooth scroll. Albums are sorted by artist and the album cover (or something related to the artist and cd) is retrieved from the net. Artist name is displayed in the dcs reflection (yeah, how cool is that reflection. Mind you, it's the cause of the long startup time - but well worth it!). SOng count is displayed in the top right corner of the cd.

Ok, click on any of the albums to see the songs in the album. Album name and artist is diplayed on the left along with the cd cover. There is a back-to-list button at the top rigt of the view. You can always use the fullscreen button to switch to the fullscreen mode (which is preferred mode). Click on any song to start playing. You can use rocker left to go to previous song and rocker right to go to next song. Rocker functions work in album list view as well. Middle button toggles pause/play.

Convinced that you want to try it out? Cool.

You need to have python installed on your device before you install!

For some reason the python 2.5 install seems to elude me. This link MAY work on N800: http://repository.maemo.org/extras/dists/bora/install/python2.5-runtime.install

For those who have trouble installing it, do this:
Open "Application Menu"->"Tools"->"Application Manager"
In the main menu choose "Tools"->"Application catalogue..."
Click in "New" button
Enter:
Web address: http://repository.maemo.org
Distribution: mistral
Components: free non-free

All right. Now, go to install list and select python-2.4.

Install.

Once you have Python, you just need the media player.

Latest version can be downloaded from here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=234

And you are done.

Comments, bug reports and such are welcome in:
urho.konttori@gmail.com
as well as comments section of this blog.

UPDATE!
Latest version can be found here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=234

Media Converter 1.3 released!

2007-02-07T01:31:00.000-08:00

1.30 7.2.2007

About a month since the last update. Now that I have N800, I have been able to work a bit on making media converter to be a one stop program for N800 and 770 users for their video conversion needs.

Latest version contains separate resolutions for 770 and N800 users. There is a drop down at the top left where you choose your device and resolutions will be listed accordingly. Also, once you have tuned your favourite settings (such as output dir, device, resolution, bit rates), MC will remember in the future what settings you had. How cool is that?

There has been some problems with videos that do not tell mencoder how long they are. Thus mencoder doesn't report that to MC and grief will ensue, as the progress bar isn't moving. As a quick solution, I have added a seconds counter that reports how many seconds of the video has already been processed. It's a bit of a quick a dirty, but much better that the 0% progress bar.

And while not yet completely debugged, I have added a HD resolution of 400x480 to the N800 resolutions. It looks terrific, but the automatic cropping of video doesn't do a prefect job at the moment and the video is in 1/2 fps for the time being. I should work for 770 mplayer users as well.

Windows users should also be happy to hear that any previous users with problems opening the media converter (due to java installation problems) should now be able to open MC.

As always, thoughts, comments, recommendations are welcome to urho.konttori@gmail.com.

Downloads for windows, OSX and Linux here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=26&release_id=409

Oh, new release of Theme Maker is just around the corner. I've put quite a bit of work to it and I just want to test it out really well before launching it. However, if you are interested in it, pop me an email and I can send out a beta now.

Media Converter 1.21 Released

2007-01-08T04:01:00.000-08:00

Long time, no updates. Well, upon hearing about the N800, I thought to add support for resolution text file. You can now specify your resolutions and frame speeds that are to appear in the resolution drop down. This is mainly for just tuning the resolutions for 770 and N800 more easily.

Download

Anything else? Indeed! A new icon by Benoit Ricaud. It looks terrific! Icon is used in windows and OSX versions.

Resolutions file looks like this:
Low Quality (240x144)
Action Movie (288x208)
High Quality (352x208) 3/4 fps
Very High Quality (352x288) 1/2 fps
MPlayer Optimal (400x240)
MPlayer HD Video (400x480) 1/4 fps

It is located in installation folder in windows and inside the app in OSX.

So, first you define the name, followed by resolution in Brackets () and then if you need to lower the fps, the division of 1/4, 1/2 or 3/4. No other fps choices are available.

If you wonder why there is the HD video option, even though it has lousy FPS, it is brilliantly suitable for slideshow like videos. For example if you make a iPhoto slideshow and save it as video, that will look stunning on the 400x480 resolution.

So, if anyone of you has the new N800, please tell me what resolutions it supports. Especially I'm interested in knowing whether the 400x240 resolution works in full fps.

Theme Maker Home Pages Released

2006-11-03T04:44:00.000-08:00

Theme Maker has finally proper home page. It's a bit small for the time being, I'll try to add some downloadable themes there tomorrow. For now, it's just to have a tutorial on theme creation and download links.

http://thememaker.garage.maemo.org

If you have created themes with theme maker and would like me to link to them, please mail me at urho.konttori@gmail.com. I can also host the .deb files if needed.

Also, please take a screenshot of your theme so that the download page would look better.

Media Converter 1.2 final

2006-11-02T04:21:00.000-08:00

Just released 1.2 final. Fixes stability issues from 1.2 beta. Now a recommended download. Download link below.

http://mediaconverter.garage.maemo.org/Media%20Converter/Downloads.html

On other issues, I have updated the home pages a bit and added instructions on how to use subtitles for the movies. It's a bt tricky, as MC is a batch converter, so that's why I went for the 'use same name as video filename, but with .srt extension' -approach. If you have better suggestions, please let me know.

Also, I released 1.2 as a proper app for intel OSX. PPC version will have to wait just a little longer, but hopefully I'll have one ready tomorrow.

Oh yeah, I know, the icon could be cooler. Any ideas on how to symbolize video conversion to 770?

Oh, here's the icon. Suggestions and replacement icon images (128x128) are very welcome!

Home pages for Media Converter

2006-10-26T04:39:00.000-07:00

I just created home pages for media converter.

As media converter is such a simple app, it only needs simple home page. So, a small description and download pages should do it nicely for now. Let me know if you think it would need more!

Here is the page: http://mediaconverter.garage.maemo.org/

Media Converter 1.2 Beta released

2006-10-25T07:27:00.000-07:00

1.2 beta 25.10.2006

1.2 beta released finally. Too long since the last major update. This one does rock though, so digg in:
(Linux, Windows, OSX powerPC versions)
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=26&release_id=202

Intel OSX version does not fit into garage limits,
so download that from here:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~konttori/MediaConverter/MediaConverterINTELOSX.zip

Here's the changelog:
Added support for user to able to define destination directory. Quite many people have been asking for this feature. I made it quickly now so that it won't save the users settings, but future versions will save users directory settings.
Minor tweaks to UI.
Tested on OSX Intel.
Much improved video quality. At some point the second pass of the HQ mode was dropped (and instead it just repeated phase 1). Second pass has now been added. Big thanks and tons of kudos go to Andrea Gronchi for noticing the problem and suggesting a fix!

Why is that beta then?
Well, new features mean probable small bugs, so let me know asap you hit them.

A little bit about my life. We successfully moved with my wife to a new flat. I also switched to mac mini and been spending my time getting home fixed and my work place (mac mini) in working order. Expect a proper mac installer in the near future!

Moving stopped development of another hobby project for the 770: Media Center. I can tell you that it will most positively rock. However, with not enough time for 770 development, it's coming together slowly. I will next focus a bit on theme maker so that it will support Nokias own template. If I'm lucky that will be done tomorrow, if not, well, then it won't be done. I acquired a potential new contract that is apparently on a bit tight schedule, so if that begins tomorrow, I'll be doing that for a week or so with probably not much spare time left. Mans gotta get paid once in a while as well.

Computer crashed and burned, theme maker, mplayer,java

2006-08-29T00:40:00.000-07:00

My computer stopped from booting last thursday. Not cool, I can tell you.

I think this is the second time when a motherboard has crashed on my computer. Last time it was when I was like 13 or 14 years old and had an amiga 2000. I had made a microphone controller on electronics class at school, which bas based on some diagrams by Mikro Bitti. It *should* have worked brilliantly. And it did, if it's purpose was to direct all charge from the battery though pretty much all the expensive chips in Amiga (Blitter, Copper, 68000, must have been some others as well).

Anyway, I was able to get a replacement in form of a laptop from the company that I'm doing freeleancing for. Much appreciated, Absolutions!

I've been too busy working to have had the time to setup programming enviroment on it for java development. Maybe I get the time today. I would really like to make a new version of theme maker.

You see, just on wednesday, I got an email from Johan Billen at Nokia. He reminded me that there is a way to remove the left, right and bottom borders that are surrounding apps in the normal view (not in full screen). I had the time to do a couple of tests and was able to remove all the totally unnecessary borders and got it working.

So, that's a small thing that I think would really improve theming.

Another thing that I was planning to test was that I noticed some chinese and japanese people hacking their way to install local fonts to their 770s to get proper localization for them. I just thought that it might make sense to allow theme to set the device main font and install the font at the same time.

It would thus allow a theme specifically for the chinese and another for the japanese. It would also benefit any themes that need to really get the look right (like LCARS theme. Why is no-one making a proper LCARS???)

I would go ahead and buy a mac mini to my desktop this minute if it wasn't that last time I did it, apple lauched a new model 2 weeks later for the same price and much better specs. I would rather skip that mistake this time around, especially as it's been something like 200 days since last update and there speculation in the air that apple will launch the new model any day now.

A good thing is that as I freelance, I get to deduct the vat from the computer price. I wonder if I can deduct the whole thing from profits, as really I cannot work without it, so it's an investment. I think I got to call the tax people for that. Anyway, dropping the VAT (22%) is a nice even if I couldn't drop anything else.

Oh, back to 770 issues. I tested mplayer on 770 again yesterday. Audio sync on mp3dsp seemed much better. I was able to get it completely offsync a few times, but otoh, it was perfectly on sync other times (even on same video). 400x240 video at full fps was perfect on 1x scaling and skipped frames on 2x (800x480 fullscreen) only when the action was really intense. I tend to test with two videos, one movie trailer and one slow action clip from a movie. Congrats Serge for making the mplayer work on 770. I hope you get the last bits right and 400x240 playback full fps is reality next time you release mplayer.

The best thing about mplayer that I can think of is that it will allow playback of google video and other web based clips. They are usually small enough that 770 will have the power to decode them, and being able to do that will benefit 770 tons.

Oh, forgot to talk about java. I noticed that jamvm was ported to 770. Way cool. The actual engine was tiny, classpath was huge. As I haven't had the time to test (I was working unti 23 yesterday), I haven't had the time to test jamvm either. With that huge a classpath, I would love that the installer would install that to the MMC.

Also, apparently the installer isn't complete yet, so maybe the author could make it application installer installable and consider the classpath to MMC option.

Anyway, I'm anxious to do some performance testing on java. Anyone done any benchmarking? What's the fastest way to do bitmap operations on jamvm?

Theme maker 0.85 versio is out

2006-08-21T06:01:00.000-07:00

I just finished theme maker 0.85 last thursday. It's now been tested out by Tom Morris, author for the Aqua theme. From his feedback, I can say that it's all out for the grabs for anyone wishing to make a theme for Nokia 770. You can get Toms aqua theme from his homepage.

The latest version is special in the sense that the uninstaller works now flawlessly and removes all the icons and graphics the installer created. The most important feature on it though is that the scrollbars in opera are now themed close to perfection and they appear just the same way as they are in the other applications.

You can download theme maker from here: ThemeMaker085.zip

And here to demonstrate the scrollbars: Brushed theme (12 px fonts)

Screenshot is from brushed theme.

About 770 pdf reader

2006-08-07T02:57:00.000-07:00

I was just yesterday reading The Tux magazine on my 770 on the couch. They use a wide screen format with two to three columns. Lots of images, a brilliant magazine indeed. Works really fast on the it 2006 too. While I was reading it though, I had problems reading it comfortably. If I used the fit to width -option, which I love, the font was too small to be read at a relaxed distance. Fortunately 770 has excellent zoom options. I zoomed in once or two times, depending on the page and reading was a bliss. ... Until I had to change page. In fit to width mode, you can just press arrow right to go to the next page. Unfortunately that means that I have to zoom out two times to fit width mode, press next page button and then zoom in two times before I can read the next page. That's 5 presses to get to the next page. Unfortunately that's often not even enough. The right button press registers much too easily two presses when I press it just once, after which I have to try to go back one page with the left button. Left button naturally behaves just like the right one. The same applies to the image viewer.

Well, to get things more comfortable, I noticed that I can switch to normal mode from the fullscreen mode and use the icons at the bottom of the page to go to the next page and then I'd switch back to fullscreen mode. Only 2 button presses and one screen tap to go to the next page. Quite an improvement, but still, there is no reason why it needs to take more than one press.

Zoom level 2

Zoom level 3

Enter navigation middle button. At the moment it is used to switch to fullscreen and back. But what's the need when 770 has a dedicated button to just to do that. So, it figures that a change is needed. How about using the navigation middle button to go to the next page (or show the next image in image viewer)? It would be a simple solution and the current button behaviour would not be missed.

Activites

2006-06-19T06:45:00.000-07:00

Phew! After having dental surgery last monday, I'm finally beginning to look like a human again. Almost feel like one as well.

While suffering from horrible aches, I've been busy implementing some changes to media converter and theme maker. One of the biggest things is that I've been able to create projects for them in maemo garage. All files are now in svn excluding two jar files for theme maker for which I had some surprising problems in uploading them using netbeans 5.5. Oh well, I may just end up putting them in the svn some other way. Those libraries are not mine anyway, so I'm not sure if they belong in svn anyway. Before anyone comes asking, they were for a free (as in do whatever you want with them) license.

I just updated my 770 to 2006 os beta a few days after release. Splendid stuff. Many many improvements. Especially I like the integration on virtual memory, which is completely smooth. Also, EABI kicks as overall, as pdfs, flash and pretty much everything is much faster. Splendid stuff, as I said.

So, off I went to improve theme maker for the 2006 OS. A few tests and I got the installer stuff working. Then some heavy work on trying to figure out hot the theme actually works and now I can say that theme maker is inches off being complete. It's definately complete enough to make themes in already. What I'm especially proud is that theme maker is able to make .deb installer package for the theme now. What's so cool about it is that I was able to make the debian in java code and thus you don't need linux tools to be able to make packages.

Also, NuvoTheme is now in splendid shape, and it's naturally included in theme maker. You can download NuvoTheme from here (uninstall previous version first if you have such) and theme maker from here.

Also, I've been busy looking at media converter. Still working on multiple platforms really well. All the code is handled in subverion and I also tested tasking myself through garage. Wroks really well. Kudos for nokia for setting up garage! The latest media converter hasn't been changed much. Some small cosmetical issues, such as tuning presets and adding a notification that you can also dragndrop files to media converter. But inside there is one small and really nice improvement. For some reason it 2006 was not able to open videos that were made on mencoder and didn't have explicit -ofps parameter to set frame speed. Now, in the new version, this parameter is set on always and thus you can play back videos on ti 2006 as well.

I tested 352x288 resolution in it 2005 previously, but the video was a bit too choppy for my taste. In it 2006 this has changed completely. 352x288 resolution is the resolution proper for 770. It's smooth and looks absolutely gorgeous. Have a look at this small clip I made to experience what I'm talking about : ff7clip.

Theme Maker 0.5

2006-05-29T02:19:00.000-07:00

I've been not too keen on doing updates to the theme maker in the absence of 2006 edition. However, tigert got me convinced about a week ago to add the installer components to the theme maker now. This way I can concentrate to just to add the changes that need to be done for the theme to work.

I managed to do the installer completely in java (nice), so that theme maker is still completely cross platoform and especially, also works in windows.

I also decided that since launch of 2006 edition is in Juna and that is a span of 30 days,
I figured that it might also mean the end of june, although I highly doubt it.

So, I decided to make another release now.
This version has been done to support 2006 edition and builds a debian package that works on 2006. So, if you are a Nokia developer, you can build themes that install nicely with the app installer, but for the rest of us, installer is not so easy. Fortunately, the debian does work in 2005 edition quite well. By following the steps described below, you should have no trouble installing themes on your 2005 edition as long as you have root access. Notice that 2006 edition will not require root access anymore.

Once you make a theme with the 0.5 version, you will get a themename.deb file in your installation folder.

Copy that to your 770.

open xterm.
sudo gainroot
cd /media/mmc1
dpkg -x themename.deb /

This will install the theme to your 770. Next, just go and change you theme to the new one.

Nice thing about the deb is that it is relatively compact size.

I'm off to New York tomorrow for a week or so and will be back on the 8th of June, so don't be surprised if I'm not returning emails for a while.

Oh, theme maker link: ThemeMaker.zip
And test theme debian: NuvoTheme.deb

NuvoTheme and MediaConverter

2006-05-05T05:58:00.000-07:00

I just released a new version of MediaConverter. 0.95. Cool. Almost ready as a app I ould recommend. The new version added support for dragndrop. A feature that at least I have been looking forward to for a long time. In the end, adding the support for windows and linux was pretty easy. Like 2-3 hours of coding and debugging. But OSX is still a mystery to me. It apparently behaves a little different than linux and XP. Please someone with interest to debug it on OSX with me, contact me!

I also updated the NuvoTheme a bit by toning down the colors a bit. Someone suggested that I should start gzipping the theme files. A Nice idea. I'll definatly look into it soon. As that would allow also theme to consist of two files. A sh script and the gzip archive. Well, until 2006 os that is.

Here you can see the theme selection icon (finally).

And here is the media player, which looks very sleek in my opinion.

Also, the calculator really likes having simple and clean buttons instead of the default buttons that overtried to look cool.

Theme maker 0.45

2006-04-28T03:46:00.000-07:00

A minor update version has been added.
New in this version are:
Added horizontal seeks bars
Icon for the theme
Input method borders

And progress bar while making the theme (now you know if it's locked or not ;)

NOTICE! THEME BASE IMAGE SIZE CHANGED TO 1080x1000!!!

Here is an example theme base image.

Next version should have vertical seek bars and maybe the tab border.
It always takes quite some time to add new images and then to test them on 770, so the development is a bit incremental.

Maemo Theme Maker 0.4

2006-04-27T03:32:00.000-07:00

Latest version is finally here!

I had time to fix some existing bugs and here it is. The latest version includes scroll bars and progress bar.

It also includes an example theme image NuvoTheme, which you can see on these next few screenshots. It is a prototype like theme and serves as a testing ground for the theme maker.

Unfortunately installation of themes still requires root access, but I'm still hopefull that it can be improved even before OS 2006.

I also noticed that Opera doesn't use the same theme file as other programs do. For example the scroll bars are still the same in Opera even if you change them in your theme.

Download Theme Maker 0.4
Download NuvoTheme

Next version coming up soon..

2006-04-20T04:29:00.000-07:00

As per request by many non-users, I will compile the next version for 1.4 target. That should help it to work on most of the platforms. The next version will be coming up shortly, with many added components and a nice example theme file.

One major improvement would be the ability to install themes to 770 user space. At the moment installing a new theme requires root access, but if the themes are installable to user space, then ThemeMaker could save themes as installable debs. I am still waiting for confirmation on whether this is possible for the current version or will we have to wait for the 2006 OS for this to be possible. In any case, I will probably pursue making the install files as .tar.gz files for the future releases. I have found a nice gpl java based tar library (which includes support for gz), so packaging it should't bee too hard.

And for any linux users out there, no, I can't just use linux tar command, as I haven't found a good tar exe for windows. If anyone has an idea on a good command line tool for making tar iles on linux (which is gpl), then that would be much appreciated.

Oh, one more thing that I've left out is the icons. It seems that most (or atleast some) of the icons have a white background. This is of course depressing for anyone willing to make a theme with other main color than white. I hope I can package replacement icons that have transparent background, but that won't happen for the next release yet.

Theme maker 0.3

2006-04-07T02:22:00.000-07:00

Ok. I've updated theme maker.

New version has a lot of bug fixes and some new tiles as well.

I hope you enjoy it.
Oh, forgot to mention that I added the itunes theme example image in it as well.

Here's a view on that:

And eres the program: ThemeMaker.zip

Testing theme maker

2006-04-07T01:01:00.000-07:00

As we all know, the only way to be sure that something works, is to test it. As it happens, usually things don't work quite as planned and these problems can be found by testing.

So, I dared to test making a theme yesterday. Many bugs were found from theme maker during this process and many reasons, why I have to add new tiles were also discovered. Thus, unfortunately, the tileset image will become even bigger for the next releases.

So, I made a theme that I call itunes theme. Have a look:

As I don't really have the time to really invest in a great theme, I just decided that I will make a theme based on existing ideas and just test that such a theme *can* be done for maemo as well.

Ok, so, home applets work pretty well, although for example the clock applet doesn't follow the normal home view theme. Now, why is that? Probably it was decided that it would take too much space that way. But Nokia, please! You could have added some themability for it anyway. It looks pretty dull at the moment. Perhaps someone could make a themable version of the clock (along with interface to GPE calendar perhaps).

Also, as can be seen on the music player, arrow down has presed white border, which looks pretty dull in the applet. I'm going to try to do something about that in the future.

Also, some little errors remain in that image, such as the top right corner application border, which I fixed as soon as I saw it, but didn't bother to transfer the changes to 770.

I'll include the source image for this theme for anyone interested for the next theme maker version, which I'll try to launch today.

Also, for anyone interested in just testing it out, here is the theme: itunestheme.zip

Install as usual. Copy to mmc, open xterm, sudo gainroot, cd /media/mmc1/itunesTheme, sh ./install.sh, use control panel to switch.

As a final note, I can now say, that theme maker can be used to make some really sweet themes for 770 and it really doesn't take long to make some.

Theme maker 0.2 released!

2006-04-05T01:25:00.000-07:00

Theme maker 0.2 released!

Changelog:
Added some more guidelines.
Added menu 1st level and menu rest.
Added note frame and Infoprint frame.
Added status bar pressed.
Added tabs.
Also some minor fixes elsewhere as well.

At its current state it contails almost all window decoration graphics. Next up (in some versions) will be:
a) Buttons
c) Zipping of the theme file
c) Better installer script
d) Better font support

As a current state shot, have a look at the source image that the theme maker uses:

You can download the file from here: ThemeMaker.zip

Theme Maker preview!

2006-04-04T04:46:00.000-07:00

A new theme maker for 770 is just about done. It features ability to set most of the windowing based theming in maemo. The user interface itself is very simple. Have a look:
As you can see, only colors are really defined here in good detail. If you are making a theme yourself using this editor, you should have the color part in a notepad file, as the maker doesn't save prefs in any way. The theme maker is set to go by default settings, so those willing to test it, only have to download the zip file, unzip it, open the jar file and then click on the build theme.

So, how does it really work? It uses a source image file: themeSourceImage.png, which looks like this:

Apparently blogspot doesn't do justice to alpha maps. But the png file in the installation zip has those, so rest assured that it's working. This image should be edited in photoshop or gimp. By modifying this file and then running the thememaker, you can easily convert your 770 to look like pretty much what you want it to.

It does not, however, yet contain all windowing related components, nor does it contain any icons. Rest of the windows components will be added later on, but you can rest assured that any work you do with this image, can be ported to any future versions without problems. All images will be in the same space on the future releases as well. If there is need for more space, the image will be made larger.

On the left side of the image is a normal app view with home view task bar at the top, and normal app view task bar below it. Home view task bar can contain alpha values.

On the right side is located the navigator panel with all buttons pressed down. If your theme doesn't use any presses, just copy the left side navigation in place of this.

Ok and then the warning part: Make a backup of your settings BEFORE trying out theming. It's very easy to get you 770 to a state where you have to reflash it. If your 770 goes to a reboot loop, there is little that you can do byt reflash your 770 with the nokia update utility.

Now that you have created a theme file, you need to install it. This is done by copying the theme folder (default: MyTheme) to your mmc card. Then open terminal.
Execute:
cd /media/mmc1/MyTheme
sudo gainroot
sh ./install.sh

You are done. Theme is now installed. Now just open control panel and change theme. Warning: Pushing apply button in the theme selection will do the same thing as OK button. This is probably a bug. So, even if you press apply, and you have (too) bad content in your theme, it will result in a reboot loop.

If you have any questions, just pop me an email to urho (here a dot) konttori at gmail.com.

Here is the installation zip: ThemeMaker.zip

770 Font size

2006-03-30T23:16:00.000-08:00

Examples of how making fot size smaller helps usability of apps:

Exibit a: Home screen with rss feeds on normal theme:

Exibit b: Same image with font size reduced to 11 px:

See how in the 11 px version you can now see all the headlines of the news applet almost completely. Also, as there is more space between the lines, the applet doesn't look so stuffed. To improve the applet even more, it could be changed so that the refresh button would be on the heading part of the applet, on the top right corner. Also, the 0 unread could be on the heading part besides the news -text. This way news applet would be just as functional, but not take so much space on the home view, as the bottom part could be freed. Or alternatively there could be more posts displayed on the applet. Ok, same applies to the clock applet. With smaller font size, the text could be put under the clock. Thus the horizontal size of the applet would be smaller. Also, what's up with the clock border. It looks like there are two borders around the clock applet.

But that is not the worst part. When for example using sylpheed, a more complex app, the situation is much worse, although much of this is due to current conversion needing to set the statusbar off by default as well as the search bar. By turning them off by default, the app would be much better on both font sizes, but even then it would be better with 11px main font size. Also, another problem is that it is impossible in the gtkrc to set the app view size / the margins on the left and right of the app. There is maybe 24 pixels in the left and maybe 16 on the right. And some space at the top and bottom. This is completely waste of space as the apps would look just as good without the unneccesarily wide borders - AND they would have slightly more space (maybe 5-7% more... don't laugh, it's really quite a lot.)

Original:

And then the version with 11px fonts:

See how much more is visible and the font is not by any means small or too small. The app is far more usable after that small adjustment to font size. And the same thing applies to all apps really.

Also the main menu would greatly benefit from reduced font size. At the current setting, once you have even one xtra app, the first level menu becomes scrolling. Not good. See:

But, once again, after 11 px font, the menu doesn't suffer from this anymore:

Oh, and click on any of the images to see how it looks in full size.

Here is the modified gtkrc.

Ok, here's a simple how-to:

download the theme zip from: http://www.helsinki.fi/~konttori/Me.../theme_test.zip

Connect your 770 to your comp. Unzip the file to the root of your mmc.

Disconnect 770. Open xterm (you must be in rd mode or otherwise have root access).
Execute following commands:
sudo gainroot
cp -R /media/mmc1/theme_test /usr/share/themes/theme_test

Ok. Theme is now installed. Close xterm. Open Control panel and go to personalization. Choose the new theme, cleverly titled: Urhon testiteema (which incidentally stands for Urhos test theme in finnish).

You're done.