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

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

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

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

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

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: