Friday, April 11, 2008

Maemo, Wiimote and remote controlling: A perfect combination

In the last two weeks, a new maemo friend is in town. He is an old colleague and workmate who has just bought an N810 and developed this in such a few time. Don't you think he will be a valuable contributor to the maemo scene? :-)

Watch the video:

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Maemo is getting better and better

A lot of good news on Maemo.

Canola 2 jumps to beta 8 with lots of bugs fixed:

Better third-party plugin support: More API available for third-party plugin development.
Better handling of large titles in titlebar.
Fix during cover change.
Sort files inside "Browse by Folder".
Show current time during seek.
Fixed bugs in video player.
Ability to refresh podcast feeds manually.
Ability to select where downloaded contents go.
Smooter animation in the lists and sub menus.
General theme improvements.
Allow more podcast feeds.
Support compressed feeds and request them by default.
Better handle out of space.
Show more normalized download velocity and time remaining.
Various fixes in network handling in Podcast.
Restart downloads when podcast plugin is loaded.
Make it possible to preview the podcast description in the list.
Make it possible to read the feed description while listening to the podcast episode.
Remove episodes from "Podcast: New Episodes" when listened to or deleted.
Show the podcast feed title in the player as album and not the parent title.
Ogg support for the Scanner is back.


I copied this from the news page of the Canola 2 project at INdT, as there seems to be no permalinks for their news.

All existing add-ons (YouTube, so far) and themes have been updated and you should go for the last version if you change to Canola 2 beta 8.

But the best is yet to be told: there is a LastFM plugin! I love it, although its functionality does not match (yet) Vagalume's. But, to be fair, Vagalume does not have so great interface as Canola.

Ah, and more things not yet supported but in sight:

Playlist creation (on-the-move) + Playlist saving and other related features
Youtube paging capabilities for the search results (to allow more results to be browsed)
UPNP support
PNG thumbnail support still missing
Full hardware key mapping support


The YouTube results paging is a must as now the interface does limit the number of results you can enjoy. And what to say about the chance to access remote contents via UPnP. Media in your S60 3rd Edition phone or your PS3.

More on Maemo: as announced in the CTIA'09, the WiMax version is coming. Errrr... well, congratulations to the ones who will buy it and use WiMax, but I do not think this will happen in Spain. The best news from the last edition of CTIA was said in the same announcement from Nokia as some sort of additional-and-less-important information (source: Internet Tablet Talk):

upgraded OS2008 [that] introduces useful new features to the platform, including an enhanced e-mail client, support for Chinese character rendering in the browser and RSS feeds and Seamless Software Update functionality to eliminate manual software updates, making periodic updates of the operating system quick and easy. While standard on the Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition, current owners of Nokia N810 and N800 Internet Tablets with earlier operating systems will be able to upgrade their device to the revised operating system for free during the second quarter of 2008.


So N800 and N810 owners should be looking forward to a new system update for these gadgets.

And last but not least, some more disruptive applications for the N800/N810. I am still checking out Numpty Physics and trying to advance to the 4th stage :-) MyPaint screenshots look amazing although I guess that drawing is not one of the things that I best do. Anyway, I will try to get better at it and try to develop cool stuff like these: