Comments on the MeeGo Handset UX Day 1

Click for bigger. No, really, do it, I'll reference it.

The big news of today for Maemo/MeeGo enthusiasts was the release of the Handset User Experience mockups, code and UI guidelines. If you’re a mobile phone enthusiast I’ll assume you already read those completely (if not, you should!) and so I won’t post those as news.

I will, however, comment on the UI demos we got. I know that whatever the Nokia device running MeeGo won’t look exactly like this, but you never know.

  1. The status bar and the title bar: Right now on Maemo, you have a top bar that has, left to right: task switcher, clock, tray, title and close button. For MeeGo they decided to split that in two, a thinner status bar and the title bar that doesn’t always show up. Where does the awesome tray for notifications we have currently goes? I understand that having a thin status bar allows for it to show up in more places, but Maemo’s approach is way more elegant.
  2. Clutter on the title bar: Ok, so you get the titlebar. Right now on the screenshot linked above we have task switcher | text pane labels | search button | close app. System wide controls, sort controls and actions on the same place, kinda messy innit? Add that to an oddly empty bottom bar and the idea is dubious. The MeeGo UI basics page doesn’t show the sort and action buttons there though, just the title with the drop down arrow, Maemo 5 style. As always, that can change during development.
  3. Desktop and launcher: I don’t really like the Dock idea for launching the main menu, as it just takes space and you can add app shortcuts to the homescreen like widgets right now. The current Maemo 5 main menu and switcher being on the same place behavior is more natural, in my opinion.
  4. Lock screen: Not the ridiculous drag to unlock screen currently on Maemo 5, great!
  5. Task Switcher: Not pictured, but lifting the webOS card views, kinda silly since the current Maemo 5 task switcher can fit more stuff. Nicer imho. You can still get the Maemo 5 one but extra step.
  6. And this one is probably a proto issue but on the demo video apps minimized to the desktop. or something?

All in all, I kinda like Maemo 5 a lot better right now. Then again I’m comparing vanilla MeeGo with the “Nokia experience” Maemo 5, so who knows how the version I’ll get to play with will look like.

A couple links of relevance:

Update: Oh something I had forgotten about: no signs of supporting non-touchscreen phones, for now. :(

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Select new Maemo 5 applications for June

Despite the title, I don’t plan on making this a monthly series. Not yet at least, who knows if I’ll be able to keep it constant. That said, I found 3 cool new applications in the past couple days, so I thought I’d make a single post for all.

Sticky Notes, about time!

Starting with something simple, but really well executed. Sticky Notes was something I was surprised nobody else had thought about doing before. Sure, there was an old Maemo 4 Yellow Notes port, but it was stylus driven and er, not very good looking, to be polite.

Sticky Notes is great looking, easy and logic to control (tap and type to edit a note, no unnecessary dialogs!) and it even runs independently from hildon-home, so no slowdowns and you launch it from the main menu, avoiding dealing with the weird widget placing menu. It’s rare to find something that gets so many things right on the first release!

ApMeFo, funny name

The second one is ApMeFo, a godsend for someone as obsessed with folders like me. This application allows you to make and edit menu folders, simple no? Well, it automates this. Yeah. :P It doesn’t have all features I’d like to see yet, but it’s definitely a welcome improvement.

N900FTP, not the best name around either

And finally, N900FTP, which as the name implies, is an FTP client for the N900. :P What makes it notable is: It;s finger friendly, unlike *shiver* gFTP, and it’s an example of why the community is awesome, if you read the t.m.o thread. Feature requests and questions being thrown around, while the app kept on getting better. It even supports SFTP, which seals the deal for me.

All in all, a good month for Maemo 5 applications, innit?

Oh, and in other news, Google Voice is now open for everybody (in the USA.) Notable because I got the best number ever (it ends in 565, LOL in an alphanum keypad.) I’m still kinda overwhelmed with so many features, but I’ll get around it setting it perfectly with time. (yes, I just wanted to flaunt the LOL phone number. :P)

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Zen Bound for Maemo

Those little "flaps" were hard to cover.

Those little "flaps" were hard to cover.

Well, I’m a couple days late in posting about it, but… Zen Bound, is out on the Ovi Store. A port from a best seller in the iPhone App Store, this could be the best game (or a close second to Sonic games on PicoDrive, but yeah) to get out just for the N900, specially with MeeGo coming on.

Premise is simple: you have a wooden “thing,” you rotate it with the touchscreen in order to wrap it with rope. When the rope touches the wooden block, it marks the area surrounding it with “paint”. The objective is to get the maximum possible of the thing covered in paint. It’s more challenging than it sounds, yet the feeling of completing a level is oddly fulfilling. It’s hard to get the feel across just with words, so go watch a video of it.

Support the platform of your choice, I asked before when talking about Gravity for Symbian, and I’m asking the same here. It looks great, it has a lot of levels, gameplay is really spot on, it is worth the 5 bucks they’re asking for.

PS. It wouldn’t be a post by me if it didn’t have just a little bit of complaining (:P), so here it goes: It doesn’t respect the system-wide volume controls (technical limitation, or so I’ve heard) and it should have an easier way to zoom out from the block, when the rope goes off-screen (unless I missed something.)

Links:

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lol timing

Well, time to get ready to flash the phone again. at least reinstalling stuff is easy.

Update: apt-get install cpumem-applet simple-brightness-applet batterygraph cbrpager conky drnoksnes fmms gjiten gpsjinni grr mplayer kmplayer leafpad mauku mirror picodrive recorder transmission vncviewer mafw-lastfm wordpress

(love using apt-get via ssh <3)

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No folders on PR1.2?

A PRICE TO PAY?!?!

Haven’t posted anything in forever, why? I just kept thinking that my next post would be a little “review” of PR1.2 when it came out and that I’d wait for it. That was 2 months ago, lol. Today I finally lost my patience and flashed it with the leaked PR1.2 RC.

So, as it’s customary with this blog, today’s post is about folders. When I saw the first SDK screenshots, I saw that they dropped the More folder for a single launcher screen with all icons. (dumbest decision ever, why does Nokia only copy iPhone OS and Android on the stupid stuff? even apple stopped being retarded and is adding folders to 4.0). But I thought I could change that by editing a couple files. Seems not.

I tried editing hildon.menu (there’s even one at ~/.config/menus now!) following the discoveries originally made in this thread.

  • Commenting files with <!– etc> doesn’t work anymore, they just pop up in the end of the menu again. (go away ovi store shortcut)
  • .directory files aren’t recognized at all, anymore, apparently.
  • Adding another <Menu>etc</Menu> item to the file breaks hild0n-desktop. Not even a (No applications) message, just a blank (blurred) screen.

Unless the syntax changed and nobody told me! If that’s the case someone please let me know! I searched the t.m.o forums and didn’t find anything. And if not, well, I hope they fix it for the final PR1.2 :P

breaking the silence post woo~

Update: of course, t.m.o delivers. (haven’t tried it yet tho)

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PicoDrive for Maemo

[!]

It’s here, and it’s amazing, full sound, 60fps. Even the UI is perfect (like DrNokSnes) Available in extras-devel, so don’t get the .deb linked.

Here, have a bad video meanwhile.

Update: Oh boy it can play Sega CD now too! Have a video of Sonic CD too.

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Harmattan Widgets Demo (or, how MeeGo will act like!)

So hey, while I’m still organizing my thoughts on the Maemo/Moblin merge (I have a 500 words draft here in this blog wtf), I thought I’d post my impressions/highlights of the Harmattan Widgets Gallery demo the UI Framework team just released yesterday, and linked here.

!! Container

It’s a drag from the top container, reminding me of the Android notifications pane. While not pulled down, you can only see the silver part. I really hope they don’t use it as a notification though, I love the current Maemo 5 one!

!! Navigation Bar

You’re able to hide all of the top bar UI elements, in this screenshot I just hid the nav bar while keeping the buttons. It’s an interesting possibility, as long as people don’t abuse it. I like having the clock everywhere :P

!! Object menu

Long tap pop up on certain lists, cool addition, but we all have seen it elsewhere. My real opinion on it will be based on how often/logically it is used on the real thing.

!! Toolbar

I didn’t like the !! Toolbar demo, it’s basically adding yet more stuff to the upper part of the screen. 4 icons or two icons and a text field. (?!) There really isn’t a place for those, and I can’t think of a use for it… maybe music library search? They should move it to the bottom, like it is on portrait mode:

Portrait !! Toolbar

Not in the way of anything, leaving space for a clock/notification icons pane, much like current Maemo 5 portrait mode (the phone app :P)

Yep, that was it! Fancy stuff, fancy stuff.

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Notes on the N900, on Maemo et al.

Maemo family.

So! I got an N900 last week! It is awesome and stuff, and so I held off writing about it until I thought I was more or less familiar with the inner workings of Maemo and stuff, even though I played a lot with my N800, lots of things changed for Maemo 5. I’ll list my experiences with it, coming from an Symbian (formerly S60 lol) background, because making a full blown review would be redundant this far into the game.

Hardware:

  • My first phone ever with a QWERTY keyboard, and it’s great. Complaints: no ~ key, so I have to go Fn+Sym to pick it on the touchscreen. Meanwhile keys are “wasted” on € and £ (I know I know, only one layout for all English speaking countries, still.)
  • The off center spacebar doesn’t bother me at all, as even on my laptop, the right side of the spacebar key seems to be the most worn out one, it just felt natural to me.
  • My last Nokia slider was an original N95, so it’s great to see that the slider here actually feels solid. If I were to point one fault with it, is that when it’s closed, there’s a slight amount of play on the bottom right corner of the phone.
  • The lock switch is small lol :( coming from the 5800, with its awesomely placed and shaped lock switch, that’s kind of bad. Thankfully there’s two other ways to unlock the screen, onscreen and sliding the phone open.

Built in software:

Speaking of unlocking your phone, this is something I really didn’t like, with all the possibilities of an unlocking screen (tap two different places in the screen to unlock, draw a pattern, etc) they had to go with the iPhone-ish swipe thing?

Lame.

Unlocking the screen, you get to the homescreen.

My current desktop.

First thing: I didn’t grow used to the Panorama Desktop thingy, I keep just one pane active. Mostly because it remembers the last pane you were at when you unlock the phone, I guess I just like to know what I’ll see first thing when grabbing the phone. Oh well.

Also, you’ll see I removed the now playing widget. Mostly because it doesn’t open the full media player when you tap play, giving an illusion of it being a separate player, but when you close the full media player in the Dashboard, the music stops. Kinda confusing. The music player also gets jumpy on high CPU load (really high), when I’m downloading something using transmission for example, the music skips.

Last complaint about the music player: those really shouldn't be behind the options menu. :P

On the other hand, everything else is awesome :D The browser is the awesomeness, Email + Nokia Messaging works brilliantly for my Gmail account (getting stuff even before my desktop email application), the image editing options in the gallery are great. The whole concept of the Conversations app is fantastically done. I have nothing but praise really.

Except maybe Ovi Maps. It’s not bad per se, but it’s hard when I have high expectations from using the Symbian version for so long.

Oh, and someone make a in-device search app, kthx.

3rd party applications and modification:

Ah, now here’s where Maemo really shines. Ever since I saw that OpenOffice running on an N900 picture, I knew this was the platform to look for. But for now, let me start from the simpler ones:

  • From my screenshot, I have Custom Operator Name Widget. Sometimes I have it set to display lyrics, or a witty quote, or whatnot, love being able to edit it. (Right now I have it to display “T-Mobile” instead of the regular alphatag “T – Mobile” (notice the spaces) lol)
  • cpumem-applet displaying current CPU and memory load, great to see if some new app you downloaded is hogging all the CPU, and it’s visible mostly everywhere.
  • Remember all that noise I made about the iSearch/Q Search widget for S60? :P Someone finally got it right, and made a simple and editable search widget, TouchSearch.

Going opening the menu I have this

I stuck the Ovi store shortcut in more, promoted App. Manager to the top level and added a Games folder (I love Games folders). I wanted to hide the Camera icon (because there’s two other ways of launching it lol) but couldn’t get myself to break the harmony further. Here’s my Games folder icon (copied myself from the .svg, that’s why the ugly borders) and a talk.maemo.org post with an instructions .pdf on how to modify hildon.menu Anyway, let’s list what I got installed:

  • In the games folder: Angry Birds, Bounce, DrNokNes, Gweled (Bejeweled clone), MasterGear, VGB and VGBA (I love emulators) (where’s my Genesis emulator developer people where~)
  • Enhancements to the device (aka stuff that should be here in the first place): fMMS (lol), FM Radio, GPSJinni (think the GPS Data application from Symbian that actually displays latitude and longitude) and Petrovich (send stuff)
  • Then real other applications, Mauku, XChat, Transmission, among others. It’s amazing, that’s the full XChat, the full Transmission etc, just like on desktop computers. (only with interface modifications to work better on a phone, of course) Downloading a series with Transmission and watching it on mplayer without leaving your phone is awesome.

Community:

You might have noticed I linked to maemo.org a lot, and really, it is a huge part of the allure of this platform. You can have conversations with application developers on talk.maemo.org, read community sourced guides on the wiki, submit platform bugs on bugzilla and chat with people on #maemo at freenode.

I’ve already submitted bug reports on the forum, and one to bugzilla (go vote for it!), but my favorite thing happened on the irc channel. I went there and just asked if there was a possibility of running this (SSH tunnel manager) on the N900. A couple moments later someone links me to this

gSTM running using Easy Debian.

Quite amazing huh?

Wrap-up:

Closing this fast because I’m going up to 1000 words. The N900 and the Maemo platform are great, they’re incomplete for now (MMS, portrait mode, etc), but really, just looking at desktop software being ported with ease and the community behind it, I can tell this is the right platform to bet on.

P.S. This went past my radar, the V40 firmware for the 5800 is hackable again! Just did it to mine yesterday, so it can go to retirement in peace. Or something.

P.P.S. It took me forever to write this, and I’m sure I forgot something I wanted to talk about, so as always, I’ll be updating this post if I remember more stuff.

Update Feb/15:

And a very important one, too. So, Nokia and Intel are merging Maemo and Moblin into MeeGo. I still don’t know what to think of this announcement, besides that it’s a shame they’ll throw the Maemo branding away, after maemo.nokia.com is so well done and laser shooting penguins. Plus there’s the whole ARM vs X86 architecture, will Intel be cool with devoting itself to an ARM platform? And finally, Maemo is based on Debian, Moblin on Fedora, this will probably get in the way somehow. (packages, maybe?)

So yeah, this announcement might make a lot of sense, as two powerhouses making a single OS (hosted and approved by the Linux Foundation nonetheless!) instead of two underfunded side projects, but still, it changed my view from “best platform evur!!1″ to “wait and see” for Maemo.

Welp watch me coming here a couple months from now saying “zomg MeeGo is the best thing ever” or something, I’ll be enjoying my N900 meanwhile.

P.S for the update: Nokia also showed Symbian^3 concepts at MWC, looks kinda cool too, you guys~

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WordPress for Nokia is looking kinda amazing! (or, Qt and the future of Symbian)

I started this post on the 5800, true facts.

WordPress.org announced they were going to make a mobile app “for Nokia.” (that means Qt based targeting both Symbian and Maemo) There’s an early, feature incomplete development version on dev.nokia.wordpress.org, and it’s kinda amazing! The app’s interface really feels like its iPhone and Android counterparts (in terms of how it’s structured, not how it looks, of course), and the installer is just 217kb. And if they manage to get the same code to run on Maemo and Symbian just as nicely, it will be the first major 3rd party app to prove Nokia’s “code for Qt easily, deploy anywhere” idea. Exciting times.

P.S. Yeah it looks awful, wait for Symbian^3 if you want it to look native~ (good if those N98 rumors floating around are real)

P.P.S. I got an N900! Waiting until I complete one week of ownership to put down some thoughts about it. Liking it a lot so far though!

Update: There’s a Maemo built out, tried it and it is essentially the same application. And despite some different pop up menus and some er… overall whiteness of the app, it looks just native.

You know the menus that appear on tapping on the application title bar? Yeah, those are white. Odd.

Qt is going places y’all.

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Oh hey, Ovi Maps is now free (also new 3.03 build)

Free!

In a pretty important piece of news, Nokia made all their Ovi Maps services free of charge today. Imagine all the fuss around Google Maps Navigation. Now imagine that for around 20 million phones (none of this Droid/Nexus One only shenanigans), all over the world (none of this US only shenanigans), with preloadable maps (none of this data connection requirement even when roaming shenanigans). This is huge.

But of course, people don’t come to this place to read news (hahaha), so here’s my impressions of the new app. (labled v3.03 10wk01 b05 MW on the about dialog, 3.03 build 246 on the .sis (lol version numbers) there was a old 3.03 labled 3.1 for press purposes, too)

Browsing around

  • The brought back Browse categories after not having a way to access them on Maps 3.01
  • You can browse around by looking at the map, but if you accidentally go back to the main menu (the first picture on this post), there wasn’t a way to go back to where you were in the map on 3.01. Now you can just tap “Find places” then tap the Map softkey, or the map area to return to it.
  • I don’t know if this is new for 3.03 or 3.01, but there is now a (British) English voice that reads street names (“Turn left at Main Street” instead of just “Turn left”). That was a common complaint people had in comparison with other navigation apps. Glad Ovi Maps finally has it now.
  • Lifecasting (posting location to Facebook) isn’t N97 only anymore. Didn’t work here though, kept refusing my Facebook credentials for some reason.

I tested the street name reading today, just to check it, and it did pronounce most names correctly, though it screwed up on Napier Ave (it’s nay-pier)

Oh, and of course it would be much better just to have a “View map” icon on the main menu, as pretty much all dedicated sat navs have, but oh well. (<-do this Nokia)

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