Hello everybody.

N900 release was delayed a bit, but you shouldn’t be upset cause this only means that Nokia cares bout end quality of the product and don’t want to give you half-cooked buggy brick. Meanwhile community developers have more time to polish their existing software (like we’re doing with OMWeather) and even create new one.

Community member Martin Grimme, also known as PyCage is working on FM radio application for n900 and I’ve decided to help him with it and create something visually appealing and easy to use.

But first I’d like to thank everyone that have donated money to our Other Maemo Weather team. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve donated – the fact of your attention itself is very important to us that keeps us on track.

In random order:

Sven Muentel
Ralph Angenendt
Ziling Zhao
Zane Farooq (We got your request, will do our best :))
Marcello Bellini
Sami Kyöstilä
Randall Arnold
James Thompson

Thank you very much, we will do as much as possibe to continue work on OMWeather.

So, let’s check out brand new FM radio app.

Forget about that boring radio UI from n800 – today it’s the time for something intuitive and cool looking. Current UI mimics old-fashioned radio “ruller” . Pan around it to tune the station. That’s basicaly the only feature you’ll need, but we decided to add some additional functionality.

These dot marks are saved radio stations. When you tune one you will se either saved name or RDS stream if supported on the bottom. Tap that label to open up favourites menu. If the station is not in the list – you can add it (in real life just double tap on the label – easy) and if it’s already in the list – you can remove it (with confirmation).

Same menu will be opened if you click the station frequency number and it will show you list of all saved stations.

If you have found station that’s not in the list – you’ll see “save station” instead of label – try to guess what you have to do to save this station :)

And the last one bit of extra functionality is location selector. Tap the application’s title to open it. If you travel alot and a radio fan the same time – you can add location you’re going to, for example, download the list for it (or add stations manually) and start using radio in another city right on arival.

Also we’re planning to add “stream recording” option later so you can, you know, record FM stream :D

Well, that’s all for now, your opinions are highly appreciated as always, it’s only you that can make your life better so don’t loose your chance and ask for functionality right here and now.

Thanks for reading and good luck.

Hello everyone.

Last couple of weeks was full of great news connected with Maemo Community. Great Maemo Summit in Amsterdam, 300 devices for participants, Nokia Developer Device Program revealing with addition of quite positive reviews of n900 (even with pre-production software) – all this stuff is breathing fresh air and blood into Maemo Community, hope we’ll se the results of these hype soon. As for me I have both good and unfortunately bad news so please, read this post right to the end – it’s important. But let’s start with good. Latest OMWeather release, that was connected with Fremantle Stars program was made without my participation (for some really weird reasons, but whatever) but now Stars program is over and I’m back to my duties :)

I’d like to present you the preview of new OMWeather for Fremantle that will bring you fresh ways to view, manage and customize your weather information. Let’s begin with main view, it has lot’s of changes in user interface.

As you can see, main view no have “card” system. Pan left or right to view basic information bout current conditions. Click source logo to refresh data or “settings” to configure your widget. To jump between different stations just tap the title to enter touch selector with all your set stations, without any limitations.

But that’s not all. If you want to see detailed info bout each day – now you don’t need to click anything multiple times: just rotate your device into portrait mode and here it is – all detailed info right in front of you. Navigate through it with panning aswell.

Now let’s move to the settings. Now it’s a single screen with all settings stacked into sections – easy and intuitive, optimized for both portrait and landscape use.

For example, if you want to change background opacity – tap on it in the list and you’ll see the pop-up with all controls you need:

As for the station management, it haven’t changed much, just got some optimizations for multi-orientation use.

Well, that’s all for good part, let’s talk bout bads.

Short talking: We can’t make all of this stuff. Our team has three lead developers, Vlad Vasiliev (andministration, programming), Pavel Fialko (heavy programming) and me, Andrew Zhilin (design). And only one of us luckly have new tablet (for 6 months and only because Vlad participated in Maemo Summit, nothing special). It would be fine but Vlad has made huge ammount of work to bring you OMWeather to the new Maemo 5 OS before mass release and he deserves some rest. As for Pavel and me – we’d be honest – we don’t have enough money to afford n900, even with DDP (Pavel don’t have even that). Simple discount calculations give us the result that we’ve earned $5 a month for the most popular Maemo app up to date. So now it’s time to ask for help.

We have created PayPal account for you donations. it’s not even a donation for the past work we’ve done, cause we did it for fun, it’s an investment in the future that you’ve just saw above. So if you have some spare cash – don’t be shy – make an investment!

Important update: link is fixed now!

Also you’re free to promote this post in every single Maemo related source you can.

Thank you very much for reading, see you soon. I hope.

Hello everybody.

Today I’d like to proudly present you the result of Google Summer of Code developement cycle from my good friend — Max Usachev.

He was working at porting something very useful and unique to the maemo platform — card-based education app called “Mnemosyne”
and I’ve gladly helped him with visual appearance of this port and I’d like to show you the results. But first of all some facts bout Mnemosyne itself.

The Mnemosyne software resembles a traditional flash-card program to help you memorise question/answer pairs, but with an important twist: it uses a sophisticated algorithm to schedule the best time for a card to come up for review. Difficult cards that you tend to forget quickly will be scheduled more often, while Mnemosyne won’t waste your time on things you remember well.

Maemo port is a full-featured stand-alone app with touchscreen oriented interface. Let’s start from the general screen:

Learn is the main mode, where you’ll interact with various kinds of cards, trying to improve your skills and knowledge. For example, you can not only try to remember words, but also sounds or pictures:

When you’ll hit “Show answer” – you can rate your answer from 0 to 5, so if you’ll rate it 5, this card will appear much more rarely so you’ll be able to continue learning stuff without senseless repeating. Also you can easily edit, add or remove card right from this screen (if you suddenly remembered something or noticed the mistake)

Also you can do it Input mode with some advanced features.

You can create one-sided card (simple question/answer type), two-sided card (question and answer can appear randomly, very good feature for language learning), *closed* card (For example, you’ve typed in “*London” is the capital of *Great Britain*. Each word covered with * can be hidden or visible. It’s similar to “two-sided card” but you can use as much closed words as you like) and finaly – [transcription] card where you’ll need to pronounce the word and then listen to the right answer. Yes, there is a text-to-speech functionality! We’ll come back later o it.

Next important feature of Mnemosyne is syncing option. You can easily sync portable version with the desktop one and get all of your cards and stats right on the device.

Settings contain two tabs with options for text-to-speech and general settings.

Text-to-speech options

General settings

About andQuit buttons are really obvious and I can’t tell you a lot bout them :)

Expect Mnemosyne for Maemo soon in Extras near you :)

In conclusion I’d like to say that Max has made a hell of a job, fixing bugs, collaborating with desktop Mnemosyne developers and I’m really happy that I had a chance to help him with this awesome peice of software. That’s for reading, and good luck.

P.S.: Very special thanks goes to Ed Bartosh – without him this stuff won’t ever happen!

Hello all.

Just came up with little, but neat idea for Fremantle. It’s so little that I don’t even need “more…” tag :)

As we’ve already seen on various videos, flush screen of the n900 allows to detect very first pixels of the display that opens up the door to some neat interactions for example roll-over mode in web browser.

So what I propose is to use this thing as a customizable quick launcher for very essential applications for the user on the home screen. Just swipe from the left or right (or even up and down) on the home screen, just as you would do it to enable mouse pointer in browser, and gain access to the notes, media player, messaging or any other app you need.

Something like this:

Well, that’s all for now, feel free to discuss it in comments :) Thank you for reading.

Hello everyone.

Today I’d like to show you my idea about Fremantle desktop behaviour. As you remember, now it has cool feature called “Panorama desktop” that allows you to scroll through 4 different desktops with a simple flick of the finger. That idea is not something extraordinary or brand new but it’s really useful.

As for visualizing, Nokia has wisely chosen Android style with it’s neat effect called parallax scrolling.

Parallax scrolling is a special scrolling technique in computer graphics, seen first in the 1982 arcade game Moon Patrol. In this pseudo-3D technique, background images move by the “camera” slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in a 2D video game and adding to the immersion. The technique grew out of the multiplane camera technique used in traditional animation since the 1940s.

So, basically widgets are foreground objects and move a bit faster and background is, you know, background object and move slower.

For example I’ve made a small demo movie, that shows how it works (click image to view)

But since Android already uses it and we have a goal to showcase n900 incredible performance, I thought that it would be cool to add some more trickery to the background.

So, my proposal is to compose background (everything under applet’s plain) not with one plain with wall paper but with 2 or 3 and add each plain speed multiplier so the deeper it is the slower it moves. This would allow to make some incredible semi-interactive backgrounds without harming the performance (since each plain is just simple .png file, nothing serious). And if user wand to set up it’s own simple wallpaper – it will be applied to the front plain and it will work just fine.

We can go even deeper with ultimate eye-candies if we’ll add decoration layer above applet plain, that will provide cool feeling of third dimension.

Feel free to comment on this idea, or some other stuff. Thanks for reading.

Hello everybody.

Today I’d like to share my thoughts about upcomming Maemo 5 release (along with new highly anticipated hardware) and it’s window to the internet, in other words – browser.

First of all it’s cool to see “mouse over” mode (as I was calling it long ago, but haven’t got time to describe it in pictures though) in MicroB (Timeless said that it’s Maemo brower now :D) that allow you to hover above drop down menus without clicking unnecesarry links , that’s cool :)

But now I’d like to mention circular zoom feature. Well, maybe it sounded as a great idea for non-multitouch zoom and pretty unique too. But as you can see in various video demonstrations (or for yourself, lucky owners) it doesn’t work quite as it was expected to. It starts with some really bad looking page fluctuation and then starts to zoom in/out at some unpredictable speed. I’d like to show you how my vision on “fine zooming” in browser.

Basically it can be done one as the circular zoom – one handed with one finger but it can be more intuitive and user controlled aswell, just like pinch action.

First of all slide your finger from the right of the screen, just like you do it for “roll over” mode from the left.

Now just tap anywhere on the page to mark the center and move some part of the page to or from it. You can repeat moving as much as you want, it will not disappear until you tap the center again or zoom icon on the right. Same thing can be applied for rotation functionality (circle line will appear then)

Well, that was simple feature, so that’s all for now.

As always I’m waiting for your comments, thanks for reading, take care.

Hello everybody.

Today I’d like to show you some results of my work with Valério Valério on his famous BlueMaemo. We’ve done great ammount of job and I’m pretty happy with what we have  got. Mostly I’ve made just general restyling but some useful features was also added. Hope you’ll enjoy it too when it will reach your tablets and now let me show you what you can expect soon.

So, when you’ll launch fresh version of BlueMaemo you’ll immediately notice the difference. I thought it would be obvious to use blue color as the base. Also you can see that UI arrangement now looks exactly like upcomming Maemo 5 “Fremantle” UI. That was made to less confuse users with jumping “close” and “back” and helping them to get used to the new OS interface much faster. All menu options now have text labels for easier navigation. Connection status is now shown on the bottom cause wasting precious menu space on such a small function is bad. maemo.org logo is now improved too :P

Ok, let’s move on and look at some key changes in functionality. Let’s start with Mouse.

As you can see, trackpad now looks like actual trackpad. Buttons are at the bottom in places where user will expect them to be. Commonly used RMB and LMB now as large as on the real thing. Hold label will glow when you’ll activate it. Also notice a quick switch between mouse and keyboard on the top. It was made for all users without hardware keyboards (n800 for example) to make their operations faster. Let’s click it.

As you can see, keyboard changes are mostly visual, all acts the same. However, there is one small functional change – Esc and F12 keys are finaly there :D

Now let’s look at the mode that most of you are using BlueMaemo for – multimedia.

This mode is totaly revamped and enchanced. Now it looks just like you would expect to look media player controls. Now you have separate buttons for previous/next and rewind/fast forward if your player supports this functionality. Also you can see a “Profile” option. it was made for those users that want to control more than one player/media center application. For example different players for audio and video. Now you can adjust as many profiles as you want and switch them rapidly. Now let’s take a look at the gamepad mode.

It has profiles too and some more buttons were added without harming usability. Genesis fans will be happy :)

That’s definitely not all that we can show you and changes can be made anytime. Share your opinion bout Bluemaemo and this particular restyling, maybe you have some cool ideas to tell.

Thanks Valério for such a great maemo software and thank you for reading.

Hello everybody.

Today I’ve read an interesting discussion at http://talk.maemo.org about File Manager and kinetic finger scrolling. Quim mentioned that user won’t need to have a fast way to navigate thru loads of items in the File Manager cause all possible media will be arranged in specific applications like media player for music, image viewer for images and so on. Well, I think he’s right in some points but a handy way to navigate thru large ammounts of files without breaking your finger is always good. So I have an idea how to make everybody happy. And to concentrate on scrolling itself, I’ll show you my vision of built-in file chooser.

Let’s imagine you want to add an image to your mail.

So, when you click common “clip” button, you’ll see file chooser. Not image browser, media player or even file manager, simple file chooser. To my mind it would be pretty good to see initialy root folder of the device and a list of favourite folders, that were specified in full-featured file manager. It would give user quick access to particular folder that he uses for data storing without digging thru sub-folders.

Now, I need to attach a screenshot to my email. I quickly browse to media/screenshots and see

Now we have a finger friendly button to return to the parent folder that also acts as the name of the current folder in “pop-art” way, bunch of files with their properties and activated pop-up menu on the bottom. There you can choose what type of arrangement would you prefer, name, size, date or whatever you like. Small arrow button on the left switches arrangement mode.

And now we got to our main problem. If we have 500 screenshots in this folder, it would be too hard to reach Screenshot273.png . And this is where the magic begins. When user clicks the tiny scrollbar at the right, it switches in some kind of search mode that depends on what type of arrangement you’ve chosen. We have selected “arrange by name”, so it will show us first letter of the bottom item on the screen. Cool, but not enough for our case. So let’s add some intelligence into our scrollbar and let it show not only first letter, but also part of the name that actually changes with scrolling. And here it is, I can reach close to the screenshot273.png and then fine scroll to it.

Thanks for reading, hope you’ve enjoyed this article, stay tuned for more stuff!

Hey everybody.

Not long ago every maemo-related persom has seen sort of rumors from the mobilecrunch and especially cellpassion. The first one has pretty detailed description of the upcomming Maemo device and the second has “leaked” photo of it. I had some free time to redraw the device from that “leaked” shot and I’d like to say that it looks like fake. See for yourself:

The keyboard lacks of Fn and Char buttons so it’s definitely not the real device on the photo. Looks like Mobilecrunch has more correct details bout keyboard layout, but that’s not the reason to believe all these rumors around :) One thing is pretty clear – future device will rock.

P.S.: And yes, it’s a phone!1