OMWeather 0.3 preview and support

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.

Preview: Mnemosyne for Maemo

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.

Fremantle: Swipe launch.

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.

Fremantle: Parallax Background

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.

Fremantle: Browser zoom.

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.

Nokia E900.

Preview: BlueMaemo

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.

Fremantle UI: File Chooser

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.

Rover Rumors

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

“newstyle.maemo.org” Feedback Post

Hello world.

I’ve read on ITT forums that new style foe maemo.org is ready to be criticised by the community and is looking for feedback. As I’m a web-designer aswell, I thought that my feedback would be good advice for maemo.org guys. But I’d like to mention that I’m not the ultimate truth of any kind so it’s just my humble opinion.

So, here are 8 various mistakes in maemo.org fresh style from my point of view.