Handful of Nothing

I think I miss listening to the Cranberries :)

As some people know, I work for INdT where we develop a couple of applications for
Maemo, and we are really fans of the platform and the whole linux mobile in general. So when I read about the contest it was clear I should make a internal competition with the members of the design team. Here is team.M first works, and of course I said it’s not good to be submitted :) This team is based in Manaus (in the amazon) and it’s composed by 3 really nice guys: Miguel, Abrãao and Glauber. Here is their first iteration on the brands:

This is their message about the candidate for entries (they need to be approved by me after some modifications etc):

“We would like to start this post saying that branding design is not
our main area of expertise or business. Knowing that, what we’ve done
was try to apply some graphic design principles to accomplish
something that may look rather simple but is in fact one of the most
complex things in the design field: Construct a visual identity. As
every design process should, we have started the job by doing some
research on the topic, our goal was to define “what means maemo.org to
its users, what values does it represent?”. After doing some internet
research, digging a lot in the forums and conducting a survey with a
bunch of developers, we ended up with the following characteristics,
aspects, keywords and etc for maemo.org:

People, Freedom, Mobility, Internet, Nokia ITT, Linux, Technology, Nokia, Internet, Challenging, Nerds, Fun, Share… and so on.

With these in mind, we gave a look at the alternatives that were
produced so far for contest and in some famous, and not so famous,
logos to avoid “copying”. I hope we did our homework well. After that
we gathered our design group over a rounded table and generated the
biggest number of alternatives we could, nothing was discarded, no
devil advocate was allowed. With a lot of paper in our hands we did a
old technique to let creativity flow: Every member of the group got
one alternative sheet from the pile and had a small time (15 min.) to
make some “improvements” over the alternatives he liked and then pass
the paper to the designer next to him. We keep doing that until all
the alternatives were reviewed.

With half of the process gone, we selected the best alternatives with
the help of some good willed developers and went to the computer. There
we still did some small changes over the main idea, defined the logos
final appearances(plain and fluffy) and illustrated some use cases for
them, like application over t-shirts and caps. That may be not the end
of the road, but we think that we are on the right way.

People Involved:
Abraão Affonso
Glaubert Oliveira
Miguel Peres
And a lot of nice developers
”

——-

Wow! that’s a huge headline :) Well after seeing / reading some big consultancy companies going back to the desk to work on their iPhone sales prediction, because they remembered that small detail that MOST OF THE WORLD is not the US… I will try to make a small comparison for people to understand with my other hobby : Guitars.

What guitars has to do with mobile phones or the iphone sales? Well… As I explained in the other post, iPhone cannot sell a lot in a lot of countries because of price. People then said “Are you dumb? it’s only 199 now, in some countries it’s even free!”. yeah yeah yeah, but is it free or 199 without contract? No! So how much it would cost? something around 500 US they say. But wait.. we are talking about imported products, and for that I give you the Guitar example:

This is my consumer dream nowadays : A Steve morse signature guitar:

It cost 1.4k USD. today’s exchange rate is at 1.6 BR$ for each dolar, so this would give us the final price of 2240 BR$. The same could be applied to the iphone, at 500 USD, going for only 800 BR$. Affordable :)

But then enter a common 3rd world / emergent country taxes crushing style customs! And your 1.4k dollars guitar has turned into this:

Yes. you saw it right, 8.300 Br$ (and this is cheaper than the official distributor recommends) so we are talking about 5243.12 USD :) Magic? No baby just taxes over taxes :) This is actually better than the ps3 case that I talked when it was launched, the ps3 at 599 got here for 8k also.

So, 5k Dolars :) you can by a round trip with hotel for the US, buy 2 guitars, come back, pay all the taxes, and sell one guitar and you will have the 5k back and 1 guitar. Magic.

Now, what about a 500 USD phone? Even with the 199 USD you can compare with other eletronics: the Wii costs 249 right? Here in Brazil it costs 1.599, or 1000 USD :) So the best price for the iPhone will be something at 500 USD WITH contract (I’m putting here that the carrier will make it free, but it will have to pay the taxes to import the phone) and the minimum salary is 2 times lower than this :)

I was looking the entries for the Maemo logo and I was really happy to see how many people have contributed already. But I also gave some laughs, because I could recognize at least 6 or 7 famous brands there :) Amazon, Palm, Engadget, etc and 2 guys being hanged by the neck! :) In the end I’m happy to see people giving their shot on the future maemo looks, and for sure we will contribute with some options :) after all we are the fuffly fuffly-ui-dudes :) Anyhow I think Maemo really needs this revamp, and I hope more people contribute to make this a great brand. My advice as a graphics professional? Be simple :) We are brazilians, but the European way of less is more is always great to start with :)

Carman, our fully open source project here at OpenBossa Labs, aims to give tablet users the chance of analyzing their Car’s OBDII protocol was on “hold” for a while with no new versions announced. The fact was that just like Canola, the whole INdT team was going over a lot of changes so the projects were hit by that.

Anyways we were not stopped, and Carman indeed received a lot of love, but it could have used a little bit more. The first thing was the obvious “closer” relationship with Canola. The new version is not integrated, but is indeed full EFL based and respects the same approach as Canola on GUI design. More important than the visual is the addition of several new features, one of my favorites is the Trip report. This little feature will enable you to record all your trips or telecommutes to analyze for example best route, with lower consumption, lower engine stress and give you the chance to compare 2 very similar routes (like I have 2 - 11km and 13km possibilities here, but one of them is really better even on consumption: 13km, just because the engine is less stressed the whole way)

Also we tried to give a real “renew” on the visual design, bringing a really outstanding, best-of-class graphics to Maemo, and I can guarantee, it’s going to be the most gorgeous application for Internet Tablet. If you do not believe me take a look in those images below : (these are the final Visual design being implemented) the goal is really to create a custom look, trying to give freedom for theme makers to adapt Carman for several Car models. This themes were crafted by Nando Sperb, a incredible designer working in carman Project.

In the future, we still want to connect Carman and Canola, have both as opensource and this is the first step.

Please, waste a little minute of your life to read this : http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/16/heres-whats-going-to-happen-to-apples-rivals/ and then come back to the non-alienated world outside the US.

Fact: I am a huge apple fan. Fact: I do use the iPhone. Fact: I do use OsX. Fact: I know a lot of mobile phones. So let’s go:
Not using only the “Nokia sells more than apple in single day” argument, the point is: Apple has a head start on the single smaller niche of the market: the high end phones. Also: Even on that niche, there’s still people that think that they need physical keyboards or a working bluetooth (so their small laptop can go to the internet once they are in the country for example). Also there’s a bunch of people who like to add media in a little bit free way, like just inserting a usb cable and copying inside the card. Likewise there’s people who want a little bit better reception and a camera that takes better pictures(like the sony ericssons).

With that on the line, and after you expend a little more time reading the comments the conclusion is the following:

Apple will indeed have a great year. But has someone noticed that the same success level that Apple had in the US was not achieved in the other countries? That only countries that are more american-like (Status-driven etc) like Brazil, will be able to replicate it, when others (parts of Europe, India, most of china) will continue with their own choices of phones (mainly durability, pre-paid cheap phones, etc)? Does anyone reported that Symbian, even with all it’s flaw still selling a lot of phones and by no ways in the universe will be staring at apple without moving?

Please people! Get your grips on! It will be a nice competition, on the high end section, but as everything it is also subjected to a possibility of failure in several other market, and the whole early adopter community can also be dragged in the future to more open devices like the future android enabled ones. The market scenario will be a lot more complicated than the iPod was for apple. iPhone will never never hit 20% market share in the world. This would mean nobody uses anything besides iphone on the high end category, what we all know is just like to say that nobody is going to use anything but the ipod ever again.

There’s just no space in the world for another monopoly like MS windows. I don’t believe that after all this bla bla bla about long tail, people believes that one product, with just storage space variation will be the doom of it’s competition.

So finally the 3G iphone hit the shelves. Already a lot of people pissed off because there’s no front camera, or better bluetooth support or this or that. I barely read those topics. I went straight to the thing that catch my attention: the MobileME. While it looks just like a new clothing to .mac + mobile sync, it’s actually looking quite similar to OVI from Nokia. I maybe be wrong, but at least in some part (I think OVI will be a little bit bigger and cover a lot of field not covered - games, maps) but if you put together, application store + itunes store + mobileMe it’s almost like OVI. Now comes the thing: does it worth 99 dollars / year? Are you going to buy it? For us here in Brazil, 99 is just a little bit too much, but it makes more sense than paying 99 for .mac.

It’s going to be interesting now to see the fight going over the User experience field more than ever: Who’s going to provide this “technology-internet-savvy” user with the best experience? Nokia OVI or Iphone + MobileME?

Update: It was good to see that some of the design flaws I complained a lot were solved for this issue. The main one was in the industrial design : weak reception. this time apple’s placed a plastic cover on the back, this will for sure improve the signal strength. Also I complained a lot about the lack of mass item deletion. The new email also brings that. (I’m not saying that they saw any of this here) I’m just happy to see that even with all the things that were out, they still paying attention to a lot of details that, in the end, makes the difference.

blogo
Is a really great small application with a very simple interaction design that just works really flawlessly on amateur’s blogging workflow.

If you have a couple of blogs and a twittwe account this may be of some help. Or at least save you a couple of megabytes in virtual memory that you would spent with the browser.

May 19th, 2008

Hello people! After a long delay we are back with a slightly bigger update, now even with a smaller team.
We managed to get the two most desired features into this release, but please bare in mind that they are
appearing for the first time, so we will need your help debugging and reporting problems so that we can
iron out the bugs.

Instructions:

Already a Canola user? Just click on the “Check for updates” button in the Application manager and wait for the Beta9 to appear!

Before running Canola, make sure you install all of the Canola related updates.

Most notable changes:

UPnP streaming is here now you can install the plugin that will allow you to browse UPnP capable media services and stream (photo, video, audio) as requested.
Canola is no miracle maker, so make sure that your videos are already in good resolution and your pictures are not insanely big to avoid slow performances over your network.

(1) A new icon with the name “Media servers” will show up at Canola’s home screen as soon as you have installed the UPnP plugin. (2) Inside Media servers, “Search servers” (3 and 4) will let you browse available UPnP devices.

Support for playlist creation! Simply press and hold a song in order to add to the dinamical
“On the Move” playlist later saved as a real playlist if you like. You are able to save as many playlist as you like, as well as edit them. More features will be coming in a near future.

(1) When you enter Canola’s “My music” section your whole song library is at your disposal. (2) If you press and hold a song the song will be added to the “On the Move” playlist. (3) The “On the Move” is found within the “Playlists” section of My music. (4) At the “On the Move” you also able to remove songs from playlists and even save your modified playlist by accessing the options menu.

Tune Canola2 using a new plugin Now you don’t need to use another application for managing cover arts and video thumbnails. The standalone 3rd party Canola Tuning application has been turned into a plugin that integrate seamlessly into Canola and give you more control over your cover arts, video thumbnails by allowing you to update and delete unused cover arts as well as select your cover art sources.

(1) The cover arts and video thumbnails can be updated simply by accessing an option found in the settings panel. (3) You can even choose your favorite place to download covers. (4) This feature can also be accessed directly from within the album art screen, found in “My music”.

Better List handling, in order to reduce miss clicks during scrolling : Please, let us know if it works better for you. We will keep improving based on your feedback.

Other Additions / Fixes :

- You can now change the volume using the hardware keys on your internet tablet, not just when using the player, but everywhere in Canola.
- Pre-added internet media is added in new installations, which will bring you a nice selection of photocasts, internet radio stations as well as podcasts. Enought to get you started, exploring these features of Canola.
- More stream URIs supported for internet radio, which allows more radio stations to be added.
- An annoying PNG thumbnail bug has been fixed, which should make some of you happy.
- Several dozens of bugs has been fixed during the release cycle, and Canola should be considerable more stable.
- Many interface gliches and corrections were made, resulting in API change. If you are a plugin author, you will need to update your plugin accordantly.

Note: If you have extra themes and plugins installed, make sure to update them as well, at the
Add ons section.

What’s known, and what’s coming:

We already know that UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) support is not top of the notch, so please be kind and share your problems with us, so that this component is able to evolve. Also, we highly suggest you to use streaming optimized media as well a good UPnP server.
We follow Nokia’s recommendation: SimpleCenter. It’s a free download and runs on Windows. If you are on Linux, FUPPES does the job, but you’ll need to organize the shared media to appear as good as possible. Missing points: the media has no thumbnails and it’s not possible to differentiate visually one kind of file from another. So make sure you have organized your contents into distinct folders.

Coming before beta 10:
- Highly improved YouTube plugin; sorted results, support for comments, log in to your account, leave comments etc.

Coming in beta 10:
- FM radio
- Search on lists
- Better list navigations (search, jumps, alphabetical grid)
- Simpler grid for photos and album art, to ease use by allowing alphabetical grouping and to improve speed in some cases

It was just amazing :) don’t miss the next one!!!

So we received the last test build friday and we got pretty excited because it’s already on release shape. So expect an update monday or tuesday :)

Why took it so long this time?
Compared with the other releases, yes it took more time, but some guys left the company (all luck to both in their brand new company) and we were re-organizing ourselves to deal with 3 new projects. The team responsible for the Canola, has actually grown, but Canola team doesn’t exist anymore :) Actually it has always been the “Concepts Team” and Canola and Carman were the only public applications. Before that you probably played the “Blocks” (tetris-like games), the port of Doom, the improved Chess bundled game, the first port of abiword and gnumeric, maemomyth, videocenter, Video Converter, just to name some of public projects, but across our small office.

Now the team needs to deal again (like in Canola2) with simultaneous projects so we needed help. Gathering together the buddies from another office (Manaus) we are now becoming a slightly bigger team, but the productivity speed will only come with time.

So, what’s coming?
Apart from the usual big package of debugging, we are finally deploying the test version (because it has never been public tested) UPNP support :) YES! The original project still far from what we needed, so Chenca took the lead and ported the old support to a Canola2 plugin format and now you will be able to use it. Please forgive us for the simplicity and the lack of controller profile but we did our best in the time available. Improvements for sure will come.

Also, we took a lot of the recommendations from the Users in the internet tablet talk forum and you gonna get a lot of asked features. Example being the youtube : Sort results, comments, log in to your account etc. Also better error handling, and fixed some situations that were not dealt before.

One of my favorite new features is the Canola tuning integration. Everything will be there. It’s going to be needed only to download the small plugin that “binds” the cover download to a source( Amazon, last.fm) the rest (id3, folder) will be already there integrated. Also the new list is being integrated and we expect to reduce the error when scrolling to the lowest rate possible.

There’s also a small effort in some improvements on the loading time, and more great things to come in beta10, like choice to change the picture view layout to simple grid (as well the cover art) and for those seeking speed the choice to see only 2 rows of pictures instead of 3, better navigation in the list (point to jump across the list) and finally a lot of small fixes to better support plugins. From the serious ITT posted bugs, we killed already the libseet0 problem and the battery problem described by HAL has been found and it’s being solved!

I hope everyone who uses canola enjoy this new upcoming update, and give us as much feedback as possible so we can improve for beta10.

Ok, enough of Canola2… Some links
Today, enjoy a full saturday of playing guitar and browsing the web between the technic exercises, I came across this nice desktop tablet concept that would really solve my problem of space. I think the foldable display is just genius when you want to move from digital do analog work (drawing?) and better yet if you’re doing other kind of activities just like old-style studies :).

Speaking of Concepts, looking at Frog Design’s new concept (the mask) brought my attention to the subject: how important or how relevant should be a concept? Of course when you think of Concept cars, they are there in expositions and they end up being implemented in some way (fully, only details, etc) but when you do some concept that is really far away and sometimes even worse: has been already described in some science fiction novel is it worth it? Or companies are just looking for publicity? I ask that because I really want to setup a blog for me and my team mates to post concepts (not like the mask) but a little bit more realistic ones. Are they going to start discussions on the concept itself or just bring some “this is not possible” comments?

I hope the rest of the year will be as good as the last 6 months. :) Now just 2 more years to reach mach 3 :)

After a couple of years working on a mainly developer based company, it has been quite nice to see the Design team to grow and show it’s value in the last year. But one problem has arrived for us here in Brazil: There’s not available professionals around.

I know nowadays everyone is facing problems in hiring good professionals but my point is that here you can always find only web-oriented guys. Not that there’s a problem in hire by talent, but I really see the day when I will hire a intern that did a lot of real user interface during his university. The courses in Brazil were first focused on graphic design, then on digital design (mainly web) and now I think that there’s a chance to influence the academia to the real interaction design, or even better to the user experience area.

For me it’s clear that UX is the umbrella of almost all design subjects thus it has a lot of potential of gathering interest from the students, but for sure they need some vision that there will be market for them to really dive into the idea.

That’s why I’m quite happy to be involved in some work with the Universities, that were only giving scholarships to Computer Science students and now is including the Design students as well.

It’s crucial to give the design students the same kind of challenge we give to the computer guys to prepare them better to the real life challenges in this increasingly digital and interactive market.

I think soon enough We can have some more interaction design oriented courses like there are already in some other countries. I will do my best to do my small part on this as good as possible.

By Krisse:

You see Canola as over-simplified, but I see Hildon as over-complicated. I think the reason we disagree is because we have totally different ideas about the kind of person that would be a potential tablet user.

I would just change that to not use the actual things, but what they represent : Canola would be replaced by a task / simplified user experience to the Hildon as “desktop-like more featured experience”.

Sorry for the prolific post before :/ Thanks Krisse, to point out everything in 2 lines.

Apart from the title, that is just to grab your attention I really wanted to make sure some people understand one thing: Knowing how to criticize is a crucial thing to have your message heard. Also I wanted Maemo Developers and some heavy users to know another thing: The most important thing your software or your device must have is a target group, the group to which you design and develop your user interfaces.

So, the guys over tabletschool, were very kind with our project, but What I want to talk is on the end :

There’s been a lot of rather strong feedback (EXTREMELY strong, some of it!) for this article already, which is the main reason the ITS has avoided editorials. :-)

This would make me sad, if I was not surrounded by great Developers (physically or in the net - IRC, Gtalk) that are concerned with more than their own belly button. Let me clarify some thing that may help you understand better what is “User Centered Design”:

We picked a user profile. We analyze their needs, We see the competitors, We try to solve the USERs problem and most important: we try to solve that “User” profile problems, not EVERYONE’s problem. Why? Because it’s simply impossible to do so.

With that said, I then ask all the thumbs down guy here on maemo planet to read the following sentence:

“If you don’t agree with the basic concept behind canola, the simplicity and focus on consuming not editing, then Canola is not for you.”

But hei! What is the beauty of open platforms? : You have choice. You have the Hildon UI, you have KDE so you’re actually more well served than those users that do not care for the 95% of features you miss in Canola or any other simplified UI. They care about User oriented interfaces, not a powerhouse interface, and I can be wrong with that but the massive amount of emails I receive gives me the hint that there are a lot of user who wants the simplicity way.

Don’t get me wrong, this is like Itschools not about technical matters. I’m the one here in the company who says: I don’t care what Acronym you’re going to use, I just want the best user experience with everything that we can do on it. I want the cherry on top of the user’s pie. If you don’t think it’s important, pass it forward there are a lot of people that do care about.

And just to make clear: ~80% of the email asked for features, complained about bugs, requested improvements but none asked to include regular UI elements on the software. Why? They understood the goal.

So please, stop felling “hurt” when people talks good things about things you don’t agree. I think Hildon is a desktop like UI, and thus provide a desktop like experience. Canola tried to fill the other gap. If users think they should have more Canola, it’s their rights, as much as you think Hildon should “be ok for them”. It’s not. That’s why the use Canola (or the other apps) and that’s why We focus on python development. Because we believe we need to do more, in a simple and python give us that power.

And about the whole Canola thing: If you also really want to criticize, I know it takes time, but read the forums in ITT. Look at our way of dealing with users. We do treat them as co-developers. We do listen, we do change. But we stick to our goal.

Also to make clear another thing, this time for the tabletschool: http://tableteer.nokia.com/tableteer/os2008/team_marcelo.xhtml, INdT stands for : Nokia Technology Institute and Canola only exists because Nokia indeed wanted it to exist. As I said Canola is in opposite direction to Hildon, but that doesn’t mean Hildon is not good. It just means that the user focus is different.

Concluding: Please understand the concept of user centered design, before trying to compare things. And please be ok with the fact that it was not made for you. As it probably was not made for the one who made it. Or do you really thing all the Devs in the team were happy to hear me shout that the thing was not “smooth” and fluffly enough?

There’s a LOT MORE after the click :) But please, bare in mind that the topic here is not about Canola, or hildon or this or even your taste. It’s about being humble enough to figure out that sometimes you may not be the target.