Planet INdT

Nokia 5800

It is not about putting touch and transitions. It’s about the whole package. It should be consistent, responsive, integrated and with visual clues to whatever you’re doing.

If you take time to look at the videos :
http://gizmodo.com/5058503/nokia-releases-5800-xpressmusic-tube-full-video-tour

What will strike you in the first seconds are several minor things that unfortunately ruin most of the experience, even the whole device / software looking quite solid:

a. Lack of responsiveness : 2 presses? Press and nothing happens for more than 1 second? Touch to zoom and it takes half a second?

b. Still carrying the past on it’s shoulder: Focus when there’s no focus? Ok, if you want to mix hardware controls with touch controls you can focus on another features but not on the list.

c. What is that pick? I am a guitar player, but to kill the stylus by putting a pick that is funny :) The portrait qwerty, the full qwerty the T9 and recognition are hitting that spot : Let’s try to please everyone. At least for me, IMHO this is where things get really ugly. Trying to please everyone is one of the most dangerous decision a design team can make.

d. Build on top of legacy: Ok you need to maintain S60 compatibility, but come on, s60 was not made for touch. Even with series90 the touch was not planned for fingers. Legacy is the worst nightmare of all.

e. the icons. Oh, the icons. The GUI icons for Camera, Video player and so on are really bad. I hope this are not the ones in the final package, but that looks so amateur :/ What is that recording light?

f. Transitions where is not needed, missing when needed : From one screen to the other a simple fade, but the selected item title slides up and decreases size to fit the former title space’s. Complicated.

g. Keyboard flying around? Consistency at least in the input method is key. The keyboard is supposed to be in the same place always, but if you look when adding a feed to your favorite friend, the keyboard goes to the middle of screen, with buttons bellow. Not good.

So, there’s a lot of things going on in the video, but they are there. At least Nokia didn’t trying to make the videos be something the device is not. The real deal seems to be there, and you know what you’re getting.

I will for sure try to use one soon, and post here if my impressions based on the video are right, and see if I can at least detail in really fine-grain level some of this small things, somebody can be reading and can be helpful!

We like to do UI for thumbs, but this is way too cool for school :) Nice work by the Panasonic guys. I specially like the thumbs on the screen. It’s sort of an cartoon-rendered-augmented-not-so-reality and it rocks :)

I need to visit some Asian technology event really soon :)

Last weeks I was at Qt Software’s (formely known as Trolltech) office in Oslo working a little bit with those amazing guys. I would like to thank everybody there for everything . It was an awesome time!

Well, talking about Oslo it’s obvious to say that I had a lot of time during the flights to hack Plasma! It was very good because I could understand a little bit more about Plasma script engine’s API and could finally make the QEdje Script Engine work 100%. Hmm…ok, maybe it need some love during package install to avoid the install of invalid files, but I’m working on this right now, right Aaron ? (just commited this fix: revision 866487)

It’s really nice to have a way to easily select an edje file and it automagically(tm) becomes an applet that can be used as a gadget. Of course QEdje needs some more love in order to support some more features from the original Edje as gradients and some other stuff, but the current version supports the most common use cases. Hey, and don’t be shiny…just git clone qedje (instructions at http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/qedje) and contribute to the project too =D.

While finishing the script engine I found some problems with Qt’s proxy widget. After some discussions with Alexis (darktears), Aaron and Thiago I finally understood the problem and was able to fix the segmentation fault: first I applied Alexis’s patch on Qt (it’s inside qt-copy now) and then used valgrind to understand the next problem I had. With that I just followed Aaron’s tip about setting the proxy’s widget to 0 (zero) just before deleting it in the script’s destructor. Just worked \o/ =D.

So, after some test and review it just went to kdebase as our friend CIA-54 (aka bot) told us:

<CIA-54> asouza * r866456 workspace/trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/ (6 files in 4 dirs):
<CIA-54> QEdje Script Engine arrives to kdebase
<CIA-54> Working version. Still needs improvements on package install to avoid
<CIA-54> install of invalid files.

Screenshot showing a lot of the kde logo edje animation on my desktop as well as canola’s deepblue theme (the player group) with it’s settings window (it has a preview so you can see what it’ll look like if you select that group).

my desktop

Next steps ? Wallpaper API !!!

Cheers!

Apple’s jewel was launched in Brazil in plans even worse that I believed:

Couple of weeks ago, I wrote about it here, here and I actually believed that it could exist a “free” iphone in really expensive plans. Poor me. I was really naive. More or less I was right :

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 :)

The cheapest iPhone will be way more than the any price out there. around 999 + monthly fees of more than 300 Reais. this is actually USD 550 for the device when paying more than USD 200 monthly. And please don’t forget that we are talking about a country with minimum salary of about USD 210. (of course those people are not even near the sight of the iPhone, only when they become second hand phones - but this is a subject for another post)

So, if you decided to pick the less expensive plan? this is what you pay:

For the iphone 8gb: 1499 ( USD 822) and the montly plan 52 ( USD28) but this gives you only 50 minutes of calls.

So you can compare it to the USD 199 8gb model in the US.

What About the data plans? No unlimited internet as expected in Claro, and the most expensive plan in the Claro carrier is for 200mb only. That’s a easy to beat limit. I would suggest do the math before joining because to pay 1.499 + 150 monthly and have only 200mb it’s really a turn off. If you go vivo the plans are way better, and there’s even the unlimited option for BR$ 308 (USD 169). Believe me it’s not a joke.

While I don’t need to say that I don’t have information to agree with this post, I need to admit that the phone is looking quite interesting.

For now I will only talk that a lot of ui design challenges that we faced are solved, and it was kind of funny and informative to see how google ui guys solved it, because there’s always a couple of ways to solve a problem:

a. The easiest, most obvious way. It works but has most of the time a higher cost in experience WoW
b. The medium way, where you try to bend the rules, increase the average experience and can make the difference
c. The really bold, where you will suffer critics to be really different, but those are the ones who can really make your product have personality and stand out from the crowd with a king.

Of course in the same proportion the risk of doing a incredible crap thing comes with the choice but you need them in today’s market, where the iphone is the standard for user experience.

The g1 seems to be on most of the time on the a, and just a little bit on b. You can see that most of the decisions are more on the safe side for obvious reasons, and while I disagree with a lot of details they are not in any way the “problematic” ones.

I think the point is that I was expecting more from google than the usually do, and what they do it exactly what they did with their other projects: really simple UI and sometimes (ok a lot of times more than sometimes) sparks of greatness that really can make the product be loved by a lot of users.

Now it’s time to wait to put the hands on the phone, but not being fan boy it will be for sure a real contender in the market :) The regular cellphone guys will soon know how much should they worry with the G1.

The Summit ended yesterday, We are waiting a couple of minutes to get the taxi to the airport. Tired but incredible satisfied. These days were the perfect opportunity to get to know a lot of people that I only knew through the web, and man… having a face on the nickname really improves the communication for me. Big thanks to the guys that didn’t get annoyed with me talking really heavily, as usual!

I hope the guys there liked my talk, where I presented more than the usual about us at Openbossa, the new brand debuted, and better than I expected, Ellen from KDE usability project and openusability was there :) As really a pleasure to meet her and to be able to talk a lot about how to take some of their projects also to Brazilian universities that we work with.

See you Monday night, already back to Brazil. The taxi just arrived :)

So, as every single time I tried to guess a date, the team found some critical (segmentation fault) bugs in the newer versions (updated EFL libraries) and then we are delaying the launch.

At least I will be announcing the counter point to that on the Maemo summit :)

Sorry again, and I can tell : we are actually moving now everyone from both teams along with other members to fix everything to make it less problematic. We will not rush to break devices :)

We don’t want to offend or look like a nerdy-ugly-only-boy-band

So Me, Etrunko, Aloisio, Glaubert and Marcio are almost Berlin, excited for this week’s agenda: Osim and Maemo summit. Our main goal there will be of course the Summit, and I personally expect to not only know a couple of virtual buddies out there, but also to communicate a little bit more “Who we are” and “Why we are different” and finally “Why we need to do that for Maemo”. These will be the guideline of my talk, and I hope people get excited to watch it.

I will not only cover a little bit of our history in the maemo development, but also show some of the future projects coming, how QT is changing the landscape and better: How we are closer to finally opensource Canola and other projects what gets me really excited, because we have been chasing this for almost 2 years now.

Hope to talk to everyone who’s interested in User experience and new un-explored ground for Maemo ! (and of course also to those who are not into it :)

Hi,

I hate when I need to excuse myself. Specially when it’s about delays. It happened in the first release of Canola2, and it is happening now. Canola should be out in august and we are reading to a middle sep. release that I am not confortable with.

Reasons (I also hate justifying, but people deserve at least an explanation):

a. New team is finally reaching a good speed of development
b. They had the complex task of fixing some old, core level bugs
c. We are implementing the new development process / project leading process remotely, so you can imagine the problems.
d. Teams are smaller. (again!)
e. Carman needs EFL, so deeper testing

And what about Carman?

a. Carman is now EFL based, like canola, so it needs some libraries so testing is intensive
b. The first team guiding it faced some heavy problems and it was replaced “during flight”

What about a date now?
I again hate to give dates because they always go wrong, but if today’s build is ok from both projects both projects will go live tomorrow :) * I hope so