Mohammad in test shot (low light = lots of  noise)

The Amazing Vignette Filter separated

Filter in place..

Anyone else done something like this? I started to ponder 3M magic tape for "haze" effect already...

New gPodder main view

I guess I need to draw some of those icons now... =) Stay tuned!

(Here is a funny thought for today: Ihink the N900 and boring meetings are the key to revive my blogging Wordpress editor works just great with the Firefox-3-based browser in the device.. )

GPodder fun

I've been bicycling to work all summer and I enjoy listening to podcasts and internet radio while enjoying the fresh air. I recently installed gPodder and enjoyed the new maemo5-style user interface a lot. The application is easy to use with fingers (not recommended while biking! seriously! ) but I there are a few thoughts I wanted to share. I am sorry to use the lazyweb for this instead of contacting the guys directly - but maybe this sparks up some interesting discussion, so what the heck.. read below for some lengthy ascii-art UI design proposal fun and for the N900 goody surprise..

GPodder: Adding podcasts

I already wrote a nice, polite paragraph about how it would be nice if gPodder would just fetch the RSS feed url information from the website for me, so I could just type "www.uncontrolledairspace.com" into the "Enter the podcast feed URL" -dialog. You know, so I would not need to worry about finding the RSS feed url by hand.. then I tried..

It does it already!

So maybe the dialog title should read "Enter the podcast web address" instead? Like this:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder ________________[ X  ]
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|============== Add new podcast ===============|
|                                              |
| Web address: [______________________][ Add ] |
|______________________________________________|

Notifications

When you add a new podcast, the popup notification that says "downloading episode information from.." in a notification banner. I guess this is because you don't have any information about the podcast yet, so you couldnt show the name in the podcast list. How about creating a list item for the new podcast, showing "Downloading information..." in there until you get the RSS feed, and then populating the list with the real data? This would be more consistent with how updating a podcast works, and it would avoid the popup banner that feels like it's blocking the user interface.

Navigation

The two-column main view is not really useful in a small screen, as both sides contain pretty long lines of text. So you end up having just a bit of your podcast names visible, or alternatively just a bit of the episode list. It might be more useful to split this view into two. So that when you start gPodder, you would see just the list of podcasts. Or, maybe a front page like this:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder_________________[ X  ]
|                                              |
|                                              |
|        _                           _         |
|      _| |_         /`´´\         _| |_       |
|     |_   _|      (_|o_O|_)       \   /       |
|       |_|          `  °´        .-\ /-.      |
|                                  ˙˙˙˙˙       |
|   New podcast    Podcasts      Downloads     |
|                                              |
|______________________________________________|

Press "Podcasts" to get to the list:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder Podcasts _______[ <= ]
| /icon\  Daily Source Code                  * | <= green dot
| \here/  4 new, latest 2 days ago             |    (new stuff!)
| -------------------------------------------- |
| /icon\  Uncontrolled Airspace Podcast        | <= no green dot
| \here/  Latest 5 days ago                    |    (all listened)
| -------------------------------------------- |
|                                              |
|                                              |
|                                              |
|______________________________________________|

One could sort them by (Name | Updated | Recently listened ) via the menu? Once you click on a podcast, it would open a new view with episode information about that podcast:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder: Uncontrolled A_[ <= ]
| Uncontrolled Airspace #151                 * | <= new
| "Dave needs NyQuil" - 3 days ago             |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| Uncontrolled Airspace #150                 * |
| "Dave needs NyQuil" - 12 days ago            |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| Uncontrolled Airspace #149                   |
| "Midnight in the Morning" - 21 days ago      |
| -------------------------------------------- |
|______________________________________________|

From there you would naturally show the episode information for the selected one.

Wow, now that was some ASCII-art.. I wonder how this works out in Planet Maemo and on the blog itself..

Oh right.. the surprise. I made some N900 wallpapers, go grab them from here. Hope you like them

Stripes are in!

Originally uploaded by TuomasKuosmanen

Design for maemo website

Originally uploaded by TuomasKuosmanen

We're working on a decent frontpage for www.maemo.org, to put the new site framework into use. Feedback is welcome and very much appreciated.

I think they look awesome - 9 people managing to use a common visual style is also a pretty remarkable. I think we made the right choice to go with SVG and a clear workflow to follow.

Congratulations everyone, I really hope the voice of reason wins and we can get this in gtk+ upstream - I remember the days when I drew the first icon and everyone jumped up and down for the simple fact that we had icons. Let's not stop the creativity this time either, guys!

One thing I want to do in the future is to start thinking towards high-dpi screens (not just N800 - this is coming to desktops and laptops too) - we will need more icons in the larger end of the scale - and I, wearing my Nokia hat, want to work together with the community to define this for us all, so we can avoid duplicate work. Besides, the smaller the pile of patches Maemo has against mainstream free software the better.

• The topright corner's black blob is gone from the "home" view - yes, it was a bug, not some weird artistic brain fart of mine.
• The buttons are much lighter in appearance - I want to do a very clean, simple theme that works.
• The theme is now dithered to 32000 colors, so it has less banding on the blue gradient in the task navigator and statusbar panels.
• The virtual thumb keyboard is cleaner (in progress, I know it has some pixel glitches) - the goal is to make it very easy to type with - hence the very prominent pressed-state of buttons and the clean appearance. Let me know if it helps - I think it does.
• Some other crap perhaps that I forgot.

Grab it here. You need hildon-theme-cacher from here to install it. N800 only for now.

I hope to replace the old purple maemo platform development theme with this one. The template is in svn, I hope I committed it on the correct place, as Michael was moving stuff around when they were refactoring the theme packaging a bit. In any case, it's there and if you feel like hacking on a new theme of your own, there's also an Inkscape svg file you might find useful, in the same svn tree.
Oh, it looks like this:

It's still not perfect, as you can easily see, but I'll try to tweak the remaining bits when I can. But I feel it's good enough at this point. And hopefully it makes N800 users happy, with new look? Let me know if you like it..

Edit: DOH. Forgot to tell the packages are here. Install cacher first, the theme depends on it. (It generates some gtkrc cache that speeds things up when starting applications..)

Try the same on del.icio.us: This and this. Smooch!