Pierre-Luc Beaudoin

Make it a Star Trek pad

I didn’t know there was a Star Trak LCARS theme for my N810. Thanks to Internet Tablet School for pointing it out to me. The guys who created the theme did a really good job copying the Star Trek user interface elements known as LCARS. They even changed the volume icons, battery and luminosity indicators, some are even more clear.

Surprisingly, my N810 feels much faster with this theme. I guess flat colors are less job to render than the default theme. Making an application fullscreen is now fast. There are even animations I never saw: did you know that the address bar was nicely resized when the progress bar appears in the Browser? I recommend this theme for every one who wants a faster tablet.

Congrats to the creators:

• LCARS PADD - Synthesize.us

The Nokia N810

I have had a N810 for 4 weeks now and I like my new gadget. This new revision (coming after the N800 and 770) sports a full qwerty keyboard that makes it really faster to write emails and chat. But only in English. The French Canadian keyboard layout seems to be missing many accentuated letters (è, ê, even é!), the suggested completion words list is incomplete (ie common word “cadeau” is missing) and do not give priorities to suggestions (listing ticked before ticket). As I’ve seen the request before, a quick switch between 2 layouts is needed. The keyboard itself is a little smooth; your thumbs are gonna be full of pain after 30 minutes of typing (I am writing this review on the train).

The bundled GPS receiver is a great add-on although the default Maps application misses many streets on its Canadian map (my hometown’s main street built in 1867 is missing, go figure). Hopefully, there is Maemo Mapper an open source map application that use known Internet map sources as OpenStreetMap. Plus, Maemo Mapper has a position tracker which is the functionality I was looking for.

I am fairly new to Maemo (the platform on the N810) and I am pleased with the diversity of applications available. As for the usability of the UI: there are some issues. One is that the X to close application is hard to hit without the pen. We can’t minimize the applications from the taskbar like on any other OS. And finally, the UI is missing some consistency: some part of it can be used with the fingers while other not. Half of the scrollbars are finger size and not the rest (although I believe they should never be finger size).

The device feels fairly fast only some flash heavy websites make it slow to use. But it does have flash, witch is a plus for accessing YouTube and more.

The only real problem I had so far was when starting the camera while other apps (Maps or the music player) were running: the tablet will stop responding and instant reboot.

The bundled media player is pretty good itself. It plays many popular formats out of the box and has a nice net radio library. It has near 800 stations in many languages and for many music styles (although Radio-Canada is missing).

I’ve got all the development tools installed, I’m planning to hack on it soon.

Ogg Vorbis/Theora Language Removed From HTML5 Spec

Sad news for HTML5, while Ogg Vorgis/Theora were not necessary to make HTML5 work, a standard codec is needed to make some part of HTML5 usefull - the part I worked on for WebKit/Gtk+. This point has been repeated over and over: all browsers implemented HTML5 needs to have a common codec.

While there is no default image format in the HTML* spec, we were lucky nobody ever used their patents against JPEG. In fact, it is most probably because of said patents that Apple and Nokia were reluctant to include Vorbis/Theora on their OS or their phones.

Someone has to fix that patent system!

• Slashdot - Ogg Vorbis/Theora Language Removed From HTML5 Spec

HTML5 media tags in WebKit/GTK+

I’ve been working on bringing support for media tags in WebKit/Gtk+ in the past weeks. Based on Antti Koivisto’s work on the general WebKit support for the tags and his QuickTime implementation, I was able to provide the basics for this to work.

Sure there are sharp corners right now, it’s a good start. While I did the backend part, connecting WebKit and GStreamer, Alp Toker did a GStreamer sink for Cairo that completes the work. You can see the screenshot on his blog.

Media tags will enable web developer to integrate video in a page as easily as it is for an image nowadays. You could eventually implement a complete media player within a HTML file. With all the major browsers publicly announcing their progress on the matter (Safari, WebKit/Gtk, Firefox, Opera), we can sure hope we’ll see less flash and more pure video in the next years.