June 27th, 2008

Hello Everyone,

As most of you noticed, diablo is out and now everyone is going to port applications and so on. You can still install canola using chinook packages, but we cannot guarantee that things will work. Why? Things have changed, and we need to generate packages with DIABLO SDK, and most of the needed components are ALSO being ported.

For example: while we can use SSH from Chinook, Diablos SSH was not there (at least until yesterday) Mplayer is not there and even python is not Diablo ready. While most of you can argue that it's working because chinook works it's quite risk to take this for granted, so..

While the components are being ported, if you want full support from us please avoid Diablo for now. We are doing our best, I believe all other projects are doing their best but this release is not ready and it will demand time from all projects.

So, if you go with diablo (like myself) please hold the bugs for a while until we generate the diablo packages and then we can debug based on real infrastructure.

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. If you install it from the Application Manager, the right package for this plugin is "canola2-tuning-plugin", not just "canola-tuning", the old one.




(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

April 4th, 2008

Beta 8

Beware! If you have extra themes installed, make sure to update them too.

Hi Everyone, so one more milestone was reached, and the packages are already on the repositories. Please point your applications manager to the update section and put it to test!

News for developers, Today we will also upload the file with the binary build of Canola for the desktop linux to be used as testing environment. It plays everything, and will work flawlessly on at least Ubuntu Linux. To guarantee a fully working testing place, you can also use an Ubuntu Live CD in VMware. (this is also the way for Mac and Windows Users)

If you are a theme maker, you can also download the example style sheet, and compile the theme in the testing environment for your personal test. As themes requires a probably complicated (for you theme maker) debian package creation, we are setting up a webserver to do that for you.

Youtube is updated, and uploaded to the Addons sections make sure you also update this plugin.

Last.fm is available today, so please check the Add ons, section!
Warning : As most probably known, theres not a full proof way to protect the Last.fm password, so you are warned that we are not encrypting/obfuscating your password (just like a lot of maemo applications do) and it's clear that you agree with that if you download and instal the Last.fm plugin. Our policy for that is being open, so Last.fm source is also going to be available on the website.

We need testers for : Experimental Kinetic List : As commented several times by myself (handful) on the ITT forum, we were always searching for ways of improving the list and making it better with less accidental clicks. So we did some changes to an experimental list implementation and we want to provide for those with list problems, and also for some with no list problems, because it's a very sensitive component in Canola UI. So if you know how to become root and place a couple of .pyo files on some folder please drop me a line at handful AT gmail.

Finally, apart from the changelog bellow a lot of bugs were fixed, even some nasty ones like the Mplayer taking over the keys on the video playing screen and we are really waiting for more feedback.

Better third-party plugin support: More API available for third-party plugin development.
Better handling of large titles in titlebar.
Fix during cover change.
Sort files inside "Browse by Folder".
Show current time during seek.
Fixed bugs in video player.
Ability to refresh podcast feeds manually.
Ability to select where downloaded contents go.
Smooter animation in the lists and sub menus.
General theme improvements.
Allow more podcast feeds.
Support compressed feeds and request them by default.
Better handle out of space.
Show more normalized download velocity and time remaining.
Various fixes in network handling in Podcast.
Restart downloads when podcast plugin is loaded.
Make it possible to preview the podcast description in the list.
Make it possible to read the feed description while listening to the podcast episode.
Remove episodes from "Podcast: New Episodes" when listened to or deleted.
Show the podcast feed title in the player as album and not the parent title.
Ogg support for the Scanner is back.

Unfortunately Out of beta8, but on advanced stage:

Playlist creation (on-the-move) + Playlist saving and other related features
Youtube paging capabilities for the search results (to allow more results to be browsed)
UPNP support
PNG thumbnail support still missing
Full hardware key mapping support

Known Issues in this Release

Don't set the download folder to a non-existant disk. It will not work, it will spin forever on Internet Radio and Photocast
Icon for last.fm on Red Theme is missing (using basic one)
Podcast "new ball" is coming back when you delete a already listened podcast.
Last.fm will scrobbling 2 times if you listen to more than 50% and then rewind the music.

Before asking question please take a look in the "using canola guide"
For more info, please visit the Internet Tablet Talk Canola Forum

March 20th, 2008

Canola2 beta7 was released today to support third party plugins, and the good news is that the first one is available, YouTube, but it's not a third party plugin, but you got the point. Now you'll be able to search, bookmark and even save videos from YouTube.

Interested? Install Canola2 beta7 first, then the YouTube plugin available on our Add ons section and you're good to go. Beware, if you have extra themes installed, make sure to update them too.

March 14th, 2008

New themes were included in the Add ons section. Now you may choose between five skin options for Canola2.

March 13th, 2008

Hello everyone,

We know everyone is expecting youtube and last.fm but we are not adding them to the default package, but instead they will be here on the website in the "add-ons" section. Why there's nothing there right now? Well, we did a lot of changes in the architecture to support third party plugins (youtube can be considered one) so we need at least to make sure things are ok before releasing this plugins.

We need your help : use canola2 beta6 as much as possible, and if tomorrow (friday) everything looks good we will upload the youtube packages for you.

Anyways, we are also going to release tomorrow the blue theme, the simple red and black theme and as requested by users the backgrounds and some more goodies.

Thanks, and we are waiting for your feedback!

The Canola Team

Beta 6

New view for current podcast downloads; shows information about the download.
Newly organized podcast menu with new submenus such as "Today's episodes" , "New episodes" (Episodes that have been downloaded and have not yet been played).
Podcast also give a visual clue to whether an episode has been played or not.
Podcast better ensures state when exiting Canola during download.
Fixed problems with showing wrong download progress for some podcast episodes while scrolling the list.
Minor changes to the default themes.
Green theme has been renamed to Marbles.
Internal support for configurable fonts.
Internal changes to accommodate the writing of plugins.
Options have been added to photos slideshow: Loop.
Now currently remembers the podcast position when using the standard OMS player backend.
Added "browse by folder" to music.
Fix video position restore bug.
Speed up parsing of feeds.
Fixed bugs when updating media library.
Remembers the last position when exiting a video.
Playback audio side of podcast of the Quicktime format (.mov).
Added autostart plugins support.
Enter all internet models now blocks the screen a lot less (Settings, Podcast, Internet Radio and Photocast).
Fix image rotate bug.
Updated player screen. How the trackbar is a bit shorter and has bigger numbers (current time, time left) at the start and end of the trackbar.
Added scrollbar in the mini-cover selection and the list of musics in cover selection.
Quicker podcast list scrolling.
Handling of feeds requiring username and password (add username:password@ after http://, ex.http://username:password@www.manager-t...).

February 25th, 2008

This is a small update for users that have the Beta5. This will fix the problems with the box character that appeared before some songs, and volume problems when using mplayer as backend.

February 22th, 2008

Beta5 is up, and it's a middle point for the Beta6, actually it was supposed to be beta4, but some problems appeared, to make sure it works for everyone we updated to Beta5 already.
So, beta5 still a bug fix release, we are launching it because a lot of serious problems were reported and we wanted to make sure people get those fixes. Also, very important : with Beta5 and so on.. you can "backup" canola using the backup application from maemo now.

What's not in: Blue theme, Youtube, Last.fm

What's in : Zoom in the photo viewer and a lot of bug fixes

Here goes the changelog:

Beta 5

A bug with media library access was found that broke podcast after refreshing the media library It also wasn't able to play back mp3, due to missing id3 library files (id3.so) in Light Media Scanner plugin packages

Beta 4

Podcast: many fixes, removal of leaks, do not hardcode cover path, new Current Downloads and Queueing support.
Play audio of videos inside podcasts.
Internet Radio: support URIs that are not feeds but direct streams (.ra, .mp3).
Settings: fix "locks" in Media Library folder selection interface.
Settings: new option to keep choose whether the display should be lit or not while charging.
Fix problem with database not finding your media the first time after selecting it in "Settings > Media Library".
Reload cover inside the player when it is changed.
New (and larger) network and battery icons.
Fix bug in "cover change" when changing Canola theme.
Parse various feeds using threads, to avoid UI lockup.
Feeds are now downloaded to ~/.canola/tmp (or what is specified in the 'temp_dir' setting) and deleted afterward.
Zoom and pan in photos fullscreen view.

Atabake

Fix volume problems when using mplayer as backend.

Python-downloadmanager

Queuring
Better API
Fixed problem with progress

Canolad (daemon)

Use new LMS plugin for id3 parsing.
Fix bug when removing items from scanned folders by type (audio/video/photo).

Python-terra

Escape titles in Main Window.

February 8th, 2008

Hello there! After the release of the beta2 we found some silly bugs that deserved a quick fix. Along with those are also a couple of things that were ready in this week. So open your application manager and try updating Canola2, beta3 should appear as available.

New Feature

Album cover art selection (when covers were downloaded by Canola tuning)
(first release of picture. We plan to integrate "pick from file" to enable user to select cover)

Improvement

Faster, less cpu intensive download manager in podcast


Bug fixes:

Fix: Copy main cover if cannot create link
Fixed trackbar+animation update issues on player
Fixed relative paths on playlist bug (#2087)
Fixed listdir bug on cover_change
Fixed Settings: double-click bug in Media Library.
Fixed 'rewind' issuing 'next' instead of 'previous'
Fixed Podcast: fix a memleak when deleting an episode being downloaded, was leaking 31 objects.
Fixed Podcast general improvements

Added more rubust system for getting download paths, and in the progress clean up code and use python a bit more smartly
Using now Download Manager (AsyncDownloader class) for downloading feeds.
Fixed IRadio/Feedparser: Fix bug with wrong arguments
Fixed Photos: add check to avoid raising exception in case of 0 sized images
Fixed file path when the filesystem does not support symbolic links.
Fix to conform with new get_class API.

February 1st, 2008

Hello everyone! In this first release as we promised in the Canola Future page we are delivering a update that compromises a lot of bug fixes from the past few weeks. If you are a OS2008 and already have Canola installed, you can go the application manager and check the available updates, canola beta2 will be listed there.

We would like to thank everyone that has provided us bug reports, email with critics and suggestions and made this update possible in the short time.

Our big thanks to: Michael frase, Jeremy Peterson, Joe Kandaba, Cai Maver, Jonathan Greene, Andrew Flegg, Philip Gruebele, Andrew Zhilin, Bejamin Kavoossi, Veli-Pekka Lindholm, Michael Leeson, David Brewer, Tom Hawley, Pat Griffin, Hans Halvorson, D. G., Ken Bleau, Richard Griffin, Joe Hoffman, Jitu Suthar, Tim Samoff, Dave dyer, Sven Jaborek and Aaron Sakovich! We thank you very much for your time of going there in garage and providing some feedback (Along with a lot of anonymous people under the nobody handle!) and we hope you have a lot of patience to do the same now with beta2.

So what in this update?

Features:

770 Support: for gregale and HE*
- Small issue with Dbus and non UTF-8 chars on file name still there
- Small hack to install on HE still needed

IRadio:
- Support for ASX feeds
- Support for .ram files
- HTTP redirection

Download-manager:
- Better error reporting for downloads.
- Implemented in Python in this version

Settings:
- "Refresh all" : Forces a rescan on the media library
- "Multiple albums entries" : Help fixing duplicated album issues.
- Simplified Media Library folder selection (two states, larger icons)

Player:
- Scrolling song title


General:
- Improved the first use delay, showing load information now
- Added full support to Wma files with tagging
- Addes parcial support for several other formats (check here)


-- Bugs reports from garage closed in Canola2 beta2:
Click here to visit the Garage tracker
1790 Album names are listed several times
1791 No Album Art displayed (Canola-tuning updates)
1792 Videoplayback: toggle fullscreen with thumb-press doesn't work properly
1796 Only pictures in view are cached
1798 Locking Keys stops playback
1802 Entry Text Field for "Add URL"
1803 Scanning media sometimes does not work immediately
1804 Problem starting slideshow
1805 wrong photos displayed inside selected directory
1808 UI freezes when connection is lost
1811 Artist is not pulled from ID3 tag correctly
1817 Canola blocks keys in other applications
1821 Lock screen and listening to music
1822 handling accents (locale fr_FR) in paths
1825 Default download directory?
1827 Podcast download stops when you navigate away to another screen
1832 Cannot navigate below the top-level media watch folders when connected via USB cable
1833 Canola 2 misses files changes when made from a USB connected PC
1837 Play/Pause Display incorrect
1838 Podcast Support Broken
1839 Incorrect audio playback in "all songs" mode.
1843 incomplete library
1845 Internet radio channels do not play
1846 Podcasts no longer stream
1849 keyboard becomes crazy
1851 Media Player "Mute Audio" Option, impacts Canola
1856 volume between tracks
1859 volume level coming out of pause
1860 Resuming playback by d-pad center button after seek causes track to restart at 0:00
1861 Existing volume setting ignored if new track is selected
1873 video: play/pause inverted if clicked fast and twice
1874 broken redraw of interface
1877 Audio player should get missing covers from internet
1880 Scan works differently according to the selected folder
1888 Downloads of audiocasts does not work very well
1895 Error while downloading podcasts
1903 Filenames and folders with accent(s) not supported
1906 Screen Lock stops Music Play
1908 Video list not updated
1913 & Symbol causing issues in title bar
1914 Albums with lowercase letters appear at end of list
1915 Different case tags for same album seen as different albums
1920 Music not found on 128mb SD Card on internal slot
1931 Audio Bookmarks
1932 ID3 tag v2.4 support?
1935 screenshot of multiple copies of compilation album
1937 radioparadiseinternet radio does not display song info. Default media player works fine
1941 will not find photos in certain folders on sd card
1945 no media found
1946 Canola2 stopped working...
1953 Sampler like Album floods Album views
1954 idea: please allow me to handle my own cover images
1955 to small area for tracknames
1958 Internet radio: adding streams without .m3u should be possible
1965 audio files problems
1971 Screen dimmer does not shut down with a slide show
1989 lack of album thumbnail in album cover selection mode
2012 Exception thrown within Photocast plugin
2014 Exception thrown within Photocast plugin when quickly clicking next
2038 Incorrect display of albums with multiple artists
2044 N800: Inserting external MMC blocks viewing of Podcasts on internal MMC
2045 Backlight turns off in slideshow
2046 Locking screen pauses playback
2053 audio output drops dramatically when tablet display turns off