n900

Really Enjoyed DemoCamp Vancouver 12 yesterday. Great Venue. Great energy from some great pitches and some great looking companies and ideas. Best yet. The only thing that could be improved is lighting for videos :-). Can we shine a light on the presenters next time? Just kidding! Some sample videos (I was able to stream about 16 or 17 including happy birthday to Justin of 49 pixels and all the pitches) after the jump of The Perfect Song and QuikPiq (randomly selected!).

I was disappointed by my N900 live-streamed Qik Videos:

• The videos are too dark! But what can you expect from a cameraphone :-) Hope the N8 is better in low light. Or perhaps I should think of a portable light. Anybody know of a portable lighting solution?
• I was also disappointed by the Qik application itself which seems to have lost (or maybe it's an N900 or Maemo bug) the 6 presentations that were buffered in the N900 Qik application but Windmobile couldn't stream fast enough in real time (probably because of Wind's nascent, un-tuned un-optimized 3G network and lack of base stations).

pitch from Quikpiq

pitch from The Perfect Song

Does Pixelpipe on the N900 support flickr uploads that are visible only to your contacts who are "family" on flickr like ShoZu does? It doesn't appear to. My observations (check out my previous post on Pixelpipe with the N900):

1. PixelPipe doesn't appear to support flickr's privacy level of "family". It does support totally private and totaly public which map to the equivalent in flickr but that's not what I want.
2. Luckily the built-in  N900 Share Online does support family on flickr. So that's what I am using.
3. My theory: PixelPipe on Symbian and other operating systems supports Flickr's "family. Just didn't bother to implement it on N900
4. With the number of people who use the N900 being low, I can see why such a decision would have been made. So no harsh feelings Pixelpipe :-)

Until I get an N8, I have stopped using ShoZu and Nokia Sports Tracker am using the N900 + PixelPipe + RunKeeper on the iPhone 3G. Why?

1. None of my friends use Nokia Sports Tracker (On Nokia Sports Tracker, I recorded over 700 activities (90% bicycling, the rest cross country skiing)  and many people use it but not one of my friends around the world uses it on a regular basis anymore)
2. A fair amount of my friends and people in Vancouver use RunKeeper
3. Up until today despite many attempts, Nokia has been unsuccessful in creating a popular social network which is what Nokia Sports Tracker and RunKeeper are. And although I love Nokia Sports Tracker and I'll try it on the N8 in the future, I doubt Sports Tracker now that it's spun off Nokia will be successful! Love to be proven wrong
4. All in all the N900 camera is better than the N82 (except for the flash which I don't use)
5. I don't have to carry my Bluetooth GPS, the N900 GPS is good enough
6. PixelPipe is not nearly as great as ShoZu but it's good enough

What's wrong with RunKeeper

1. On the iPhone 3G, it doesn't multi-task so if I get an alert or phone call, the tracking stops. Hopefully fixed on iPhone 4
2. There's no way to lock the touch screen so it's easy to inadvertently stop RunKeeper while you are bicycling. Of course this wasn't an issue with N82 which is an old school candybar phone without touch screen

PixelPipe observations

1. No connectivity re-transmission unlike Shozu. So as I blogged before, if you lose connectivity in the middle of PixelPipe uploading  your photos you have to manually figure out which photos were uploaded and upload only the missing ones. This is very painful for a crazy :-) person like me who uploads dozens of photos ; not so painful for the normal person who only uploads 1 or 2 photos per day
2. No automatic tagging on a per account basis. In ShoZu you can set it up to tag differently based on which flickr account you upload to
3. No multiple accounts unlike ShoZu
4. No way to upload friends only or family only i.e. no way to use flickr permissions like ShoZu does only public or private. A pain if you again are a crazy :-) person like me and use flickr permissions  like "friends only" or "family only" which I gather less than 1% of flickr users do
5. No way to select multiple photos unlike ShoZu. This is a Maemo limitation I guess since there is no system UI gesture to select multiple photos or files. You have to laboriously select one photo at a time until all are selected.

I have switched over to the N900 for the moment for my cameraphone pictures. All in all the N900 seems better than the N82. Some comments and nits:

1. Would be nice to be able to switch off the touch screen because sometimes in the middle of bicycling I realize the GPS has turned off or the setting is wrong for some reason:
2. Does this happen because of a glitch / bug or because of an inadvertent touch while bicycling? I think both!
3. The N900 camera is not much faster than the N82 (in fact the N82 might be faster). Anybody done any timing?
4. The N900 lens is clean. After 3 years, the N82 has dust under the cover
5. In silent mode, the N900 camera app doesn't make a noise. This is different from the N82 and N95 which didn't allow me to turn the camera sound off even in silent mode
6. The N900 built-in GPS is faster than  the N82 + Bluetooth GPS that I was using before

I was wrong. The N900 version of Pixel Pipe *does* (yay! my apologies to the PixelPipe folks!)  allow sharing of unlimited number of photo as follows:

1. In the Photos app, touch the top (where it typically says "All Images")
2. Tap "Share Images"
3. Select as many images as you want to upload
4. Tap "Share"
5. Tap "Share via service"
6. Under Account, select your PixelPipe service
7. Tap "Share"

It works great except when you lose connectivity. Then PixelPipe due to no fault of their own but due to Nokia's brittle sharing infrastructure doesn't retry when you re-gain connectivity. This retry "seamlessly when you re-gain connectivity" is what ShoZu does so well. It's not a big deal if you only load 1 or 2 photos. It is a big deal when you upload dozens ; then you have to figure out which photos were uploaded and then go through the above 7 step process for the remainder of the photos.

The subject says it all.The low light, HDR and Fcamera apps of FCam (my FCam post) are great but I can't use them because there's no GPS in the EXIF or camera info in the EXIF. So great experimental stuff but not suitable for my daily use.

The final cool thing to report is that it doesn't stop the music player  from playing music unlike the N900 built-in camera app. Wish I had time and a Windoze box to hack the source code to fix the EXIF issues and add GPS.

Tnkgrl brought up a good point today at lunch at Nuba. Why do I continue to use the N82 when the N900 is better (e.g. faster shot to shot, great macro, etc.) ?

The primary reason is ShoZu! There is no solution as far as I know on the N900 that will upload dozens of photos at once to flickr. If anybody knows of such a program for the N900, please let me know and I'll switch (I can't handle doing 12 at a time, it's a waste of time when you have taken 20-50 as I usually do!).

The pre iPhone 4 camera is not as great as the Nokia cameraphones have been (the iPhone 4 finally has a decent camera that actually is better than most Nokia cameraphones) but because it is easy to use and to develop for there are many apps that make it fun e.g. hipstamatic. I am glad that the N900 finally has some decent apps like FCamera, low-light assistant and hdr capture that are powered by the research project FCam. Can't wait to try these. Expect lots of fun and weird pictures from these apps in my flickr stream soon.

Here's how I write Python programs on the N900 on my Mac

1. installed the ssh package, open ssh server
2. via ssh, I use terminal.app to the ip address of the N900 (which I can see at all times with the personal IP address widget) and test stuff out interactively using python's command line interpreter, aka the python REPL
3. when i am happy with the code that I have tested the REPL, I add it to the file on the N900 which I edit on emacs running on my mac using ange-ftp
4. test the code out on the n900 from terminal.app, 90% of the time it just works since I tested it in the REPL unlike my C/C++ days when something you never thought of always required you to re-compile

Easy, peasy. No need to learn silly :-) Java or C+ or wait for compilation and access to the full power of your Mac for google searches plus you can execute on the N900 directly. No need for silly :-) emulators which in my experience aren't very useful.

During my Python GPS experiments when I ported Matthew Brown's gamelan pygame python program to the N900's python aka pyamaemo,  found out the following which I am documenting so I won't forget:

1. current version of PyMaemo is python 2.5.4
2. python 2.5.4 uses the Numeric floating package (bug 1038, although I think installing NumPy manually instead of waiting for python 2.6 from PyMaemo is the road to yak-shaving madness :-) ! )instead of python 2.6's NumPy
3. Numeric and NumPy are mostly compatible; there are very subtle differences which are easy to fix; so easy to fix that even I who know almost nothing about Python was able to fix it!

Continuing to have a great time with Python on the N900. I'll have to post later about how awesome it is to run N900 Python aka PyMaemo scripts  from a Terminal.app window on my Mac edited in Aquamacs using ange-ftp (or whatever it's called in the 21st century).

Anyhow came up with gpsgamelan.py which is a modification of the script from latlongsound.py to play gamelan (indonesian scale) music (using the code from PyGSoundTestTest_3.py from Matthew Brown, thanks!) based on the jitter from GPS Lat/Long (10 different sounds based on latitude and another 10 different gamelan sounds based on longitude)

Here's what it sounds like (short video from flickr):

Not so great sound. My next idea is to play more pleasing music

• e.g. for each neighbourhood, pick a major key (there are twelve possible major keys in Western music AFAIK)
• based on the latitude, play a major chord (one of 10 possible)
• based on the longitude, play a minor chord (one of 10 possible)

My guess is this will produce more melodic and pleasing sound

Check out latlongsound.py, my N900 hack to produce random sounds from GPS coordinates (it's basically an unholy :-)  combination of keyboard5.py from MIT and the PyMaemo Location API sample sound code using PyGame, thanks to the MIT and Maemo folks for sharing!). What should I do with this next? I have lots of ideas, love to hear what would be cool from others!

After yesterday's post about potentially bogus data roaming charges, I looked up how to turn off data roaming on the N900 and here's how (original thread on talk.maemo.org):

1. "Settings > Internet Connections > Connect Automatically" to "WLAN"
2. Settings > Phone > Data roaming > Always ask

Just for fun, I am writing a little PyMaemo python script (sorry but I don't do C++ anymore so that's out :-) !) to compute and then play sounds based on my GPS coordinates (using the N900 Python Location API).

The easiest way to synthesize (rather than just play sounds) seems to be to use the PyGame sound synth (e.g. keyboard5.py from MIT computes some nice sounds) but I don't know how to make it work with the PyMaeMo GPS loop.

LazyWeb, anybody have some sample Python code :-) ? I of course will do my homework and post on the official very hard to follow forum (should I ask in talk.maemo.org OR the pymaemo list?) , but any help would be much appreciated.

If you examine the iPhone 4 photos and videos floating around the Internet you will see that the photos and videos are fantastic. Not as fantastic as the upcoming Nokia N8 but for 99% of the folks it's more than good enough. And that includes the "I have taken 40000 cameraphone pictures since 2004" cameraphone geeks like myself.

Even the mighty, not released until the fall, Nokia N8 doesn't have the fun and funky cameraphone applications that the iPhone has. One could argue as I have in the past that these are gimmicks to make up for the lousy camera which was true.  But with the iPhone 4, the camera is excellent: fast, plenty of pixels and excellent quality and the HD video on the iPhone 4 is unequalled by the N8.

So has Nokia lost the plot? I would certainly say so. Definitely lost the geeks and other "small c" and hobbyist creators to Android; the high profit, high margin trendy middle class and rich folks to the iPhone; the only thing remaining is low margin high volume phones and lingering vestiges of brand coolness in Asia and Europe.

Is Nokia doomed to "IBM-like 1980s irrelevance" where Apple and Android are like Microsoft in the 1980s - popularizing  and growing the market and pushing Nokia like Microsoft pushed IBM to the margins?

Certainly seems that way. I still think all is not lost. If the N8 ships on time and Symbian^3 is actually much more usable than I think it is and more importantly, the N8, post N900 device and Symbian are marketed properly worldwide and if the Meego post N900 device is cool and compelling, there's definitely the possibility of a rebound.

My fingers are crossed for the big N. I'll continue to enjoy my N900's unabashed and unequalled openess and hackability (disclosure:I received my N900 free from Nokia at the recent Nokia adventure but was going to buy anyway) and I am pretty sure I will buy an N8.

And to participate in the fun and use its great camera and software, I'll also get an iPhone 4.

[thanks to WOMWORLD Nokia for the N900 review unit, the following is my usual stream of consciousness; conclusions later :-) !]

Things I like:

1. Eye Candy - Great Effects
2. Audio - Fun sound effects
3. The truly open potential of Maemo since Maemo (now Meego) is a "normal Linux" not some half open / half proprietary b*stardized Linux like Android. This means out of the box I can install with minimal effort and do all the normal Linux things like install Ruby, python, use SSH etc
4. Firefox ! Yes. Being able to write Firefox add-ons and HTML5 webapps is (eventually once the speed is improved and Firefox has some time to iterate and improve)) going to be very very good thing
5. Camera while not as great as the N82 is much better than the iPhone

Things I don't like:

1. Phone is an app and seems like a half baked app at that. Not sure how to invoke it.
2. The media player app doesn't multi-task with the camera app. If I am playing music and switch to the camera app, the music stops
3. Touch Screen is unresponsive
4. UI performance seems to lag and the latency of the UI is often too slow. Seems very sluggish in other words
5. No real twitter client, give me something like Gravity please
6. No ShoZu - the built in sharing programs and PixelPipe are not my cup of tea; I prefer my multi-media to be uploaded automatically (or at least not 1 at a time; need to be able to select unlimited number of photos and videos and upload them)
7. Maemo UI is non-intuitive but it has potential (to me Meego has more potential in the long run than Symbian!)
8. Camera is sluggish when processing photos and is also slow to power up and auto-focus and to take a shot when compared to the N82

Hard to believe that I didn't make any predictions in 2009 (my 2008 predictions)!

Herewith again some randomly ordered Mobile predictions which are worth what you paid for them!

Mobile

1. Google will introduce a "comes with data" mobile phone featuring an easy environment to write HTML5 & JS apps
2. A Canadian mobile phone carrier will actually sell mobiles other than the iPhone that have current software & aren't 6-12 months old :-) The current "sell old phones with old firmware with bogus customizations" model of Rogers, Bell and Telus will be over in 2011.
   
3. Apple's tablet will be introduced, it wil be big seller and a great creator and consumer of multi-media and it will be closed and have the iPhone App Store model rather than the Mac app model.
4. Nokia will deliver Maemo 6 and an N900 successor but it won't be good enough for the mainstream but will be awesome for me & other mobile devs because mobile Firefox will offer superior HTML5 and JS experience (yes working for Mozilla I am biased :-) !)
5. The next iPhone will boast a 5 mega pixel camera and other still and video imaging improvements which will be more than good enough for old cameraphone snobs like me and accelerate Nokia's decline among mobile multimedia creators.
6. Mozilla Messaging (my employer!) will introduce a version of Raindrop that doesn't require you to do geeky things like install things like CouchDB yourself and it will rock on Android, Maemo and any other modern open mobile web  environment (sorry Blackberry, iPhone and Symbian but you lose since you are all neither open or modern or both :-) !) Just kidding, it will rock on any modern mobile web browser open or closed methinks :-) !
   

After some digging and research around the web, my ideal mobile mad scientist programming language would:

• have the 2D and 3D graphic manipulation power of Processing, Nodebox and Shoes
• be cross platform mac, windows, linux, maemo on mobile, iPhone, android
• be 'web native' i.e. REST, JSON, XML and all the other web API stuff built in and not bolted on like it is Processing, trying to use the flickr api from Processing is shall we say kludge-o-rama (awesome code from bryan chung but indicative of the unnecessary struggle one is forced to engage with in Processing and other non web native languages)
• not use a Java-like syntax, death to curly braces and wasted semi-colons
• be dynamic, death to the Java/C++ cargo cult of typing for no reason 
• be easily adaptable to new APIs and new sensors through the ability to create a domain specific language and/or easy to use and beautiful foreign function interface
• be open source, sorry but for my mobile art,  i can't use programming environments and languages that are not open source
• support the REAL loop, I don't want to spawn threads for the sake of questionable 'concurrency' like I am forced to with OSGI and the Bug Labs Bug

IF I were an idealist that pretty much rules out everything :-)

Fortunately I am a pragamatist. So I will continue my experiments in:

• Nodebox & Python on the Mac
• Cocoa Touch and Objective C on the iPhone

What about Processing? Sorry can't handle the Java syntax and the pain of doing XML and JSON and REST programming and the kludge-o-matic way to access Java libraries. processing.js? too early and too much impedance mismatch to use all the lovely JS libraries out there. And Shoes is promising especially if it were improved so you could easily use normal Ruby gems but given its current "hibernation" "post-Why" not sure it will continue to be improved.

What should I use on Maemo if/when I get an N900? Ruby plus SWIG or some such foreign function kludge er interface :-) to access the sensor APIs which I assume are only available in C and C++ ?

What should I use on Android if/when I get an Android device?

What should I use on Windows? Not that I really care :-) But it would be lovely to have Windows people join in my fun without having to do anyting. Eines Tages!

Somehow I think the "mainstream" world is moving towards my ideal solution and the mainstream solution for what I want will look more like processing.js and ruby-processing or smalltalk i.e. scratch then it will look like Processing, Nodebox or CocoaTouch

The N900 is the closest thing to my N999 vision that Nokia has announced. More like this please. Still prefer a separate company/stealth division. Still really want a device that caters to  mobile, social multi media creators like  myself. Still want an optical zoom. Still don't need a QWERTY keyboard. Congrats, Nokia, anyway on thinking a wee bit different for a change. And good-bye to S60/S^2/whatever crazy re-branding Nokia wants to give you.. You'll always be my first mobile crush but yes I have jilted you and it will never be the same between us :-)