Nokia and Intel has announced today the MeeGo Project, a new open source, Linux project for both Maemo and Moblin. The new Qt development environment will feature easy to use and flexible UI for a better app development experience. The Linux Foundation in turn will handle the open source project organization. MeeGo aims to target netbooks/entry-level desktops, handheld computing and communications devices, in-vehicle infotainment devices, connected TVs, and media phones.
If you haven’t seen me posting much here at Maemo Talk, it’s because I’ve been helping Andrew Flegg with his new project: Maemo Weekly News.
Maemo Weekly News is a weekly online publication that highlights Maemo specific news throughout the week. What’s good about it is that all the news are community contributed by sending a tweet to @mwkn. Editors (which I am a part of) and sub-editors will then flesh out all the tweets and the best ones will make to the weekly publication. More information here (link).
I will be posting the contents of each issue here at MT. Here’s the full list of the contents of the first issue:
Three days of great talks, fifty sponsored participants, three hundred Nokia N900s, four hundred plus enthusiasts, and the best Maemo device to date. What a summit! Thank you Nokia, and thank you Amsterdam!
Would you believe that it’s less than a year before the next summit? Looking forward to that!
This is the second in a series of posts called “3 New Things About the Nokia N900.” Link to first post.
Here is a video made in London in which Gary Birkett explains the Identity controller’s features. Note that the first and last sections, showing the Identity projection, were taken on an N900 (and the middle section by a simple POS camera):
EDIT: Here is onedotzero’s official video with Karsten and Gary:
The onedotzero festival is about the moving image, not computing or mobile telephony, which made it a non-obvious showcase for the N900. It combines “collaborative music, film and live performance, and playful interactivity, digital arts and culture,” and it inhabits a creative space exciting to the Wieden+Kennedy London advertising agency. (They explain that “the ideas and curiosities of Wieden+Kennedy inevitably overflow outside the traditional world of advertising. We are constantly experimenting with new forms of communication and creative expression.”)
So it seems really natural that W+K would attempt to express the identity of onedotzero this year by visualizing all the online discussion about the event on Twitter and the blogosphere, as well as at Flickr and Vimeo. To instantiate their idea, W+K turned to programmer Karsten Schmidt, who collected the various feeds, processing them in real-time using six powerful computers (and programming in the Processing language) to stream ribbons of text, very Matrix-y in its feel, into the shapes of letters.
To accentuate the real-time and interactive nature of, well, everything, the shapes formed by the text-ribbons were actual SMS messages texted from cellphones to the system. And to make it emphatically interactive (and mind-blowingly fun), the letter-shapes and text-ribbons could be stretched, twisted, revolved, animated, enlarged and frozen interactively.
To transform this conception from a mere artistic expression on a computer screen into festivalgoer-involved experience required those six HD projectors and an easily accessible (and easily used) controller.
That’s where Gary Birkett, our own lcuk, came into the picture. That and the events of 13 November 2008.
That’s the date that Wieden+Kennedy London was named “lead global strategic and creative agency for Nokia’s Nseries business.”
So instead of utilizing a Wii remote or Apple iPhone, both familiar, handheld devices with accelerometers in them, W+K opted for the jaunty, new soon-to-be-released N900 from its client, Nokia.* And Gary created an interface for the N900 for the accidental gameplayer handed the device. His app interprets a user’s twirling or shaking or screen-drawing for a seventh computer in Karsten’s array, which causes the huge projection to respond instantaneously.
To manage this, Gary used his own liqbase framework to create his application. And, like other liqbase modules, this controller will be distributed as open-source software.
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* That’s the real world, and I’m not complaining or ruing the events that led to my being invited to London to see the whole thing come together. Thanks to WOM World / Nokia, in fact! But the uniqueness of the N900 will come across more clearly when the PUSH project winners appear.
I got my hands on a Nokia N900 recently — for which I had to travel seven thousand miles and endure the company of five cellphone-addict bloggers for 48 hours, both courtesy of Nokia’s word-of-mouth marketing efforts — and I was utterly dazzled.
At one point I was explaining why we word-of-mouth-spreaders were performing professional work for no pay and little chance of recompense. As it happened, the question arose while we were standing outside the British Film Institute, just as evening was slipping in, using a cellphone to manipulate Matrix-like text being projected on the wall of the National Theatre opposite (the “Identity Project” of the BFI’s onedotzero festival).
We were all grinning maniacally, twisting and turning and shaking the device gleefully in our turn, playing what was essentially the world’s largest video game — 138 feet wide, 10,204x1080 luminescent pixels** cast by six 18,000-lumen projectors ["the Rolls-Royce of projectors" I was told authoritatively*]. “Sheer childish enthusiasm,” I explained. “Sincere enthusiasm. It’s the blogger form of professionalism, and it’s the kind of pay that regular jobs don’t provide.”
Later that evening, I had a rematch with Identity, as evidenced in the accompanying video, and you’ll note that although I was the one who needed the video made and the app’s developer on the N900, Gary Birkett, was there to show it off, I insisted on driving and making Gary take the video. Something really exciting was occurring and I felt myself in the very center of it.
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NOTE: I need to describe both the events I attended and what I discovered about the N900, so I will put these into separate posts, starting with Identity. But as I have two videos for that, I’ll put the first one here:
Also, note that the video made of the Identity projection was taken by an N900 — pretty good for a cellphone camera at night!
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* Compare that to the typical home projector’s 3-4 lumens.
** That’s 11,059,200 pixels in the overall display.
My good pal Jay Montano of My Nokia Blog, posted a 52-minute(!) video of the session. If you don’t feel like watching the video, Jay has summarized the Q&A session, emphasizing the important points on his blog (link).
I wish there was a video of Nokia VP for Maemo Devices, Ari Jaaksi’s presentation at OSIM World 2009. His nine slides (below) talk about making Open Source more user friendly, how Maemo is inspired by the consumer’s insights, and how Nokia is working with the community from day one. The last slide summarizes it perfectly though:
“We want to concentrate on user experience and work together on things that are generic.
This is how we can create value for our customers.”
If you haven’t seen me posting much here at Maemo Talk, it’s because I’ve been helping Andrew Flegg with his new project: