Hi, Am Sonntag, den 19.03.2006, 23:05 +0100 schrieb Lionel Dricot (aka Ploum): > Little story > > Today, I was in a shop, in the queue. There was a lot of people in > front of me. 10 minutes to wait, at least. Fortunatly, there was an > open Wifi not far. So, I spent the whole queue reading > planet.gnome.org. How have I lived so long without my lovely Nokia 770 > ? > > End > > So, after only two days with my 770, I've written this quick'n dirty > review. It might be of interest for some of you : > > http://wiki.frimouvy.org/Nokia770 (wiki, feel free to edit) Comments about the wiki page: > **Suggestion : make the hardware home key acts as a shift key when in keyboarding mode** Having strange second uses for well-defined hardware keys doesn't sound like a good idea. What about putting the dot on the same mode (side) as the numbers instead ;) > A lot of people have complained about memory on this device. Yeah I never quite got that... just what the heck are they _doing_ with their device? Storing a database management system on it or what? As someone being in the computer field for far too long (when 64KB ram were much and 500KB floppy was huge - note the K :)), let me say that if 64MB+64MB of backing store and 64MB of ram aren't enough, please tell me just what are you using it for? I'm curious, it's not just a rhetoric question :) > I like very much the current idea with left panel, top panel-window bar. It works and I think we should port this idea to our average desktop. I simply wish I could customize the left panel and the menu. For now, all installed programs are in the same submenu. I wish I could access GPE-calendar quickier than Scummvm... I agree that the submenu where the application entry is put into should be freely choosable by the packager (who best sticks to the desktop file standard for the actual category names he uses, of course :)). > Why can't I have access to the MMC card when USB is plugged ? You (actually your PC) _has_ access to the MMC card, I thought that was the whole point (apart from for flashing) > Why can't I have access to the system memory ? As in RAM? or as in user-useable flash? I guess the latter uses a filesystem type MsWindows does't know (if you use that, just guessing here) - not that I tried, actually I'd just scp it over the net and spare myself all the work of plugging usb/mounting/copying/unmounting/unplugging :) > The web browser sometimes crashes... Not too often but it happens more than it should be. Really? it never crashed for me, however half of the time I can't add bookmarks o_O > The whole email reader is simple and efficient. It just takes too long to start and why the hell does it sort mail in chronological order *BEFORE* sorting them in anti-chronological order like I want ? It would be better to simply load, at first, the last twenty emails so I can already browse them. I don't quite follow you... you mean it doesn't scroll to the end of the list (= newest posts) by default when app is started? Reversing the well-known chronological order of newer-things-are-below-older-thing to something else doesn't seem to make sense to me (think about it, even a Terminal has newest entries at the bottom...) Or did I misunderstand you? > File type association. When I click on a ogg file, I want it to open the ogg reader. When I click on a pdb file, I want it to open FBreader. It doesn't have to be automatic. I can specify it the first time. But, at the moment, I only have a very frustrating "cannot open this file" error. That has been a mess in the whole open source world... I finally see a light at the end of the tunnel as how to store those things internally is being standardized somewhat (sigh...). > I hope to seen soon the ogg player and the mp3 one merged. yeah, that is: ogg played by gstreamer and mp3 played by gstreamer as well :) > And why not also the video player ? Mini-totem anyone ? What do video and audio players have in common (from a users point of view, not the developers point of view)? I do expect many _more_ things from an audio player than from a video player, the reason being the sheer number of audio files I have and the few video files in comparison, namely: - seaching in tags (!) - categories by artist/album/year/... - editing tags, maybe (though by now my audio tags have been fixed, but have to think of the new users :)) - maybe playlists/shuffle (does anyone else find it strange that bought music CDs don't have CD Text on them so you actually have to edit every single one of them to tag them properly?) On the other hand I don't care about those things in a video player at all, all that has to be able to do is play the video :), seek, maximize, and close. No playlists, not even file>open, actually. Others may see that differently :) > Is there a site where I can download 770-compatibles videos ? I thought 3gpp video sites worked, but a quick try showed them not to work... weird, I could have sworn they worked before... must be one of those weird days :) > And how can I encode my own videos in a 770 readable format ? I tried getting the streaming video stuff to work... see http://maemo.org/maemowiki/RealVideoStreams It's a mess... I even tried to change the realproducer source to support reading from pipes so I can actually realistically recode a video to real format (read: without gigabytes of temp space for the _uncompressed_ video), but they seek all over the place (which doesn't work with a pipe)... So I plotted to scale down the original video down to nokia-playable resolution while uncompressing it (with mencoder) instead, save that to a file, and have realencoder read from that. The reason was that a nokia-playable resolution uncompressed video isn't all that big... I have that amount of temp space at all times, probably. Sure enough, RealProducer crashed instantly when being fed the scaled-down video. What is Real thinking, anyways? And try reading the Helix Producer source, or building it, for that matter... what _is_ that? Doesn't look like usual autotooled source at all (which is a bad thing - that makes the learning curve huge). I say all that in the hope that someone affiliated with real/helix reads that and helps me by removing all the seeks in the realproducer parts :) *hopes* Can we please support a normal format in the streaming video player as well? Like MPEG2 or something? > Voice recorder: Still missing. I hope to see something so I can record my ideas in speex or ogg format. It would be damned cool as the 770 already has a microphone. Really? might be something I'd like to try hack on... any details? can a normal OSS dsp be used to read from it? :) I remember a talk on maemo-developers that involved an external mike faintly, but nothing much about the internal one ... > Terminal: Cannot live without it. The annoying bit is that the custom applications are not in the $PATH. that's really annoying. Tommi Komulainen hinted at FOSDEM 2006 that /var/lib/install will be gotten rid of soon :) there is hope... > Shall I install dropbear or openssh ? Which one is better ? It would be cool to ssh from my PC to the 770 and vice-versa :-) I never used dropbear before... I think I heard rumours that X forwarding is an openssh extension only... not useful for the nokia 770 though... so I'd use dropbear because it's probably smaller (if X forwarding support isn't in it, it should be smaller :)) Hope that helps. cheers, Danny
