Greetings from California!
The Mobile Rules award ceremony will begin in a few hours. Me and Mario from the Vagalume team are already here in San Jose ready to talk about our program and tell everyone how cool Maemo and Gnome are for developing software for mobile devices.
Let’s cross our fingers and see what happens!
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After a weekend of talks, meetings and networking (but also tourism and nightlife) I’m finally back home.
I still have a lot of work to do, many e-mails to read and tons of PGP keys to sign, but I was very fun to meet you all 🙂
I have to upload some photos too, but here’s one of them: the great Dirk-Jan waving at the camera during his talk about our beloved Modest.
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By the way, the latest betas of Modest are frankly quite stable, so update ! 🙂
The development of Vagalume has been stalled during these days but we have some news nonetheless:
And now, back to work!
OMG ! Last Friday I published the new version of Vagalume and the same day the list of finalists of the Mobile Rules! competition was announced. Guess who is one of them …
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Award ceremony in San Jose (California) next month.
Thanks Óscar for your words of support!
The people have spoken and the results have been overwhelming.
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Vagalume 0.5.1 is out. More UI updates soon.
FOSDEM 2008 is around the corner. Of course I’ll be there along with other igalians so I hope to see you there 🙂
If you’re a Maemo user/hacker then you’ll probably be interested in this wiki page where we’re trying to coordinate a meeting.
By the way, some people have suggested me to use GTK themeable icons in Vagalume instead of the custom ones that come with v0.5. Here’s a couple of screenshots comparing both (click on the images to view them full size).
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I’ve just created a survey so you can vote which one you prefer 🙂 If you don’t have a user at garage.maemo.org, just leave a comment in this post.
See you at FOSDEM !
The last version of Vagalume was released more than a month ago. And although it was dead for some weeks because I had many other things to do, here comes Vagalume 0.5, back from the dead!
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As I said before, I’ve been busy lately so the list of changes is not as big as it might be, but thanks to the help of my colleagues Mario and Felipe we have some new things. The list of changes include:
Here’s the new look of Vagalume under IT OS2008:
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And for those interested, now we have a new vagalume-users mailing list.
(*) Mario has written a detailed post about the status bar plugin, including a screenshot. Check it out!
Go here to download Vagalume.
And that’s all. Enjoy!
Everyone has heard of stories about hidden messages in songs, many of which could only be heard by playing the record backwards. That was in the vinyl era. CD owners had to rip their songs into wav files and process them with a suitable software tool. For example the manpage of SoX describes its reverse efect as “Reverse the sound sample completely. Included for finding Satanic subliminals”.
Some years ago I was listening to a CD by the Scottish band Urusei Yatsura when I heard the disctintive sound of a ZX Spectrum audio tape in one of its tracks. That sound had already been used several times by some artists (such as Aphex Twin), but this time it was very sharp and sounded like a complete program.
So I loaded it into the emulator and I found a funny satanic message written by the band:
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The source code (it was written in BASIC) had some comments, including this one:
What is sadder?
a. Finding this
b. Writing it
For those interested, this message can be found at the beginning of the song “Thank you” from their last album “Everybody loves Urusei Yatsura”.
You can also load this program using a ZX Spectrum emulator. Get the file in TZX format here.
This has been a good year, I met some great people, travelled a bit and went to lots of interesting concerts. Concerning my work, the development of Modest and Vagalume has been very exciting too. I’m sure that 2008 will be even better!
However, now I need to rest for some days and turn off the computer. See you in 2008!
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Bom Natal !
Merry Christmas !
Feliz Navidad !
It’s almost a month since I last posted something here, but it’s because these last weeks I have been really busy.
However it was definitely worth it. Last Wednesday the first beta of Modest, the new e-mail client for the Maemo platform was released.
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I’ve been working on Modest with some colleagues at Igalia for some time now and we have been doing our best to create a good e-mail client. Modest is still in beta, but I think that it’s reasonably usable now and we’re looking forward to improving it. The reviews we’ve seen so far have been positive and that encourages us to keep on working! Thank you all!
I’d also like to thank Philip, the author of Tinymail, for all his help and contributions and for being such a nice guy.
And, of course, the great Dirk-Jan from Nokia, the best possible leader and an amazing guy who had the good taste to announce Modest quoting one of the greatest records ever made. And he even uses Vagalume! 😉
Well, and what happened to Vagalume then? Of course I haven’t forgotten about it, it’s just that I haven’t had much time to work on it. However I managed to introduce some new features and bugfixes, so Vagalume 0.4 is here. As usual, details in my webpage but for the impatient here are the highlights:
Here’s how Vagalume looks on a PC:
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By the way, this time I compiled Vagalume packages for Ubuntu too. I haven’t tested them but they should work.
And that’s all! I hope you enjoy both programs!
I’ve just released Vagalume 0.3, the Last.fm client for Gnome and Nokia 770/N800/N810.
Although I said that I’d begin to improve the UI after releasing version 0.2, I finally decided to implement some other basic features first. Fortunately these last two days I’ve had some time to work a bit on the UI too, and thanks to the help of my mates Felipe and Mario now we have some icons and other minor UI enhancements 🙂 (by the way, check Felipe’s blog for new ideas concerning Vagalume)
Here’s a screenshot of Vagalume 0.3 on a Nokia N800. There’s still a lot to do but at least I hope that it doesn’t look so boring:
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Major changes in this release include:
And now a bit of spam: I’d like to recommend a couple of tracks from some local bands for you to test these new features 🙂
The first one is a band from Ourense called Annie Hall. They sing mostly in Spanish and their guitar pop is (in their own words) influenced by bands such as Teenage Fanclub and The Jesus and Mary Chain. You can listen to their whole record in its page at Last.fm, or you can play it with Vagalume clicking on these links (all tracks are downloadable):
The other band is 6PM, a Galician band whose first record, Far From Perfect, has received some good reviews. 6PM sing in English and their music is darker, more electronic and sometimes a bit experimental. Their music is often compared to that of The Postal Service. They uploaded their whole album to Last.fm and here’s the link to my favourite track: Homemade Screener
More info, packages, source code, etc., here.
Update: It seems that in the 770 all buttons appear without images, I’ll try to debug it later and release new packages for the 770.
Update: The problem in the 770 described above has been fixed in Vagalume 0.3a (so that is a 770-only release).