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.

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:

• New dialogs for tagging and recommending tracks
• Ability to edit existing tags for a track, and to see the list of the most popular tags set by other people
• HTTP proxy support so you can use Vagalume at work 😉
• ConIc support: Vagalume will connect your N8x0 to the Internet if it’s offline (thanks Calvaris!)
• New Vagalume icon (thanks Felipe!)
• …and some other optimizations and minor fixes

Here’s how Vagalume looks on a PC:

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:

What’s new in Vagalume 0.3?

Major changes in this release include:

• Support for lastfm://play/ URLs. These are the 30-second previews (and sometimes full-length tracks) that you get clicking on most of the songs in the Last.fm webpage.
• If you click on a lastfm:// link in other application (the web browser, the e-mail client) now it will be opened with Vagalume (Maemo only feature)
• Some of those full-length tracks can be downloaded (see examples below). There’s a new button to download the mp3 file in Vagalume for those tracks. Right now they’re always stored in the Audio Clips folder and there’s no progress bar, but I’ll improve that in future releases.
• As you can see in the above screenshot, now Vagalume shows the album cover of the track being played
• We have new buttons to love, ban and download tracks, and icons for all of them

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):

• Cómo lo ves
• Amateur
• Haga clic para encender (whole album)

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).

I have been busy lately so I haven’t had much time to work on my little Last.fm client, but I finally managed to prepare a new release, so here is Vagalume 0.2!

First of all I’d like to start with an introduction because some people asked me about the name of this program…

So what does Vagalume mean?

Vagalume is Galician Portuguese for firefly.

The name has absolutely no relation to Last.fm and it doesn’t have anything to do with music either. I chose it just because I liked how it sounded 🙂

How do you pronounce Vagalume?

This word is composed of four syllables and it’s stressed on the third one: va-ga-LU-me.

To pronounce each syllable you can follow these examples:

• va as in vast, vantage or varnish ^(*)
• ga as in garden, garlic or gasp
• lu as in lucid, luminary or lunacy
• me as in medal, melody or medical

(*) although we Galicians pronounce it as in bargain, basket or bathroom

(Updated 10 Nov 2007: as stated in the comments of this post, the Galician phonological representation of the word is /bagalume/ and the usual pronunciation is [bɑɣɑlumɪ]. Thanks Marcos and Cameron)

What’s new in this release?

There haven’t been many big changes, I basically added support to some parts of the protocol that weren’t implemented in the previous version. Here’s the quick summary:

• Support for recommending tracks to other users
• Support for adding tracks to your playlist
• Volume control for the Nokia devices using the hardware +/- keys
• A combo box to select a friend instead of having to type his/her name
• More visual feedback for some actions
• Some bugfixes and other minor changes

Now that most of the core features are more or less working, from now on I think I’ll begin to work on the UI. But beware! I’m not a good UI designer, so be prepared for the disaster 🙂

Where can I get it?

You can get Vagalume from my page or from garage.maemo.org.

There are packages for the Nokia 770, N800 and N810, as well as a package for Debian etch (x86).

And that’s all for now. I’d like to thank again all of the suggestions and positive comments that I received these last days. Thank you all! 🙂

UPDATE: It seems that this post has just entered planet.gnome.org. This is my first post there, so hi all! 🙂

After a couple of pre-releases, version 0.1 of Vagalume, the Last.fm client for the Nokia N800, is finally here.

This is the first proper release and it comes with full source code licensed under the GNU GPL.

There haven’t been many changes since the first pre-release from last monday, but this version includes some nice new features such as:

• Proper support for loving/banning tracks.
• Support for tagging artists, tracks and albums (with multiple tags at once).
• More menu entries to select Last.fm radios. Avoid typing long lastfm:// URLs.

I have also compiled packages for Debian etch (x86) and Tablet OS 2008 (using Maemo chinook beta), so if there is any lucky owner of an N810 out there, I’d appreciate feedback 😉

I haven’t tried to compile Vagalume for the Nokia 770. I don’t have one of those and I haven’t had the time to find out if it’s easy/possible to make it work there, but if someone tries please let me know. For those interested, this program depends on GTK+2, GStreamer 0.10, libcurl and libxml2.

You can get Vagalume from my webpage.

I’d like to thank all the people who tested the initial pre-releases and sent me their comments. I’ll take them into account for future versions!

Enjoy!

Updated 02 Nov 2007: Vagalume seems to compile with gregale SDK, so I’ve just put a package for the Nokia 770 in my webpage. If anyone can try it and tell me if it works I’d appreciate it!

Updated 02 Nov 2007:Solmis has confirmed that the package for the Nokia 770 works!

These days I have been working on Vagalume: a Last.fm player for the Maemo platform (Nokia N800 and N810, though it’s designed to work on a regular PC Gnome desktop as well).

It’s still very small and doesn’t do much (I started it just a few days ago) but since it already works and has the most basic features that a Last.fm player must have I decided to release it.

Don’t expect a UI with lots of colours and shiny buttons in this release: I have been concentrating mostly on the protocol so the UI is stripped to the bare minimum.

Here’s a sample screenshot (taken from the scratchbox):

Features:

• It plays Last.fm radio streams (using the Last.fm protocol v1.2)
• You can select any radio (Personal, Neighbours, Loved Tracks …, or any arbitrary URL)
• It implements the Audioscrobbler Realtime Submission Protocol v1.2, specifically:
  • It sends Now Playing information
  • It scrobbles tracks (so you’ll see what you’ve been listening to in your profile).
• It is stable, I’m using it everyday and I haven’t experienced hangs or other strange behaviours so far.
• It’s small (the binary is less than 50K).

What it doesn’t do (yet):

• It doesn’t have the ability to Love/Ban/Recommend tracks
• It doesn’t have a nice UI
• It doesn’t show album covers on the screen
• …and many other things

You can install Vagalume in your N800 (with Internet Tablet OS 2007) using this package.

I plan to release the source code under the GNU GPL later this week and I’ll probably build packages for Debian and Ubuntu as well, so you can use this program in your PC. And of course there will be packages for the upcoming Internet Tablet OS 2008 (N800 and N810) too.

And that’s all, folks!

Updated 31 Oct 2007: more packages here.