So this is becoming a one-a-week blog, which is certainly a sign of how busy things have been for us. Among other things, here's what we've been up to:
Forums
We were contacted by Matthias Lee, owner of opentablets.org, a couple weeks back. Since then, they have put together forums for Vivaldi and have started posting news and information about our efforts.
I know some of you will ask "What about forums.kde.org?" Plasma Active forums and related KDE discussions will continue there, while opentablets.org will focus on our specific tablet (and other) future products. This is the beauty of open participation: everyone gets to add their own flavour.
We're really excited about opentablets.org as it is one more piece of the community support and interaction puzzle being filled in by the community itself.
Device Image and Mer Progress
We've been working with new OS images this week at a somewhat frantic pace. Mer now has NetworkManager packages, allowing us to use that instead of connman where it makes sense. This really shows the progress of Mer as a community project in my opinion. Kudos to the people who have made that happen, including our own Lamarque who has worked on all sorts of KDE and NetworkManager bits.
We've updated KDE PIM and other relevant packages as well to catch up with various fixes and improvements to improve performance and reliability. This comes along with updates from Plasma Active itself such as the new file manager and encrypted activities.
With newer images, I'm now getting ~7 hours of continuous usage on the device. Again, this depends on what I'm doing, but while flipping between activities, launching apps, doing some web browsing .. you know, the usual stuff .. the battery is serving us well. It is still possible to kill it quicker with more aggressive usage (true on all devices in my experience), this is quite reasonable. I'm hoping we can deliver with these kinds of lifetimes on the battery.
Image creation has started to creep into the publicly visible area as can be see on the Vivaldi page on the Mer wiki. Our collaboration with Mer, both on the technical as well as organizational level, continues to be excellent with Mer being put on ever more solid ground. And a non-profit organization is not far away, it seems, so we can help provide for the technical needs of the community. :)
Add On App
I've talked about the Add On app previously as said we were getting close to releasing code. We have been working in a private git repository trying various things, not all of which were successes along the way, looking for what we could utilize well as our add-ons delivery application. We still have a fair amount of work to do on the client side, but today I put together a git repository containing the current client side work and put it up on git.kde.org. You can grab it with a `git clone kde:scratch/aseigo/bodega-client`. Eventually, assuming all works out as planned, this will move through the usual review process and find a home alongside the other Plasma Active repos. This repository is where we will be working from this point forward on the client side, and we welcome others to join in.
Right now there are two parts in the repository: the library which is a Qt-only C++ wrapper around the json API which makes it easy to use in an async way, and a QML application which integrated nicely with the KDE Platform by using Plasma QML Components and things like KWallet.
On the non-technical side, one of the really exciting things we're doing is what amounts to profit sharing with app developers, via the points give away experiment we're doing with pre-orders. I really need to write some more publicly about this, but the concept is pretty straight-forward: we take some of the proceeds, turn them into points in the store, give those to people who purchase devices and they pick which content (apps, etc) should be awarded those points which results in the content creators being rewarded financially based on those user choices. What's intriguing to me is that this all happens really without anyone knowing that they are part of that process: to the device owner as well as the content creator is looks like business as usual .. except the device owner may perceive it as having received some free value in the store.
In Other News
Work continues on our corporate partner network (which I wish to make a little more generic as we work on this side of it to include non-corporate members more seamlessly) and we're in the "letter of understanding" signing phase. I'm really excited to be able to share this with the world as it will demonstrate nicely the dynamic nature of the ecosystem that is developing around the Make Play Live devices.
Oh .. and we've also chosen our 10" hardware for release later in the year. But more on that another time. ;)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
15 comments:
Yes! Some time ago decided that perfect for me is 9" and for this reason skipped on Valdi but I will live with tenner :)
Wow the idea of profit sharing is so creative and great ^^! Kudos to you and all the developers :D
Great news. Hopefully you'll revisit 7" with better specs as well (in the future). I.e. with 1+ GB RAM and higher resolution (CPU and GPU in Vivaldy are already pretty good).
I know some of you will ask "What about forums.kde.org?" Plasma Active forums and related KDE discussions will continue there, while opentablets.org will focus on our specific tablet (and other) future products.
I see very little activity on forums.kde.org in regards to Plasma Active and Vivaldi (almost none to be precise). I hope community won't get fragmented into multiple parallel forums like it happened to Meego. I invite more participation on forums.kde.org for anyone interested in Vivaldi.
Vivaldi page on the Mer wiki.
Are you going to update Mer SDK section on Mer wiki about how to use Mer SDK to build packages for Vivaldi?
Thanks!
Great news. 7h usage sounds good and I like the reward-points idea.
@shmerl More RAM means higher end-user priece. 512MB are challenging but then lots of us did not had more during KDE3-times either. It should be doable and maybe it even has the positive effect of mem-usage optimizations done on the stack/apps.
I think if half of that, so 256MB, are available for apps after boot then a typical end-user will not experience any differences except maybe for games and memory-monsters. We will see.
Well, for 512 MB we already have Vivaldi with its price. I was talking about having more options for higher end in 7" format. More RAM may be is expensive, but gives more options. And even 1 GB isn't so terribly a lot.
Hey aaron, can you and your team please reconsider the name of the product for the love of god.
Simply because Vivaldi doesn't sound to catchy and doesn't fit a name for a tablet at all. To prove this right just review all the names most commercial tablets currently on the market, they are rather catchy.
I suggest you call it Tango tab. Its catchy and it won't get a big company pissed off at you for trying to copy its name.
I hope you guys don't stick with Vivaldi it sounds plain old horrible. Don't forget its the name that has a lot to do with selling the product.
If this tablet is rather a success. Do you guys have any idea as for the next model and its specs?.
Can you post some of the specs if you guys already research into this.
The device is fine with 512 mbs of ram. Whats important is the processor and the gpu. Even if it were to start using swap, it would be fast because of solid state cards that your operating system runs off of.
Most people saying "not enough ram" should not post any technical comments at all. Besides I hope no one starts using more than 400 mbs or ram on a device with those specs because it will be slow as hell. Rather the battery, processor, and gpu are more important than ram. I hope there will be a kde tablet with a bigger screen soon.
Mark N: Most people saying "not enough ram"...
Calm down. No one said it's not enough in general. But having more is good as well for more complex use cases. Some applications require more RAM than others.
The news about the 10" device is a bold step, not without risk - if many share my attitude. With the chance to get that this year I am inclinced to give up my pre-order option for the 7" and rather wait for "the real thing". Another aspect is that I can watch user comments coming in and make a decision based on those, whether the software is worth it.
Good luck with all my heart for the whole project.
I would only buy a tablet what has 4:3 screen format as 16:9 or 16:10 is just too tall on potrait mode and too short on landscape mode. 4:3 is perfect for a tablet and it is sad that Apple understood it.
Since you are basing on the C71 and there is a video showing a re-imaged C71 working I have to ask.
How about the C71 Upgrade? It is basically the same from what I can tell except it has more RAM and runs Android 4.0.
I will still get the Vivaldi just to support the project since this is at least 10 times as interesting as Apple popping out a new iPad. (10 times may be on the low end of estimates) But for the sake of openness and the whole nothing is impossible spirit I would like to make it known that such a device exists.
To the people complaining about 512MB of RAM, the N900 does fine on 256MB thankyouverymuch.
And N9 has 1 GB. You're welcome ;)
And the upgraded version you mentioned has 1 GB RAM precisely.
Post a Comment