Today is a day in which I find myself passing through many doorway as all sorts of milestones for our little project are coming up at once.
As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, we'll be shipping the Vivaldi tablet computer with 1GB of RAM .. and today I can tell you even more good news: we've doubled the internal storage to 8GB as well. We'll be settling on the USA pricing shortly as well, and I think people will be pleasantly surprised with where that lands.
Purchase orders for the first production runs of devices have
gone in. This is truly a "point of no return" for the project, and
that is very, very satisfying to have reached. We have some of the typical
right-to-the-wire engineering work to do on the software side, but then
we'll be pulling all the triggers and emails will pour forth and sales will open.
We've been signing letters of understanding with various companies as part of an effort to build a partner network around Make·Play·Live. This will allow us to provide services and support around Vivaldi, the Add-Ons App and future efforts that would be impossible to do otherwise. I've got a whole separate blog entry brewing about it which I'll release after the official announcement next week.
Speaking of sales, yesterday the first Make·Play·Live accounts were created using the Add-ons App. It was also the day that the credit card processing system went live, making addons.makeplaylive.com a fully operational battle station. In step with this, today is the last day of development for version 1.0 of the Add-Ons app. We'll start loading content on the server soon and move it over to an SSL secured home on port 80. A development installation will remain up on port 3000, and we intend to keep that open to the public as well.
Aaaand, I have another long blog entry in the "philosopher/pragmatist" series already written and waiting for one more round of editing before pushing "publish" on it.
Somewhere in all this, I also managed to catch up with mailing lists and push a fix to libplasmagenericshell in kde-workspace that fixes a crash when loading themes without window shadows. I have to say "thanks" to Marius Cirsta from Frugalware for doing the detective work that tracked down the source of the problem and made my job simple. :)
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20 comments:
I m happy it's progressing and thriving, thank you so much for the initiative!
My biggest complaint would probably be the resolution of the tablet. My 3 usages of the tablet will be:
Read pdf (publications etc)
Browse the web
Watch movies
I feel like with the current resolution (800x480), those tasks wont be very enjoable. I might be wrong, but i would have to see it in real life to see how it looks like.
Anyways, looking forward to a kde tablet :)
I am on the preorder list and I have some small questions:
- interval when payments can be made after everything goes live
- estimation of the day/month when it should go live
- how is the pdf viewer app ? m$ had a demo for "slates" and they used adobe reader, which looks awful on tablets; stock okular ?
- how will it ship ?
- can you reinstall the system easily on the tablet ?
- can you create files for encrypted activities that also become encrypted ? ( notes, docs, etc )
Other than that, can't wait to impress with kde on a tablet :D
Could you please get your blog removed from Planet KDE now that you're not part of KDE anymore? We're getting tired of your spam, thanks
@ToAlla_
If you're getting tired of it, the best way to deal with that is not trying to be a jerk on the Internet, but just skipping the posts you personally don't like.
As to claims that Aaron is not part of our community, that is plain nonsense.
Besides that, his post is clearly KDE-related, so very much has a place on PlanetKDE.
This is awesome news, thanks again! :-D I'm really looking forward to all the positive developments this idea will bring to F/OSS!
@Beat Wolf: imho it works pretty well; i tried a number of different tablets for months before being "ok" with this. all the same, we will eventually also offer higher resolution tablets.
@Andrei: "interval when payments can be made after everything goes live"
immediately.
"estimation of the day/month when it should go live"
when it's ready; but the fact that POs have been sent should be a big hint ;)
"how is the pdf viewer app"
right now we have okular on there, but lacking a proper touch UI i'm seriously considering using "tablet reader" isntead, which is a new QML based reader that uses the same libraries as okular (and is currently being ported to okular's core, even better!) that is well suited to the device. it is in kde's git now...
"how will it ship?"
by post, direct to you.
"can you reinstall the system easily on the tablet?"
the bootloader is not locked
"can you create files for encrypted activity that also become encrypted?"
eventually, yes. however, we are probably going to disable the feature for the first devices and re-enable it later via a software update as we have not had time to fully test the system to our full satisfaction, and with a security feature that's critical. we'll see, though.
@ToAlla_: every bit of code i've written in the last month has been for KDE, virtually all of it has been put in KDE"s git and i'm still doing this full time .. only now it's on my own dime instead of Nokia's.
we're also sponsoring others to work on KDE things now too, something we'll expand further in future if things mature well with this project.
i also still work on Plasma Desktop and various other things. but yeah .. i'm not sure where you got the idea that i'm not longer part of KDE. perhaps you could explain?
@seba & @Diederik van der Boor: thanks for the support! :)
Question: will the firmware image be available after the Vivaldi is out? I have one of the Zenithink C71 Upgrade tablets with Android, but I'm much more interested in loading Active on it.
@Einer: yes, it's an open project and we don't intend to hide things from people. :)
you can build the image yourself using the Mer SDK, which also means you can modify it, which is another level of awesome imho...
i was going to hold out for the 10 inch that i read hint of here and there. i changed my mind. any idea when you'll be ready for a second run?
so is the Vivaldi a meson3 based tablet then?
Great Job! I really hope Vivaldi and Make Play Live become a success and we start seeing more and more hardware that is really designed/optimized for Linux/KDE and not just use it as an add-on to save a little cost like other companies do.
Keep up the good work guys, you are being an inspiration to us all :)
Hey,
I'm looking forward to buying your tablet (maybe a high-resolution one however, will see ...).
I'm using kde 4.8 currently and hope I will be moving to a more "unified" environment with the vivaldi-tablet (syncing activities, ...?).
Not sure, but I'm also lookign forward toa tablet with a Mirasol-screen with front-lighting if the reviews turn out well. Maybe a good idea to combine it with the vivalid-tablet? Perfect book-reader, ...?
Aaron: How soon do you think QML PDF reader will be available for everyday use?
3G
3G
3G
!!!
:D
thanks
Any updates? It's too silent on the Vivaldi front.
@Schmerl: we have an okular based one working now that has been merged into the Vivaldi images. it doesn't have every possible feature at this point, but it works nicely and we will continue to develop it based on the okular core.
(and please be patient with us when it comes to communication times. we are all very busy making this happen. we don't always have time to hang out and comment on or write new blog entries :)
@davide scaini: yes, eventually :)
I think i will skip this tablet (needs a bigger screen). however if you guys decide sell a KDE powered smartphone i buy one. no matter the specs/price. now i think about it, i might buy i tablet if it helps you guys create a kde based smartphone. did i mention yet that i'm very interested in a kde based smartphone?
anyway keep up this good work!
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