For the very first time the Linux Foundation is organizing the Linuxcon Brazil. It will happen on August 31th and Seeptember 01 in São Paulo city at WTC.

I’m already confirmed to do a presentation in Portuguese-br: A Maturidade do Linux no Mercado dos Celulares e de Serviços: Rumo ao Domínio!

I was also invited by Klaus Kiwi to participate of a mini-sumit to discuss about Linux development as a professional activity, which I’m not sure if it is already confirmed.

Helio Castro will  be there as well doing a presentation about Meego!

Ok ok, maybe you don’t want to hear what we have to tell there, but what about listen to Linus Torvalds at this keynote

I’m pretty sure that there will be other good presentations and talks over there.

See you there?

Well I cannot blame Nokia maps hard because it really helped me to find lots of places in this huge city.
However, last month I bought a simple Garmin Navigator (Nuvi 1053T) and I have to write that developers have a lot to learn with Garmin, regarding to the usability.

The usability was the main reason that I’ve chosen this brand instead of the other one available in the market. At this point you must be willing to ask me:

“if Nokia Maps at your N900 helped you to find all places you wanted when looking for a new apartment, why the hell did you spend money in a navigator?”

Well, for some reasons:

* Due to the Murph law, always during a decision taken the phone rings and I got lost
* After get lost my Nokia Maps didn’t recalculate the route by itself
* When the 3G internet was slow it was a pain to wait to see the maps and the path (Ok I know that there is solution/workaround for this issue)
* It doesn’t warn me when there is speed camera

and the main reason:

* My wife didn’t like the Nokia Maps usability and couldn’t use it very well and since I work at home she will use more the Navigator than me.

Well, due to this reason I’ve started to take a look to different brands and models.

The first one that I’ve played with was a Tom Tom of a friend. I didn’t agree with
the most of path it took and I saw that this friend and I had some difficulties to use it even been computer engineers.

Later,  I played with a my cousin’s garmin. Well, he is a smart and intelligent doctor but he admit that he can’t use computer and other electronic devices so well.
Although he got his garmin and use it so easily that I couldn’t believe. I had also agreed with most of the paths and than I was almost decided to buy one of this.

When I was in a store in Finland looking for a Garmin to buy I found a demo device on the shelve but it was in Russian and even in a complete strange language I could with few taps
to change the language to Portuguese and use it very well.

Then, obviously I bought it.

So most of my problems I had with my N900 in São Paulo streets have already been solved. But this is not the main reason that I decided to write about it.

I believe that all developers should learn a little bit about its interface.

= Developers in general

* Leave the interface as clean as possible. On the map screen there is few information; next step with street name, distance and directions and the map itself. It also doesn’t show the small streets when it is not really necessary.
* Use few buttons as possible. On the main screen there is only two buttons: “Where to go” and “Settings”
* is it touch screen? So prepare it for fingers. Really. Use big icons. If you have to get a pen to touch it is simple wrong. As a friend of mine would say: It is so 5 years ago.
* Use meaningful buttons so people can use even in strange languages.

= To the Navigator developers

* Recalculate route is essential
* Talk and speed cameras are not easy but important
* If the device is for multiple usages, add an option that allows it to ignore automatically incomming calls or other service when you really need the navigator.

Well, but as the title suggests this post is just for the N900 users

As you should know the weakness of this device is the battery when you use so much 3G, wifi, bluetooth and GPS. I have to recharge my device every single night to be sure that I’ll have enough power for the whole next day.

At least I had, before to find out the Autodisconnect tool. You configure it to disconnect everything that is not really being used and is saves battery.

Well it doesn’t do any miracle but at least nowadays I can forget to recharge one night without being worried during the next day.

OBS: I’m not a Autodisconnect tool developer and to be honest I’ve never seen its code. This is just a tip for the users.

To restart it I’d like to tell that I’ve attended Akademy 2010 conference in Tampere-Finland from july 2th to july 4th and it was simply great.
It is always good to met people that you don’t know and put faces on the irc nicknames. Talking about people, Here are the group photo.
It was also good to meet other Collaborans and old friends there, which presented good stuff:
* George talked about telephaty
* Fleury came up with great new ideas for Qt and KDE styles
* Artur presented the Plasma mobile

There were other great presentations there as well.

So, what is next here in this blog?

Well, I know that we are far away from the new year’s day when people do lots of promises for next year but it is time to promise some posts here in this blog.
Some of these promises are in my todo list for a while and I hope that after promising it will force myself to write them soon.

You can wait to read here on next days/weeks about:

* linuxcon Brasil that is comming soon (Aug 31/Sep 01, where I’ve just confirmed my participation with a presentation.
* tip for N900 users to save the battery.
* Garmin Navigator impression.
* MeeGo
* Syplifying memory measurement

Not exactly on this order, but to be honest I’ve already started to write most of them while I’m in an Iberia flight to London through Madri.

“MeeGo is an open source, Linux project which brings together the Moblin project, headed up by Intel, and Maemo, by Nokia, into a single open source activity.”

Ari Jaaksi has written a very informative announcement. Read it.

Some Highlights:

• “The development and integration will be open, too. Everybody can invest in MeeGo and participate. It is a genuine open source project.” (Ari Jaaksi)

So, I hope to see the build system open also…

• Use the Qt Creator to create your applications: How to create a basic meego application.

These 3 last years at INdT was simply fantastic. Thank you (INdT) guys for everything. I wish the best for all of you guys.

Now it is time to move on. I joined Collabora today. Thank you (Collabora) guys for the good reception. Let’s rock.

I intend to write more technical posts related to the work at Collabora. (latter/in the future)

GVT

GVT is definitely coming to Recife: I took this photo here in my street (Mamanguape – here in Recife) this morning when they were installing this optical cable.

For those that don’t know: Here in Recife, the fastest internet is provided by Oi (1 Mb)… No, I’m not kidding: 1 (one) Mb only.

This week we were talking about GVT and someone asked: “how much does GVT 1Mb plan cost?” Everybody else start laughing because GVT has plans from 3Mb to 100Mb.

We,ll have fast internet in Recife, finally.

Recently, Qt Labs Americas was created. It is an openBossa initiative aiming the growth of local Qt and KDE communities all over America, starting in Brazil.

It was cool to see our Python team working hard on PySide which is a project that provides LGPL-licensed Python bindings for the Qt cross-platform application and UI framework.

Congratulations guys.

No dia 21 de Maio eu irei palestrar sobre GNU/Linux em sistemas móveis no Jampa Mobility Forum em João Pessoa. Neste evento eu terei a oportunidade de mostrar o mercado de GNU/Linux para sistemas móveis. Além disso eu terei a oportunidade de continuar em uma missão pessoal: difundir o uso e o desenvolvimento em GNU/Linux pelo Nordeste.

E aqui está o convite oficial do evento:

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Pessoal,

Gostaria de convidá-los para o Jampa Mobility Forum. Este evento tem por objetivo apresentar fundamentos teóricos e experiências práticas da área de dispositivos móveis e sistemas embarcados, trazendo os avanços no estado da arte e as últimas tendências do mercado.

O Jampa Mobility Forum é um evento com alto nível de qualidade sobre a área de mobilidade, que a Avaty! Tecnologia e a Faculdade iDEZ estarão organizando, e contará com a participação de professores, alunos, pesquisadores e profissionais de Tecnologia da Informação.

Para saber mais informações sobre o evento, programação e inscrição, vejam a chamada do Mobility Forum em anexo ou acessem o site do evento.

Abraços,

Andre Assad

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I’ve already posted last year’s video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHM8cUoxmio

I don’t think that you wanna miss it this year.

As always, it will be an amazing conference with great people presenting their projects in a paradisaical place. Besides you will have the oportunity to talk and share experience with great minds

Btw the programme is out:  http://www.bossaconference.indt.org/programme

Enjoy it!