The roads I take...

Back in 2007, I was wondering if a mobile device that fits me will ever be built and saw the unveiling of the N810 as a step nearer to that. It was a really open, hackable mobile device, with a Mozilla-based browser, but it lacked phone capabilities, so even when I bought one a few months later, I still needed to carry a phone around with me in addition to this surely nice device.

What I really wanted after all, was a smartphone, albeit one that was truly open and hackable at least on the side of software, reasonably fast, with a Mozilla-based browser that shows the web as it should be and a touch screen in a handy size - oh, did I say it should be a phone at the same time? Would it ever exist? I trusted it would, I was just thinking ahead of the time.

The OpenMoko was a phone that sounded interesting, but it never came to a state where it would have few enough problems to make the mass-market. When Google came up with Linux-based Android, it sounded good, but the G1 and friends are nothing like an open, hackable device. It goes without saying the the iPhone isn't, even though it looks cool and seems to be pretty functional.

Meanwhile, having the N810, I grew quite fond of the nicely sized touch screen, but even more of the maemo distribution, and of many things like maemo-mapper, which is my trusted OpenStreetMap-based travel companion nowadays. And I closely am following the maemo community through blogs, etc.

So, it was no big surprise to me when Nokia unveiled the N900, powered by maemo 5 this week. I've read enough rumors about this "RX-51" or "Rover" prototype device, esp. in recent weeks but even vague comments before that.

And still, it's a bit overwhelming for an open source guy like me. This is actually one of the largest mobile phone producers worldwide shipping a smartphone (yes, a phone!) based on Linux, with a fully hackable software stack and, importantly of us, a Mozilla-based browser! Shipping, as in pushing it out as their top-of-the-line product for consumers! Not just a geek thing like the OpenMoko, a normal consumer device that at the same time speeds up the heartbeat of any open source geek!

This is a bold step for Nokia, and I really hope it will be successful - this could be an important point in getting open software out to consumers, possibly even as large an impact as Firefox on the desktop. Thanks to Nokia for taking this step. This week, I'm really proud to be a Nokia - and maemo - user.

I'm not sure if the N900 is fully the device that fits me in every regard, I fear the screen might come to be a bit small of the things I've grow accustomed to (maemo-mapper, browsing, showing my pictures to people, even doing some programming), and I also fear that the smaller keyboard compared to the N810 makes typing even harder, but in any case, the N900 is another large step to the device I want. I think the fact that it's less a niche product but a general consumer product (even as a high-end smartphone) is overall the more significant matter than if it fits my requirements perfectly.

This week, I found some more time to hack around on my fun project to do a Mandelbrot set fractal renderer in XULRunner - some of that fun hackery done on the N810, some on my desktop, finally some on my laptop, and now those sources create a really usable application.
The only thing holding me back from doing a downloadable "(pre)release" package of any kind is that it's still somewhat hard to do that for XUL/JS-only XULRunner apps. I'd need to compile my own XULRunner and package it with that or such to get a usable downloadable thing.



What I added this week to bring it over the top was a zoom function that works by dragging the mouse over any piece of a rendered image and a possibility to bookmark locations and call them up again at a later point. With that, one can easily navigate to different places and get pictures like the one above - my laptop calculated and rendered the original 1280x1024 picture in a matter of seconds, with a 1.9.1 XULRunner from some time this weekend, so the same TraceMonkey present in Firefox 3.5.2 to calculate all those iterations, and I did save the contents of the canvas used to paint it as a PNG with the functionality I have in the application. Any quality degradation comes from scaling and converting to JPEG on my web server.

Oh, and there's one more interesting picture I did get out of this work:


(larger sizes linked, original 1280x1024 desktop-wallpaper-ready version available on personal request)

All the fractal pixels in this image come from TraceMonkey's calculation again, of course, but the GIMP helped slightly to finish off this one.