Camera and More

Hello,

For a change, it’s not Rohan here. Work on Camera is still a WIP. Code for the camera libraries are closed source with NVidia and getting around the camera sub-system is taking longer than expected.

Having said that, if you are waiting for the camera update, voicing at Tegra Forum might help though most of the questions are either deleted or never replied. Here is one of the dev for Adam voicing for support, but even the last suggestion suggests to move on to OMAP

As the lead for the sw, it is extremely important for us to make sure that the roadmap doesn’t break anything on Adam 1. The only option (and better one) was to opt for RenderScript.

RenderScript is hardware independent (though can be tweaked) and development on RS will make sure that Adam 1 stays in SW support for at least 2 more years.

RenderScript and SVG are going to be in out focus for next two-year here at Notion Ink. Below is a very small sample of RenderScript rendering an A3D model of simple sphere, with Earth Map (from Nasa), bump map created using GIMP, couple of lights and animation (not obvious from an image).

Frankly sharing anything on development on next versions of Eden doesn’t make sense till the camera issue is resolved. That’s the last piece of puzzle, and if you can help sport your voice on that forum, possibly we can fix things faster.

As an ex developer of a leading brand you all know about, it is really fascinating to even absorb the idea of how community has made more than 200 ROM variants for Adam. Unlike Adam 1, there will be no short-cuts for 2. If something not working, it won’t go out. Our roadmap is built for next 4 years, so there will be speed differences. But one thing is clear and that’s what I bring here at NI, great products needs stronger fundamentals, and that’s what we will build first.

Last words on the next generation SW approach. We are approaching the era of micro-apps. Every app cannot be tuned in for a particular user. A doctor may have 15 years of formal education and 25 years of practice, but when it comes to sw, he can’t possible build one. But if see clearly, IDEs and APIs like Android SDK and iOS SDK have worked till now to ease the development of the programmers to attract more developers, making things sometimes as easy as making a “task flow” like an accountant would do, “refer” a value in one cell of a sheet to another cell. There is a truck load of information yet to come, but first things first.

Best

V

And we love it!

Hello All!

We loved the response and appreciation we have got till now. But more is yet to come. Right from more than one product to be there at CES, to the recent patents we have filed, there are going to be more disclosures on the work we are doing. A special thanks to the open source community, nVidia and Pixel Qi, for supporting us and helping us make this into a reality. (Special thanks to slashgear for covering us.)

So, who are we? What do we do? When are we going to launch the product? I know you all have lots of questions.

We see ourselves as the usability firm, one which will always keep the user at the core and design everything. Right now the product which is to come at CES will showcase only Android. But was it not designed for smaller mobile phone? What about those full screen alert boxes? There are lots of issues for Android to be used on the big screen. We are going to fix it, but will not showcase in CES this time. There are going to be a lot of User Interface changes in the final product.

We believe that the ‘window’ concept is gone. The UI which we are using is some 4 decades old, but we are yet to get rid of the folders, hierarchy and drop down menus! All this is going to change. A lot of new user interface ideas are coming. One of the few one which we like are this and this. In fact, TIME’s project Manhattan is an early response to the same. The UI is going to change, because the needs have changed. Now we need our devices not only to browse internet, but also to read the books.

Some of the concept designs have made us smile in awe and in anger as well. Awe because they were able to solve a lot of problems, and anger, cos they were able to showcase it to the world before us. Yet, this new UI needs to evolve. And the community would play a very big role in the same. We are thinking of involving the community in a bigger way, where they get to choose which rules are to be adopted, what UI element makes a lot of sense and what compromises are to be made, if efficient usability is to be achieved.

iPod brought music to life, then videos as well. Soon internet and applications saw the surge. Amazon came out with Kindle. But what’s next? We believe its the media. Newspapers at go. Delivered every morning to your home screen.

We recently went to Taiwan. And to our understanding, and major ODM’s fear, we can definitely say, that Apple IS cooking up something. Even if one of the ODMs is their manufacturer, the fact that their other non-Apple group would suffer is a big burden for them. We talked to all. And we tried to explain them, that product is not going to win the next generation of computing device race. It’s the CONTENT. We tried our hard to make them realize, when Apple launches their product, they will have a very beautiful device, the best UI which a tablet can feature, and to support all that, one of the best content delivery systems (their recent acquisition are big hints). All this would again usher a big group of people making application for them. And then again the normal product manufacturers would be left.

We are not going to do to this mistake. That is why we have already made quite a few collaborations, and many more are in the pipeline. We would release our own SDK later next year for the bigger screen application development. We would help the open community as much as we can, so there is already lot of content there, before we hit the market. Designing on Android if way easier than on any other OSes.

We have a comments section on the website, would love to hear from you. And love to answer your queries. You can also mail us at info AT notionink.com