Since I ex­pect An­droid on tablets to be a big thing in 2010, I am ex­per­i­ment­ing with the clos­est thing I can get: An­droid in my eee 701 Surf 4G:

I got the test­ing An­droid 2.0 im­age from http://an­droid-x86.org. I had the 1.6 "stable" one but it was... well, it worked aw­ful (half the key com­bos or menu op­tions caused it to crash, re­boot or oth­er­wise au­to­com­bust).

So... how is it work­ing? Slow, but it has po­ten­tial!

The bad:

• It boots quite fast... but my tricked full Arch Lin­ux in­­stall boots faster.

• It works sloooooow, you can see in­­di­vid­u­al let­ters when you type in the search gad­get. I read this is a tem­po­rary prob­lem, though.

• I am get­t­ing a "cas­­trat­ed" ex­pe­ri­ence be­­cause the open an­­droid app stores are not as well stocked as the of­­fi­­cial an­­droid mar­ket­­place (and come on, why the heck can't I get free apps from there???)

  I see ob­vi­ous holes in the app land­s­cape that I sup­­pose are well cov­­ered in the mar­ket (like, is there a Ra­­dio­­Tray re­­place­­men­t?)

  No text ed­i­­tor?

  No semi-de­­cent word pro­ces­­sor? Not even one that gen­er­ates HT­M­L?

• The web brows­er is pa­­thet­ic. It may be nice for a phone, but for a "re­al" sys­tem? It's aw­­ful. You get the mo­­bile ver­­sions of all sites (ob­vi­ous­­ly) and many don't let you switch to the re­al ones! (even google does that, for Google Read­­er), and of course, no flash.

• The email app is ter­ri­ble. You can't not-­­top-­­post!!!! "In-Re­­ply-­­To" is of­f-spec!

• The WiFi set­t­ings are way too hid­­den. They should pop if you click on the wifi icon.

The good:

• It shuts down in­­­cred­i­bly fast.

• Some apps are quite nice, spe­­cial­­ly the Aldiko book read­­er is awe­­some (and I can share the ePub books with fbRead­­er on the arch lin­ux side.

• The in­­­clud­ed SSH client has great ideas.

• I love the "all your da­­ta is in the SD" ap­proach. I do the same thing with Lin­ux. In fac­t, I have the same ex­act da­­ta or­­ga­ni­za­­­tion now on both OSs :-)

• The home screen with the slid­ing app draw­er: nice

• The "grab­bable" sys­tem no­ti­­fi­­ca­­tions on the top bar: very nice

• The "use the menu key to get the menu" thing? ge­nius ;-)

• The "ev­ery­thing fullscreen all the time", thing? works on this screen.

• App in­­stal­la­­tion is a solved prob­lem here.

• I know I will be able to get Qt work­ing na­­tive... can't wait!

I am not sold yet, Arch is just so much faster right now, and it can do so much more, but...

• I am get­t­ing a touch­screen for it, so I can ex­pe­ri­ence it more the way it's meant to be ex­pe­ri­enced.

• I am us­ing it a lot to read at night in bed (Just fin­ished Mak­ers, read it, it's cool!).

• I am us­ing it for ca­­su­al mail read­­ing (I refuse to re­­ply with that bro­ken ap­p).

• It's a pret­­ty nice alarm clock, so it's be­­com­ing my bed­­side OS.

I'll write an­oth­er re­port once I have the touch screen or a new (hope­ful­ly faster!) ver­sion run­ning.

Ver­sion 0.6 of Mar­ave, my peace­ful, fullscreen text ed­i­tor is now avail­able at the usu­al place: http://­mar­ave.­google­code.­com

New stuff:

• Syn­­tax high­­­lighter

• Plug­ins

• Bugs fixed

• Nicer an­i­­ma­­tions

• Code cleanup

Gra­tu­itous screen­shot:

Just up­load­ed Mar­ave 0.5 to the usu­al place. Mar­ave is a re­laxed, fullscreen text ed­i­tor that tries not to dis­tract you.

It even in­cludes a sim­ple mu­sic play­er just so you don't have to think about switch­ing to an­oth­er ap­pli­ca­tion!

This re­lease has sev­er­al bugs fixed, and looks a bit nicer.

The main new fea­ture is ... in­ter­na­tion­al­iza­cion. It now in­cludes a span­ish trans­la­tion on­ly, but if you want to help trans­lat­ing it to any oth­er lan­guage, please step for­ward!

There are on­ly 60 phras­es to trans­late, so it should­n't be more than one hour of work.

Here's a screen­shot of this re­lease:

Mar­ave is free soft­ware un­der the GPLv2, and should work on any plat­form where PyQt work­s, which means Win­dows, Mac, and Unix-­like op­er­at­ing sys­tem­s, at least.

The first "good" ver­sion of Mar­ave my re­lax­ing text ed­i­tor is out!

What is Mar­ave?

Mar­ave is an ed­i­tor that does­n't dis­tract you. It has a fullscreen in­ter­face, and most of the time, while you write, you will on­ly see your tex­t, and maybe a back­ground:

Of course it is al­so quite con­fig­urable:

Some of the fea­tures:

• Cus­­tom back­­­grounds (im­ages or col­ors)

• Font and font size are con­­fig­urable

• Re­­size­able ed­i­­tor of con­­fig­urable opac­i­­ty

• "Van­ish­ing" UI, when you tipe, it all goes away

• Op­­tion­al me­­dia play­er (right now aimed at stream­ing au­­dio, maybe sound­s­capes some­­day)

• Op­­tion­al au­­dio feed­back for the key­board (just in case you miss the old type­­writer)

• Theme sup­­port

• Mul­ti­lin­gual spellcheck­­ing (re­quires pyen­chan­t)

Mar­ave is im­ple­ment­ed us­ing PyQt, so it should work in all ma­jor plat­form­s, Win­dows, Lin­ux and Mac OS­X, as long as you have PyQt in­stalled.

In the fu­ture, easy to use bi­na­ries will be pro­vid­ed for Win­dows and Mac.

This ver­sion is not fea­ture com­plete. Specif­i­cal­ly:

• Search+Re­­place is not done

• There may be some cus­­tomiza­­­tions not im­­ple­­men­t­ed

Down­load Mar­ave 0.1

UP­DATE 0.2 is out, at http://­code.­google.­com/p/­mar­ave/­down­load­s/list

An­nounce­men­t:

Mar­ave (noth­ing, in guaraní) is a re­laxed text ed­i­tor. Its goal is to let you fo­cus in your writ­ing, free of vis­ual dis­trac­tions and clut­ter.

It is writ­ten us­ing PyQt, so it should work in all ma­jor plat­form­s, and it is li­censed un­der the GPLv2 so it is free soft­ware.

You can find the cur­rent SVN (no re­lease yet) at http://­mar­ave.­google­code.­com

Screen­shot­s:

Sta­tus:

It's not fin­ished yet, but it has the fol­low­ing fea­tures:

• You can ed­it text

• Min­i­­mal­is­tic, "van­ish­ing" us­er in­­ter­­face

• (Op­­tion­al) au­­dio feed­back for the key­board

• (Op­­tion­al) re­lax­ing mu­sic (re­quires in­­ter­net ac­cess)

• You can cus­­tom­ize the back­­­ground, font, colours, and sounds

• Live spell check­­ing (re­quires pyen­chan­t)

There are al­so some ma­jor miss­ing fea­tures:

• Search and Search/Re­­place is not im­­ple­­men­t­ed

• UI cus­­tomiza­­­tions are not stored

• UI has to be cleaned up a lot more

• It does­n't ask to save when clos­ing

• Au­­tosave not im­­ple­­men­t­ed

And at least one known bug:

• In win­­dows the wid­gets are not well placed Fixed in SVN

A litte his­to­ry:

A few days ago, I saw ommwrit­er men­tioned in a tweet or some­thing sim­i­lar.

I was think­ing "nice thing", but in the back of my mind I was al­so think­ing "that can't be too hard to do". Af­ter al­l, the hard part of cre­at­ing a pro­gram is mak­ing it do things, right?

Well, yes and no. I did man­age to cre­ate a some­what rea­son­able fac­sim­i­le in a day, but tweak­ing the looks of it is driv­ing me nuts :-)