it was exactly 12 months to the day since my nokia internet tablet arrived.

I've started to bring together the ideas and principles I've thought about for many years into a cohesive and compelling touch based framework.

I'm coding in C again! Its so different to the visual basic I've spent the last few years using, but its kept my mind sharp by having to think in extremely optimized units.

Best of all this year I've made loads of new friends and been to new places and I've learnt about all the cool things we can do in linux and talked about everything we want to do in the future.

What a year its been!

I'm really looking forward to the Christmas break to get some time to spend on liqbase, theres a lot to do but the classes are gelling together nicely.

Merry Christmas everybody, hope you are safe.

Should I be worried about software patents?

I have thought about touch screen user interaction for a long time now, and have written numerous visualizations and interactive controls over the years.

I have a kickass collection of functions and algorithms for all areas of the system but I have never specialized in one specific place.
This year I have started to open my source and release these little ideas and have sent coded up implementations into the wild.

Some of the code is novel, some of it is mundane, other pieces are just weird but give a pretty effect :)
I've found a nice home within the nokia maemo linux community and my software has been well received amongst its members and beyond.

I bet somewhere I've stepped on somebodies toes and have their patented algorithm in my code.
In reading up about them this evening I find out that the chances are, if you have done anything more than hello world you will have too!

How would I find out what patents I have in my code?

Should I be checking every single function I write against the central registry?

paper is slow.

when I am talking to my friends or sitting in a meeting at work, I like to have a pad and pen so I can doodle and take little notes or reminders for later. When I am going for dinner I write everyone's order. When I am on the phone to a customer I have to take notes.

These notes are not intrusive and we go through tonnes of paper with them every single year.

How long do we spend searching for that scrap you wrote your dinner order on? or the todo list from the last meeting? What did customerx say when you spoke to him?

how many napkin ideas have fallen into the wastebasket never to be seen again?

I want to keep them all and let you use them and expand upon them.

liqbase is faster than paper.

A couple of weeks ago I returned from the first maemo.org summit.

At that summit a number of very special things occured.
I met up with people I had only spoken to online and drank lots of beer, and secondly my software was recognised.

I was able to show my vision for touch based devices and I was bowled over by the reaction.

I have been writing a piece of software for the last few months now, called liqbase - its designed to make the most out of a touch device and actually put control back at your fingertips.

Its still just a hack, there is no polish and it needs a lot of work, but its out there.

The Nokia Internet Tablets run a variant of linux called maemo, with a thriving community at the maemo.org site we code and hack our devices because we can.
I didn't wait for anyone else to fix it for me, I didn't wait for next gen hardware, I made the most out of what I had and went ahead and tried myself and am more than happy with the results so far.

Its been a long hard slog this year, I've hacked and cursed and laughed and cried along with my friends, but I've managed to do something which works like a touch screen is meant to.

I want to take it further, Nokia wants me to take it further, maybe, just maybe we can manage it.

http://uk.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=lcukmaemo
http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23854

Its time for my worlds to collide.

I have spent the last few months playing with my Nokia N810 internet tablet, and whilst it is an amazing piece of kit I was underwhelmed by the speed of the graphical rendering.

Since its a linux box I decided to have a look at what I could do.
The results of this is a technology demo called liqbase.
It manages to do fullscreen blits and nice kinetic effects which have felt lacking on this device until now.

I decided to do a little bit of lateral thinking and ended up creating a small graphics library using the x11/XV YUV overlay which is normally used for movie rendering.

I'm impressed with the performance I'm getting (25fps 800*480) and it makes my tablet feel fast.

I've picked up C again, and actually managed to use linux properly for the first time and most of all had a great time doing it.

So far, its been a closed source endeavour, but thats been not wanting to side track myself with supporting functions which were not staying anyway.
I made my decision this morning and I am releasing the code later and whilst I'm nervous I think its the right thing to do.

Open source FTW :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUPp_mE7rwI
http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21556
http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21259