Yannick Pellet's Blog

Enyo now, Open webOS 1.0 in September

2012-01-26T05:32:00.000+02:00

First steps towards open webOS, read on
http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/25/hp-webos-to-be-fully-open-sourced-by-september-enyo-2-0-framew/

Legend

2011-10-15T02:06:00.000+03:00

2 weesk ago, Nokia released what is probably its greatest device until now. The N9.

I have worked 2 years on almost every aspects of the N9 and 10 years on the Maemo/Meego platform. The N9 is actually the first true design statement from Nokia and it is carrying a technology that was unique in the mobile platform world... Many things are right in this device... Yet, six month ago, Nokia ramped down meego and discontinued any effort to take this platform further.

This appears to be a paradox, but it is not. Strategy is the voice of realpolitik . You add the numbers, look at the bottom line, make a decision.... and sometimes you make a sacrifice.

I will found comfort in predicting that the N9 will have the destiny of a legend. Intense, grandiose and short lived like a firework...."Too weird to live , too rare to die" like a rock'n roll star.

Mark my words, when Hendrix wants to connect with Cobain in heaven, he goes for his guitare, halts, reaches for his pocket...and pulls out his N9.

I thank all of my colleagues and friends in Nokia and Meego for those wonderful 10 years. Hat's off to you, gentlemen.

I know we will always be in touch.

As for me, I have left Nokia since the summer, and I have started heading Application and Platform development for webOS for HP.

Real People

2010-01-05T22:53:00.002+02:00

N900 has been on the market for more then a month now…Time flies…
The buzz is continuing and sales seem to have started very, very, very well…
I am obviously happy about all this…But actually something else is making my day.

For months and months, we have been designing a ground-breaking product for Nokia in a completely closed environment.
Off course, designers have designed, architects have "architected", developers have developed, and managers have managed. We have done feasibility studies, we have done usability studies, we know more or less where we succeeded, and we know more or less where we still need to improve. And we have been endlessly testing the device and doing endless amount of modifications with customer satisfaction in mind.

But all this is no substitute for reality that is to say: real people using the device in their real environment

The fact remains: when you are designing such a product, you need to have an intuition for what the customer wants and this intuition drives every single one of your actions for months.
There are tools, methods and process that you can use to measure how good you are doing along the way, but in the end it is all about the intuition and the strength of the confidence that you put behind it to drive the work…and eventually it all boils down to the time when the device gets in the hands of the customer.
Are they going to like the browser? The multiple home-screen? What about the conversation views? Are they going to notice this and that feature? All this gets resolved magically within couple of weeks.

I was not the only one starving for this. Last week-end, some of our guys from our application testing team went to do a couple of days of internship at our flagship store. They actually sold our device during a whole day and got confronted to customers themselves. The feedback we got from the guys was quite outstanding; some said the experience was simply tremendous.
With the huge coverage the N900 has been getting, no need to say that we have on our hand a unique opportunity to grow our knowledge and experience on the matter. We need to leverage this.

I myself will probably see you around at the Nokia Flagship store somewhere in the winter.

Wishing you a happy new year.

Maemo positions opened in Finland, US and India

2009-09-13T23:02:00.000+03:00

There are a lot of positions opened now in Maemo. Just click here, and this should take you to a search engine which has all our opened positions. Uuse the obvious "maemo" keyword, and you will find everything from engineering to marketing positions.

In the Application team, we are looking for architects, project managers, programmers, etc... covering a lot of different areas: browsing, location, real time communication, productivity, testing, program management, services, etc...and there are openings in Finland, US (Mountain View) and Bangalore.
I -in particular - am looking for somebody to drive our development in Bangalore - if you feel up to it , don't hesitate to contact me.

So far, so good.

2009-09-06T23:50:00.000+03:00

N900 public launch and announcement...that went all right...Bloggers blogged. Twitters tweetted. People got excited... a dozen millions hits on the maemo5 website within 24 hours...Genuine interest all around.
Then came Nokia world....And the first opportunity for hands-on reviews...What was the result?. Reviews were mostly positive and the buzz was remarkable on the floor of Nokia world.

So far, so good.

But it's not over until it´s over.Until the device is in the hands of customers and people start loving the device, all of this means very little-The only thing that can be said at that point is that people understand what this device is about and what we tried to do.

So, let's keep up the good work, let's stay focus...We are on the right path.

Yannick

PS: a few reviews were the N900 was mentioned. techradar, pocket-lint, mobile-ent, business24

Videos

2009-09-02T00:58:00.000+03:00

Apart from the promo video - which everybody has probably already seen - , there has been a couple of extra interesting post on youtube
The first one is a small presentation from our friends from marketing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP5R-5NX1BE&feature=PlayList&p=32A4BB8E620CF809&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=19

....But my favorite would have to be this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WhyrhWsMFk

It only has a couple of hundred hits on youtube so far but it is building a cult following which should rank it right up there with the productions of Andy Warhol and Luis Bunuel in a matter of months...and will also probably trigger a long series of such alternative weird videos to my greatest pleasure...

N900 announced.

2009-08-27T15:32:00.001+03:00

The N900 has been announced, it is based on Maemo 5.
Here is the N900 official press release about it:
http://www.nokia.com/press/press-releases/showpressrelease?newsid=1337594
And here is the maemo site about it:
http://maemo.nokia.com/.
Check it out.

Hiring in Mountain View, California.

2008-09-09T19:10:00.009+03:00

Maemo SW is setting up a site in Mountain View - which means that there are some positions currently opened that might be of interest to some of you. This site will deal with third-party and partner management with a special focus on the Internet services and technologies. We are looking for people with very different background- some product management and UI positions for instance. I am in particular looking for somebody to manage the site. (go to the careers link on http://www.nokia.com/ site and search for the "Maemo SW, US site manager and Head of third-party and partner development" position). This is a quite interesting position, and we are looking for somebody who would have both the technical and open source background as well as some insight on product management and partnering
As far as RD is concerned, there are several positions available: architect, project manager, lead developer. Hope to hear from you.

N810

2007-10-27T12:30:00.000+03:00

N810 is out. One step further. It has the slide/in-slide/out keyboard everybody was asking. It has integrated GPS. Plus lost of others HW goodies. The Browser is Mozilla based - which is the result of the effort that we put on N800. The device is thiner better, more optimzed and has got a brand new revamped look.

Mozilla based Browser for Maemo.

2007-07-17T23:16:00.000+03:00

After a lot of community ground work and hard development, we can now announce the development version of a new Mozilla based browser engine for maemo.
It is a XULRunner configuration of Mozilla trunk targeted to Firefox 3.0 and Gecko 1.9. It does not include XUL and SVG because of performance optimization and uses GTK/XLIB/XFT instead of Cairo
I could not attend Guadec this year for private reasons but some of you who are there have probably checked out Ari Jaaksi´s and Leonid´s talk on the subject.
This is something that has been asked by the community for a long time, and that I have been asked for many times at Guadec. Let´s see now if you guys like it.

Another round of thank-yous for the Skype, Rhapsody and Flash 9 projects.

2007-07-16T19:49:00.000+03:00

As far as Skype and Rhapsody is concerned the responsability for development was under the Internt Application that I ramped up about 8 month ago. So special thanks goes to those guys (Sotiris, Ouyang, Vitaly, Zsolt, enkatetc..) . That being said the development needed effort and coordination from all the teams all over OSSO: Multimedia, RTC, Testing, etc... The list of people to thank is endless: Mikko and Makoto from Multimedia, Sasha, Andrei, Simone, Naba from RTC, Alexandru and all the people from testing, Rami and Shalinder from project, Lee from localization, Brad from legal, Erkko and Sami from product, Sasha and Misha from integration...and I am probably forgetting some names, here, etc...

As far as flash9 work is concerned: Mikko, Matti, Erkko and Leonid and the Adobe guys should be the one receiving our gratitude. I would like also to extend my thanks to the CP management, with specific thanks to Ari Jaaksi who has been given us great support during our trials and tribulation.

Skype and Flash 9 on top of N800!

2007-07-16T19:24:00.000+03:00

The new SW upgraded for the N800 is out! Apart from the Enhancement in terms of performance, usability and memory card support, the two main application feature are Flash9 support and Skype (Flash9 comes with the SW package, Skype is installable through a pre-install icon on the device)
A lot of coordination were needed between the different OSSO teams in order to make this happen and - even thought the road was bumpy - overall we did manage to deliver everything in close to 4 month of development.
A lot can be siad about the Skype effort in particular in relation to the Real Rhapsody release of march 2007. One can obviously note from those 2 projects, tha some part of our development - specially in the Application area under my responsibility - is concentrating on enabling major Internet services on our device. A lot of work still needs to be done and will be done on the Application infrastructures. The basic Sw offering will definitely improve (new apps will appear, some apps will be redesigned and more open source work will definitely be done). But Partnering with Internet players and enabling those SW at the platform level is also a strong trend in our development as Ari Virtanen pointed out. We cannot make our customer wait for the Internet services they like to use, while we continue to work on the infrastructures, UI, and other Apps. We cannot tell Skype or Rhapsody users, please wait another 12 month to use your favorite application. Otherwise those customers might just turn to another device that does support their favorite application. So basically it means that our development needs to be split in two and go in parallel toward 2 different trends: one that follows the long-term approach focusing on the maturity and features of the platform (performance, UI, extra application, design, connectivity, HW support, etc...) and another trend that focuses on delivering the Internet favorite services - wherever they might come from - on top of the platform at any given time. Those projects are generally extremely complex as they combined business and development and they of course cause a lot of synchronization issues witht eh platform and product work.

Thanks to the telepathy community and the team

2007-01-19T01:17:00.000+02:00

Now that the N800 has been out for a month and things are settling down, I would like to take the time and opportunity to openly acknowledge and thank the open source work that has been done in 2006 inside OSSO Application - particularly in the domain of real time communication.

In October 2006, we started the work to enable the OSSO platform with voice and video. Now, in february 2007, the team working together with the Open source has managed to deliver on-time for 2 different HW (770 and N800).

The first thanks I would like to extend is to our in-house team. Nothing would have been achieved without the hard work and competence of those guys. So Sasha, Jussi, Andrei, Simone, Naba (as well the newly arrived): thanks to all of you!

On the Open source front, I would like to take my hats off to the Telepathy community, and specially to Robert McQueen, Philip Kallaf and Robert Taylor.
We had to find a viable open source architecture that would allow us to enable the platform with both voice and video inside a six month time-window. Those guys made it happen with the utmost professionalism.

Thanks to all of you

HIRING! HIRING! Application development on 770. Anything from management to development.

2006-06-08T17:17:00.000+03:00

Hello all!,

We are currentely recruiting. Bellow you will find a small description of what those position are about as well as a link to them on the nokia career site. I think there is definately something for everyone - from developper to manager. Check the position bellow some of them might be interesting. Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

1/R&D Manager. This is an extremelly interesting position for anybody who is also interested in the business aspect of things. But don't go for this one if you are want to focus on pure software!!

2/Project Manager Project management position: scheduling responsability for deliverables, etc...

3/Senior Software Engineer Coding, prtotyping, solution finder, architecture proposal.

4/ Senior Software Engineer: 4 developpers position on Open source VoIP, IM and Realtime communication. Any experience on existing open source VoIP/IM solutions is welcome i.e. telepathy for instance.

5/Browser Specialist any experience on browser development is welcome.

6/ Sw developper. General software development and architecting on applications.

7/Project Manager. Scheduling, deliverables, responsability

Hope to hear from you.

Yannick

Linux Award in London

2005-10-12T21:28:00.000+03:00

I was last week at the linux award 2005 in London with Ari. the Nokia 770 was nominated in the best embedded Linux category for And guess what...We won!!
Ari and me received a mail about this from Jon Masters only five days before the event,and improvised the trip at the last minute. It was again very rewarding event after tall the hard work we did.
The Linux expo was also pretty interesting. A few interesting topics around linux business. Matthew Allum from OpenedHand was there, so we had a few cigarettes together when he was taking breaks from his stands.

2005-10-11T10:28:00.000+03:00

First development release (1.11.0) of Sofia-SIP is out.

About the 770.

2005-10-10T17:27:00.000+03:00

There was some announcement that N770 was delayed. One should not think too much this. As one of the person that has been involved with the whole process of development from day one, this reflects one thing: we just want the 770 to be a success and to be as perfect as we can make it. We are just in the last stretch of the race, fixing the last details.

Boston Summit...not able to make it unfortunately...

2005-10-07T02:23:00.000+03:00

I will not be able to attend the Gnome Boston Summit as I have some pretty imnportant work to conclude. However,Jussi Laako will be there. He will be able to tell you a bit more about the work that we did for Sofia SIP.

GStreamer 0.9

2005-09-01T15:11:00.000+03:00

GStreamer 0.9 is out. The Fluendo and GStreamer guys were involved from the start in N770. Actually I would like to thank Christian Schaller, Wim Taymans, and all the other GStreamer guys that gave support and guidance during the 770 project.I liked very much working with those guys and I hope we can continue. We started supporting the development of 0.9 in December 2004, and now it is finally out.

Sofia-SIP Project

2005-08-15T09:22:00.000+03:00

Sofia-SIP stack under LGPL will be up. In the past month, I have been working recently together with Kaj Vehmanen and Jussi Laako on
opening the Nokia Sofia SIP stack under LGPL license. It is now out there. It should be very useful to all of you looking into
VoIP and IM. Pleas check it out here

LugRadio

2005-07-04T12:01:00.000+03:00

Carlos Guerreiro and I did an interview at Lug Radio. If you want to check it out please take a look at here
The experience was very agreeable. Jono, Stuart, Matt and Ade were very fun to talk and the whole thing was relaxing. Radio...Those guys are actually what I always dreamt of doing.

Guadec 2005

2005-06-04T22:16:00.000+03:00

Guadec 2005 was fun. N770 and Maemo has been launched. The first feedback seems very positive. And the community's reaction was just overwhelming.
Now we just need to continue to work extra-hard to make sure that we fulfill those expectations when the product is released.
My presentation went all right. It was a very straight forward presentation, the absolute opposite of a marketing slide set. And it was meant that way The idea was to present in a very straight forward manner what we still needed to do, in order to convey to the community that our team is hard working, competent and honest - and that, even though we were hidden for a long time from the world, the whole project was done in the true spirit of Open Source. Apparently from what I could read form different mailing list, this message got throught.

Nokia Internet Tablet 770 and Maemo

2005-05-27T15:07:00.000+03:00

Launch of Nokia internet tablet 770 and Maemo:
That is the thing I have been working on during those past two years without really being in a position
to say anything about it, except to certain party in the . I was basically heading the development of Application
for the Nokia 770 and the development of certain aspect of the framework such as Multimedia and DSP.
And I also worked a lot on creating relationship and partnership with the open source. I feel like I have been in a
basement for the past four years and that only now I am able to share the work.

New-York

2005-05-20T22:00:00.000+03:00

Off to New-York! I will be spending a week there for business before heading towards Guadec, where I will be giving a conference on "Nokia and Open Source".

2005-05-10T12:00:00.000+03:00

Getting ready Guadec 2005 in Stuttgart. This is always something pretty fun and to look forward to.

2005-04-29T22:21:00.000+03:00

That's it. End of a show. The after-show blues is settling in. Everything went just great and everybody was just magnificent, we managed to get a lot of people. Thanks to everybody who could attend the performance and I hope you ahd a nice time.

Six Characters in Search of an Author

2005-03-15T12:00:00.000+02:00

I have joined the finnbritplayers which a semi professional english speaking theater company in Helsinki. I auditioned for the spring 2005 production which will be Luigi's Pirandello's Six characters in Search of an Author. For some of you that knows the play, I got the part of the director. Performances will be on the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th of April at Malmitalo in Helsinki. Clickhere for more information on schedule.