Just installed, now...
Basic Usage
The Media library
Supported formats
Internet media
Tips and Tricks: Photos
Tips and Tricks: Music
Tips and Tricks: Podcast
Tips and Tricks: Album Cover Art
Tips and Tricks: Videos
Known issues

First thing to do is setting up your media library. We will improve this in the future but for now you need to do it by hand. Just take a look in the Media library.

After that, you may want to add your favorite podcasts, then some internet radios and finally some flickr feeds.

1 System Indicator : Provides you the basic system info with: clock, wifi signal level and battery level

2 Now Playing indicator : When a music is playing (or paused) you are able to return to the playing now screen by touching the indicator.
Why the icon is 4 little squares? Well this is supposed to become the "task switcher" in the future.

3 Options button: wherever this button is present you will have more features command for the specific feature you're using

4 Back button: Get back to the previous screen. Holding the back button a little more takes you back to the home screen. Typing on it on the home screen exits Canola2

5 and 6 Side Bar this left and right bar gives you the most important commands on the current application. In the case of music, you want to be able to play pause, and set volume.

7 Rating start Use the rating to create your playlist of top rated songs. You can also slide the finger to the left over it to set it back to zero

8 Contextual Option buttons This button will appear whenever you have additional commands for the current application. Always look for it to find that missing feature

9 Track bar, or navigation area In players this will be your seek control. In other views in the future we will implement ways of segmeting content, and paginating big collections. So you always "navigate" with your thumb

Canola2 tried to bring a little more consistency than the canola, so you will notice some basic pattern around the whole application. Music, Video And photos will have the same side bars, and contextual options available. We will add more as the software evolves, so make sure you're always checking those each update. Canola2 is mainly designed to be used with both thumbs, and relies on kinetic scrolling to avoid ui elements in the scrolling, one of the most basic interactions in the whole application. We are aware that some devices will require as little bit too much effort to scroll correctly but we believe this will change in future tablets.

The latest release doesn't come with your media watched by default. The first thing to do is to set up your folders. This will result in all your media on those places being scanned and monitored if some change happens.

This is actually pretty easy, just follow the steps bellow:

click on the settings icon (the last one on the main menu)

click on "Media Library" Now first click on "audio Folders" and touch the button with the eye. a "V" mark will appear. This shows that this folder is now being scanned by canola. Do the same for Video folders and photo folders

We the Canola team, recommend you to use regular folders like "Music", "Video" and Photos for your files, and disable the "scan" for the whole card. This will not only make the scan process faster but will also keep your media more organized in correct categories.

The media options load inside the settings [2] and you can always go back just by touching any space on the left green area [1]

Multiple album entries

There was a problem in the first version of Canola2 that prevented it from show those album from multiple artists (Compilations, Original Sound Tracks) correctly, thus ending in several albums with just one or 2 songs. Because there's not a real standard to solve this problem, and we don't want to help only a part of the users we added in this small wizard in this version that helps you find possible duplicated albums. You run it, click on a "Suspect" album and if you see they belong to the same album you can use the command "Combine" to make them become one.

Refresh All

If you have reasons to believe your media collection is wrong, you can use this command to force Canola to re-index all your media.

Canola2 plans to support any media format supported by the device, but the full support will come into pieces, but until there Canola2 already detects almost all the media, even when not able to "categorize" for example your music in a different format. The following formats are currently supported with tagging: *Some of these formats needs an external 3rd party player, not included in Canola.

Audio	Video	Images	Metadata / Multiple formats / Others
mp3 wma ogg * m4a ** aac ** wav ** ra ** [You may need an external player for the formats bellow] flac	avi wmv asf 3gp mp4 [You may need an external player for the formats bellow] mpeg4 (xvid and others) mpg ogm	jpg png	m3u pls rm rmj rmvb

* OGG supports demands that you install the OGG support on the platform (Not developed by us, maintained by Tuomas Kulve) and a small plugin for Canola. Unfortunately still not simple to add the support, and we are working with Tuomas on improving that. For now you must follow this instructions

Canola2 comes with installed plugins for Podcast, Photocast and Internet Radios.

Podcasts are well known "Shows" distributed in a standard called "RSS"(or other common feed format). If you need suggestion on great podcasts clicking here

Photocasts are the same, but aimed to feeds that distribute photos. Canola2 is ready to use Flickr feeds. You can visit flickr and get any feed URL (by geting the link from those nice orange icons in the bottom of each page

Internet radios are broadcasted also using several formats, and canola can support several of them, including .pls and .ram files.Some of the best resources for internet radios are: shoutcast.com and BBC.co.uk

If you use OS2008 and install Canola Tuning, you can easily add new RSS feeds by following the next steps.

1 Open the RSS feed URL then press the icon as shown.

2 A new window will open. Choose where to add this feed.

Mike, an old friend of the Canola team, has posted a nice review in his site of how to use internet media, take a look by click here. The review teaches you in a very easy way how to add feeds on Canola2.

Canola has limitations and we are trying to improve it most of the time. Still there will be things that you will be able to do to improve your experience. One of the critical things is to remember you're not anymore on your desktop thus performance and memory are not that rich on your internet tablet. In order to gain maximum performance and less headaches, you can do a little bit of tweaks before putting media on your device.

Photos:

Remember that you are on a mobile device. It has limitations and thus it hard to load those nice pictures straight from your 7 megapixel camera fast enough to keep you satisfied. Here goes a list of small things you can do if you want to improve the picture view use:

1. Avoid pictures bigger than 1600x1200.
2. Canola runs on the device screen resolution (800x480) so most of regular pictures will not be fullscreen (will have black stripes on the side). If you want fullscreen pictures try cropping them in the same proportion: 800x480 - 1600x960 and so on.
3. Photocasts are feeds (RSS) of photos. We support Flickr now so you can go to flickr, get a feed URL and paste into canola. There's only a small catch the picture that we are getting is the medium, that is small on the device. This will be improved.
4. Avoid placing all your pictures in one folder. If you can separate them by folders you will get faster loadings and better feedback when scrolling.

Music

Canola uses the metadata known as "Tags" to create it music library, just like the applications you are probably used in your desktop (iTunes, Windows Media, etc). Those tags needs to be right in order to get the best fidelity, but it is something a hard work to have all your music collection tidy and ready to go to your other players.

if you are interested in organizing, adjusting volume or just fix tags on your collection, here goes some suggestions

• MusicBrainz Picard Tagger. It's free and cross platform, running on Windows, linux and Macs
  
  
• If you fell your collection has "different" volume level between songs, you can also fix it with a simple, free application : Mp3gain.

Album Cover Art

Album cover art is a great visual way of browsing your music collection. Canola cannot download covers directly to it, but there's an application that can make your life easier: Canola-tuning :click here to get it. If you already have it installed don't need to install this version. 0.2.4 is the most updated version.

Canola tuning installs 2 applications for you:
Album Art downloader
Video Thumbnailer

The album art downloader will actually search for album art inside your music folders, and download missing ones from the internet. The version 2.4 is ready and being packaged will add the support for the embbeded tag. This will be added maximum next week. Sorry guys, it's Carnival! Version 2.4 is in Garage, so if you are an experienced user you can try installing it by hand.

Please remind that this download system is not 100% reliable and for those more independent albums you can get wrong results.

Future Canola version will give you more flexibility in this matter allowing you to choose from multiple covers. Also we plan to integrate the video thumbnailer and more.

You can also take a look on how to use Canola tuning in Mike's blog, clicking here

Videos

The best way to make sure your videos will play nicely is to convert them to optimal formats to the Internet tablets. Please use some of the following softwares to do so:

For Windows users :Internet Tablet Video Converter

For Linux and Mac users: Urho Konttori's Media Converter

You can also find the official documentation about this in the maemo website

Canola2 still beta. This means bugs. Lots of them, and to make sure you are able at least to track what we are doing here goes the best resources to get information on what's going on Canola.

Internet Tablet Talk - Canola Forum

Canola2 project at Garage.maemo.org

Apart from those resources some issues are quite common and may be bogus for you while using.

• New: Sorry Canola guys, but I just can install this. It keeps saying the [ download manager is conflicting, that this pythons something is missing...] What can I do? Well, we have been investigating it and theres a way of probably solving it, read here
  
  
• New: Well, I just can install the Canola tuning! Keeps saying it needs pynotify and some other python thing! help me!. This is a problem being worked, you can try installing from the termial, but we would suggest you wait for the package. We will upload for the repository when it ready.
  
  
• New: I installed Canola, and got some lockups. Videos play but not music or my podcast icon is gone! We are already on that. But first make sure you reboot you device, if possible stop atabake (instructions here) and start again. Some users are reporting the same for podcast. But it's working fine for others... strange, but we are after those now
  
  
• Canola seems to be taking longer to load, but looks faster in the menus. No and yes. It will be a little slower on the first boot and of course if you have a 8gigabytes memory card. We are improving this and now Canola shows up faster, and loads things showing the progress. While appears to be longer is actually the same time, and we are also pre-loading the part that caused that delay in the first click that was rather annoying.
  
  
• PODCAST downloading makes canola slower. True, downloading eats the little computer's power so please be economic while downloading. We are adding the support for queues in downloads, so it will only download one at time, making it easier to use the rest of Canola. 3 podcasts are the limit today, because after that it gets almost unsuable
  
  
• Refreshing database everytime when starting Canola. Sorry this is a "consistency" check. We plan to hide it, but we prefer to load the canola UI faster and then show it, then not showing anything because we are scanning on background
  
  
• There's no support for Asian others languages. Unfortunately not now, but we need just a good font that support all caracteres. We are on the quest to find it and the support will come in future releases.
  
  
• My [FLAC, M4A, AAC] music doesn't get organized! Sorry but we are also adding support format by format. We had only mp3, now we have ogg and wma and in the near future all the formats supported by the platform will be properly supported inside Canola.
  
  
• The music that is playing suddenly stops when I'm just adding a new podcast feed!. Yes, today to protect the integrity of the database we make sure you're not writing on something is being used, thus we need to "kill" everything that is playing.
  
  
• I use a device with the OS2007 [or OS2006] and I can't play my music with non latin characters on it!. It is quite impossible at time. Dbus (component that manages the communications between the parts of canola) can't handle the special characters on the Os2007 and below. It has been fixed on os2008 but we really cannot help on this one. Our suggestion, if you really want to use canola after this problem, is to do a batch rename of your songs. The tags will make it appear on the Canola, and soon we will add the internacionalization support that will help you a little bit more on that