OK resending this since i accidentally sent it directly to Mr John Seghers
Regards,
Daniel
----- Original Message -----
From: "Silva, Daniel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "John Seghers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2007 6:40 PM
Subject: Re: UI ideas/questions or can we animate things as smooth as
iPhone?
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Seghers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'OpenMoko'" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2007 5:05 PM
Subject: RE: UI ideas/questions or can we animate things as smooth as
iPhone?
I've been lurking, but this is something that I do have a bit of
experience
with--and definitely some opinions.
Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote
Tomasz Zielinski wrote:
> framework, designed for mobile devices and running quick
> framebuffer operations? GameBoy provided nice full-screen animations
> in 1989, eighteen years ago.
I feel your pain. Trust me, it hurts me as well...
The GameBoy Advance is an ARM7TDMI running at 32MHz. However, its screen
size was only 240 x 160 (1/8 VGA) and it had a hardware-based sprite
system
as well as both bitmapped and character mapped graphics capabilities with
hardware fine scrolling and multiple planes.
IIRC, the GTA01 has a 266MHz processor--only a little more than 8x the
GBA--and fully 8x the screen area with 16x the memory required for a
bitmap.
> I'm 100% sure nobody will cry after pure-X11 applications we loose
> this way. Almost every GTK application would require rewriting/porting
> to fit OpenMoko capabilities, so it's not great loss too. Not to
> mention font and other DPI-aware issues.
Interesting. Can I hear more supportive or counter arguments?
What do the others think?
I've been writing games since 1981, on Atari 5200, 8-bit NES, SFX,
Genesis,
Windows, and too many cell phones to keep track of. Please, please,
please
give us direct access to the frame buffer and a low level API to the
Blitter
in the GTA02.
I don't know if you have to throw away X11 support to do so, but I do
agree
that you won't lose much if you do so.
No you don't have to sack X11 to have access to the underlying hardware,
you can
interface with it through DRI ( Direct Rendering Infrastructure ), but
that would
kill the point of having X11, why having X11 if you access the hardware
directly?
And besides you would have to write a DRI driver to interface with
OpenMoko hardware,
since there's only a handfull of drivers available.
I agree that loosing X11 per se wouldn't do much harm, but going the
vanilla framebuffer
way we would be loosing a lot. It would require ALOT of work to rebuild
what has been done
until now ( if they're really using X11+GTK ) just to go in that
direction, when i believe
the problem is not there.
I believe people are missing few things, although i really didn't checked
the code yet,
i bet the code is still very umpolished and could and will be optimized.
From what i've seen
in the wiki, OpenMoko is still using KDrive ( trimmed down XServe
implementation ) and a full
glibc.
Change that for something like DirectFB and uClib ( or diet libc ) and you
already would
start to see things shape up.
Then there's loading times, for a solution like OpenMoko i wouldn't rely
on dynamic linking
and would go for static linking, remeber this is not a desktop system.
http://www.directfb.org/docs/GTK_Embedded/summary.html
If you/they must use dynamic linking i would recomment using something
along the lines
of prelink.
A lot of statements have been made here about people flocking to the Neo
*because* they can modify it. But remember that the geeks who will buy it
because they can run their favorite X application, or bring up a Linux
shell
are the vast minority if you're looking at hundreds of thousands or
millions
of devices being sold.
The vast majority of the purchasers are going to be people who buy it
because it functions smoothly, makes great calls, and has lots of nifty
eye
candy. And, oh by the way, the can customize it to their heart's desire.
But
those customizations aren't going to be done at the Linux developer
level.
Those are going to be seamless plug-ins or self-installing apps that give
them something they want on the phone. This also points to the need for a
slick graphical app catalog/installer. Synaptic, apt-get, rpm...not
going
to cut it for the normal end user.
There are loads and loads of cheap and really great functioning cell
phones, OpenMoko/neo1973
could be the greatest phone in the world and still noe even make a small
dent on
the market.
Sure there are people who will look for the best bang for the buck, but
mus of them
will just buy what's more trendy and/or has the most 'cool' factor.
Just look the iPod and the more recent iPhone fenomena, neither one are
the best on the
class, but they have hype.
neo1973/OpenMoko needs to have something that sets it apart, an for now,
more than the hardware
its OpenMoko and its 'promise' to be a great platform to develop to.
More developers = more applications = more users wanting to buy one. There
are many many linux
( and even windows developers, hey im one ) wanting to develop for it, and
it will gather much
more attention if we already have known tools to our disposal like X11 and
GTK, throw a simple
but powerfull language to it, and even non developers will buy one just to
tinkle with it.
This is a resource-constrained device compared to the computers we have
on
our desks. Yet, people will expect that such a device will have fluid eye
candy, will be very responsive, and if it doesn't, it won't matter to
them
that it was built with Desktop technology.
The basic apps that run the phone need to have performance, fit, and
finish
as their top priorities. And for that you can't have a ton of
abstractions
between the apps and the hardware.
- John
I completly agree with this, but you don't have to throw away
X11/GTK/somethingelse out of the picture and
loose a common ground to many developers to achive that.
Regards,
Daniel
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