Hello Tilman. I will just comment on the tichy part of your email, since I am the main author.
On Fri, 2008-09-12 at 12:24 +0200, Tilman Baumann wrote: > I like the Tichy concept of having pythons apps running as plugins in > one python runtime. > I always expected it to be something like a app launcher that > executes > python modules rather than calling stand allonw apps. But it is exactly what it does. I think you misunderstood tichy. But still I want to defend my approach (that you seem to recommend so I am confused). Tichy is a python app. I can't afford to start a new python interpreter every time we open an application. I don't want to have too many python interpreters running at the same time either. My solution is to use a cooperative event based system for all the basics applications (dialer, messages, etc) They all run in the same interpreter, and share the same mainloop. That is what i refer to tichy as a "python applets manager". > But tichy as it is is useless. I agree with you in the sense that if tichy would only call stand alone app, it would be useless. > Combining all apps into one screen does > not help, we have window management. Do you mean we should use one X window per applet in tichy ? Well that is possible. In fact I have a backend for gtk+ and etk/evas (still experimental). Both of them use one window per applet. > The GUI design does not strike me as good either. I can unfortunately only agree on this :(. My fault. I am not an expert in GUI design (I have a hard time with it cause things that look good on the desktop don't on a small screen.) When I started tichy I tried to use gtk+, but then gave up and used my own SDL based gui system (we talk about the guy who liked to write video games here :-) ). Then I though about all the possible choices of graphics backend -and how critical this choice could be- and I realize the only way to be sure not to make a bad decision, is not to choose one at all. So here is how it works : When you write an application for tichy, you use as few gui objects as possible. Instead, you define 'Items' with properties and possible actions. Then tichy will request for a plugin that offers the 'Design' service and ask this plugin to create the user interface for the application. the design plugin is free to create any interface, as long as it shows the proper items and provides a way to trigger the proper actions on those items (not unlike edje works) That is why I can create backends for almost any graphic library you can imagine, without changing the code of the applications. > The all in one concept is just wrong in my eyes. Great idea, but done > wrong. The concept is wrong or the idea is great but done wrong ? For me the all in one concept is important, at least for all the basics phone applications. There is just too much communication between them. It is not only a matter of sharing data (the framework is there for this), but also being able to lauch one app from an other, and to share the screen space in a clever way. Also the time to launch an external application is too slow. > I don't want to have my phone work nearly as like tichy works. > > I like to have some native apps like the GTK PIM apps back. > They where really well made, usefull and useable. > > I like to have a home screen on the desktop like the GTK home app. > This was really a great concept. i like to see that come back. > I think this would be a easy job for a desklet... I agree with you. Beside it is very simple to do. > > Especially important would be a dialer app that starts quickly. > (maybe > living in a applet all the time) > The GTK dialer would be a great template. ;-) > > And i would say it is time for some gui guidelines for new world etk, > efl apps. > We have a great looking environment, now let's define how apps should > look. And pleas don't make them look like qtopia, Zhone or tichy. > I have some ideas for that too. But i whink we need some > experimenting > first... > Is there already some movement into finding the new way to interact > with > the UI? Well, what about the idea I talked about : You define a set of minimal necessary information needed to construct the gui for many kinds of applications (most of the time an application is just trying to show some objects and let the user trigger actions on it). Then you use a plugin to actually construct the gui. I guess Raster was a visionary on this idea. In fact he is the one who gave me this idea once on irc, the next week I started implementing it in tichy :P But even the applications we have that do use edge don't do it the perfect optimal way. If your application's code use -let's say- a scrollbox, then you are already deciding that you want to show your items in a scrolled view, so what if the user want to show them in a table, or in a fancy 3d view like we start to see on a few closed source mobile phone ? Then you have to modify the application code. In tichy you would first create a list of items, and then ask the design service to create a view of that list. That view may be a scrollbox, but it may as well be anything else. You can actually play with this in tichy : application conf->design>grid/default/wheel OK, that was my small marketing rant for tichy :) Hope some people will show interest in it. Here is the -very poor- wiki page for it : http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Tichy Charlie/Guillaume
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