On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:32:09 +0100 Helge Hafting <helge.haft...@hist.no> wrote:
> Yorick Moko wrote: > >> I (and surely others) am working on a leaner, faster theme - any > >> eye-candy that distinctly impacts the user experience should NOT be > >> default, and in this case we desperately need a simple and fast > >> theme as the default or the immediate impression users will get > >> is: "Damn, this is slow!" > >> > > > > nice to hear that > > ugly and fast beats pretty and damn slow any day for me > > (pretty and fast would also be acceptable ;-)) > > Pretty and fast should be possible then. > > There is no need for multiple layers of transparent icons. They can > be collapsed into one layer with a single transparent icon, looking > _exactly_ the same. > > Effects when a icon is actually selected is another story, but that > sort of thing should not need to impact scrolling. > > Helge Hafting Therein lies the problem, in a sense. (or a large part of it) With the default.edj theme (Illume doesn't override it for Fileman, which includes Illume icons) every icon on the 'desktop' initially displays just the icon image, be it png, jpg, animated edj, whatever. When you touch the screen to scroll it, it will highlight the touched icon even if you don't actually select it. When it highlights it, it makes visible a 'background' png behind the icon, and two or three layers of transparent pngs on top of the icon, to give the 'glass button with an icon embedded in it' effect. Even when not visible (IE, on at least all but one icon at a time) those extra pngs are there, their positions are calculated AFAIK and their bitmaps are loaded. (again, AFAIK - those two are internals of Enlightenment and I'm guessing) But to make the user experience worse, whenever those extra pngs are made visible or invisible, it uses an animated fade-in/fade-out. So every time you drag to scroll, it's busy animating a fade-out on the previously highlighted icon, animating a fade-in on the one under your finger, and scrolling all the transparent and invisible PNGs. The effect is quite attractive, if only the FR had the horsepower to manage it while running a phone, GPS, and frameworkd. :( With the present state of my altered Illume theme (serenity.edj) I've trimmed the icons down to just the 'icon' image itself and a single png that appears behind it when highlighted. Outside the theme itself I've disabled dropshadows and changed rendering, and disabled the battery applet display (pending debugging - it sucks CPU apparently) and it reduced Enlightenment cpu usage dramatically. But I found significant further savings by tweaking icons. I've been using some Oxygen icons, and because I always have the launcher at 'extra large' (3 icons across in portrait) I started out with the 256x256 oxygen icons. Which are beautiful, but suck resources like crazy. I figured changing to 128x128 would help but the problem was almost exactly the same, while it looked worse on screen. So I did some investigating and testing and found that if I prescale my icons to the actual displayed size on the FR it responds great. In this case, that's 116x116 pixels. (that's the icon itself at 'extra large' - Illume displays the name below that, and the two of them are in IIRC a 162x142 tile) So by prescaling to 116x116 pixel icons in Gimp I get the same memory and CPU (hence UI responsiveness) as with much smaller (blotchier after scaling) images. 'Large' launcher icons appear to be 76x76, and 'medium' 36x36. This is theme-dependent though, as well as preferences dependent - within the edje theme they can be scaled or resized or whatever. So a prepackaged icon theme would probably need to be scaled to match a particular Illume theme's resulting sizes... Even then, if the user has utilized the useful 'scaling' settings it will probably differ. Still pondering the best answer here. So right now, with the rescaled icons, removing excess icon adornments, and disabling dropshadows and battery the SHR Illume is /almost/ as smooth scrolling as 2008.x. I also found that disabling animation of the slipshelf drop-down etc helped significantly in making it feel more responsive. Overall, it feels like a completely different phone when I switch back to the Illume theme. j _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community