On Friday 02 April 2010 20:55:47 Auke Kok wrote: > On 04/02/10 12:40, Katrina Niolet wrote: > > I think I’d like to see a standard UI with device manufacturers being > > able to put their own if they want to, that way device manufactures > > that either don’t want to spend the money on a custom UI, or > > differentiate themselves in other ways at least have a starting > > point. > > that will certainly be possible - vendors can choose to replace any part > of the meego stack since it's all open source.
Although that is, of course, true, the interesting question is whether they will be able to call it MeeGo? The question is, how far can you move from MeeGo and still call it MeeGo? This is a hard problem because we would like manufacturers to be able to innovate and differentiate in UI features. On the other hand, if I am an application developer trying to create an app for MeeGo I want to give the user a great user experience, so I need to know, in detail, how the UI works. For example, if a particular gesture invokes some additional system feature on one device, it would break my app if I use the same gesture for something else (whichever feature got invoked it would be a bad user experience for some users). Or if one device puts dialog buttons at the bottom of the dialog and another puts them at the side, my user experience testing (which I may have spent a lot of time and money on) is useless. The issue for app developers is that even if the app will technically work on all MeeGo platforms, is it a great user experience on all platforms? In order to get developers to provide really great apps, which is necessary to have a successful smartphone, the answer has to be "yes". That means that devices cannot deviate from the MeeGo UI (at least for their class of device) -- so no manufacturer innovation or differentiation in the UI! Graham _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
