At 6:26 PM +0100 14-03-00, Richard Hartman wrote:
>So? Leave that to the programmer to determine. The
>current API re. the backlight is incomplete. You can
>determine presence. You can set the state. You can
>not determine the state. 2 out of 3 ain't right.
Yeah, OK, that's a good point.
Technically, the IIIc does not have a backlight. After thinking about this
for a while, we decided to use a different abstraction for this. The IIIc
is considered to have a 'software adjustable brightness', just like the V
has a 'software adjustable contrast'.
So now there are at least three different sets of APIs:
backlight: on or off
contrast: 0 to 255
brightness: 0 to 255
Devices may have any combination of these hardware features, which may or
may not be interrelated. (What happens when someone produces a device that
can be read with the backlight off, but also has a brightness adjustable
backlight??)
Exposing this stuff through the APIs has been hard for us to get right.
We're trying to to abstract the heck out of everything, because that gets
really expensive. On the other hand, we have to provide enough so that you
can write interesting apps.
What's even worse is the NEXT generation of devices may have even more new
hardware features, and so we need some elegant way of extending the APIs to
cover these. And these extensions have to be backwards compatible: that
is, you need some way for them to be no-ops on existing devices which have
already been released.
I'm open to suggestions.
--Bob
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