Hi everyone!
There hasn't been much traffic here lately, so I thought I'd just let everyone
know what's up.

** PicoGUI Text Layout

Recently I've been working on adding good text layout and text manipulation
capabilities to pgserver. This will lead to mutiline text editing, word
processing, and even a web browser. I hope this to be the 'killer app' that
finally makes PicoGUI useful on handheld computers. There still is no capability
accessable from the client side, but I'm adding functionality to the 'textbox'
widget in pgserver. My progress so far will continue to be shown in the
'textdemo' demo app.

** The TuxScreen

John Laur has ported PicoGUI to the tuxscreen! If you haven't heard of it, the
TuxScreen is a telephone with a 640x480 256-color LCD, touch screen, wireless
keyboard, PCMCIA, ARM processor, and Linux... all for $99. PicoGUI still has
issues running on ARM. I bought a TuxScreen (came in thursday) so hopefully I
should be able to fix all the ARM-specific bugs in PicoGUI. John's touchscreen
driver is in CVS as 'tuxts'. He is also working on a keyboard driver for the
TuxScreen.

** Handhelds- Helio, VR3

Linux on the Helio is not dead! There has always been confusion surrounding
Linux on the Helio it seems. There are different kernels, different romdisks,
all built independantly, with only one person who knows how to compile each one.
I tried to change this with the Pico/Linux project, but it has been idle for
some time. A question on the vhl-tools mailing list prompted Tasnim to post the
ROM image he has been using on his helio. It had various improvements over the
ROM image available through Pico/Linux CVS. However, all the PicoGUI components
had to be loaded into RAM after booting- the ROM image was something he found
somewhere, with no source code. Jason Chu and I have done some work to fix up
the Pico/Linux image. It is almost usable :)

** How you can help

Want to help with PicoGUI, or maintaining a port to a new architecture? The most
important thing is communication. The principal method of communication in
PicoGUI is this mailing list. If you're about to send me something that might be
of interest to other developers, think about sending it to the list instead. If
you prefer something more interactive than a mailing list, I have created a
#picogui IRC channel on openprojects.net. Usually you'll find me there as
'scanline'.

** PicoGUI's future

The PicoGUI project is nearly a year and a half old. We're close to having a
real usable GUI system for handheld computers and other embedded systems. There
are still large pieces missing, like a PIM application, text editing, and a good
launcher application. As a developer community we will continue to design, code,
and debug until we have a useful system. Then we will code some more :)
I suppose another thing to think about is version numbers. Right now PicoGUI has
no tangible version- releases are identified only by CVS checkout date. There
are many systems for versioning, including Linux's versioning scheme, Mozilla's
milestones... we need to figure out what's right for PicoGUI.

--
Only you can prevent creeping featurism!

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