Re: ui customisation for accessibility
We'd also love to get your feedback and how to make things more visually impaired friend Wow. Thank you for such a positive response! So to motivate some people playing with GUI and fonts, could you give us some feedback what you hate/dislike on normal phones On my current phone the text is too small (so i can't read sms etc) and the ui customisation that you can do with 'themes' does not allow me to have a good high contrast (white on black, yellow on blue) ui :- ( The 'simplest' solutions to this are 'best practises' like respect os/ system colours and designing/ implementing flexible ui layouts. But you are right that there are also opportunities for 'cool' accessibility: off the top of my head i can imagine that the 'speed reading' technique of displaying individual letters sequentially might give a very accessible (and fast!) way to read smss. It'd be great to implement this and see how it flies! Are you impaired yourself? Or does you work with impaired people? Will you like to join OpenMoko development? Yes, I am visually impaired myself, and I am a developer. And right now I need a new phone, and one that I can use ;-) So, yes, I'm very interested in developing for OpenMoko! ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
voice prompts recording Re: ui customisation for accessibility
Salve Matthew! On Fri, 08 Dec 2006, Matthew Wood wrote: Are you impaired yourself? Or does you work with impaired people? Will you like to join OpenMoko development? Yes, I am visually impaired myself, and I am a developer. And right now I need a new phone, and one that I can use ;-) So, yes, I'm very interested in developing for OpenMoko! Your interest in developing for/with OpenMoko is great ;) But you are right that there are also opportunities for 'cool' accessibility: off the top of my head i can imagine that the 'speed reading' technique of displaying individual letters sequentially might give a very accessible (and fast!) way to read smss. It'd be great to implement this and see how it flies! :) A friend of mine had the wish that just shaking the phone would say the current time to his bluetooth headset - well without a sensor and bluetooth this will be an idea for v2 - but just another idea how a phone could become more usable. IMHO audio output has a high potential and because text to speach is not so clear, not so understandable and a little monoton/boring, prerecorded voices for free use left, right, one, two...) like for asterisk would be interesting: http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk+sound+files+international For doing that, some official sets of text would be helpful, so that integration of different languagtes or just choosing a different speaker would become more easyer. To have homogenous voice recordings, it would help to to avoid recording one set on different days. Also the technical equipment, acustical quality of the recording room (studio) and (semi)proffessional recording assistance would help that the effort of doing a recording of a big set would worth it and would be usable for a long time. I have worked for a radiostation and sometimes I meet people where I think wow this person has a great, clear voice. For the beginning a semi-good recording is better then nothing - and I guess it would take a year that we have a good list of words for small, medium and a big set of voice-outputs. But on the long term, I'm interested to support other people to record on a high quality level. So what would be a good starting point to have create a wordlist for voice prompts recordings? Which licence to use? GPL? Some more questions: Beside this idea, did you already have used free text2speach tools like mbrola? I still worry about the touchscreen and text imput. Do you have ideas how to use it? And OpenMoko/Neo1973 will be more than a GSM-phone, do you have ideas how to use other features like calender/agenda with an ui optimized for visually impaired people? Wap/Web browser? Do you have ideas how AGPS could be used to makes your life more comfortable? E.g. busstation/trainstation? Cooperation with other v.i. people and exchange information linked to local coordiantes... more? Greetings, rob ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
every data could saved like a wikiwiki
Salve! I used MegaWiki on the PalmPilot, a hack that allows you to use the normal Palm application memo, calendar, todo, addressbook as wiki and of course the Wikpedia. So I love to see some links inbetween applications like MegaWiki for OpenMoko Todo * call [Frank] Frank [Markt 1] tapping on Markt 1 would open a map and routing, with calculating the traval to him with different transport methods - feed - bike - car /taxi with approx. costs - bus/train The Wikimedia offers (like other wikis: MoinMoin...) a history with date and info who did the changes, a comparing of versions and a usefull function What links here When I go to the addressbook entry Frank What links here could help to find some forgotten links and data on my OpenMoko system. AGPS, when I log where I was - maybe with building a class of region and localisations (Europe,Germany,NRW,Cologne,Tango-cafe) the history of the wikiwiki could also show where I made the change. So I remember in Spring 2006 meet a good dancer in this Tango-cafe, and I like to find her emailadress i could filter with private, 01/2006-05/2006, 20-02h, cologne Don't say naaahh rob, old pretender - you don't get so much email adresses... ok your right this example is fictive, but to get more filter possibilities without the need to enter them are very powerfull for business cases. A filter rule could be also what happend on that day - weather: rain, cold, snow - which closes you have wearn (for the ladies, choose red blouse) - which people you have meet - which people you called/you have called - where you have been something that is not realy linked to that information you are looking for. When you are collection informations - e.g. about a shop, restaurants it would be interesting when you could share this informations with your friends. When this service is P2P it could work fine with quite private informations that you would not publish on a community webpage. For beaming and sharing your information, it could be interesting to put your information under an open licence that you as author will keep in history - or that you remove all links to you. So you and your friends could build a personal adressbook with doctors, servicenumberes... When a adress is changed, it could be fine to have the information who are the friends you chare this information with - so your wiki with the adress of a local theater will be replicated with your friends (you and the other could desside how urgent this replication will be - cheap anouncement only (info I have an update for this wikipage) or non update untill very cheap communication connection In the same way todo lists (for families, friends, association/clubs, your team...) could become linked together - when somebody started or finished to solve an item of the to-do list (shoping, cleaning, organising...) the to-do lists of the others could become an update. Because of the history, it is clear, who have done what - sort it with the names and you can see how did much and how did nothing So when every short information would saved with a wikiwiki linked style (even every call, every missed call, every SMS...) it could become a very powerfull system. I recomend to test MegaWiki to understand me a little better. http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2006-November/37.html IMHO to wikized especialy small/short info on a PDA - togehter with AGPS worth it ;) Greetings, rob ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: FPGA
Bah! I meant to copy the list on that question. Thanks for the answer though. Maybe someone else can also help clarify? I thought fpga were basically PLDs and that they worked exactly the same. I didn't know they lose config without power and need to be reprogrammed. --Tim On Fri, 8 Dec 2006 5:51, Ole Tange wrote: As far as I understand it is like RAM: It looses state if it looses power. So it will have to read its config from some storage to start working. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPLD: Non-volatile configuration memory. Unlike many FPGAs, an external configuration ROM isn't required, and the CPLD can function immediately on system start-up. /Ole On 12/7/06, Tim Newsom [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ok... So how many times can you reprogram it before it wears out? Like flash has a max number of times it can be written and eprom and eeproms did... What's that number for FPGAs? On Thu, 7 Dec 2006 15:40, Ole Tange wrote: You cannot use them simultaneously, but you can change set in 10 ms. /Ole ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community --Tim ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
ui customisation for accessiblity
hello openmoko folks, i've been intrigued by your announcements and would like to ask: can an open platform like yours be used to provide a smartphone ui that's more accessible to the visually impaired? current phones can be really hard to use :-( as more details about the platform emerge I'll be interested to see how much ui customisation (text size, colours) will be available 'out of the box,' or whether it's feasible to reskin the included messaging apps to make them accessible...? ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Shiny geek toy?
On 12/7/06, Christopher Heiny [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What exactly is it that we want OpenMoko to be? Do we really want a shiny geek toy? Something that is super cool and technologically advanced, but only nerds will want to hack on? Or should we be working toward a solid OpenSource platform that will encourage other phone manufacturers to build on it and in turn give their work back to the community? I think it is possible to do both. To take a recently discussed example: an FPGA is really super cool and flexible and you can do just about anything with one. But the downside is that it is HARD to do that stuff. Even if you, personally, find VHDL or Verilog to be easy to work with and understand, the average engineer working at someplace like Samsung or Nokia (or wherever) will not have the same skills you do. Sorry, I do not quite understand you there. It sounds as if you think the _only_ way to program a FPGA is through VHDL or Verilog. One of the things you can put on a FPGA is a generic microprocessor (e.g. a PowerPC or SPARC). You can then program the processor as you normally do. In fact I would expect this approach: Use some of the FPGA for a generic microprocessor (e.g. handling the UI and phonebook) and only use the rest of the FPGA for compute intensive operations (e.g. software radio, video decoding). Please check out General Purpose, Low Power Supercomputing Using Reconfiguration http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4969729965240981475 It really opened my eyes to what might be possible. Additionally, it takes time (lots of time) even for skilled engineers to design, implement, and debug new features for FPGAs. Agreed. But most of the user facing functionality would be in the generic microprocessor. Time to market is critical for most phone manufacturers, especially in countries such as Korea where product lifetimes are often measured in months. This argument is exactly why I think a FPGA is the right way to go: My phone does not do WiFi, but I would find it tremendously useful if I could install WiFi just by installing software. With FPGA you open the possibility to upgrade the phone with functionality that would otherwise require a new hardware. Five of the critical enablers to this are: - rock solid reliablity. Anything in the phone should just work, and it must do it every time. By stripping down the FPGA to just include GSM and a generic microprocessor as default, I think that would be doable. - easy to customize or extend. Not just by VHDL aces and Perl wizards, but by the average C/C++/Java programmer two years out of university. His boss is going to choose a platform that plays to his skills (or lack thereof). I whole heartedly agree. With the generic microprocessor included on the FPGA this can achieve both goals. - support fast development. That young coder in the previous bullet is going to be under a LOT of time pressure. His boss is going to choose the platform that he feels will best help him meet schedule, and will see C++ and Java as enablers, VHDL and Perl as barriers. That depends on what you are trying to develop. If you are trying to develop video decoding or software radio you might limited by processing power. This limit might be moved with FPGA. But again: I do not see any reason why you need to make a choice between VHDL and Java when you can have both. I do not see FPGA as realistic for neither v1 nor v2. But for v3 it just might be a possibility. /Ole ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: FPGA? [scanned]
On 12/6/06, Ole Tange [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But even if this is not possible getting a FPGA out to the masses, I would think would make a lot of difference. Especially after seeing: General Purpose, Low Power Supercomputing Using Reconfiguration http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4969729965240981475 I have no idea if the power consumption is prohibitive - I will expect others on the list can enlighten us on that. On http://www.altera.com/products/devices/cyclone2/features/power/cy2-power.html I found: 0.1-0.4 W. To me that sound pretty small. /Ole ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
Blackberry Wishlists
I haven't misposted again. No, really. Inspired by Christopher Heinys thrust, I started wondering about what actual 'average' consumers want. It's my impression that the BlackBerry currently holds the crown for the if I wanted a phone that could also do XYZ: http://www.google.com/trends?q=blackberry%2C+nokia%2C+motorola%2C+pda%2C+palmctab=0geo=alldate=all Whilst the number of people searching google for pda remains relatively constant, over the course of ~3 years, the number of people searching for blackberry has grown to match the number of people searching for pda. Not that this is conclusive in any way - it's just a trend, not an explanation of such. So why not look up [product] wishlist on google, to see which areas can be improved? Interestingly, a lot of end-user gripes seem to focus exclusively on the closed-source applications - based upon my five-minute research, I'd say the very act of providing a simple way for end-users to change/manage their applications for free, is a massive step forward. That said, those applications have to grant the wishes out there.. i'll start off with this one: http://blackberryforums.pinstack.com/1389-blackberry_wish_list.html Amusingly, note the special significance of Post #2 on this thread. Richard ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: every data could saved like a wikiwiki
Wow. I had never heard of MegWiki. I visited their website on your recommendation and I love what I've read. It would be a great feature to have. Michael On Fri, 8 Dec 2006, Robert Michel wrote: Salve! I used MegaWiki on the PalmPilot, a hack that allows you to use the normal Palm application memo, calendar, todo, addressbook as wiki and of course the Wikpedia. ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
32bit/64bit datatype issues
We had some major headaches with this - mostly because legacy code written for 32bit architectures tends to make silly assumptions that pointers can be cast to integers. But there also a number of tricky cases where it wasn't immediately obvious that the datatype discrepancy was the root cause. As it becomes harder to find 32bit desktop processors, this is going to become increasingly significant, especially for services or applications which communicate between the Neo1973 and a 64bit home/work PC. I noticed that the GIMP project has its own typedefs (guint, guint8, gint16, etc).. so I was wondering if OpenMoko will be supplying its own definitions too? Going into the future, it would mean that there is a level of protection against having to go back through reams and reams of code and finding obscure errors that could have been avoided very easily. On a more present-day note, if it had native conversions for big/small endianness, that would be really really nice, too. Richard ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: FPGA
AFAIK from my VERY limited exposure to FPGAs, you actually have a couple options. There is SRAM storage which requires re-program at power cycle. But you also have Fuse/Anti-Fuse FPGAs which are one time programmed; and EPROM, EEPROM, and flash which don't require you to reprogram at power cycle. Again, that's what I remember from the small amount of time I spent looking at them as a solution for a previous project. Jeremy Crosen - Original Message From: Leonardo Etcheverry [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: community@lists.openmoko.org Sent: Friday, December 8, 2006 9:06:35 AM Subject: Re: FPGA Tim Newsom wrote: Bah! I meant to copy the list on that question. Thanks for the answer though. Maybe someone else can also help clarify? I thought fpga were basically PLDs and that they worked exactly the same. I didn't know they lose config without power and need to be reprogrammed. Nowadays the line that separates FPGAs from CPLDs is blurry and even different vendors have different sayings about it. Initially, PLDs were devices, which could hold a rather limited amount of logic, yet they kept their configuration after being power cycled. Then FPGAs came along, which could hold a much larger amount of logic, but they lose their configuration whenever power is lost. So FPGAs need to be programmed each time the power is cycled (It's interesting to note that a FPGA is actually based on SRAM and LUTs.) Also, note that FPGAs can work in either 'passive' or 'active' mode. When in 'passive', someone needs to externally initiate the programming of the device, tipically a JTAG chain. When in 'active' mode, the FPGA will try to fetch its own configuration from a (small) ROM connected to it, this allows for easy configuration in standalone devices. Then came along CPLDs which offered more density than the CPLDs, though not as a much as a FPGA, but they kept configuration even without power. FPGAs however, are the most popular devices today, they have the greatest density and allow to hold complex designs such as video codecs, DSP blocks and even whole processors. (As of these days, I'm working on a design consisting of a FPGA holding an entire processor along with 'custom' hardware in order to speed up a voice codec algorithm). To sum up: * FPGA : the device with the greatest density, they tipically lose configuration when power cycled (note that Xilinx offers OTP (one time programmable) FPGAs, which keep their configuration, but that's a whole different storylet's stick to the everyday jargon :-) ) * CPLDs : devices less dense than FPGAs, but they keep their configuration even after losing power. I hope this mail wasn't THAT much confusing... :-) By the way, keep up the good work, I think the OpenMoko initiative is a terrific idea, and if it turns out as half as good as the ideas I've seen in this list, it will sure turn out to be a great product! Regards, Leonardo Etcheverry --Tim On Fri, 8 Dec 2006 5:51, Ole Tange wrote: As far as I understand it is like RAM: It looses state if it looses power. So it will have to read its config from some storage to start working. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPLD: Non-volatile configuration memory. Unlike many FPGAs, an external configuration ROM isn't required, and the CPLD can function immediately on system start-up. /Ole On 12/7/06, Tim Newsom [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ok... So how many times can you reprogram it before it wears out? Like flash has a max number of times it can be written and eprom and eeproms did... What's that number for FPGAs? On Thu, 7 Dec 2006 15:40, Ole Tange wrote: You cannot use them simultaneously, but you can change set in 10 ms. /Ole ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community --Tim ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community ___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com___ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
