One Application, Multiple Frameworks (was: openmoko on other FIC platforms as well?)

[Michael 'Mickey' Lauer]

> I see one main problem with openmoko on this devbices. It is designed
> for phone handling not media player handling.
> We should be able to use the base system, but would need a complete
> new gui and framework design.
> In long term I would really prefer to have _one_ device for phone
> calls, contacts, dates, mp3 and perhaps small videos, navigation, etc.

Entirely correct. We are at a stage in time where we recognize that we
(application developers) have to solve an important problem to make
usability scale between different devices requiring different UI
paradigms motivated by physical differences.

We have KDE and GNOME for the desktop, we (will soon) have OpenMoko for the phone,
we have Maemo for internet tablets and similar appliances, but we
still lack a way to easily write applications that scale UI-wise. Of course,
we can just cross-compile and run the applications, but they don't
adapt to the look&feel and (what's more important) to the UI paradigms
on the target platform.

What we are doing right now is adding more and more #ifdef clauses to
applications or making every application a plugin-host for a variety
of frontend (UI) plugins, but I don't think this will be the way to go
in the future.

Eventually -- when we have more experience with the variety of such
frameworks -- we need to come up with an additional abstraction layer
that allows us to describe all these specifics in a way that
applications can transform automatically to the target environment.


Regards,

:M:
-- 
Michael 'Mickey' Lauer | IT-Freelancer | http://www.vanille-media.de