OpenMoko ON the iPhone

[Christopher Heiny]

On Friday 12 January 2007 05:32, Gervais Mulongoy scribbled in crayon on the 
back of a kid's menu:
> another solution to that could be the use of scalable graphics the way
> its done with svg or the way it is done in enlightenment.

That sounds like a much better solution than the "monoculture" approach.  In 
my experience, it is the monoculture itself that causes the problems Jon is 
describing - the original developers have the luxury of building for a 
single screen size and color depth, and make all sorts of assumptions about 
that which cause huge problems later on when a more diverse population of 
screens arises.

> On 1/12/07, Tomasz Zielinski <tomasz.zielinski at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2007/1/12, Jon Phillips <jon at rejon.org>:
> > > the good news is that it can be generic enough to handle
> > > these different devices...
> >
> > The bad news is they all have different screen resolutions, so
> > application for different screen size will loose 95% of functionality,
> > regardless of applied workaround.
> >
> > Remember J2ME "standard". It's specification was way too wide so it
> > accepted and tried to unify GUI for phones with (i.e.) 72x96 pixel and
> > 352x416 screens. We know how it ended - if you are mobile java games
> > developer, you have to fork your project to gazillion
> > resolution/phone_vendor/phone_model combinations and support every one
> > individually (and almost every mobile phone model has own set of J2ME
> > implementation glitches).
> >
> > Windows CE and PocketPC also suffers - all non-standard resolution
> > and/or screen orientation makes users cry.
> >
> > In fact only PalmOS had reasonable resolution - they simply quadrupled
> > screen size from 160x160 to 320x320, which makes backward
> > compatibility a piece of cake.
> >
> > I wish OpenMoko will grow in monocultural hardware environment, to
> > avoid mentioned problems too early...
> >
> > --
> > Tomek Z.
> > tomasz.zielinski at gmail.com
> >
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