UI ideas/questions or can we animate things as smooth as iPhone?

[Jose Manrique Lopez de la Fuente]

Hello,

I am not sure if it is a graphical framework problem after seeing how
smooth Canola[1] is in a Nokia 770 device:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV-HtJcIW-I

best regards,

[1] http://openbossa.indt.org.br/canola/

2007/6/6, Tomasz Zielinski <tomasz.zielinski at gmail.com>:
> 2007/6/6, Fabien <fleutot+openmoko at gmail.com>:
>
> > And I think openmoko can lead to real improvements in this domain, if:
> [...]
> > - some people with the right social skills make the UI improvement effort
> > run smoothly.
>
> iPhone is fascinating because it's GUI is so responsive and so smooth.
>
> Unfortunately, current OpenMoko GUI running on GTA01 is exactly
> opposite - every icon tap causes lag, busy indicator isn't too
> reliable and user experience is hit by overall slowness.
>
> As we know, much less powered machines (like 7MHz Amiga with Workbench
> and even 1MHz C64 with Geos) had enough resources to provide rich and
> usable user interface. I mentioned PalmOS some time ago - it executed
> programs in-place so most apps started literally in half a second.
>
> Question to FIC Team an/or other embedded developers: is it possible
> to speed up OpenMoko GUI responsiveness by a factor of 10 or the
> guilty is too-multi-tiered architecture of Xorg/GTK/Matchbox set?
>
> If with GTK/Matchbox we cannot achieve such rich, fluid and, erm...,
> fluid GUI as iPhone, maybe it's not too late to drop GTK and choose
> other framework, designed for mobile devices and running quick
> framebuffer operations? GameBoy provided nice full-screen animations
> in 1989, eighteen years ago.
>
> I'm 100% sure nobody will cry after pure-X11 applications we loose
> this way. Almost every GTK application would require rewriting/porting
> to fit OpenMoko capabilities, so it's not great loss too. Not to
> mention font and other DPI-aware issues.
>
> If OpenMoko will be judged as "poor's man iPhone look and feel", it
> won't be attractive ever. To attract public attention we need at least
> one demo application which can animate elegant GUI with colorful
> widgets (e.g. album covers) as nice and smooth as we saw at iPhone
> commercials. If it cannot be done, it will be hard to advertise Neo,
> because youtube screencasts is today primary way people become
> acquainted with new device's user interfaces.
>
> --
> Tomek Z.
> tomasz.zielinski at gmail.com
>
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>


-- 
J. Manrique López de la Fuente
http://www.jsmanrique.net
msn: jsmanrique at asturlinux.org
jabber: jsmanrique at jabber.org