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

Tim Shannon shannon.timothy at gmail.com
Wed Jun 6 15:56:02 CEST 2007


As I understand it the new GTK mobile initiative will really be focusing on
performance on mobiles.  I don't think the software is there yet, or the all
of the hard ware.  Personally I'm not too concerned with the speed of the
GUI... yet.

That and it sounds like the next hardware revision will be using a GPU to
render the gui.

On 6/6/07, Tomasz Zielinski <tomasz.zielinski at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> OpenMoko community mailing list
> community at lists.openmoko.org
> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
>
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