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

[Florent THIERY]

I would say, considering the fact that the apps ecosystem hasn't
"flourished" yet, is it really too late to switch? In the rest of this
mail, please assume it is not.

> How detached is the underlying processes/functions and GUI from each
other? How difficult will it be to just pull a different GUI layer on top of
the phone functions?

The openmoko team can choose among technos that separate the two layers.

If you choose to develop (local) web applications for instance, then
only the backend of the web rendering engine is the criteria.
Switching from gdk to qt libs (which have had lots of
embedded-oriented optimizations) will require only changing the
rendering engine (webkit-gdk or webkit-qt), the backend isn't a
concern.

Yet, for "traditional" applications... If you choose to develop your
applications using a general purpose scripting language
(python/ruby/whatever), using GUI bindings that support multiple
backends (such as [1] [2] ) could let time for the final decision...

The clutter toolkit seems more and more interesting, because it supports:
* GTK+ embedding
* Language bindings for Perl and Python
* Provides a fixed-point API [4]

But it would also mean:
* no apps before P2 model
* no clutter-based openmoko devices on non-OpenGL-capable devices

[1] http://wiki.python.org/moin/AnyGui
[2] http://wiki.python.org/moin/Ocean
[3] http://cairographics.org/backends/
[4]http://www.clutter-project.org/docs/clutter-clutter-fixed.html

Any thoughts?

Florent