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

openmoko at mauve.plus.com openmoko at mauve.plus.com
Thu Jun 7 21:13:18 CEST 2007


> I've been lurking, but this is something that I do have a bit of
> experience
> with--and definitely some opinions.
>
> Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote
>> Tomasz Zielinski wrote:
>> > framework, designed for mobile devices and running quick
>> > framebuffer operations? GameBoy provided nice full-screen animations
>> > in 1989, eighteen years ago.
>>
>> I feel your pain. Trust me, it hurts me as well...
>
> The GameBoy Advance is an ARM7TDMI running at 32MHz.  However, its screen
> size was only 240 x 160 (1/8 VGA) and it had a hardware-based sprite

<snip>

> A lot of statements have been made here about people flocking to the Neo
> *because* they can modify it. But remember that the geeks who will buy it
> because they can run their favorite X application, or bring up a Linux
> shell
> are the vast minority if you're looking at hundreds of thousands or
> millions
> of devices being sold.

They are utterly irrelevant, after the thing hits the mass market stage.
The question is - when will it hit mass market.

(I am not a FIC representative)
FICs whole strategy for this device is a low-cost route to selling phones
to users.
They employ a few dozen people on the project, and in return get an OS
they can use to sell hardware to people.

The whole idea is that they are going to be relying on the 'geeks' to code
large portions of the OS that will be deployed in the final version.
At this stage in the project, making it interesting, easy, and fun to code
is almost the priority over polishing it as much as possible before it
goes out.
You want as few barriers to a moderately skilled coder who knows how to do
X applications - for example - getting their 'hello world' program up and
running on the device.

Performance can be fixed later, and glitter added.
Yes, the Neo has a relatively underpowered CPU at the moment, compared to
desktops. But P1 is unimportant to end users.
Going from 266-400Mhz will provide a significant boost before P2 launches
to the public - some of that revenue can then hopefully be put into
streamlining and adding glitter.






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