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

[Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri]

On 6/8/07, Pedro Aguilar <paguilar at junkerhq.net> wrote:
> Hi,

Sorry being that late to reply.


> We should try different options, do some serious benchmarks and based on
> the results we could choose the best solution.
>
> Some options would be:
> - X11/GTK
> - X11/EFL
> - DirectFB/GTK
> - DirectFB/EFL
>
> Both, GTK and EFL, have backends for X11 and DirectFB, so running demos
> and apps shouldn't be a problem.

I'd not go with DirectFB, because X11 is not that slow, you can use
Shm extension and it will be fast, you also get some things for free,
like remote sessions to control or be controlled by a bigger machine.

Also, many apps will run "out-of-the box" with X11, which is not true
with DirectFB.


> Running DirectFB/GTK works fine in embedded systems, I used it in a
> PNX8550 processor, but the Neo's processor doesn't have that processing
> power...
>
> According to the ELF doc, the Evas library with DirectFB backend is
> designed with embedded systems in mind, but I haven't tested it. At least
> in the i386 platform works great.

I'm working on Evas for embedded systems, mainly focused on Maemo,
where I do the real hw tests, rasterman is helping me with most
issues.

We're developing software_16 and software_16_x11, with some
optimizations going into core system, like my optimizations to speed
up region operations (avoid overlap, merge neighbor rectangles),
things that are fast on desktop but on slower cpu with smaller data
caches become an issue.

Still many things are missing, no scale or text so far, but I hope to
add those until the end of June.

> One real problem I see is that for making some benchmarking we need the
> real hardware, an emulator wouldn't be reliable.

yes, probably I'll try to get one so I can do my tests... but you can
get my code straight from e17 cvs (remember to choose it at
./configure), so far no ecore_evas support, so you need to init your
engine by hand, just use expedite (benchmark tool) and check
improvements.

PS: my personal think is that we're already full of desktop apps and
they just don't fit or are usable in embedded systems, Maemo/Nokia
products can show how many GTK/Gnome apps are ported and used or
useful, it doesn't pay, except by complex apps like Gnumeric, Abiword,
but these can be embedded somehow... but following these lines, we
should go with Qt and get the whole Koffice and Kontact.    In other
words, we need to write custom UI for these devices, with different
guidelines.
   For this purpose, EFL fits better than GTK, you can write your
beautiful main UI using Edje and when forms are required, you place
ETK or EWL there... the inverse of we have now with GTK where we try
to make widgets fit or dirty hacks to get the visual we want... in
Edje it's just simple, you can place things using relative
positioning, via script, UI is totally scriptable.

-- 
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
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