How "snappy" can the Openmoko GUI get using GTK?

Ted Lemon mellon at fugue.com
Sun Sep 2 16:58:46 CEST 2007


On Sep 2, 2007, at 7:17 AM, Giles Jones wrote:
> Launch speed is something that can be fixed, I'm not sure if the  
> build system is using pre-linking? if not it will be something to  
> use as this is the cure to application launch speed delays on Unix  
> like systems.

This is probably true.

> The interface is VGA and so there's a lot more to draw and this  
> makes the GUI less responsive than QVGA. The acceleration in the  
> next gen hardware will solve this.

This is definitely not true.   I mean, it's true that the QVGA is  
going to take less time to paint, but paint times aren't the problem  
- if they were, kinetic scrolling wouldn't look so nice.   No,  
there's something else going on that's making the UI so  
unresponsive.   Possibly something is timing out, or something's  
running in lock-step that should be asynchronous.

> The Palm PDAs were using task switching, it wasn't a full  
> multitasking OS, so you have to realise that a Linux based PDA will  
> always lag behind a very simple OS.

Again, true, but not likely to produce the results we're seeing.    
E.g., when an app is running, and a tap on the UI takes seconds to  
produce a response, this is not something you can attribute to the  
fact that Linux is a protected-mode multitasking kernel.





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