QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features & assumptions

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:15:53 -0400 "Steven Milburn" <steven.milburn at gmail.com>
babbled:

fyi - that animation of the window popping open and then the pause until it
fills - is the application starting up. that is used to "cover up" the fact it
takes 1 or 2 or 3 seconds to start. on the freerunner you just sit and wait
with nothing but a little ticking clock thing - on the iphone you do the same
thing - just a zoom out and display a "screenshot" in the meantime is used.

so as such - the blame should really be apportioned to the kernel and
application space for not being able to start "instantly" :) not to the
animation which is just keeping you amused while you wait anyway (better some
feedback than none while starting). :) also note - that zoom is done by the
graphics accelerator almost entirely, which is idle while a process starts, so
it's unused resources. :)

> I have used an iPhone, my wife's.  The animations are pretty at first.
> After a while, they're just annoying.  My wife gets impatient waiting for
> windows to get out of the way so she can get on with what she's trying to
> do.  What's really funny is that some times the phone will do all that neat
> animation, and the window that shows up has no content.  You stare at an
> empty contact list for as much as 3 seconds easily before it suddenly fills
> up with names.
> 
> My wife may be an exception to the rule here.  She sometimes does data entry
> at work and has the dialogs of her application memorized so she can type in
> the fields much faster than the application can keep up.  When the keyboard
> beeps, she'll sit back and take a sip of her beverage while the application
> is popping dialogs up all over the place filling in what she typed.  It's
> fun to watch.  (FWIW: the application is running over a slow network via
> citrix, so it would take a lot to speed things up.  She's stopped asking)
> 
> With the touch screen UI, she can't use this approach.  She has to wait.
> 
> --Steve
> 
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Stroller <linux.luser at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> 
> > Reading these posts of the last few days it has just occurred to me
> > that it's not Carsten we should be beating up on here.
> > Who the heck asked for translucency and flashy animations?
> >
> > Management seem to be asking for this "alpha" bleeding rubbish, and
> > it seems to me that we users need to be telling management that we
> > don't care a heck for it.
> >
> > Sure, I know the iPhone does this now, but that doesn't mean Openmoko
> > has to do it. Do we really want Openmoko to be just another iPhone
> > clone? I know we see a fair number of posts on here about the iPhone,
> > but surely that's just a result of the current buzz - is UI animation
> > really a *necessity* in the long-term (or medium-term) future of the
> > mobile phone market?
> >
> > DISCLAIMER: I haven't used an iPhone, and I'm not terribly interested
> > in it.
> 


-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>