Centralization of graphical awesomeness

[rixed at happyleptic.org]

-[ Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 04:42:21PM +1100, Carsten Haitzler ]----
> but.. if i were smart.. i'd not develop apps for the freerunner. it's a "dead
> product".

It might be dead, but as there is no other free phone I have no
choice but to use this one.
I can live without fancy graphics anyway (although I can remember a time when I
was coding 3d eye candy on much less powerfull hardware, but that's another
story).

> it has no evolution path.

You seam to consider gta03 community project as unable to produce anything ?
I don't think so.

> you don't build your world around your first bit of hardware. (...)
> most games i know of are written to work on the highest end graphics cards
> at the time. why? by the time the game
> is out and is selling - everyone has finally upgraded to those cards.

We are dealing with 2 different ideas here I believe : what hardware
you target when you plan the feature of a future product, and what hardware
is required to run a given set of features.

You designed E to give good results on bigger hardware (due to the ambitious
theme engine if I understood correctly) ; and I believe you that it's probably
honestly optimised. You targeted more capable hardware when designing E and I
believe it was probably the good choice ! For instance, if I were designing a
rendering toolkit now I would certainly not consider anything but OpenGl
capable hardware :) I've seen E at work on bigger hardware too, and it seamed
allright.

The problem is : on the freerunner we merely need something to display some
simple widgets, scroll the screen smoothly (because on a small display you
always need to scroll) and be reactive to user finger pressures. If E, because
of an ambitious design, is unable to perform this on the freerunner, then it's
simply not a good fit. You can say that the hardware does not fit E or that E
does not fit the hardware, the fact is we have much more free software to run
on the freerunner that free hardware to run E.

As an important but overlooked side effect, the more capable the graphics
toolkit is and the more bloated and unfriendly the resulting end user interface
will be. While we were at replacing the original gnome mobile desktop, I would
have liked to start from a minimalist but inovative toolkit more adapted to
limited hardware like the freerunner or the many other gadget with only a small
touchscreen that will keep getting out, instead of having one more toolkit for
the same device range for which we already have dozens.

Kindly,