Aurora

[Michael 'Mickey' Lauer]

NOTE: Cross-posted to three mailing lists, please keep it that way, if
you want to reply.

Dear FOSS-Telephony lovers,

today we want to announce something that has been brewing in our minds
for quite a while and will change the way we develop the
freesmartphone.org middleware.

In the past, FSO has been too much developed without considering how the
features will actually be used by the API consumers.
Apart from the great work our friends from SHR did, there has only been
a handful of special purpose FSO clients, such as
the Emacs client, Zhone, and Zhone2. Zhone (and its successor Zhone2) is
currently an oversimplified approach based on a
non-maintainable Edje file. We have therefore decided to develop a new
testing/demonstrator for FSO named Aurora that
is supposed to be the driving force for further development.

AURORA

The aim of Aurora is to replace zhone and zhone2 as development UIs for
FSO. From the viewpoint of a middleware architect,
it's essential to have clients available that use the various features
of the FSO services. On the other hand though, this
time we want to create something that is also suitable for day to day
use. Aurora is supposed to be something we call
a "featurephone client" – featurephones being those things we used for
telephony before smartphones were invented.

Aurora being a featurephone client does not necessarily mean it will
never get the "smartphone features" Android or iOS
are popular for, it rather describes our approach as being
as-simple-as-possible. So for now you will not be able to
install additional apps or features. Everything (you need) is part of
the Aurora client.

DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

At the top of every application stack is the user. Pleasing him or her
is the topmost priority. Technology should not stand in the
 way, but rather support the user. Hence, Aurora releases will be done
as user milestones. For every user milestone, we will
pick a number of user stories to be implemented. We will then split a
user story into tasks and distribute among the contributors.

SUPPORTED DEVICES

We decided to only support the Palm Pre devices (Pre/Pre Plus/Pre 2) for
the first to-be-released version of Aurora. More
supported devices will join after the 0.1 release. This decision has
been forced by the fact that we are only very few people
working both on FSO and Aurora (and also on OpenEmbedded). Later on, we
expect to see the OpenEZX family of devices,
the Openmoko devices, the Nokia N900, and possibly also a bunch of HTC
smartphones supported.

TECHNOLOGY

Some words about the technology choices we have made for Aurora. The UI
components of Aurora will be based on Qt's QML
(Qt Markup Language) and will have parts written in C++ and Vala
(although we're going to use Python for prototyping as well).
We will support both Qt/X11 and Qt/Embedded, the latter being useful on
smaller systems, such as the OpenEZX family of devices
(48MB RAM, no GFX acceleration, etc.)
For the first release we will only provide Qt/Embedded based images for
the Palm Pre devices;
those flashable images will be based on OpenEmbedded, however we'd
welcome people taking care of creating releases based on Debian, Gentoo,
etc.

THE CODE

At the moment, there is not much to look at, but feel free
to download the current status via git.freesmartphone.org -> aurora.

HOW TO HELP

Speaking about welcoming people, the major aim of this announcement is
to find people who want to share this vision
and give us a bit of a hand. We are especially lacking artists and folks
who can improve our user interaction.
Apart from the technical reasons, we chose QML to have a very low
barrier of entry. QML is easy to understand
and it also comes with a GUI design tool.

If you are interested and share our vision, please feel free to contact
us. We can then see how you could help us to get to the end goal (see
roadmap) even faster.

There are two possibilities to make us aware of you:

- IRC: irc.freenode.net; channel: #openmoko-cdevel
- Mail: smartphones-userland at linuxtogo.org

Thanks for your attention,

Mickey & Morphis.

-- 
:M: