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

[Hans van der Merwe]

On Thu, 2007-06-07 at 11:29 +0200, Fabien wrote:
> 
> 
> On 6/7/07, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer <mickey at openmoko.org> wrote:
>         Tomasz Zielinski wrote:
>         > If with GTK/Matchbox we cannot achieve such rich, fluid and,
>         erm...,
>         > fluid GUI as iPhone, maybe it's not too late to drop GTK and
>         choose
>         > other framework, designed for mobile devices and running
>         quick 
>         > framebuffer operations? GameBoy provided nice full-screen
>         animations
>         > in 1989, eighteen years ago.
>         
>         I feel your pain. Trust me, it hurts me as well...
>         
>         > I'm 100% sure nobody will cry after pure-X11 applications we
>         loose 
>         > this way. Almost every GTK application would require
>         rewriting/porting
>         > to fit OpenMoko capabilities, so it's not great loss too.
>         Not to
>         > mention font and other DPI-aware issues.
>         
>         Interesting. Can I hear more supportive or counter arguments? 
>         What do the others think?
> 
> I'm only interested in graphic effects if they improve the ease and
> speed of my interactions with the phone. Most of graphic effects don't
> fit in that category on computers, and my gut feeling is that the
> smaller the screen, the worse it gets. 
> 
> I want something:
> 
> - fast. Don't wan't to wait 1 second everytime I open a menu in order
> to get it half transparent (and therefore less legible BTW). Maybe I
> don't want a menu-based UI at all, actually. 
> 
> - easily and deeply configurable: because even *I* can't tell what's
> the perfect UI for myself without a lot of experimenting. Empowering
> the users is not only about giving them the sources, it's also about
> making them as easy to change as possible, so the rapid prototyping
> abilities of the whole framework are extremely important. 
> 
> And actually, I might want it bad enough to implement it. I'd bet on
> some tiny, X11-less GUI for responsiveness, plus a layer of Lua
> bindings for the rapid prototyping aspects. Anyway, AFAIK the widgets
> implemented in the common, big open-source toolkits have been designed
> for big screen + mouse, so it's more important to easily write new
> widgets than having loads of unadapted, XVGA-oriented ones. 
> 
> Note that this approach is not incompatible with the heavier,
> GTK-based one: once an interesting user experience is found on a
> lightweight and easy to tweak UI, it can be transposed on the 
> heavy one(s).


On this topic:
How detached is the underlying processes/functions and GUI from each
other?
How difficult will it be to just pull a different GUI layer on top of
the phone functions?

ie, have commercial Mokos with different frontends - one for my dad who
wants to sync appointments with PC and make calls, thats it - and one
for me with buttons on rotating cubes while watching a movie streamed
via wifi :)

(I havent had time to take a look at die software layers yet, I know GTK
is in there, is X also in? that seems wasteful)






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