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

[Andy Poling]

On 2 Sep 2007, at 14:57, denis wrote:
> Watching a lot of videos about Openmoko and the GUI I saw that it is
> very slow and yards away from being "snappy". (regarding the application
> startup and the acting inside an application) I know that speed is not
> the priority thing in developement  at the moment but how fast and
> "snappy" can the Openmoko GUI using GTK get? I'm looking at this from
> the user point of view, I'm not a developer so it would be very
> interesting to me what can be expected in the future. What are you're
> expectations? Will it get as snappy as the old PALM Pdas had been?

I haven't seen anyone else mention the obvious: some of the device drivers and
alot of the code have debugging output enabled.  Start the X server manually,
and watch the debugging info spew forth, and you'll get an idea where a bunch
of CPU cycles are going.  As an example, every stylus press results in at
least 4 debugging msgs printed, something happening in a place I would
consider latency-sensitive.  In addition various things complain constantly of
missing icon image files, etc... things that would surely be cached if they
were present, and those complaints take cycles.

It's all appropriate in a development environment - we just have to factor
that in when considering the responsiveness of the device.  IMO it's
appropriate for the primary focus to be functionality and the secondary focus
to be user interaction effectiveness at this point.

-Andy