Insisting on metaphors that exploit the device's weaknesses (Re: Centralization of graphical awesomeness)

[Petr Vanek]

On Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:42:16 +1100
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at rasterman.com> (CH(R) wrote:

>On Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:27:03 +0200 "Michael 'Mickey' Lauer"
><mickey at vanille-media.de> said:
>
>> >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)
>> 
>> Why do all of you insist on using scrolling as the only metaphor to
>> present excerpts of large content? Given the physical size of the
>> display and the hardware constraints (touchscreen jitter, for a
>> start... not going to comment on the Glamo) I think this is very
>> questionable. There are other metaphors available that would fit the
>> device's strengths much better. What about paging?
>
>good words mickey. good words. :) (i have a todo item for the scrole
>rto have a page mode. it already has a page mode actually - but its a
>scrolling one much like iphone's N pages of icons  - but it's infra to
>simple provide some theme elements that you press and they jump
>up/down/left/right a page and then do the jump - so it's mostly there.
>it just hasn't been any priority for me - am working on an oldie
>request to get rotatable objects.. which now works. under flux.. but
>works and renders... image and text objects so far are working. in
>theory all other basic object types too, but smart objects - not yet).


While i agree i still wonder. i tried latest android on freerunner
yesterday - most scrolling nice and smooth. had qtmoko on last week -
the same (yes, i read the explanation why it works, but it works). now,
in order not to put anybody down, i must say that for example scrolling
in shr contact list IS smooth. so my question is: where exactly do we
have scrolling issues? think about it. Then i tend to think about the
Illume desktop, that is so much unfriendly to scrolling.

Raster, i meant to ask before but had no time: if we take etk toolkit
and E window manager as for granted for SHR (hopefully with some
choices, but  still), is there any other desktop module we could use
instead of Illume? In your no-speak project, is there anything being
developed? What do you use on small device? Illume was ditched long time
ago, is there not a replacement with attention? Anything you could
recommend?

Thank you

Petr