Phone functionality in GUI applications

Thomas Wood thomas at openedhand.com
Tue Oct 16 18:24:57 CEST 2007


On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 18:09 +0300, Nuutti Kotivuori wrote:
> Thomas Wood wrote:
[...]
> 
> > PhoneKit
> > --------
> 
> [...]
> 
> > Produces system model GUI dialogs for call handling (incoming, outgoing,
> > in call) and manages pin entry on network registration.
> 
> This I'd like to be somewhat separate. If PhoneKit creates GUI
> dialogs, that ties PhoneKit to a certain GUI framework entirely. Also,
> people might want different functionality in these system modal
> dialogs - and it would be a bother if these changes would need to be
> made in to PhoneKit.
> 
> Perhaps a separate process communicating via dbus to handle these - I
> see these related more to the actual UI framework (main menu,
> profiles, task switching, etc.) than the phone functionality itself.

This was something that was brought up on IRC as well after I sent the
e-mail, but I would prefer to keep discussions on the list.

The reason we included the call handling GUI parts in PhoneKit was that
we wanted to keep the number of processes running to a minimum. We
started out thinking purely in terms of OpenMoko's requirements and we
assumed GTK+ would be the "official" GUI toolkit. However, if there is
demand for PhoneKit outside of OpenMoko, or even if OpenMoko decide to
use another GUI library, it should be easy to do this. I would suggest
using a very simply plugin system such as a shared (or even static)
library would be sufficient. The most important thing is to get the
correct balance between modularity and abstraction, against the
requirements of speed and low resource usage.


> 
> > Home
> > ----
> >
> > The current "Today" application, provides the entry point for all
> > software.
> 
> This looks fine as such, but...
> 
> One thing which has bothered me in OpenMoko from the start is that the
> responsibilities of 'today', eg. show last calls, sms's, calendar
> entries, and a 'task manager' have been bundled. And I'm unsure where
> the other required OpenMoko specific functionality resides - main
> menu, profiles and such.

I'm not sure what is in store for profiles and settings management
(apart from using gconf I would imagine). PhoneKit would obviously have
to interact with this at some stage but it could conceivably be handled
by a plugin as well.

Regards,

Thomas

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