Usability Review of OpenMoko GTK+ Applications

[Thomas Wood]

On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 22:56 +0100, "Marco Trevisan (Treviño)" wrote:
> Rodolphe Ortalo ha scritto:
> > Le lundi 10 mars 2008 à 13:27 +0000, Thomas Wood a écrit :
> >> I've been thinking about the usability of the GTK+ based OpenMoko
> >> applications and I have come up with some suggestions I'd like to
> >> implement.
> > [...]
> >> Theme
> >> -----
> >>
> >> The biggest problem with the current theme is performance. The main
> >> issue here is the use of gradients which requires either stretching
> >> images or dithering (for 16bit display). Both these are a significant
> >> performance hit, so I would like to suggest redesigning the theme to be
> >> faster and more efficient.
> > 
> > Is it really necessary to adjust the theme itself to solve such
> > performance issue? My first reaction reading you was: would it be
> > possible to use some kind of caching (or static pre-processing) to solve
> > these issues (esp. as the UI configuration is not so dynamic)? But I am
> > not well aware of all the implications here so I may have a bad
> > perception of the problem itself.
> 
> 
> And isn't there any way to improve the 2d rendering performances 
> improving the video chipset driver?!?

The 2d rendering here is not the issue. The scaling of the images in the
theme is. If you switch to a theme that does not use images to draw the
widgets, you will find the applications become significantly more
responsive.

Regards,

Thomas

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