Usability Review of OpenMoko GTK+ Applications

[Shawn Rutledge]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 3:48 AM, Chris Lord <chris at openedhand.com> wrote:
>  I think most of us have agreed that this is definitely the way to go,
>  but until someone steps up and writes (or ports from Maemo) some kind of
>  power policy manager, this isn't feasible.

How does it relate to power management?  You mean how to handle
closing apps (and saving data) at shutdown?  Deciding when to go to
sleep based on activity?

Maybe there could be a simple background process that monitors the
running apps and decides when to close them (by sending signals to
them, presumably).  But it needs to know which one is in the
foreground; so maybe this functionality should instead be part of the
window manager.  That way "closing the app" is done in exactly the
same way that the wm would normally do it.  The app would have
responsibility to save its state when it is closed, and next time it
is launched, to open up to the same view as it had when it was closed.

Am I missing that there is something more complicated about it than that?

> As time/resources are finite
>  things, it would be good to have a reasonable interim solution than to
>  just mark this as 'future' and forget about it.

Except putting close buttons on every app involves changing every app,
doesn't it?