Ubuntu Wiki

2008-05-23, Prague, Mobile session

Hildon built on top of Gtk (from Nokia) Hiker built on top of Gtk (from ALP, formerly Palm Source)

Hiker UI was small, they patched

Hiker port was alot easier than porting

Hildon creates new widgets, most of these don't need to exist, straight Gtk would be better.

Don't actually need to use Hildon widgets

Hiker provides high-level APIs (eg. image-loading)

Flash. Day-dream, of easy rapid protyping.

Internationalisation.

QTopia now owned by Nokia.

Change it in the trunk and upstream to make it work, rather than patching everything to work around.

Hopefully in the projects 90% of the code is back-end, the UI only being a small about (cf. Webkit/browser)

Hiker has the Apple/Palm style of one-application-at-a-time.

EFL (Enlightment Foundation Libraries)

Clutter is lower-level.

Canola, example of Media player done right. Bling. EFL.

GL-ES support not yet in EFL.

In Canola, had to write everything, transitions, widgets. Everything done on top of lists and buttons.

Qtopia, Hiker, Hildon, EFL, Clutter, Flash/gnash.

EFL provides a component called 'Edge'. Flashish.

Can give the components to the designer and they can design the interface without writing code.

EFL Interface Designer. In progress.

In Gnash, everyone uses Flex (the Adobe creation tools).

Secret to all of these is having designers write the software, not programmers.

Android. Look at it, check the capabilities. Free Software conflict.

Elisa thinking of switching from pixman/canvas to clutter.

Hiker now the standard for LiMo "stanards committee".

LIPS shutdown their bank-account a month ago.

Hiker is a framework, not just a canvas, or widgets.

Hiker: Input model, integration, menus, pre-defined kits.

Use, rather than re-invent.

Gnome applications are moving to Clutter.

People are used to the Gtk event model and (Hiker)

Mobilin 2.0.

* Intel suggested that new they'll have a new widget set and new toolchain.

* It's for the next chip. Trying to learn more and more effective if it's at least discussed within the community.

* All that's been seen so far are screen shots.

* Being kept closed, because that's the proprietary style. Same as Google "getting it right and chucking it over the wall"

* Apparently still might be Gtk somewhere, but lots replaced.

Mobilin 1.0 got chucked over the wall, and people wanted to chuck it back. Need to wait for the code.

Issues:

• media awareness of network connectivity IPC

Android defines the events that can you catch/listen.

Make it a standard on FreeDesktop.org and Rythumbox and things would implement it.

Openmoko still at the design stage, but they *have shipped dev hardware*.

* Input translation, tslib so that it changes touch events instead of a mouse click.

Gtk widgets with clutter canvas.

In Gtk the drawing is done by the theme-engine, changable.

There are so many existing Gtk applications/knowledge.

goocanvas, it's a canvas, like clutter, except 2D.

Havoc currently trying to get the good parts of Hippocanvas into clutter.

If the python-clutter.

Enlightment, edge needs less code.

Two different approaches:

1. Having a crap widget set with lots of pre-existing applications
2. Porting needing applications to a new, funky widget set/API

May want kenetic scrolling deeper down in the widget set.

Separate backend and frontend parts for applications.

Look at Gtk+Flash and/or Flash+Gtk.

Glade is a start for a development designer environment but not there.

Fix the Gtk signalling , it's not that we've run out of signals. The API is broken.

Subclassing Gtk is very easy in PyGtk and Major Pain from C.

Low-level APIs eg. GPS.

ALP is trying to open-source more stuff from Hiker. But some of it is waiting on negioations from other people.

Anything else?