RE: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features assumptions

2008-06-14 Thread steve
Seconded.

  
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robert Taylor
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 12:53 PM
To: List for Openmoko community discussion
Subject: Re: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management,features 
assumptions

Ken Young wrote:
   
 This is especially true because if the GTA03 tries to be an iPhone
 clone, it will be at best a half-assed iPhone clone.   The hardware just
 isn't competitive with an iPhone's.   If the GTA03 has QVGA, will it have
 fast 3G networking?   No.   Will it have a state-of-the-art SoC?   No.
 That's not to say the GTA03 will be a bad device.   There's a lot
 of very exciting things you can do with the Freerunner hardware.   But
 it's just stupid to try to imitate the slick, largely useless, graphics
 goodies found on high-end video feature phones.   It is also a little
 alarming to hear that alpha blending is even being discussed by 
 corporate OM personnel, when you consider the state of the current OM
software stack.

 I don't think OM should target consumers who care about watching videos
 and having slick graphics at all.   They should go after uses of Palm
 and RIM products, who will be attracted to a rich ecosystem of useful 
 3rd party applications, and a phone geared towards letting professional
 people get some work done.   There are not nearly so many of those
 people as there are Apple fanboys, but they are willing to part with 
 serious money to get the best phone for their work and hobbies.

 Think Differently!
--

 Ken Young

   
I second this as well.

I posted an email with some ideas / brainstorming about how we can take the
phone idea and extend it with some lateral thinking.

There is A LOT of room to innovate and set the moko appart from the
competition.

I think what the project needs to do is OUT THINK the competition, not COPY
the competition.

Look, Microsoft cannot compete with the Apple brand ... why try and fail at
this? 

Let's not follow behind iSteve (tm) and beast in Redmond.  I think we can
take this mobile device thing and take it in a totally different direction
and really set it apart.

Rob

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Re: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features assumptions

2008-06-10 Thread Ortwin Regel
Well said.

Ortwin

On 6/10/08, Stroller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On 9 Jun 2008, at 01:56, Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
 ... i am asked by product management to do
 things that are just not possible in vga (to do sanely/fast).
 ... in the end if product management want X they get X. and
 if for X to happen we go QVGA, then so be it. you guys lose. i need
 a very very
 very strong argument against going to qvga - and that means product
 management
 need to drop a feature.


 On 10 Jun 2008, at 11:55, Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
 ... graphics is the most intensive thing your device is likely to
 do in terms of
 processing. if you want soft drop shadows, alpha blending (and
 trust me -
 everyone is drooling for it out there - the iphone is doing it
 already) the
 sheer memory bandwidth and cycles needed to do that stuff at a
 smooth framerate
 is astounding. sure - if your life is plain with still images/
 content and
 everything is plain solid rectangles, you don't. but i am being
 shown designs
 wanted that REQUIRE compositing - REQUIRE alpha blending and all
 that snazz.
 this is coming to me and i need a way to accommodate it in the long
 run
 ... cpu alone can't do it all - unless you really cut down the
 workload. that means too
 bad - no alpha ...


 On 6 Jun 2008, at 08:45, Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
 ... if we want to play the my specs are better than your specs
 game right now, we will lose.
 ... if all you measure a device on is dpi and pixel
 count, you are being silly. how it looks matters even more. dpi
 helps there,
 but so does compositing, translucency, smooth animation etc. in
 fact these
 probably have a much greater buy me effect. by far more. i'll put
 money on
 that bet actually (this is just speaking from having done eyecandy
 for over a
 decade - on linux, and having seen what it can do to attract
 people). to make
 things like compositing fast, smooth and nice, you must lower
 resolution to do
 it, or increase graphics power grunt. so given that graphicws grunt
 is not
 changing, cpu is not, the only 2 things that can change are screen
 resolution
 or the eyecandy has to remain toned down. so does vga buy you
 more sales for
 the average joe than a sexy bit of eyecandy at qvga? i'm leaning to
 qvga +
 eyecandy myself.


 Reading these posts of the last few days it has just occurred to me
 that it's not Carsten we should be beating up on here.
 Who the heck asked for translucency and flashy animations?

 Management seem to be asking for this alpha bleeding rubbish, and
 it seems to me that we users need to be telling management that we
 don't care a heck for it.

 Sure, I know the iPhone does this now, but that doesn't mean Openmoko
 has to do it. Do we really want Openmoko to be just another iPhone
 clone? I know we see a fair number of posts on here about the iPhone,
 but surely that's just a result of the current buzz - is UI animation
 really a *necessity* in the long-term (or medium-term) future of the
 mobile phone market?

 DISCLAIMER: I haven't used an iPhone, and I'm not terribly interested
 in it. I do use a Mac as my main desktop, but that's not for the
 animation, it's because I want something that just works when I sit
 down at my computer. All us Mac fans found Expose to be a *massive*
 UI improvement when it was released, but that's because virtual
 desktops have always been rubbish on a Mac - with so many windows on
 a single desktop *some* way of finding the bottom-most one was
 required. The other day I was talking to a Linux developer who turned
 off compiz on his desktop because it slowed down his productivity -
 you simply don't need Expose if you have virtual desktops (which
 admittedly are not suitable for my granny).

 It seems to me that, whilst the iPhone's animation may wow people,
 what really distinguishes the iPhone is the same attention to UI
 simplicity that Apple have always brought to their products. It does
 a FEW things amazingly well, and that's where it separates itself
 from the majority of phones on the market, none of which *quite* suit
 the mass-market of users. Most users don't want to understand the
 filesystem on their mobile phone, so Apple do away with it; Apple
 have made it spectacularly easy (so much so that one must include in
 the discussion the word intuitive) to email a photo taken on the
 camera or grabbed from a webpage, but they make it impossible to
 email attachments under many other circumstances. The majority of
 users don't want to copy  paste text on their mobile phones, so
 Apple just got rid of it - other manufacturers muddy up the phones
 they aim at girls and little old ladies (excuse me) by including the
 ability to copy  paste; Apple have realised that only a minority of
 business-phone users want or need that.

 The Neo  Freerunner have both been smartphones, and that's surely
 the interest that draws Linux users to this list. We want to be able
 to shell into our unix servers, 

Re: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features assumptions

2008-06-10 Thread Lally Singh
On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Stroller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On 9 Jun 2008, at 01:56, Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
 ... i am asked by product management to do
 things that are just not possible in vga (to do sanely/fast).
 ... in the end if product management want X they get X. and
 if for X to happen we go QVGA, then so be it. you guys lose. i need
 a very very
 very strong argument against going to qvga - and that means product
 management
 need to drop a feature.


 On 10 Jun 2008, at 11:55, Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
 ... graphics is the most intensive thing your device is likely to
 do in terms of
 processing. if you want soft drop shadows, alpha blending (and
 trust me -
 everyone is drooling for it out there - the iphone is doing it
 already) the
 sheer memory bandwidth and cycles needed to do that stuff at a
 smooth framerate
 is astounding. sure - if your life is plain with still images/
 content and
 everything is plain solid rectangles, you don't. but i am being
 shown designs
 wanted that REQUIRE compositing - REQUIRE alpha blending and all
 that snazz.
 this is coming to me and i need a way to accommodate it in the long
 run
 ... cpu alone can't do it all - unless you really cut down the
 workload. that means too
 bad - no alpha ...


 On 6 Jun 2008, at 08:45, Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
 ... if we want to play the my specs are better than your specs
 game right now, we will lose.
 ... if all you measure a device on is dpi and pixel
 count, you are being silly. how it looks matters even more. dpi
 helps there,
 but so does compositing, translucency, smooth animation etc. in
 fact these
 probably have a much greater buy me effect. by far more. i'll put
 money on
 that bet actually (this is just speaking from having done eyecandy
 for over a
 decade - on linux, and having seen what it can do to attract
 people). to make
 things like compositing fast, smooth and nice, you must lower
 resolution to do
 it, or increase graphics power grunt. so given that graphicws grunt
 is not
 changing, cpu is not, the only 2 things that can change are screen
 resolution
 or the eyecandy has to remain toned down. so does vga buy you
 more sales for
 the average joe than a sexy bit of eyecandy at qvga? i'm leaning to
 qvga +
 eyecandy myself.


 Reading these posts of the last few days it has just occurred to me
 that it's not Carsten we should be beating up on here.
 Who the heck asked for translucency and flashy animations?

 Management seem to be asking for this alpha bleeding rubbish, and
 it seems to me that we users need to be telling management that we
 don't care a heck for it.

 Sure, I know the iPhone does this now, but that doesn't mean Openmoko
 has to do it. Do we really want Openmoko to be just another iPhone
 clone? I know we see a fair number of posts on here about the iPhone,
 but surely that's just a result of the current buzz - is UI animation
 really a *necessity* in the long-term (or medium-term) future of the
 mobile phone market?

 DISCLAIMER: I haven't used an iPhone, and I'm not terribly interested
 in it. I do use a Mac as my main desktop, but that's not for the
 animation, it's because I want something that just works when I sit
 down at my computer. All us Mac fans found Expose to be a *massive*
 UI improvement when it was released, but that's because virtual
 desktops have always been rubbish on a Mac - with so many windows on
 a single desktop *some* way of finding the bottom-most one was
 required. The other day I was talking to a Linux developer who turned
 off compiz on his desktop because it slowed down his productivity -
 you simply don't need Expose if you have virtual desktops (which
 admittedly are not suitable for my granny).

 It seems to me that, whilst the iPhone's animation may wow people,
 what really distinguishes the iPhone is the same attention to UI
 simplicity that Apple have always brought to their products. It does
 a FEW things amazingly well, and that's where it separates itself
 from the majority of phones on the market, none of which *quite* suit
 the mass-market of users. Most users don't want to understand the
 filesystem on their mobile phone, so Apple do away with it; Apple
 have made it spectacularly easy (so much so that one must include in
 the discussion the word intuitive) to email a photo taken on the
 camera or grabbed from a webpage, but they make it impossible to
 email attachments under many other circumstances. The majority of
 users don't want to copy  paste text on their mobile phones, so
 Apple just got rid of it - other manufacturers muddy up the phones
 they aim at girls and little old ladies (excuse me) by including the
 ability to copy  paste; Apple have realised that only a minority of
 business-phone users want or need that.

 The Neo  Freerunner have both been smartphones, and that's surely
 the interest that draws Linux users to this list. We want to be able
 to shell into our unix servers, 

Re: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features assumptions

2008-06-10 Thread Steven Milburn
I have used an iPhone, my wife's.  The animations are pretty at first.
After a while, they're just annoying.  My wife gets impatient waiting for
windows to get out of the way so she can get on with what she's trying to
do.  What's really funny is that some times the phone will do all that neat
animation, and the window that shows up has no content.  You stare at an
empty contact list for as much as 3 seconds easily before it suddenly fills
up with names.

My wife may be an exception to the rule here.  She sometimes does data entry
at work and has the dialogs of her application memorized so she can type in
the fields much faster than the application can keep up.  When the keyboard
beeps, she'll sit back and take a sip of her beverage while the application
is popping dialogs up all over the place filling in what she typed.  It's
fun to watch.  (FWIW: the application is running over a slow network via
citrix, so it would take a lot to speed things up.  She's stopped asking)

With the touch screen UI, she can't use this approach.  She has to wait.

--Steve

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Stroller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Reading these posts of the last few days it has just occurred to me
 that it's not Carsten we should be beating up on here.
 Who the heck asked for translucency and flashy animations?

 Management seem to be asking for this alpha bleeding rubbish, and
 it seems to me that we users need to be telling management that we
 don't care a heck for it.

 Sure, I know the iPhone does this now, but that doesn't mean Openmoko
 has to do it. Do we really want Openmoko to be just another iPhone
 clone? I know we see a fair number of posts on here about the iPhone,
 but surely that's just a result of the current buzz - is UI animation
 really a *necessity* in the long-term (or medium-term) future of the
 mobile phone market?

 DISCLAIMER: I haven't used an iPhone, and I'm not terribly interested
 in it.
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Re: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features assumptions

2008-06-10 Thread Robert Taylor
Ortwin Regel wrote:

 Reading these posts of the last few days it has just occurred to me
 that it's not Carsten we should be beating up on here.
 Who the heck asked for translucency and flashy animations?

 Management seem to be asking for this alpha bleeding rubbish, and
 it seems to me that we users need to be telling management that we
 don't care a heck for it.

 Sure, I know the iPhone does this now, but that doesn't mean Openmoko
 has to do it. Do we really want Openmoko to be just another iPhone
 clone? I know we see a fair number of posts on here about the iPhone,
 but surely that's just a result of the current buzz - is UI animation
 really a *necessity* in the long-term (or medium-term) future of the
 mobile phone market?

 DISCLAIMER: I haven't used an iPhone, and I'm not terribly interested
 in it. I do use a Mac as my main desktop, but that's not for the
 animation, it's because I want something that just works when I sit
 down at my computer. All us Mac fans found Expose to be a *massive*
 UI improvement when it was released, but that's because virtual
 desktops have always been rubbish on a Mac - with so many windows on
 a single desktop *some* way of finding the bottom-most one was
 required. The other day I was talking to a Linux developer who turned
 off compiz on his desktop because it slowed down his productivity -
 you simply don't need Expose if you have virtual desktops (which
 admittedly are not suitable for my granny).

 It seems to me that, whilst the iPhone's animation may wow people,
 what really distinguishes the iPhone is the same attention to UI
 simplicity that Apple have always brought to their products. It does
 a FEW things amazingly well, and that's where it separates itself
 from the majority of phones on the market, none of which *quite* suit
 the mass-market of users. Most users don't want to understand the
 filesystem on their mobile phone, so Apple do away with it; Apple
 have made it spectacularly easy (so much so that one must include in
 the discussion the word intuitive) to email a photo taken on the
 camera or grabbed from a webpage, but they make it impossible to
 email attachments under many other circumstances. The majority of
 users don't want to copy  paste text on their mobile phones, so
 Apple just got rid of it - other manufacturers muddy up the phones
 they aim at girls and little old ladies (excuse me) by including the
 ability to copy  paste; Apple have realised that only a minority of
 business-phone users want or need that.

 The Neo  Freerunner have both been smartphones, and that's surely
 the interest that draws Linux users to this list. We want to be able
 to shell into our unix servers, read PDFs and so on. The idea of an
 open phone fires our imagination because we can integrate our
 contacts from our LDAP servers and our diary with an iCal server, we
 can do whatever the heck we want with Openmoko - we want to ADD
 features, not remove them.

 In the context of that, does animation and transparency matter? Heck
 no! We want a phone that displays text  icons on the screen, and as
 long as the phone does that quick enough, we don't want you wasting
 resources on trying to make the experience more flashy.

 There has been mention in these threads about the screen requirements
 of smaller phones. I can only conclude from this that FIC are
 planning to leverage their experience in building smartphone hardware
 in order to break into to the larger market of small girlie and
 soccer mom phones. Fine, but please don't do this at the expense of
 your smartphone market. Honestly, I don't see how you can do this
 well, without castrating your power-phone offerings.

 Parts of this conversation have focussed on making a use case for
 VGA screens, but please, FIC management, make a use case for
 transparency and flashy animations before having Carsten work on it.
 Whilst I was writing an Apple spam arrived here, promoting today's
 new iPhone announcement - I clicked on the link to iSteve's
 presentation. The enterprise take-up from Fortune 500 companies was
 surely impressive, but this leverage is because of Exchange-
 compatibility and all the features that OS X gives to the iPhone for
 free, not the flashy animations. This is where Openmoko can compete.

 I could write a lot, LOT more here,

 Stroller.

 
I second this.

Rob

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Re: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features assumptions

2008-06-10 Thread Robert Taylor
Ken Young wrote:
   
 This is especially true because if the GTA03 tries to be an iPhone
 clone, it will be at best a half-assed iPhone clone.   The hardware just
 isn't competitive with an iPhone's.   If the GTA03 has QVGA, will it have
 fast 3G networking?   No.   Will it have a state-of-the-art SoC?   No.
 That's not to say the GTA03 will be a bad device.   There's a lot
 of very exciting things you can do with the Freerunner hardware.   But
 it's just stupid to try to imitate the slick, largely useless, graphics
 goodies found on high-end video feature phones.   It is also a little
 alarming to hear that alpha blending is even being discussed by corporate
 OM personnel, when you consider the state of the current OM software stack.

 I don't think OM should target consumers who care about watching videos
 and having slick graphics at all.   They should go after uses of Palm
 and RIM products, who will be attracted to a rich ecosystem of useful
 3rd party applications, and a phone geared towards letting professional
 people get some work done.   There are not nearly so many of those
 people as there are Apple fanboys, but they are willing to part with
 serious money to get the best phone for their work and hobbies.

 Think Differently!
--

 Ken Young

   
I second this as well.

I posted an email with some ideas / brainstorming about how we can take 
the phone idea and extend it with some lateral thinking.

There is A LOT of room to innovate and set the moko appart from the 
competition.

I think what the project needs to do is OUT THINK the competition, not 
COPY the competition.

Look, Microsoft cannot compete with the Apple brand ... why try and fail 
at this? 

Let's not follow behind iSteve (tm) and beast in Redmond.  I think we 
can take this mobile device thing and take it in a totally different 
direction and really set it apart.

Rob

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Re: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features assumptions

2008-06-10 Thread Raanan Elefant
I third this (if that is even how you say it...)


- Original Message 
From: Robert Taylor [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: List for Openmoko community discussion community@lists.openmoko.org
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 10:49:21 PM
Subject: Re: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features  assumptions

Ortwin Regel wrote:

 Reading these posts of the last few days it has just occurred to me
 that it's not Carsten we should be beating up on here.
 Who the heck asked for translucency and flashy animations?

 Management seem to be asking for this alpha bleeding rubbish, and
 it seems to me that we users need to be telling management that we
 don't care a heck for it.

 Sure, I know the iPhone does this now, but that doesn't mean Openmoko
 has to do it. Do we really want Openmoko to be just another iPhone
 clone? I know we see a fair number of posts on here about the iPhone,
 but surely that's just a result of the current buzz - is UI animation
 really a *necessity* in the long-term (or medium-term) future of the
 mobile phone market?

 DISCLAIMER: I haven't used an iPhone, and I'm not terribly interested
 in it. I do use a Mac as my main desktop, but that's not for the
 animation, it's because I want something that just works when I sit
 down at my computer. All us Mac fans found Expose to be a *massive*
 UI improvement when it was released, but that's because virtual
 desktops have always been rubbish on a Mac - with so many windows on
 a single desktop *some* way of finding the bottom-most one was
 required. The other day I was talking to a Linux developer who turned
 off compiz on his desktop because it slowed down his productivity -
 you simply don't need Expose if you have virtual desktops (which
 admittedly are not suitable for my granny).

 It seems to me that, whilst the iPhone's animation may wow people,
 what really distinguishes the iPhone is the same attention to UI
 simplicity that Apple have always brought to their products. It does
 a FEW things amazingly well, and that's where it separates itself
 from the majority of phones on the market, none of which *quite* suit
 the mass-market of users. Most users don't want to understand the
 filesystem on their mobile phone, so Apple do away with it; Apple
 have made it spectacularly easy (so much so that one must include in
 the discussion the word intuitive) to email a photo taken on the
 camera or grabbed from a webpage, but they make it impossible to
 email attachments under many other circumstances. The majority of
 users don't want to copy  paste text on their mobile phones, so
 Apple just got rid of it - other manufacturers muddy up the phones
 they aim at girls and little old ladies (excuse me) by including the
 ability to copy  paste; Apple have realised that only a minority of
 business-phone users want or need that.

 The Neo  Freerunner have both been smartphones, and that's surely
 the interest that draws Linux users to this list. We want to be able
 to shell into our unix servers, read PDFs and so on. The idea of an
 open phone fires our imagination because we can integrate our
 contacts from our LDAP servers and our diary with an iCal server, we
 can do whatever the heck we want with Openmoko - we want to ADD
 features, not remove them.

 In the context of that, does animation and transparency matter? Heck
 no! We want a phone that displays text  icons on the screen, and as
 long as the phone does that quick enough, we don't want you wasting
 resources on trying to make the experience more flashy.

 There has been mention in these threads about the screen requirements
 of smaller phones. I can only conclude from this that FIC are
 planning to leverage their experience in building smartphone hardware
 in order to break into to the larger market of small girlie and
 soccer mom phones. Fine, but please don't do this at the expense of
 your smartphone market. Honestly, I don't see how you can do this
 well, without castrating your power-phone offerings.

 Parts of this conversation have focussed on making a use case for
 VGA screens, but please, FIC management, make a use case for
 transparency and flashy animations before having Carsten work on it.
 Whilst I was writing an Apple spam arrived here, promoting today's
 new iPhone announcement - I clicked on the link to iSteve's
 presentation. The enterprise take-up from Fortune 500 companies was
 surely impressive, but this leverage is because of Exchange-
 compatibility and all the features that OS X gives to the iPhone for
 free, not the flashy animations. This is where Openmoko can compete.

 I could write a lot, LOT more here,

 Stroller.


I second this.

Rob

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Re: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features assumptions

2008-06-10 Thread Mikko Rauhala
ti, 2008-06-10 kello 14:59 -0400, Ken Young kirjoitti:
  but surely that's just a result of the current buzz - is UI animation
  really a *necessity* in the long-term (or medium-term) future of the
  mobile phone market?
 
 This is especially true because if the GTA03 tries to be an iPhone
 clone, it will be at best a half-assed iPhone clone. 

I don't usually do me, toos, but I'll make an exception. This
no-nonsense observation warrants attention from the OM powers that be.

Indeed if you try to take on the iPhone where its strengths lie at this
point, you will fail. Freedom and openness have their own strengths.
Concentrate there until you have the resources to spread a wider net
properly.

-- 
Mikko Rauhala   - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - URL:http://www.iki.fi/mjr/
Transhumanist   - WTA member - URL:http://www.transhumanism.org/
Singularitarian - SIAI supporter - URL:http://www.singinst.org/




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Re: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features assumptions

2008-06-10 Thread David Samblas Martinez
me too


--- El mar, 10/6/08, Robert Taylor [EMAIL PROTECTED] escribió:

 De: Robert Taylor [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Asunto: Re: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features  
 assumptions
 Para: List for Openmoko community discussion community@lists.openmoko.org
 Fecha: martes, 10 junio, 2008 9:49
 Ortwin Regel wrote:
 
  Reading these posts of the last few days it has
 just occurred to me
  that it's not Carsten we should be beating up
 on here.
  Who the heck asked for translucency and flashy
 animations?
 
  Management seem to be asking for this
 alpha bleeding rubbish, and
  it seems to me that we users need to be telling
 management that we
  don't care a heck for it.
 
  Sure, I know the iPhone does this now, but that
 doesn't mean Openmoko
  has to do it. Do we really want Openmoko to be
 just another iPhone
  clone? I know we see a fair number of posts on
 here about the iPhone,
  but surely that's just a result of the current
 buzz - is UI animation
  really a *necessity* in the long-term (or
 medium-term) future of the
  mobile phone market?
 
  DISCLAIMER: I haven't used an iPhone, and
 I'm not terribly interested
  in it. I do use a Mac as my main desktop, but
 that's not for the
  animation, it's because I want something that
 just works when I sit
  down at my computer. All us Mac fans found Expose
 to be a *massive*
  UI improvement when it was released, but
 that's because virtual
  desktops have always been rubbish on a Mac - with
 so many windows on
  a single desktop *some* way of finding the
 bottom-most one was
  required. The other day I was talking to a Linux
 developer who turned
  off compiz on his desktop because it slowed down
 his productivity -
  you simply don't need Expose if you have
 virtual desktops (which
  admittedly are not suitable for my granny).
 
  It seems to me that, whilst the iPhone's
 animation may wow people,
  what really distinguishes the iPhone is the same
 attention to UI
  simplicity that Apple have always brought to their
 products. It does
  a FEW things amazingly well, and that's where
 it separates itself
  from the majority of phones on the market, none of
 which *quite* suit
  the mass-market of users. Most users don't
 want to understand the
  filesystem on their mobile phone, so Apple do away
 with it; Apple
  have made it spectacularly easy (so much so that
 one must include in
  the discussion the word intuitive) to
 email a photo taken on the
  camera or grabbed from a webpage, but they make it
 impossible to
  email attachments under many other circumstances.
 The majority of
  users don't want to copy  paste text on
 their mobile phones, so
  Apple just got rid of it - other manufacturers
 muddy up the phones
  they aim at girls and little old ladies (excuse
 me) by including the
  ability to copy  paste; Apple have realised
 that only a minority of
  business-phone users want or need that.
 
  The Neo  Freerunner have both been
 smartphones, and that's surely
  the interest that draws Linux users to this list.
 We want to be able
  to shell into our unix servers, read PDFs and so
 on. The idea of an
  open phone fires our imagination because we can
 integrate our
  contacts from our LDAP servers and our diary with
 an iCal server, we
  can do whatever the heck we want with Openmoko -
 we want to ADD
  features, not remove them.
 
  In the context of that, does animation and
 transparency matter? Heck
  no! We want a phone that displays text  icons
 on the screen, and as
  long as the phone does that quick enough, we
 don't want you wasting
  resources on trying to make the
 experience more flashy.
 
  There has been mention in these threads about the
 screen requirements
  of smaller phones. I can only conclude from this
 that FIC are
  planning to leverage their experience in building
 smartphone hardware
  in order to break into to the larger market of
 small girlie and
  soccer mom phones. Fine, but please
 don't do this at the expense of
  your smartphone market. Honestly, I don't see
 how you can do this
  well, without castrating your power-phone
 offerings.
 
  Parts of this conversation have focussed on making
 a use case for
  VGA screens, but please, FIC management, make a
 use case for
  transparency and flashy animations before having
 Carsten work on it.
  Whilst I was writing an Apple spam arrived here,
 promoting today's
  new iPhone announcement - I clicked on the link to
 iSteve's
  presentation. The enterprise take-up
 from Fortune 500 companies was
  surely impressive, but this leverage is because of
 Exchange-
  compatibility and all the features that OS X gives
 to the iPhone for
  free, not the flashy animations. This is where
 Openmoko can compete.
 
  I could write a lot, LOT more here,
 
  Stroller.
 
  
 I second this.
 
 Rob
 
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Re: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features assumptions

2008-06-10 Thread Joerg Reisenweber
full ACK
/j


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Re: QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features assumptions

2008-06-10 Thread The Rasterman
On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:15:53 -0400 Steven Milburn [EMAIL PROTECTED]
babbled:

fyi - that animation of the window popping open and then the pause until it
fills - is the application starting up. that is used to cover up the fact it
takes 1 or 2 or 3 seconds to start. on the freerunner you just sit and wait
with nothing but a little ticking clock thing - on the iphone you do the same
thing - just a zoom out and display a screenshot in the meantime is used.

so as such - the blame should really be apportioned to the kernel and
application space for not being able to start instantly :) not to the
animation which is just keeping you amused while you wait anyway (better some
feedback than none while starting). :) also note - that zoom is done by the
graphics accelerator almost entirely, which is idle while a process starts, so
it's unused resources. :)

 I have used an iPhone, my wife's.  The animations are pretty at first.
 After a while, they're just annoying.  My wife gets impatient waiting for
 windows to get out of the way so she can get on with what she's trying to
 do.  What's really funny is that some times the phone will do all that neat
 animation, and the window that shows up has no content.  You stare at an
 empty contact list for as much as 3 seconds easily before it suddenly fills
 up with names.
 
 My wife may be an exception to the rule here.  She sometimes does data entry
 at work and has the dialogs of her application memorized so she can type in
 the fields much faster than the application can keep up.  When the keyboard
 beeps, she'll sit back and take a sip of her beverage while the application
 is popping dialogs up all over the place filling in what she typed.  It's
 fun to watch.  (FWIW: the application is running over a slow network via
 citrix, so it would take a lot to speed things up.  She's stopped asking)
 
 With the touch screen UI, she can't use this approach.  She has to wait.
 
 --Steve
 
 On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Stroller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
  Reading these posts of the last few days it has just occurred to me
  that it's not Carsten we should be beating up on here.
  Who the heck asked for translucency and flashy animations?
 
  Management seem to be asking for this alpha bleeding rubbish, and
  it seems to me that we users need to be telling management that we
  don't care a heck for it.
 
  Sure, I know the iPhone does this now, but that doesn't mean Openmoko
  has to do it. Do we really want Openmoko to be just another iPhone
  clone? I know we see a fair number of posts on here about the iPhone,
  but surely that's just a result of the current buzz - is UI animation
  really a *necessity* in the long-term (or medium-term) future of the
  mobile phone market?
 
  DISCLAIMER: I haven't used an iPhone, and I'm not terribly interested
  in it.
 


-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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