On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 9:04 AM, Ken Young <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 07:57:13AM +0800, Carsten Haitzler wrote: >> the day the design mockups for the ui i see stop having alpha >> transparency is the day i make this unimportant. until that day, >> your "i don't care about this" is the kind of opinion that i also am >> not interested in, because i am being shown ui designs hat REQUIRE >> it in the long run between windows, and in the short term is being >> faked with software within windows. i am just trying to make >> something possible that is being requested, and has been for a long >> time. not just say "i don't care". > > The problem isn't that transparency effects, and other CPU/GPU intensitve > UI enhancements, are unimportant. On a handheld device they *are* > important. They make the device worse. It is important to resist > the push to add eye-candy to a handheld device, because every CPU/GPU > cycle spent animating an icon, or making a window translucent, eats > some of the energy stored in your battery, and reduces the amount of > useful work which can be done between recharges.
I disagree with such categorical statements. There is a trade-off between usability and performance (e.g. user performance and device performance). The optimal value is in between, dependent on both user and system capabilities. The iPhone is success *because* of its heavy bias for user performance over system performance. The hardware isn't novel, but the UI is, and it makes all the difference. Example: Shadows on windows on Mac OS X --- the shadows indicate, better than any titlebar hilight ever will, what window has focus. Using the brain's innate understanding of depth provides user-side hardware acceleration for this activity. Example: Desktop switcher animation --- when switching virtual desktops, having the windows slide off to the appropriate side is critical for building a spatial model in the user's mind. http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/finder.ars/2 Geeks will probably want a different set of trade-offs between usability & performance, but those are best done as customizations on an expert platform. One that we hope that OM will become. -- H. Lally Singh Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science Virginia Tech _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community