Another Gui Idea...

[Vorporeal]

The major issue is not that people don't want to have lots of easy customization, it's that they're afraid that using a WM/X11 will drastically increase boot times for the system. That's why the general feeling is that people want a simple, non-X11/non-WM GUI that will quickly load at boot and use as few resources as possible so that they can quickly launch a game or emulator.

 

[yosh64]

hey

If you are coding the GUI from scratch then maybe I can have a go at this, or yas already got it under control?

I assume C/C++ would be fine? I'd just use my lil 2D SDL lib that writes graphics and everything directly to the framebuffer, and as such could easily be changed not to use SDL.

I've never really coded in a team before, so hopefully my code would be okay.

cyas

 

[Chip]

The major issue is not that people don't want to have lots of easy customization, it's that they're afraid that using a WM/X11 will drastically increase boot times for the system. That's why the general feeling is that people want a simple, non-X11/non-WM GUI that will quickly load at boot and use as few resources as possible so that they can quickly launch a game or emulator.

Boot time is irrelavant. The argument for a simple UI is entirely one of convenience and ease of use. Whether an WM is used is entirely up to the UI creator and shouldn't have any impact on the level of customizability one way or the other. The only real requirements are that it is simple, fast, and easy / intuitive to navigate using either touchscreen or buttons. Many users will have no need for anything more complicated than a GMenu-style UI, so long as that UI works well.

 

[Vorporeal]

The major issue is not that people don't want to have lots of easy customization, it's that they're afraid that using a WM/X11 will drastically increase boot times for the system. That's why the general feeling is that people want a simple, non-X11/non-WM GUI that will quickly load at boot and use as few resources as possible so that they can quickly launch a game or emulator.

Boot time is irrelavant. The argument for a simple UI is entirely one of convenience and ease of use. Whether an WM is used is entirely up to the UI creator and shouldn't have any impact on the level of customizability one way or the other. The only real requirements are that it is simple, fast, and easy / intuitive to navigate using either touchscreen or buttons. Many users will have no need for anything more complicated than a GMenu-style UI, so long as that UI works well.


Note that I never said or intended to say that it would actually affect load times, but people are afraid that it will. I am totally aware that the suspend modes are available (as well as the fact that X11 doesn't have to bloat boot times if the unnecessary components are "removed"), I am just stating the "popular opinion".

 

[sindbad]

I wish people would stop worrying about lack of performance. This is a specific device with uniform hardware, there's no need for extra drivers or useless extensions.

Also, Xorg starts up un less than a second on my computer and less than 3 on my 300mhz server. Kdrive starts up in a fraction of a second anywhere. There's even coreboot with X11, and it still boots instantly.

 

[Squidge]

Boot time is irrelavant.


Some people don't want to waste power in standby mode though - when they've finished with the Pandora, they want to switch it off so it uses zero power, so bootup speed is a concern for those people.

 

[yosh64]

hey

@sindbad: Another thing you need to consider even though you say xorg starts in no time, how long does everything that it depends on take to load before hand?

cyas

 

[Chip]

Boot time is irrelavant.


Some people don't want to waste power in standby mode though - when they've finished with the Pandora, they want to switch it off so it uses zero power, so bootup speed is a concern for those people.


Suspend to disk also uses zero power. No matter how much you trim down the boot time, it's always going to be longer than resuming from a suspend to disk.

 

[Karel Jansens]

Some people don't want to waste power in standby mode though - when they've finished with the Pandora, they want to switch it off so it uses zero power, so bootup speed is a concern for those people.

And other people don't want to waste time booting up. They don't care about the minimal amount of power a Pandora in standby uses, as long as they can have instant-on.

So who's to say which group of people is more important than the other?

 

[Squidge]

QUOTE
Suspend to disk also uses zero power. No matter how much you trim down the boot time, it's always going to be longer than resuming from a suspend to disk.


Depends. If we can read the sd card at 20MB/sec, then it would take ~6 secs. 10MB/sec would take ~13 secs. We might be able to boot the system from scratch in 6-8 secs.

So who's to say which group of people is more important than the other?

If it had fast boot times, then both groups of people would be happy

 

[Karel Jansens]

If it had fast boot times, then both groups of people would be happy

Well, not me. I want instant-on, the kind of instant-on I've come to expect from my Psions, my Newtons and -- recently -- from my Nokia Itablets. I definitely don't want the "instant-on" my Pepper Pad 3 gives me, which is about the 6-8 seconds boot time you calculated and close to the resume lag of most notebooks.

Besides, the OMAP processors were designed to be left on all of the time, their retarded little brothers in the Nokia Itablets have a standby time of 10 days for running battery life of 6 hours. Extrapolating from this I'd say it's safe to assume that a Pandora can remain in standby for more than two weeks before running out of juice.

 

[Vorporeal]

One interesting approach to an "instant-on" would be if enough space was left on the NAND to hibernate the system to that. If you copied the 128MB of RAM to the NAND, that should copy back into RAM and resume execution pretty quickly - almost definitely under 6-8 seconds. Then again, you'd lose a lot by leaving 128MB of the NAND open for a hibernation file...

 

[Squidge]

If it had fast boot times, then both groups of people would be happy

Well, not me. I want instant-on, the kind of instant-on I've come to expect from my Psions, my Newtons and --

Huh? We have already said it will have standby, and will have fast boot times, but your not happy?

One interesting approach to an "instant-on" would be if enough space was left on the NAND to hibernate the system to that. If you copied the 128MB of RAM to the NAND, that should copy back into RAM and resume execution pretty quickly - almost definitely under 6-8 seconds. Then again, you'd lose a lot by leaving 128MB of the NAND open for a hibernation file...

You would need more than 128MB available however, as if you reserved exactly 128MB, you would be overwriting the same NAND blocks each time, so what happens if you get a bad nand block a few hundred hibernations later on? Ideally you need twice that amount.

If you hibernated to SD card, you could also have multiple restore points.

 

[Sphinxter]

6-8 second boot times would be bliss.

 

[Vorporeal]

One interesting approach to an "instant-on" would be if enough space was left on the NAND to hibernate the system to that. If you copied the 128MB of RAM to the NAND, that should copy back into RAM and resume execution pretty quickly - almost definitely under 6-8 seconds. Then again, you'd lose a lot by leaving 128MB of the NAND open for a hibernation file...

You would need more than 128MB available however, as if you reserved exactly 128MB, you would be overwriting the same NAND blocks each time, so what happens if you get a bad nand block a few hundred hibernations later on? Ideally you need twice that amount.

If you hibernated to SD card, you could also have multiple restore points.


Yes, good point. It's going to be hard finding a compromise that makes everyone happy. If the boot times were longer, we might be able to do something like the big companies are doing on x86 motherboards, namely putting a very small linux distro on a chip that runs in parallel with Windows/Linux loading so that people can listen to music and use the internet while the main OS loads. With 6-8 seconds though, that's useless.

 

[Karel Jansens]

If it had fast boot times, then both groups of people would be happy

Well, not me. I want instant-on, the kind of instant-on I've come to expect from my Psions, my Newtons and --

Huh? We have already said it will have standby, and will have fast boot times, but your not happy?


I misunderstood then. I thought one was going to be sacrificed in favour of the other, but as long as the Pandora has real instant-on (you know: you hit the restore button and the screen comes on without any delay), I'm happy. Happy?

 

[atomicthumbs]

Hi, Here my (unfinished) concept for a pandora GUI...

Just used tango icons for now to show where they would go, its based on a cross between the eeepc distro and nokia N8* series overall an easy to use professional looking gui, let me know what you think andora1:

This one is my favorite so far.

Also, I've made available the Oxygen icon set on my website for anybody to download.

It has PNG versions of all the Oxygen icons, and SVG versions too.

http://bunnitude.com/misc/files/Oxygen.zip

 

[Squidge]

If you want the screen to come on without any delay, then its probably best to configure it so it just turns off the LCD, otherwise you'll no doubt have some delay.

 

[Tinman]

- Things like text, detail on sys-tray and running tasks are small
- What would the user need to do to navigate to the running tasks?
- Looks like the number of 'tabs' is fixed?
- A right-hand tab-menu for touchscreen use would mean that right hand touchscreen interactions would not block the view of most of the screen
- The highlight for the selected application isn't strong enough
- Memory card space remaining: The figure or the bar is the wrong way round.
- "Not Mounted" should be changed to something that Joe Public will immediately understand, something along the lines of "No Memory Card Inserted" or "Please insert Memory Card"

Looks good. I like it. Good that the navigation area takes up more 'column space' than 'row space'.

 

[magicman5421]

I like this gui the best.
CRAIG SHOW US SO WE CAN STOP SPECULATING!

jk, just go at whatever speed gives us the best end product