Pandora Desktop Environment Prototype Try 2 (screenshots And Videos)

[Svartalf]

But mamona is for handhelds

from their homepage:
"The main goal of the Mamona Project is to offer a completely open source alternative/experimental Platform for Maemo"

Maemo is for hanhelds right?

A stated goal and what ends up happening are often slightly different. e17, in it's current incarnation, isn't quite there for doing handheld UI tasks where you don't rely on the touch-screen/mouse. It'd need mods for at least that much. Just because they've got it and it's intended for being an experimental (there's you a titanic hint... ) replacement for Maemo does not lead to it being fully useful for the thing we're intending to do.

Matchbox is already designed for much of this behavior out of the gate and is themeable, etc.

In NONE of this do I say that it's a bad idea or that someone shouldn't be doing something with e17. It's just unlikely that it will get used for the baseline firmware WM or Launcher setup at initial delivery and that it'll be holding the same role it has on Mamona with the Nokia web tablets for now.

 

[dentrado]

Just because they've got it and it's intended for being an experimental (there's you a titanic hint... wink.gif ) replacement for Maemo does not lead to it being fully useful for the thing we're intending to do. biggrin.gif

and I haven't said so, what I was reacting on was that it sounded on what you wrote as mamona was intended for embedded non-handheld systems. I have no doubt in you choosing the best solution for the pandora.

 

[OrR]

QUOTE

I beg to differ enlightenment is for embedded use... it was strongly considered for for the freerunner iirc also what about mamona >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hipg7ov4w-I...feature=related Site: http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/mamona/wiki/FAQ



It's capable of embedded use, but unfortunately, there's not been much tweakage that I've seen towards making an honestly usable thing WITH it. It's one thing to be thin, it's another altogether to be able to be used in the way you'd use a handheld. e17's not QUITE there from the last times I've tinkered with it (which was about 6-ish months ago.). It's not that I'm telling you "no" (I think it would be great...) but while you could get it "running" in a month or so, the things you'd need to tinker with to make it truly usable may take as much as 6 or more months (seriously...you've got to account for _EVERYTHING_...it'll take at least that long for every nook and cranny that causes issues in usage to rattle out and be fixed...)

QUOTE

mamona is an openembedded distro... so there should't be any porting needed to get the desktop version of e17 running



That's not quite the point I was getting to. Embedded and handheld are slightly differing things with differing UI's. Mamona would work well for a set-top box. But that's not the same as a handheld. The UI rules and usability is...very different.

Rasterman worked a lot on getting it to run well on the Openmoko Neos somewhat recently and it runs beautifully on the rather slow (compared to Pandora) all touchscreen 480*640 phones. I don't think there should be much of a problem to get it to work well on the Pandora as well? Again, I'm not a developer so I don't really know where the problems are. From my perspective, I don't see any.

Edit: From your most recent post it sounds like the main problem is missing button support?

 

[Ravnos]

problem is some apps are really bloated like Pidgin... see debian stem FAQ http://debian.cante.net/stem/faq/

anyone know of a lightweight IM Gui with support as good as pidgin?

I know there is a new one planed for fedora and also e17 has one in the works which should be fairly light if it works (have no idea never tried it)


I haven't checked the memory usage, but Pidgin runs fine on my N800, even with a bunch of other stuff going on. No problems with it being slow or unresponsive, it works about as well as it does on my PC.

 

[wesbrown18]

problem is some apps are really bloated like Pidgin... see debian stem FAQ http://debian.cante.net/stem/faq/

anyone know of a lightweight IM Gui with support as good as pidgin?

I know there is a new one planed for fedora and also e17 has one in the works which should be fairly light if it works (have no idea never tried it)


I haven't checked the memory usage, but Pidgin runs fine on my N800, even with a bunch of other stuff going on. No problems with it being slow or unresponsive, it works about as well as it does on my PC.


Nokia's Maemo uses the following:

http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/

http://rtcomm.garage.maemo.org/

 

[Sphinxter]

That'll do nicely.

 

[javaJake]

CODE
xrandr --size 720x450

My monitor doesn't support this particular resolution. Would any of the following do?
CODE
$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 1280 x 1280
VGA connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right) 315mm x 236mm
1024x768 85.0*+ 84.9 75.1 70.1 60.0 43.5
1280x1024 59.9
1280x960 59.9
1152x864 74.8
832x624 74.6
800x600 84.9 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2
640x480 84.6 75.0 72.8 66.7 60.0
720x400 87.8 70.1

Edit: Whoops, double-post.

 

[wesbrown18]

CODE
xrandr --size 720x450

My monitor doesn't support this particular resolution. Would any of the following do?
CODE
$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 1280 x 1280
VGA connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right) 315mm x 236mm
1024x768 85.0*+ 84.9 75.1 70.1 60.0 43.5
1280x1024 59.9
1280x960 59.9
1152x864 74.8
832x624 74.6
800x600 84.9 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2
640x480 84.6 75.0 72.8 66.7 60.0
720x400 87.8 70.1

Edit: Whoops, double-post.


720x400 is the closes approximation, is lower resolution, and has a widescreen aspect ratio, so I'd suggest you try that.

My own monitor doesn't do the Pandora's native resolution either.

 

[Svartalf]

720x400 is the closes approximation, is lower resolution, and has a widescreen aspect ratio, so I'd suggest you try that.

My own monitor doesn't do the Pandora's native resolution either.

Heh... Give me a bit and we may have a slightly more usable answer. Since I got sidetracked with a bit of personal business tonight, I reconfigured my OE build environment to quickly crank out an x86 image set for running within a virtual machine on x86 systems. This way people can start getting a bit of a feel for what we're talking about, even on a Windows or x86 Mac system.

 

[Coder_TimT]

Just thought I'd point out real quick matchbox already can already...

Toggle window decoration on or off while application is running via hotkey.

One of the special "actions" that can be specified in ~/.matchbox/kdbconfig is to toggle fullscreen. So something like...

CODE

<Alt>n=next
<Alt>p=prev
<Alt>c=close
<Alt>d=desktop
f11=fullscreen



...will allow you cycle through your open apps, get to the desktop quickly and easily make an app fullscreen. Obviously those can be associated with whatever keys and I assume it will be fairly trivial to associate it to other hardware buttons on the Pandora also.

However, I don't currently see a way to actually bring up the task list with a keyboard shortcut, so that would need to be added. And I'm not seeing a way to launch an app fullscreen on a per application basis. It can be set where all apps launch fullscreen, but not per app. So that also would need to be added...

Also, I'm not sure if it was ever answered elsewhere in the thread, but yes you can have background images and yes you can have different icons per "folder". Quick example with icons that have no actual meaning....

 

[wesbrown18]

Just thought I'd point out real quick matchbox already can already...

Toggle window decoration on or off while application is running via hotkey.

One of the special "actions" that can be specified in ~/.matchbox/kdbconfig is to toggle fullscreen. So something like...

CODE

<Alt>n=next
<Alt>p=prev
<Alt>c=close
<Alt>d=desktop
f11=fullscreen



...will allow you cycle through your open apps, get to the desktop quickly and easily make an app fullscreen. Obviously those can be associated with whatever keys and I assume it will be fairly trivial to associate it to other hardware buttons on the Pandora also.


I'll be damned. That's a feature to cross off the list as 'done'. Though we will need to modify SDL to honor this, as SDL's fullscreen is rather 'hard'. I'm thinking about a 'soft' fullscreen.

But, yeah, that hotkey turns on and off the decorations.

BTW, your screenshot shows the panel off to the side. That'll happen with some themes that don't have a defined area to 'swallow' it and put it in the titlebar.

 

[Coder_TimT]

...

BTW, your screenshot shows the panel off to the side. That'll happen with some themes that don't have a defined area to 'swallow' it and put it in the titlebar.

You know I had completely missed that the panel was in the titlebar in your screenshots. I knew mine was to the left as a remnant of my old matchbox-session file from playing around with mb long ago.

I'm using your 'Pandora' theme though, is there anything special I need to do in order to make that work?

 

[wesbrown18]

...

BTW, your screenshot shows the panel off to the side. That'll happen with some themes that don't have a defined area to 'swallow' it and put it in the titlebar.

You know I had completely missed that the panel was in the titlebar in your screenshots. I knew mine was to the left as a remnant of my old matchbox-session file from playing around with mb long ago.

I'm using your 'Pandora' theme though, is there anything special I need to do in order to make that work?


Invoke matchbox panel with:

CODE

matchbox-panel --titlebar -c \#B8C8C4 &




I'm sure there's a way to do it with X resource files, etc, etc, but this was a quick prototype to get a feel for things and evaluate Matchbox.

 

[DaveC]

Will it be possible to disable multitasking in some kind of option?

I ask this because if I am running emulators and I exit and load another, then another, pretty soon I will be getting 1 FPS in a ColecoVision emu with all of the others sucking up memory and CPU.

It would be a pain in the ass to have to constantly pull up a task list, close the app, then load another app, close on and on. Or will each app just have an "exit" function? I ask as many PDA apps on other platforms have no close option, it just keeps everything stacked in memory. Hopefully this won't be like that.

 

[Chip]

I ask as many PDA apps on other platforms have no close option, it just keeps everything stacked in memory. Hopefully this won't be like that.

If a dev decides not to put a "Quit" button in his app, then he's doing something wrong. No matter, because I'm sure we'll have a way to kill processes. I agree that the inability to easily close a program is the biggest failing of Android, WiMo, and Palm.

 

[wesbrown18]

Will it be possible to disable multitasking in some kind of option?

I ask this because if I am running emulators and I exit and load another, then another, pretty soon I will be getting 1 FPS in a ColecoVision emu with all of the others sucking up memory and CPU.

It would be a pain in the ass to have to constantly pull up a task list, close the app, then load another app, close on and on. Or will each app just have an "exit" function? I ask as many PDA apps on other platforms have no close option, it just keeps everything stacked in memory. Hopefully this won't be like that.

There's the window manager 'x' in the upper left corner. It kills processes pretty dead. Will that do for a 'quit' button?

[Edit: Further Clarification]

The 'x' button is basically a window manager command. It tells the window manager to destroy the window. When the application no longer has a window, it usually exits or crashes out.

 

[PandoraSuechtig]

I agree that the inability to easily close a program is the biggest failing of Android, WiMo, and Palm.

Whoops! One reason more why i'm happy they chose an open ARM Linux Distribution instead of Android...

 

[javaJake]

I agree that the inability to easily close a program is the biggest failing of Android, WiMo, and Palm.
Actually, this is incorrect. Palm has a handy Home "silkscreen" button you can tap that will instantly pop you out of the application. If the application locked up (which doesn't happen often, folks), a simple reset suffices. If the handheld locked up altogether, Palms with OS v5 detect that automatically and reboot on their own!

So, regardless of the state of the application, you can always get out.

 

[Tor]

Yeah, it's definitely wrong as far as Palm is concerned.. there's only a single program running at any time (with the exception of special-case music player applications). When you switch from one program to another the first one gets a signal that tells it to save all its data and get out of there, then the second app starts up.

There's a feature that should be implemented in the Pandora window management and application framework though: When a visual-output program is invisible (because there's another application running in full-screen mode), or iconized, it should receive a signal (or dbus message or wm hint, whatever), and have code in place to stop doing anything as long as it's invisible (with exceptions, which you will understand and I won't describe). That will make the application a good citizen as far as the battery is concerned.

 

[Chip]

I agree that the inability to easily close a program is the biggest failing of Android, WiMo, and Palm.
Actually, this is incorrect. Palm has a handy Home "silkscreen" button you can tap that will instantly pop you out of the application.Yeah, it pops you back to the home screen, but it doesn't close the application. If you're typing up a note in notepad, then go back to the home screen and do something else for a while, then go back to notepad, your half-written note is still there. At least this is how things worked on my Treo 600 a few years ago. This is helpful for some things, but sometimes you want to just shut a program down, not just stick it in the background, so it's not taking up memory.