Pandora's User Interface

[peca]

but rox is ugly ^^

I can't agree. ROX looks good.

 

[cb88]

if you kill the rox panel and start gnome panel you kinda have a lightweight version of gnome anyway.... i would rather have that than full gnome and the fuctionality should be equivalent

nautilus would be overkill on a handheld

 

[klikklak]

Uh oh, half voted for custom interface. I don't think this is an good idea. two words : development community. Seriously, do you people want an setup that is improved upon maybe once a year or something like ubuntu mobile that'd get constant improvement from a big community. Reinventing the wheel might have been fashionable in the days of dos and amiga, but with the net and foss it's starting to suck ass real bad. Remember we emulate these systems, but we don't have to imitate them.

 

[CyruzDraxs]

Uh oh, half voted for custom interface. I don't think this is an good idea. two words : development community. Seriously, do you people want an setup that is improved upon maybe once a year or something like ubuntu mobile that'd get constant improvement from a big community. Reinventing the wheel might have been fashionable in the days of dos and amiga, but with the net and foss it's starting to suck ass real bad. Remember we emulate these systems, but we don't have to imitate them.

It's just an X interface--it's not like it'd be an entire new distro or anything. That having been said; it might be easier to just use a heavily modified Qtopia or Matchbox. As I said before; the ability to have advanced skinning like XBMC would be really great and, since XBMC and Qtopia/Matchbox are both open source, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to port the skinning engine.

 

[ant]

i don't care as long as it will be fully (and easily) skinnable.

i like making things look the way i want them too

 

[Pleng]

Gimme Workbench style full screen apps with a switcher any day.

Nail. Head. Hit.

Thats the best plan I've seen so far!

But... can we have draggable screens too, please <_<

 

[azmodean]

For when I'm running games and such, I'd prefer a streamlined menu system for just picking my game, possibly getting other apps out of memory so the game can monopolize the hardware.

If I end up doing any more general-purpose UMPC stuff, I'd like ion3, which is what I use for my desktop already. On the pandora it would probably just end up being a desktop switcher since I can't really see running many windows at once on a single screen on a 4.3" screen.

on a side note for any virtual desktop system, you HAVE to be able to map the shoulder buttons to switching desktops, that would be so sweet.

file manager? what? go ahead and use that newfangled stuff if you want, I'll keep using find | xargs mv

EDIT: oh, and ideally there would be a streamlined system for switching between window managers, so you can go from "UMPC mode" to "gaming mode" rapidly, possibly with multiple profiles in case there are specific setups you want for individual apps or use cases. Might look into it myself if no one else does, don't hold your breath though.

 

[klikklak]

In the minimum the setup would be x window manager and some kind of launcher. Both are projects already in development and neither is easy enough to do well with the limited resources available to p&|a people. Saying homebrew will solve it, well, that might happen, but it would result to no baseline solution known by all. On the other hand, what do I know? The binaries would run even if they only shipped with bash. I just think deviating from larger projects is suicidal, even in highly successful solutions like xandros for eee (which hasn't got any updates for a long time and still suffers from a lot of bugs). I still sort of dislike using ubuntu (used debian for nearly 8 years), but I think their projects would provide the best platform for the homebrew to grow on top of.

EDIT: I'm actually not familiar with matchbox (or XBMC, xbox media center?), I have the impression that it runs a custom x server in addition to window management?

 

[cb88]

personally i think matchbox is terrible.... you might even say spartan from what i have seen and i don't see how you could multitask with it.... but then again i have only ran it in xnest...


my vote is still for rox desktop and a set of window manager themes with big buttons

oh and rox filer is in debian armel so at the very least we should be able to get it that way then just stick rox -S in the ./.xinitrc i think that would work anyway

 

[FRZ]

I think XFCE is nice but, I would rather a custom Pandora interface. The issue with most of the desktop UIs is that they are made for so many different platforms that they usually come bloated with apps that I don't need for my specific hardware.

 

[efegea]

personally i think matchbox is terrible.... you might even say spartan from what i have seen and i don't see how you could multitask with it.... but then again i have only ran it in xnest...

my vote is still for rox desktop and a set of window manager themes with big buttons

oh and rox filer is in debian armel so at the very least we should be able to get it that way then just stick rox -S in the ./.xinitrc i think that would work anyway



Matchbox is a window manager designed for embedded devices, how can it be terrible? is a window manager, like any other wm, but it shows the windows on fullscreen instead of windowed. You can switch windows using alt+tab like any other wm..

 

[cb88]

so basically you are saying that it limits more than it improves.... how is that helpful wouldn't a better idea be to default to maximized and allow to be resized?

 

[efegea]

Why would you want to resize a window on such a little screen? I think it's better to have them maximized using all the screen area.

 

[icurafu]

Yes, best to just use L and R triggers to flip between apps on the UMPC UI.

 

[Karel Jansens]

Why would you want to resize a window on such a little screen? I think it's better to have them maximized using all the screen area.

That is really a very stupid design decision, and has been proven so on the Nokia Itablets.

What if you want a popup calculator?
Or a character picker?
What if popup panels are in your way? (they can't be moved on the Nokias)
What if you want to have Abiword and Gnumeric side by side?

 

[emil10001]

For me, I find full desktop environments really infuriating on handhelds with 4~5" screens, or 7" (EEE PC). The reason is because it gets really difficult to navigate, and you feel really boxed in (no pun intended), especially when you're used to a full-sized screen for most normal daily use. Not to mention all of the windows that get cut-off because they are designed for a minimum height of 600 pixels instead of 480. I have had a much nicer experience on the 770/n800 than i ever did on my OQO 02 for this reason. Plus the stuff designed to run on an embedded platform was much faster than the full hardware with the full desktop environment.

Not to mention that when you get down to something as small a 4~5" screen, why would you need multiple windows open? Perhaps the better answer to that are widgets, perhaps multiple widget screens.

As has been mentioned before, I'd like to see a simple launcher that can launch a wm if the user wants that. This way, we have a standard base platform that everybody has by default, and then if the user wants to have Rox, or KDE4, or whatever, then they can have that as well. But, I don't want to be stuck with a window manager, like Rox or KDE4 for the main environment.

To sum it up, I do want the option to run a window manager, but I don't want it as the default.

 

[efegea]

Why would you want to resize a window on such a little screen? I think it's better to have them maximized using all the screen area.

That is really a very stupid design decision, and has been proven so on the Nokia Itablets.

What if you want a popup calculator?
Or a character picker?
What if popup panels are in your way? (they can't be moved on the Nokias)
What if you want to have Abiword and Gnumeric side by side?


On Matchbox you can have popups windows like on any other wm, only the application windows are maximized

 

[cb88]

sigh.... i said windows should be maximised by default but you shouldn't "box me into" not resizing the window IF I WANT TO

sheesh... all i want is a silly resize button all matchbox gives me is a HUGE (wastefull of screen space IMO) exit buttion

 

[Karel Jansens]

Why would you want to resize a window on such a little screen? I think it's better to have them maximized using all the screen area.

That is really a very stupid design decision, and has been proven so on the Nokia Itablets.

What if you want a popup calculator?
Or a character picker?
What if popup panels are in your way? (they can't be moved on the Nokias)
What if you want to have Abiword and Gnumeric side by side?


On Matchbox you can have popups windows like on any other wm, only the application windows are maximized

That still leaves the unmoveable popup menu panels (Maemo is chock full of those pesky buggers) and the impossibility of having two applications side by side. I really hate it when someone else decides what is supposed to be best for me.

 

[efegea]

That still leaves the unmoveable popup menu panels (Maemo is chock full of those pesky buggers) and the impossibility of having two applications side by side. I really hate it when someone else decides what is supposed to be best for me.

Well, the Pandora is not a custom device made only for you, so someone must decide what's the best, not for you but for all the people that will buy the device. If you want another wm, you just can replace it.

That said, we don't know what the Pandora will have as window manager, so this discussion is useless