Wish List
From Openmoko
This article is a place to collect various thoughts about the future of the OpenMoko software platform.
Contents |
Development Related
Painless SDK installation & Setup
Our goal should be a completely painless setup for somebody wanted to develop using OpenMoko
- one command for installation (apt-get install openmoko)
- one command to start Xnest (openmoko-xephyr?)
- one command to start an i386 shell (openmoko-386-shell)
- one command to start an armel shell (openmoko-armel-shell)
No extra configuration required (allowed ;)
IDE Plugins
People like to see plugins for
- Anjuta
- Eclipse
- Kdevelop
- XCode
UI Designer
Glade code generation is deprectated, so we don't want to use it. The Gtk+ powers told me that the plan is to have gtk 2.12 (out early 2007) with support for GtkBuilder, a libglade derivative which breaks a bit the XML definition in order to support all the new widgets and properties; as soon as it's in the other ui builders will add support for this format. See also the relevant bug entry
Community Support Related
projects.openmoko.org
Infrastructure for developers w/
- one bugzilla for all projects (makes moving bugs forth and backwards between projects _very_ easy)
- one mailinglist for project
Platform Related
Community Images
In the future there could be complete, unofficial "product images" that are created by the community, for example maybe one that incorporates only free software (in the GNU or OSI sense). Or images build with a particular niche market in mind -- a student for example.
Software Related: Additional Features
Multiboot Support
I'd like to see U-Boot being enhanced to support a boot menu that allows to boot a complete image from the MMC. This way we have a simple way for part-time developers (aka people actually _using_ their phone or people not having a seperate phone for development) to experiment with new OpenMoko releases or custom images.
Printing Support
It would be really neat to be able to print over either bluetooth or USB. I could imagine wanted to print:
- Notes
- Maps
- Calendars
- ...
Cups contains a bluetooth printing backend, so (in theory) once you have your data in postscript format, you could hand it to cups and it'll do the rest. In practice, it depends on
- GTK+'s printing support
- Making cups run on a really small system
NOTE: GTK+'s printing support seems to be very immature in 2.6 (which we need to use for some time). Gtk+ 2.10 contains much better printing support -- once we can use this, it should be more easy. |
There's always the possibility to render postscript ourselves, but this is not a piece of cake -- in general, printing is much harder than one would imagine.
Further details:
- http://groups.osdl.org/apps/group_public/download.php/2205/print-summit-gtk.pdf#search=%22gtk%2B%20printing%20API%22
- http://www.gnome.org/~alexl/presentations/guadec2006-printing.pdf#search=%22gtk%2B%20printing%20API%22
- http://www.j5live.com/?p=204
PalmOS Emulator
The Access group is probably coming out with their Linux platform any time soon. One of the components is a PalmOS emulator which I'd like to see working on OpenMoko as well. There are literally millions of PalmOS apps.
Special Profiles
After reading something about too much features in mobile phones I thought about the following. It would be nice to have the possibility to choose from several profiles when starting the phone the first time. Every user profile is defined for special kinds of user behaviour. Let me define some example profiles:
- Beginner: Only basic functionality like, telephone and sms
- Advanced: included "Beginner" profile and let me say e-mail, pim functions
- Geek: every functionality you can get
- Granny: a minimum of functionality
etc. In addition the user should be able to create his own profiles. The advantage is that the user gets not frustrated by thousands of menus. What do you think about such a feature?
GPS Assisted Bluetooth Management
Allow Bluetooth to automatically turn off after loosing connectivity and to automatically turn back on based upon GPS location.
A Bluetooth device is configured for automatic reacquisition based on the following profiles:
- Manual - only when Bluetooth is on
- Non-mobile - the target device is not mobile, periodically attempt reacquisition when in the general area of the device.
- Mobile - the target device is mobile, periodically attempt reacquisition when in the general area of the device.
Each target device is configured as follows:
- Automatic acquisition at last known location: enable/disable
- Automatic acquisition at these locations: list of nickname + coordinates + range
Non-mobile devices
Examples devices include: computers
The location and range of the target device is determined via training. Periodically, the current GPS coordinates and Bluetooth signal strength are logged. Additionally, connectivity loss events are logged. An algorithm uses these logs to determine the device location and range.
Connection attempts are made when in a configurable proximity to the device. The first attempt when entering the proximity and further attempts at a configurable interval.
Mobile devices
Example devices include: automobiles
Mobile devices are configured to have two types of locations:
- Last known location
- Non-mobile locations (homes)
Last known location
A car is mobile, ideally, when you leave your car, the phone should note the car's location when connectivity is lost and then attempt to reacquire the car when you return to the location of the car.
Non-mobile locations (homes)
As mobile devices may have multiple users, it is not sufficient to always use the last known location. In this case, the device may additionally have multiple homes. For example, a car might have as its homes: home garage and work parking lot.
Running multiple application
It would be a big step to have the ability to run multiple programs like downloading emails and browsing the net or using a calculator and writing a text message and being able to swap between them quickly and formlessly.
Software Related: Language Bindings
Python Bindings
Python bindings seem to be a commonly requested feature.
User:Mickey says, "They are kind of usable on the Nokia 770, but it's at the lower end of being bearable. We should keep this in mind -- Gtk+ already comes with Python Bindings, so we "just" would need to wrap libmoko*. I would prefer to leave this to the community do though, since it doesn't make sense to start wrapping the API until we have a stable API -- and I can imagine it will take us a couple of months after going open until we can start with stabilizing the libmoko API."
C++ Bindings
There is a whole skilled C++ community coming from the Qtopia and Opie projects. If we would consider basing OpenMoko C++ Bindings on Gtkmm, then we could drag these guys in.
Perl Bindings
Another popular language
Software Related: Foreign Widget Set Bindings
Qt Integration
The Trolltech folks have a great widget library. I'd like to interface OpenMoko with Qt4, so that we can write Qt4 applications for the phone which don't look alienated.
Maemo Integration
The Maemo folks have created a successful standard for Webpad applications. I'd like to have a set of MaemoMoko and MokoMaemo wrapper classes that allow me add support for running OpenMoko applications on Maemo and vice versa. Perhaps we can get help from the Nokia OSS folks for that.
wxWidgets Integration
wxWidgets is a cross-platform application framework that's very popular (I'd say, #3 after Qt and Gtk+). On Linux, wxWidgets uses Gtk+ to implement the widgets. It shouldn't be hard to add support for the additional OpenMoko classes to wxWidgets hence supporting the native OpenMoko look and feel for wxWidgets applications.
SDL Integration
SDL is _the_ game developer library. There are tons of SDL games out there. We should add OpenMoko support into SDL.