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This article is a place to collect various thoughts about the future of the OpenMoko software platform.
Our goal should be a completely painless setup for somebody wanting to develop using OpenMoko
No extra configuration required (allowed ;)
People like to see plugins for
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
Infrastructure for developers w/
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.
There are many useful options that now can be used to full capacity:
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.
It would be really neat to be able to print over either bluetooth or USB. I can imagine wanting to print:
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
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:
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.
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:
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?
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:
Each target device is configured as follows:
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.
Example devices include: automobiles
Mobile devices are configured to have two types of locations:
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.
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.
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.
Using the microphone to detect ambient noise the ringtone volume could be adjusted automatically.
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."
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.
Another popular language
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.
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 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.
wxWidgets team wants OpenMoko classes too and we (wxWidgets) plan to include this project as one of our ideas for GSoC 2007
SDL is _the_ game developer library. There are tons of SDL games out there. We should add OpenMoko support into SDL.