Improving user experience

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Like Wolfgang said in http://n2.nabble.com/Weekly-Engineering-News-41-2008-td1336450.html , Openmoko assembled a team to focus on improving the user experience. Here is our todo list at the moment:

  • Reduce boot time.
  • Optimize the touch screen driver on freerunner for finger usage.
  • A generic python loader to enhance the start up time of python scripts.
  • Work with system team to improve suspend/resume user experience.
  • We improve the current stack, not creating new features.
  • Prefer stuffs which could be brought over to gta03 instead of gta02/om2008 specific.
  • won't work on om2007 stack.
  • working on improving the Xglamo
  • afair 3d and video (ie playing videos) still need work.
  • Program response should be lots better. Startup time reducing for apps would be great.
  • Suspend is quite good at the moment, but when the display is 'blanked' and the system is not in suspend, maybe pressing the 'power' button could wake up the screen instead. Now it wakes up and immediately suspends.
  • my suspend / resum still kills my sound.
  • The "suspend on power button" is completely useless for me.

- Emacs phone services on top of dbus - touch and accellerometer based gui for nearly blind people - funky gui that changes every week for teenagers(Ok, I dont really want to develop this but i'd like to have it)

Here are some ideas of mine: - get emacs23 working, so one can use the dbus support of emacs 23. - make a dialer compatible with bbdb, and later addressbook.el - make a gnus backend for sms - a symbol chooser keyboard, much like you hinted at below. Heres my take on the idea: - start the "keyboard"(an emacs app) in a particular context(lets say m-x now, but its the same for adresses or whatever) - (1) show all unique prefixes in this context - (2) choose a prefix - (3) repeat from (1) with the chosen prefix, exit on a terminal symbol

  • Stability
  • Stability should be the top priority. Getting suspend/resume, GSM issues and fixing CPU hogging processes fixed, would be a great help in allowing me (and I am sure many other people) to focus limited amounts of free time to actually developing software and customizing the distribution, instead of trying to chase bugs and scouring for tweaks/fixes, just to get the basic features working.
  • phone/sms functinality should fixed and maybe enhanced and afterwards the PC functions could be performed
  • Calendar/Alarm service very important. Currently accessing the clock and accessing the alarm is difficult, not to mention there is only one alarm time slot per day.
  • Some fixes for Qtopia (for people who needs working phone), instead of working on ASU.
  • to use the Qtopia sqlite3 database for the PIM (it may be a recommendation of the community) and develop one (or many) python stack outside of the "low-level" stack ( suspend/resume, GSM, GPRS, SMS, GPS, sounds, screen, accelerometers)
  • And here are the bugs that should be solved (My opinion):

LANSCAPE http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1244: Landscape mode must work good, also for glamo http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1961: Going into landscape mode must be smooth http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1336: Landscape mode shouldn't shift the screen by 160px http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1381: Let libsdl spit out the correct mouse coordinations

WIFI http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1860: Give the wifi driver more love http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1902: Make the wifi work with one-character long ESSID http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/2030: Let the wifi also connect with WEP networks

VARIA http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1158: Charger shouldn't stop charging when it's still connected http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1024: Fix the gsm reregistering issue. (Only if it's not qtopia related) http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1718: Finally fix the python-pygtk program http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1267: Fix the echo problem http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1802: Don't let the partition table of the sd card be corrupted http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1597: Don't let cpu do nothing and still eating 30% http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1315: Keep xglamo at the same performance http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1841: Solve the WSOD, so openmoko isn't the next windows

  • wifi , speed, gps, accelerometer, booting time when the phone itself doesn't work.
  • Solve the call quality problems (echo, buzzing, volume) for 99% of

the users. 2 - Solve the illume resume problems. They have been talked about over and over, but unfortunately the information is scattered and imprecise. the tickets themselves have misleading info (I should know, I helped confuse you...), so maybe this deserves a new single ticket, where everyone contributes with more exact information; 3 - Get the wifi driver corrected, so that it does not create link association and stability and problems; 4 - Finish/validate implementation of the networking stack (all the way up to resolv.conf and friends); 5 - Merge the GPRS muxer into the stable distro, so that it works out of the box; 6 - Integrate the main applications with the power management: if QPE wants to index the whole friggin' filesystem right after boot, then give it time to do so before going into suspend; if you don't, it just bogs down the CPU for many suspend/resume cycles, creating all sorts of problems, and we don't know what is going on... 7 - Accelerate Qt applications - they respond so slowly that a normal user will shoot itself in the foot everyday (i.e. pushing the "Answer" button twice because it didn't appear to respond, effectively killing the call; or taking the phone to the ear after pushing "Answer" and having it rind loudly one last time in the ear); 8 - Work with the people of FDOM to integrate the best workarounds and hacks - they did the work already, just use it. 9 - Get all the bluetooth support organized out-of-the-box. I haven't played with it in a long time, but it looked like black voodoo to get a simple pairing and OBEX exchange going... forget about PAN!... 10 - Put a "speaker" button on the dialer app. This is my only GUI desire for now...

Vasco.

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Like Wolfgang said in http://n2.nabble.com/Weekly-Engineering-News-41-2008-td1336450.html , Openmoko assembled a team to focus on improving the user experience. Here is our todo list at the moment:

  • Reduce boot time.
  • Optimize the touch screen driver on freerunner for finger usage.
  • A generic python loader to enhance the start up time of python scripts.
  • Work with system team to improve suspend/resume user experience.
  • We improve the current stack, not creating new features.
  • Prefer stuffs which could be brought over to gta03 instead of gta02/om2008 specific.
  • won't work on om2007 stack.
  • working on improving the Xglamo
  • afair 3d and video (ie playing videos) still need work.
  • Program response should be lots better. Startup time reducing for apps would be great.
  • Suspend is quite good at the moment, but when the display is 'blanked' and the system is not in suspend, maybe pressing the 'power' button could wake up the screen instead. Now it wakes up and immediately suspends.
  • my suspend / resum still kills my sound.
  • The "suspend on power button" is completely useless for me.

- Emacs phone services on top of dbus - touch and accellerometer based gui for nearly blind people - funky gui that changes every week for teenagers(Ok, I dont really want to develop this but i'd like to have it)

Here are some ideas of mine: - get emacs23 working, so one can use the dbus support of emacs 23. - make a dialer compatible with bbdb, and later addressbook.el - make a gnus backend for sms - a symbol chooser keyboard, much like you hinted at below. Heres my take on the idea: - start the "keyboard"(an emacs app) in a particular context(lets say m-x now, but its the same for adresses or whatever) - (1) show all unique prefixes in this context - (2) choose a prefix - (3) repeat from (1) with the chosen prefix, exit on a terminal symbol

  • Stability
  • Stability should be the top priority. Getting suspend/resume, GSM issues and fixing CPU hogging processes fixed, would be a great help in allowing me (and I am sure many other people) to focus limited amounts of free time to actually developing software and customizing the distribution, instead of trying to chase bugs and scouring for tweaks/fixes, just to get the basic features working.
  • phone/sms functinality should fixed and maybe enhanced and afterwards the PC functions could be performed
  • Calendar/Alarm service very important. Currently accessing the clock and accessing the alarm is difficult, not to mention there is only one alarm time slot per day.
  • Some fixes for Qtopia (for people who needs working phone), instead of working on ASU.
  • to use the Qtopia sqlite3 database for the PIM (it may be a recommendation of the community) and develop one (or many) python stack outside of the "low-level" stack ( suspend/resume, GSM, GPRS, SMS, GPS, sounds, screen, accelerometers)
  • And here are the bugs that should be solved (My opinion):

LANSCAPE http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1244: Landscape mode must work good, also for glamo http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1961: Going into landscape mode must be smooth http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1336: Landscape mode shouldn't shift the screen by 160px http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1381: Let libsdl spit out the correct mouse coordinations

WIFI http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1860: Give the wifi driver more love http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1902: Make the wifi work with one-character long ESSID http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/2030: Let the wifi also connect with WEP networks

VARIA http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1158: Charger shouldn't stop charging when it's still connected http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1024: Fix the gsm reregistering issue. (Only if it's not qtopia related) http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1718: Finally fix the python-pygtk program http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1267: Fix the echo problem http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1802: Don't let the partition table of the sd card be corrupted http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1597: Don't let cpu do nothing and still eating 30% http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1315: Keep xglamo at the same performance http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1841: Solve the WSOD, so openmoko isn't the next windows

  • wifi , speed, gps, accelerometer, booting time when the phone itself doesn't work.
  • Solve the call quality problems (echo, buzzing, volume) for 99% of

the users. 2 - Solve the illume resume problems. They have been talked about over and over, but unfortunately the information is scattered and imprecise. the tickets themselves have misleading info (I should know, I helped confuse you...), so maybe this deserves a new single ticket, where everyone contributes with more exact information; 3 - Get the wifi driver corrected, so that it does not create link association and stability and problems; 4 - Finish/validate implementation of the networking stack (all the way up to resolv.conf and friends); 5 - Merge the GPRS muxer into the stable distro, so that it works out of the box; 6 - Integrate the main applications with the power management: if QPE wants to index the whole friggin' filesystem right after boot, then give it time to do so before going into suspend; if you don't, it just bogs down the CPU for many suspend/resume cycles, creating all sorts of problems, and we don't know what is going on... 7 - Accelerate Qt applications - they respond so slowly that a normal user will shoot itself in the foot everyday (i.e. pushing the "Answer" button twice because it didn't appear to respond, effectively killing the call; or taking the phone to the ear after pushing "Answer" and having it rind loudly one last time in the ear); 8 - Work with the people of FDOM to integrate the best workarounds and hacks - they did the work already, just use it. 9 - Get all the bluetooth support organized out-of-the-box. I haven't played with it in a long time, but it looked like black voodoo to get a simple pairing and OBEX exchange going... forget about PAN!... 10 - Put a "speaker" button on the dialer app. This is my only GUI desire for now...

Vasco.