[OLPC-devel] Re: UI base?

[Ronald G Minnich]

Jordan Crouse wrote:
> On 11/07/06 08:55 -0500, Richard Smith wrote:
> 
>>I would have like to have made the conference call today but it looks
>>like the day job is going to get in the way.
>>
>>What about using this as a base for the UI.  Its small and we already
>>have a fb avaliable.
>>
>>http://home.comcast.net/~fbui/
> 
> 
> Hmm - nice thought.  I had been thinking only about character based 
> apps.  I guess we can give it a shot - our GUI design experts could help.  One
> problem - I wonder about internationalization?  Will it be able to handle
> truetype fonts?
> 
> If we need something a bit more featured, I am mandated by law to mention 
> a blast from one of my past lives:
> 
> http://www.microwindows.org/
> 
> Jordan
> 

We did microwindows in FLASH 6 years ago, to test. Yes, it's fun. But it 
was an 8MB flash ...

I guess if you folks want a UI in flash, then give it a shot, but I 
really don't recommend it. Again, you only have 900K or so, and I think 
we should opt to use that space for capability, not eye candy. Things 
are going to go wrong, and at minimum, since you don't have serial 
console, you are going to want stuff like dmesg, and you're going to 
want to page it somehow, since you don't have serial console and it's 
more than one screen ... it is REALLY painful to have a situation in 
which things are not quite working correctly, and you need one missing 
command to fix things up.

I think we should work out a basis set of commands you MUST have, and 
then see how to fit them in. Simple example: you can build mv from rm 
and cp; you can not build cp from move, and building rm from mv is 
painful. So put in rm and cp, leave out mv to save space. And so on.

thanks

ron