Microsoft breaking new ground

I don't know if this is real, but it's supposed to be about a leaked Microsoft document on the spiced up UI in Windows Mobile 7, to be released in 2009. Revolutionary? Groundbreaking? Yes, for Microsoft maybe, which means there's not one single new idea in there. But it's about time the Windows Mobile UI started looking at least a bit as if it was actually designed for mobile devices, and not just a scaled down version of the desktop system.

More E

I continued my investigations into EFL, by browsing through some EWL documentation. EWL is a UI toolkit, built on top of the lower level parts of EFL. It's not exactly innovative (yay for innovation and marketing buzzwords). The API looks pretty much like a clone of GTK. I'm not complaining about that, GTK is a pretty nice toolkit to work with, but it's the kind of stuff that felt exciting 10 years ago. This is the most conservative part I've had a look at so far, in the EFL.

RasterMoko

It was recently announced that Rasterman is the new graphics architect on the OpenMoko project. People who have been around for a few years remember him as the guy behind the Enlightenment window manager, which was animated and glitzy already back in the days when fvwm was the standard window manager in Red Hat Linux. I had no idea that he had an interest in embedded systems, but it seems the EFL is aimed at embedded systems as much as the desktop. I decided to take a closer look.

There's a very nice introduction document, which explains what's so cool about EFL. I recognize the concepts that are touted as "unique" and "revolutionary" in EFL from TAT Cascades and Kastor, but the author of the document doesn't seem to be very interested in non-free software. All in all this stuff is really exciting, and I hope that I'll keep up my enthusiasm long enough to actually try out some stuff on the GP2x, because I'm a bit worried about performance. I got suspicious when I read that coordinates in edje are floating point values, and grepping the source code for "float" and "double" yielded quite a few hits. I'm guessing that the designers considered precision to be more important than frame rate, but I think that's a mistake if your target is embedded devices. However, I haven't run any benchmarks yet, so I shouldn't say too much.

Androidology

Now I've spent a few hours digging into the Android developer site. While I have some concerns, Artem makes a very good point: this is a platform that developers want to develop for. There's a public SDK a good 6 months or so before the first actual device will be released.

Sure, people seem to want to write code for Windows Mobile as well, but Steve Ballmer is like the only person in the whole world who would consider Windows Mobile a success. Symbian has 70% of the worldwide smartphone market, and that's starting to translate into a serious share of the mobile phone market as a whole. The most recent figures I saw are that 7% of the mobile phones being sold at the moment are running Symbian OS. Where does that leave Windows Mobile? 0.4% or so. About the same as Apple, that have been in this business for a couple of months now. Way to go, mr. Ballmer!

Speaking of the iPhone, there's a device that people want to write code for, and soon there will even be a public SDK. Of course, we don't know much about what sort of openness they'll provide yet. Sure, you might have the SDK, but there's no guarantee that you won't have to shell out a few thousand currency units to get you app signed, so that it can actually be installed.

There are some concerns about the Java emphasis of the Android platform. The problem I see with this is that there's no way to do a five minute port of your existing app if it's written in C. About performance, I don't think there's a reason to worry. You can write kick-ass games that run on VM:s, as long as they're done right. This was proved a long time ago with mophun, and when actual Android devices are on the market, most phones are going to have 3d hardware. For DSP stuff, there might be a problem, but it's not like there's a lot of DSP related apps around for the open platforms we have right now...

Android

The Android SDK is available for download. And in a dramatic break with tradition, you don't have to sign up to download the SDK. Just download it. Wow. This doesn't feel like the mobile phone business.

The insecure S60 firmware updater

It's nice to see that someone with an interest in practical security issues is doing stuff with Symbian platform security. Nokia's firmware update program for S60 handsets lets you install modified ROM images on (at least) some handsets. It seems the weakest link in this security system is very, very weak. Of course, hacking doesn't get really interesting until you can hack other people's devices, but there's a quite obvious attack vector here: what if you could get users to download your modified ROM images, instead of Nokia's? I'm no security expert, but thinking about this gives me a few ideas, that I might try out. I think Nokia should be happy that their devices aren't as popular with hackers as eg. the iPhone.

Insanely huge

Being from Sweden, I found the fact that a British smartphone site uses the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet's site as a test site because it's "insanely huge", quite comical. Sure. Too bad the contents of the paper are even worse than their web design.