Go Yahoo go

I read a blog post about the new Yahoo Go mobile thingy, and decided to try it out. It's another one of those widget frameworks that everyone's so into these days, written in Java to cut development costs and increase user dissatisfaction. I was quite impressed by the performance, though. Sure, there's no reaction for the first half second after you press a button, but then the boring animation is actually quite smooth.

There's not much content there, and the app itself is quite unpolished (I didn't expect it to greet me with Italian as the default language), but it's one of those "betas", as popuplarized by Google. The user experience is quite reasonable, once you get past the rough edges. It's just slow, not insanely slow, and it didn't crash once in the five minutes I spent with it.

I guess we'll know in a couple of years what happened with all these competing widget platforms. I think Yahoo might have to convince some mobile manufacturers to include their platform in their phones to really get into the game, but they probably have already.

And while Yahoo are busy with Java and widgets, I keep working on stuff that responds so quickly to your input that you don't feel like your phone is your arch enemy...

10 years

Linux Weekly News turns ten this year. I started using Linux about that time, so I've been with them from the start. One of the news pieces from 1998 was that the latest version of the Linux kernel would require 8MB of RAM to run. At that time my newly bought PC had 32MB. My current phone has 64MB. That PC had a 200MHz CPU. My phone runs at 369MHz now. A very rough estimate would be that the weight of my phone is 2% of that computer, and about 0.1% of the volume. We live in a scifi dream.

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.