Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

In defence of Fremantle, I have to say I wasn't pressing the mouse very trusting, and in a device the behaviour is better than seen in the video.
As Stskeeps says, it's running in Mer, so the new Hildon widgets can be tested with an device.
Also, other Fremantle widgets can be seen in this screenshots: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yerga/s...7612365187767/
or here (are the same): http://share.ovi.com/channel/yerga.Hildonwidgets
Though, they are from the first alpha (without theming), and they could have changed in the updates.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

me neither, extremely frustrating.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Oh... that. I didn't refer to the kinetic scrolling (couldn't care less). It was the overall clumsiness and looks of the thing.

And, again: The original point was answering the question if what we're seeing from the UI in this alpha is (close to) the final UI. My bet was "no", because the reason given for not offering Maemo5 to N8x0-owners was "the revamped UI relying on graphics acceleration" (see here). Now because we see nothing that relies on graphics acceleration so far (and Stskeeps tells us it runs fine under Mer), either they dropped the idea of a UI relying on graphics acceleration (which would be a good thing, as it would bring Maemo5 to my N800) or, more likely, we haven't seen the real thing yet.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

*Sigh* Now it's back to very slow for me, too, after working fluidly this afternoon. Didn't change anything, and haven't been taking any drugs. Very mysterious. At least now I know how it's *supposed* to work.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Let me just clarify what I meant - libhildonfm2 + libhildon from fremantle works fine, and i have seen no use (yet) of GL acceleration in these. There might also be a performance benefit of having PVR2D acceleration in Xorg with regards to kinetic scrolling etc.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Maemo_roadmap/Fremantle says it quite clearly what clutter is used for:

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Your AperTexSize has to be accurate though.

Did you restart X?

This works for me:

Now its smooth again :)

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Well, the new hildon-desktop we are seeing in the picture of the announcement is based in clutter and libmatchbox2 (what depends on clutter too).
So I imagine it's relying in graphics acceleration.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

And here the next SharePy version running in Fremantle.
It's running in plain gtk without hildon and looks fine anyway, except the images in the treeview are with 'bad' colours.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

As a comment aside, it's a bit weird that this thread hasn't been taken to the home. I wonder if Reggie & Roger are aware?

Engadget has picked the news: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/03/m...-fans-rejoice/

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

I like the look of the single column chooser, and would like to see something similar for a file manager (as long as there is a way of copying to other folders somehow). I find that each column in the current 2-column view on Maemo 4.1 a bit too narrow so that I cannot read an entire file or folder name.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Porting was pretty straightforward: I just recompiled the sources against the new libraries. ;)

The Alpha SDK have serious issues with graphics (as expected: it is still alpha). Depending on video card and settings, UI is either lagging or messing with colors and contents (or both). For example, menus are totally cluttered (! ;)) with ATI Radeon 9200 PRO. Fortunately, I had better luck with my good old laptop, which has Intel 855GME Extreme Graphics 2. It seems that without compositing window manager UI is not responsive enough, so all visual effects must be turned on in Ubuntu Intrepid. However, the UI was not a speed monster in my 1,2 GHz laptop either, so I really hope that OMAP3 has enough horse power to make it smooth... ;)

Nevertheless, it was really promising to see Mauku on Fremantle - altough in inverse colors. ;) (Toggling fullscreen on and off makes colors right, so there is a tiny moment to make a screen capture before the application updates its widgets again.)

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

yep, the ability to hide the dir list, along with horizontal scroll would have been nice.

gpe is close on maemo4, but it seems i must read up on programming for it to get that final distance covered...

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

I could upload Modest 2.1-2009.08 screenshots if some Nokian allow it (it's still to see if Modest should have done this release) .
It costs a couple of hours built it (delete the not released dependences, built wpeditor, built tinymail from the svn, etc.).

Just say, very finger friendly :)

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

I'd like to see that yerga :D

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

The purpose of the Fremantle Alpha SDK release is to provide the APIs for development, but the official applications are not intended to be out at this point (except some example apps, osso-xterm and the Application Manager).

Thanks for noticing the Modest source code was out. It was pulled by a dependency that needed to be satisfied by the current Modest source package. We have pulled it back, only because we are actually planning a nice release for Modest when the project is ready for it (with code repository out, good release notes, screenshots of the stable version and so on).

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

About the performance issues in the SDK related to the graphics acceleration, it would be good that those of you suffering/solving them would share your pain and glory at http://bugs.maemo.org so Soumya and the development platform team get more feedback for debugging, fixing and documenting. Thanks!

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Anyone saved the masses of us the hassle of installing the SDK by creating a virtual machine image to share?

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

That would be nice indeed ;)

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Fair enough.

I'll try not leak it, except if I receive a great quantity of money or 1000 karma points :P

It's going in the good way, but this is my personal and untransferable opinion.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

A screenshot of the new HildonAppMenu: http://maemo.org/api_refs/5.0/alpha/...onAppMenu.html

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

would the pvr/opengl/clutter stuff work in vmware?
I have had problems in the past with "normal" opengl within my older vmware box.


qgil, will make a proper bug report after tea.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

you can run clutter and opengl via software rendering in vmware. You just need a fast(ish) pc.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

i have reported the bug regarding very slow performance on my scratchbox

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4180

what is the expected framerate running this software?
does internal hardware testing have the same issues?

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

VirtualBox and VMWare have OpenGL hardware acceleration, but it requires special guest drivers and probably doesn't cover ES.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Osm2go also runs under Freemantle:
http://www.harbaum.org/osm2go-freemantle.png

There were several things missing. Goocanvas wasn't an issue and was quickly compiled and packaged for freemantle. But two of the old closed source packages are missing: gpsbt and tablet-browser-interface. Are there already documents explaining what do use as a replacement?

Also the new screen layout will require some changes in osm2go's ui. E.g. the toolbar spacing got bigger and the toolbar on the left can't hold all the icons anymore (that's why there's this "expander" on the bottom). Also most dialogs have to be adjusted to cope with the buttons being on the right side. That's in fact a design decision i don't fully understand. The idea may be that with the wide screen placing the buttons on the side leaves a more "square" area for the application to work with. By imho the problem is that those buttons eat up space horizontally (since their text labels are horizontal). This leaves a big unused area above such an button. The application cannot use this area and i am afraid we loose too much screen space by this new layout. I don't like it ...

For most dialogs this shouldn't be too much of a problem and makeing them look nice in the new layout is probably just a matter of some "#ifdef FREMANTLE" adjustments.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Just to explain what dialog button layout i am talking about:

This is osm2go running under diablo (this is in fact the version i compiled using the fremantle sdk which is running just fine under diablo!):

http://www.harbaum.org/dialog-diablo.png

And this is exactly the same binary running in the fremantle alpha sdk:

http://www.harbaum.org/dialog-freemantle.png

Another interesting difference is the fact that the dialog in the fremantle screenshot does not have a "cancel" button. How comes?

Also note that the window title under fremantle is just test and not "OSM2Go - test" as it would have been under diablo (the diablo screenshot shows a project named "schloss" while for the fremantle i have been loading a project named "test").

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

This is all quite interesting. Hopefully this isn't the final theme, but I don't like the way the title bar for the dialog box is almost as dark as the dialog box background, so that it is hard to distinguish. Can you cancel by clicking above (outside) the dialog?

Is there any more documentation or style guide on the new UI yet? I find UIs fascinating.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Thanks MoG! Can you please convert your questions into bugs at http://bugs.maemo.org ? Default location Development Platform -> SDK.

This way we can keep a better track and hopefully answer them sooner & better.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Clicking out of dialogs makes them disappear, yes.

No documentation and style guides yet, sorry. We didn't want to wait for the docs to push the alpha code. The developer documentation is planned to be provided with the beta.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Oh, you are right, clicking outside the dialog closes it and it seems to be handled like "cancel". Wow, how counterintuitive!!! Honestly, this is not the first time i am using a computer and i did not understand how to close a dialog. I think that's the worst case for a UI.

Also the color theme is pretty ugly, agreed. Seems to be some special low-contrast military camouflage style ...

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Hopefully they've done, or will do, user testing on this. I know that Canola uses the same method to close the dialogs that slide in from the right-hand side, and it took me a few seconds to guess how to dismiss those the first time I saw them.
Well a black background is the iPhone style, isn't it, now copied by several other handhelds. I'm not saying it's good, but I can see why they've picked it.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

This isn't black, this is some dark olive with slightly less dark olive decorations/texts. The iPhone may have a black background, but it has way more contrast in its gui elements.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Are the new devices going to be finger-only, i.e. not come with a stylus? I ask because http://maemo.org/development/sdks/ma...lpha_overview/ says that the stylus keyboard has been removed, and the window/app close button is much larger than before.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

I can't speak to what'll be bundled with the hardware, but the touchscreen is resistive, so there's no reason you couldn't use a stylus.

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

This is theme is for the SDK only and if you don't like it file bugs to improve it. Or come up with alternative themes when Urho is done with the Theme Maker (soon, apparently).

About the click out of the dialog to Cancel, as a user nobody told me about it and I don't remember about the first time, so I guess it was not a traumatic change. I didn't even notice there are no Cancel buttons anymore! :)

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

wasn't there an announcement that fremantle would have an improved UI? *sigh*

will diablo run on the maemo 5 "lead device"? :p

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

Your question probably is "can a diablo theme be run under fremantle" which is likely a "yes". Why shouldn't you be able to replace the hacked hildon core libs with some that look like diablo?

On the other hand: The fact that some colors in an alpha are ugly doesn't mean this will stay that way. Why should Nokia publish these early versions if they don't intend to listen to threads like this one?

I indeed like their basic idea of cleaning of the dialog boxes to make more space for content. Perhaps they just need some hints.

E.g. the "where's my close button" problem can easily be solved by adding some small "X"-Shaped icon to the dialog title bar. Most users are familiar with the meaning of an (X) icon in the upper right corner of their dialogs title bar. I think i'll file a bug report to suggest just this ...

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

as a user I would expect the presence of a big fat X in the top right to also act as a close button for a dialog.

(since you also seem to be using that location for "back" as well the user will expect it soon enough)

I can't test at the moment but if you click the big X (which is actually for the test form and not the dialog) does the dialog close and then the test form?

if so, thats a major problem for the UI, if not its still disconcerting because the user will close the dialog using the artifact of UI from behind.

Personally I prefer giving people a clear way to (cancel/close/dismiss/do nothing) on actual dialogs, that way there is none of this. (at the same time I am even more guilty because I can make screens with no ui at all :p)

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

UI "quality" is a highly subjective area, and, really, the only real way to judge a UIs effectiveness is to use it on the device it's intended for. The only way to do that is to work at Nokia. So, something makes me think the folks there with devices working on the UI probably have a better picture of how well it actually works than us. ;)

The Diablo "UI" was already ported to Fremantle (please see the pre-alpha SDKs and Mer).

Re: Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released
 

How about the other way? Can someone tar up an armel rootfs of the SDK (just the libraries, etc) so I can see if we can get some Fremantle GUI on current devices? Or is that what the good folks at Mer are doing right now?

I'm not entirely clear about this yet -- Does the current UI already require OpenGL ES to render?