Re: iPhone and iPod Touch SDK is amazing... Wow.
 

Re: iPhone and iPod Touch SDK is amazing... Wow.
 

Well sometimes it is quite hard to decide which parts of screen changed. When you give direct access (i.e. memory pointers) to framebuffer to programs you don't know what the program did so you can't optimize much. Also it causes problems with tearing. How would you move three rectangles to the chip in one frame without tearing? You can't. So for such playback you must sent only one rectangle = whole video frame (and then you are limited by bandwidth). Also the overhead of starting and stopping the transfer may be bigger than sending one bigger rectangle. So yes it is optimization but (IMO) it has more drawbacks than advantages and mostly just complicates everything.

I simply said I don't know what are the rules but anyway, yes there is no problem with that. And BTW, OMAP is system on chip, it is not clear every part (DSP, MPU, IVA, 3d accelerator - each being separate CPU with own caches, private SRAM, even private MMU units ...) can directly access any other part. Some parts may have easier access to main SDRAM than SRAM of other part. There are no public docs for OMAP2 so we can only guess. Still no matter how exactly it works it is not the main problem (as already said twice).
Yes and such step causes delay and you must stop drawing until frame is transferred. So even if you can send 25 fps at 640x480 you have very little time to actually draw something there without tearing.

Anyway, as for complexity, feel free to study omapfb, rfbi, dispc and blizzard drivers (and lcd_mipid.c but that one does not add any complexity) in linux sources (in drivers/video/omap/), each handling different part of hardware puzzle. While it certainly is not deep magic, it is not easy either. Not 100% sure now but I think that for displaying full screen resolution, video is first slightly scaled down by dispc (omap display controller) and then scaled back up by blizzard (the epson chip) to overcome slow rfbi (remote frame buffer interface) transfer.

I don't understand it completely but seeing code of those drivers in kernel is good (or bad) enough for me to feel pity for anyone who must touch that code and may be tasked to throw 3d acceleration to the mix :-) But yes, I agree that given enough motivation it is doable :-) Well, unless of course they licence 3d acceleration driver as a binary blob with no right to customize it for this scenario (just like they couldn't directly customize Opera engine so they were happy to replace it with slower and more bloated firefox engine once it was usable enough, or like they can't customize Skype now and add video calls).

Re: iPhone and iPod Touch SDK is amazing... Wow.
 

Just a clarification. Cocoa stems from NextStep/OpenStep, which comes from next. Carbon comes from the old Macintosh toolkit.
There is almost no relationship between cocoa and carbon, in fact it is actually hard to bridge between them - they are two completely disimilar frameworks, programmed with different languages purely there to maintain compatibility with older software.
The iPod cannot use carbon, it only has cocoa.

Re: iPhone and iPod Touch SDK is amazing... Wow.
 

The 770 and the N800 up to OS2007 used Opera as internet browser, which is the opposite of open source, and aside from the WLAN driver memory leak bug, actually was one of the reasons why the internet browsing experience was so bad on the 770.

And even the OS itself is not completely open source.


Nokia took some good steps in the past, in creating the 770 and N810 at all, and setting up a community/development portal (maemo).


But it seems they wanted to outsource the application development completely, and that's where they shot themselves in the foot.

There are very few native applications, one of the best being Maemo Mapper.

Most apps are software ported from other platforms, which isn't bad in itself.

The problem is that many of these apps never leave beta stage, because the authors will loose interest eventually.

Why should they loose interest? Because they don't get paid...

Prominent example: Minimo

It seems Apple tries to avoid these flaws,
by providing new functionality for the iPhone/iTouch from 'in-house' .

I don't know if the developers of the iPhone UI and apps earned much money,
but I'm sure they were at least paid for their work,
which surely was a motivation to make it right and finish their work,
and everyone can see that they did a great job,
and that's one of the reasons why the iPhone is so popular.

Other reasons include the lack of marketing from the Nokia side.
They don't invest much more than the hardware basis, and the fees for running the maemo site.

Re: iPhone and iPod Touch SDK is amazing... Wow.
 

it is interesting in this thread to read all the technical stuff.... but as an advanced newbie i am more interested in bottom line stuff.. that said
i can do more stuff with the n810 than with my wife's itouch
but what she can do is more "elegant" ....
i had a client in my office yesterday he was transferring from dallas to chicago we were making small talk and he whipped out his iphone scrolled his finger across the screen and voila had temperatures in chicago and dallas in about 15 seconds... all the time i was thinking yeah i can do that with my n810 - but it looked so cool on his iphone... that finger swipe is way cool and makes me think my brand new n810 is about 10 years old ---

that is the advantage of the iphone/touch the coolness of how an app works (eye candy to some)

the advantage of the n810 (which after an apt-get upgrade-my gps is flawless and fixes on satellites as quickly as my garmin etrex legendc does) is the coolness of all the apps and stuff that work on it
just my thoughts

Re: iPhone and iPod Touch SDK is amazing... Wow.
 

You could do that with om weather. Infact just add a new city and it updates on your desktop. Yeah eye candy is nice .....but ultimately functionality is what matters. Look at the razr; when it came out it was great looking and every second phone was a razr. But now motorola is almost gone. SO it is not all about eyecandy

Re: iPhone and iPod Touch SDK is amazing... Wow.
 

There's that, but they weren't paid in the first place, and they were somehow interested. Often, they want the app ported so that they can use them. Once it hits honest-to-goodness beta quality, it's pretty usable, so they've alleviated the source of motivation that they did have.

The result is that their motivation, being more tied to early results, does a lot better than pay to get a bunch of apps kinda-sorta running, but paid developers are more motivated for finishing touches.

It suggests a route Nokia could (and to some extent does) take: Let the community be largely responsible for starting projects, but then pay developers to finish promising projects as they become functional enough to stagnate.

Re: iPhone and iPod Touch SDK is amazing... Wow.
 

the problem i have found with omweather is that it blows my battery life away (plus it obliterates the picture i have of my wife as my background image :) ) otherwise i agree the n810 has a greater functionality. . . but i do enjoy that eye candy of the itouch/phone

Re: iPhone and iPod Touch SDK is amazing... Wow.
 

Well yes, the technical stuff is boring, just wanted to explain that high resolution display (800x480, 2.5 times more pixels than iPhone) which is major selling point for tablets and was IMO excellent choice for serious web browsing is unfortunately too much to handle even for current hardware (not talking about 770 more than 2 years ago) so there are some sacrifices made. Also Nokia tablets are meant as experiment for creating relatively open platform so it is not surprising it still feels a bit unpolished and 100% closed features like 3d acceleration are not in. We already have too many closed parts in our tablets that were unavoidable. One should perhaps compare iphone with symbian based Nokia smarthphones which is equally closed and polished platform.

Re: iPhone and iPod Touch SDK is amazing... Wow.
 

Personally I think it's a combination of too early and too cheap.

- Too early, because the latest incarnation(s) of the OMAP (3430 and 35X0) will easily address the video issue (see the Pandora specs) and

- too cheap, because even the more primitive OMAP the Itablets use, has very powerful video capabilities -- provided the client pays for them...