Thread: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
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Benson is offline Benson
2008-01-18 , 22:14
Posts: 4,930 | Thanked: 2,272 times | Joined on Oct 2007
#52
Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
The problem with touhscreen UIs IMO is that, for the most part, they start off on the wrong premise: emulate a traditional PC UI and then work around the stuff that doesn't work the same.

I say it's time to forget that nonsense and design from scratch. Fight legacy UI encroachment as much as possible, by default. Maybe my wild suggestions so far won't work with the hardware in question, but that's still no reason IMO to be bound by an approach that may not be best.
Texrat, one of the greatest strengths of the ITs is that "traditional PC UI" apps can be ported (after a fashion) with very little effort. A radically different UI could seriously reduce the number of apps ported by the community. So unless Nokia can bring some serious development effort to bear on this, they'd be crippling the ITs to do this with no compatibility.

Of course, one thing suggested on the forums was the use of xvnc and vncviewer to run completely unmodified (i.e. just cross-compiled) apps displaying to a separate X server. Something like that could work here, but it's still risky changing things that dramatically.

Still, I agree strongly in principle, and many steps could be made in that direction without causing such problems. But any practical UI redesign has to keep existing unix apps in mind (IMHO).

Edited just to add quote. Thread is getting slightly tangled.
Last edited by Benson; 2008-01-18 at 22:16.