I knew that GIMP was working, but Inkscape is news to me! Thanks for that! Anyway, even on my netbook, inkscape's interface suffers from the 'low' 1024x600 resolution. I'm sure these tools run adequately on the tablet, but would need an interface that could compliment the 800x480 screen. This is what I'd like to see.


Hahaha! That's a great question!

You'd be surprised at what Blender can run on. I was using it for modeling (drawing 3D objects) on an old Pentium 200 Mhz computer sans 3D acceleration. Blender itself is pretty light. It also offers several abilities that would compliment this dimiuative environment:

1) The interface layout is completely customisable. You can place your 3D view windows wherever you want, and size them perfectly. On my pentium 200, I was running blender from a 800x600 screen quite comfortably.

2) The interface is 100% res independent! This means that the dialogs with the buttons can be scaled (in addition to the 3D view). This would further the useful space.

3) You can expand the current view to full-window for greater control.

4) You can reduce processor overhead by hiding on-screen objects. You can even hide portions (verticies, faces, and edges) of the object that you're working on for greater responsiveness.

5) You can choose the rendering mode. One would likely choose wireframe w/o surface subdivision to keep things zippy. But it is still very useful for basic ops.

Take a look at this mockup I did in the 'What would you realistically like to see in the N900' thread (post 53). The screen was purposely resized to 800x480 to simulate what it would look like fullscreen on the tablet:



Interface designers can learn a great deal from blender. One interesting characteristic of the interface, is that the customised layout is saved in the project file. This means that regardless of what computer you take your file to, it will always look the same, making it easy to use across systems.

In addition to portable interfaces, the interface, modeller, compositer, python scripting engine, renderer, game engine, ffmpeg video compressor, etc fit in a 14MB downloadable container. Just goes to show how bloated current apps are.

Ok, so you're likely not going to be rendering anything on this little device, but there are still a number of useful tasks that can be accomplished within blender (assuming that it runs well). One of which is modeling (creation of 3D shapes) as well as setting up lighting, writing scripts, simple positional animations, etc.

Seriously. It would be a fun project to port and would certainly make the news. Of all mobile devices, I've never heard of one that you can run a full 3D modeling and rendering app on. This separates the N8xx line from the pack of mobile toys.

Also, as device capability improves (*cough* N900), this project would be all the more useful. Hey, it may inspire Ton & co to build some light mobile functionality into Blender, exploiting an untapped market, or optimise some pieces for smoother operation.


YARR!
}:^)~

Corruptaneus