So far all toolkits that hit me in the head with a bat were inferior IMHO. And those include Tk, MFC, VCL, Amiga Intuition, Swing, AWT, SWT, and maybe some I forgot because they weren't worth it. I admit I haven't tried Qt yet.

But we don't want to start a religious war on this. I know I'm Gtk-biased.

I agree with him that the sleep mode shouldn't be broken but you can fix it slightly by editing mce.ini or just use powerlaunch (which I would use had it not had some unknown incompatibility with one of my installed apps).

Also, I agree that the applets should have a toggle able lock option & that snapping to other applets should really be turned off. I can't "fine-tune" my applets position & it doesn't really work when all the applets are different sizes anyway 8-)

You are proving his point again by seeing a UI as a toolkit.

Well, I agree with PyCage. GTK+ is not fixed-size.

Movable Applets
Now you can move the applets. Minor.

Well, you already could. The difference is that now you can't help but move the applets. Not minor, and he got it completely backwards.

So that's two, though there certainly aren't many.
That, sir, is one of the great advances of OS2008. You don't need shift AND caps lock. Either long-hold or (my preference) double-tap can provide that function without wasting keyboard space.

My thoughts on his review:
I disagree with him, with OS2007 & with OS2008 on scrolling the menus. If you permit menus taller than the screen, I think it's clear that scrolling should be accomplished in a finger-friendly and screen-efficient fashion.
For some reason, people either think these are incompatible and throw one out, or suggest making an area where the primary interaction method is tapping double as a kinetic scrollbar.
(Which make the slightest bounce on a touch-screen do random things: launch random apps, in this case.)

A better way:
Leave the icons as the selection area. Tap an icon to launch the program. (Actually, the whole icon region; just because the icon is small doesn't mean the selection area is smaller.) The labels, on the other hand, can be used for kinetic scrolling. Flick the labels up and down the screen, tap while it's moving to stop it, bounce your finger on it to your heart's content, no apps launch. Tap the icon of the app you want, and the app launches, even if your finger slides a few pixels. And we're not wasting any space, below, above, or to the side, on up and down arrows. (You could overlay small arrows, if you insist on visual indicators of whether you're at the top or bottom of the list.)

Regarding banning him from itT, fyi, I don't know his username and the only ones I ban are spammers.

No unicode: Big missing feature although it can probably be added manually.
Button Bar Menus : I agree, with a small screen, space is crucial. Next release maybe?
No moving/resizing/modal stuff: I agree, this is just ridiculous but probably needs a lot of work.
No persistence: I also agree but I'm not surprised, had the same with gnome environment on my PC and that's one out of a lot reasons I left it for kde. Other big one being the lack of buffering (user space or helped by the kernel) when reopening already browsed directory for example.

i kinda like the 08 menu.
as for the "jumping" applets, i seem to get along with them now.

the rest, i dont know. that toolbar in the osso-xterm do not get in my way. but then i dont spend 24/7 in the term either...

all in all, much of what people complain about 08 i would call minor issues or force of habbit issues. even the browser is fast enough most of the time, if the page is designed right (sadly it should have a runaway script detector like firefox proper have to stop some of those insanely overscripted pages).

I'm Sean Luke: and thanks to Reggie I am now able to post. Some quick replies:

Pycage and Benson both mistakenly think that by "fixed, poorly conceived sizes", I meant "fixed-size GUI", which is ridiculous. I mean, I'm not an *idiot*. :-) As the section was discussing button bar icons, what I meant was standard GTK button bar icon sizes.

GTK+'s image mechanisms (pixmap, pixbuf, whatever) do provide for multiple-sized icons. But GTK+ makes poor use of them IMHO, and maemo makes almost no use of them. Instead they stick with 32x32 and (more often) 24x24 button bar icons, which looked good on X in 1990 but which look terrible on the N800. The maemo toolbar has the vertical space for icons almost *four times* the area (shy of 48x48) that's being used right now, and they'd look better and be easier to read to boot.

As to GTK+ I said it was amateurish, I've said it twice (in both reviews), and I stand by it. Compared to, say, Cocoa, GTK+ is amazingly amateurish. The toolkit doesn't have remotely the interoperability, localization and, typography (ATSUI anyone?), and underlying graphics facilities that Cocoa has (cairo is no CoreGraphics). And GTK+ has poor design consistency and sense -- indeed it focuses on issues like skinability and language portability instead of what it should be working on, which is consistency, designment refinement, and interoperability. Sure, maemo lacks kinetic scrolling, consistency in menu sizing, consistency in button sizes, and interoperability except through dbus, but hey look, I can give my N800 a star trek skin! :-) X coders need to repeat after me: a toolkit is not a UI.

Heck, compared to nastiness like the *JDK* (sorry pycage), GTK+ is amateurish. I'll repeat an example that I mentioned to pycage privately: consider that it's 2007 and GTK+ still doesn't have a facility for widgets to indicate their preferred sizes! Consider this image.. In the JDK (AWT and Swing), you can organize buttons like the bottom row. In GTK+, you can only do the top row. Where'd the image come from? From a noble Google Summer of Code attempt to fix this in GTK+. This is really basic GUI 101 stuff, things that Sun understood ten years go, and GTK+ *still* flunks it.

(GTK+, at least the version used in maemo, is also incredibly bug-riddled. Don't get me started.)

Yabbas claims that most PDAs don't have screen rotation. Which, I believe, is false. More specifically, practically every PDA *OS* of importance (Palm, Windows Mobile, even the venerable Newton) has screen rotation built into its app event facilities. There may exist devices which don't rotate (mostly smartphones with square screen proportions, for which screen rotation makes no sense), but that's hardware. Nokia has no such excuse. It's 2008. Let's not defend bad decisions.

Much of the problem that Nokia has here is that they're trying to do this on the cheap. They had a scrappy division which was given a limited amount of money to produce a single device, and so what they did was go out and grab various open source tools (matchbox, dbus, gtk+, etc.) and glue them together. This approach gets them to product faster but the result is that they have to work within the constraints of the stuff they threw together. I'm sure, for example, that maemo's slavish reliance on modality is due largely to the constraints placed upon them by matchbox. At least I hope so -- I hope Nokia didn't actually design the system like that *intentionally*.

I imagine that Nokia's been working to improve the toolkits they're using, but it's not moving very fast. Mostly they're still boxed inside the constraints of these tools, and worse, they think that this is just fine, a sort of Stolkholm Syndrome you see among programmers who've worked so long in one environment that they can't imagine anything better, no matter how bad their environment is. In my first article, comparing the Newton to the N800, my goal was to show Nokia another environment that they've never seen, one which, for all its 1990's ancient throwbacks, is still better than maemo in an astonishing number of respects. Why? Because Apple started from scratch, trying to figure out what was most usable for people holding the machines in their hands, rather than taking existing tools -- fixed quantities -- and saying "how do we glue these together in a way that doesn't suck?"

*Thread renamed to avoid confusion.*

The thought process is this: "CAPSLOCK is stupid and just tapping shift twice makes sense on a crammed keyboard."

(FWIW Capslock on all of my keyboards is actually Control, so I would never miss Capslock if it vanished)