I'm big on custom shells and user interfaces. Before I installed vista on my laptop and got lazy, I ran a theme I made for the Litestep shell for windows. My gentoo box ran a similar theme I wrote for Fluxbox before that server met an untimely demise. I'll be honest. I really dont like the user interface on the 770. Sure, you can spruce it up, make it pretty, add a few things to the home screen, but its just putting lipstick on the pig in the end. Has anyone tried to make a replacement shell and interface for the ITT's? Is there even any interest in that? Am I the only person who would be happy to work on a new interface of them?

That would be pretty neat. Also it would let those who have ideas build something more unique and closer to their interests. And who knows mabe this new gui can be so good that people would use it over the hildon UI.

Technically Hildon *is* a custom UI. It's fairly customisable too, just see what Intel are doing to Hildon home on their MID devices.

Anyway, if you search here you'll find people have had KDE running on top of Maemo on an N800, as well as WindowMaker and OpenBox.

There are also entire OS replacements such as Poky, Angstom and GPE - but these have downsides where binary components are involved.

Yeah I don't know, maybe a port of something people could write very flexible themes for? or atleast a new improved hardcoded ui.

Openbox and Windowmaker, 'eh? But only for the 800? No love for the 770?

being able to install the themes that I had installed before the last OS update would be pretty good for me

I checked out openbox and windowmaker. That isn't quite what I'm talking about. I'm talking about doing something different, something that you simply wouldnt do on a pc, because it wouldnt make sense for pc controls. Something designed specificly for smaller devices with different controls. I have ideas, but I'm a graphic designer, and while I have a bit of IT and Linux experience, it isn't nearly enough to know how to code such a thing into reality.

So can we get an opinion on the Poky, Angstrom and GPE UI's

Has anyone installed them and been happy with what they got?

Hi. Could you share those ideas somehow? Draw sketches, illustrations, or explain them verbally?

I hunted down some screen shots of Poky, Angstrom and GPE. These arnt even close to what I was talking about either, but maybe this will give you a better idea of what theyd look like Bree, though I can't atest to how they run.

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6869195570.html
^-- Poky

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cleverswine/tags/angstrom/
^-- Angstrom

http://gpe.linuxtogo.org/gallery/gal...&id=port_24090
^-- GPE

One of my ideas is to have the screen nearly clutterfree. No bars or anything, there would be the usual nessecary icons at the top, though maybe theyd look better centered. On the far left, far right, and bottom of the screen would be transparent tabs, not sure of the lables yet, but maybe one is called Control, on is called Applications and one is called Games. Tapping one of these tabs would cause the tab to slide up (or right, or left, depending on which tab) and display sort of like... a drawer of icons, and youd just tab whichever one you wanted to launch the application. The advantage to this is that you could do it with either the stylus, or even just using the d-pad, and theres no lame menus to flip through. Plus its quicker to get to what you want. Also leaves more room for whatever you want to put on your desktop, cpu status bars, clocks, what have you. I'm not positive what to do about the minimized windows yet, but maybe put them at the top of the screen with the battery icon and stuff. It might work better if I showed you, I'll try to do a few diagrams when I get home.

Yes, giving ragnar input has potential.

Anyway, I started a "perfect UI" thread here a while back that got pretty interesting (and a bit heated). Maybe you could contribute to that discussion, Firebird.

(hi ragnar!)