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Free software on different platforms

J5's post about how Gnome is about the people and their ideas made me again think about the same thing I've been pondering lately.

Free software is being used on new platforms: handheld tablets and other embedded systems etc.. Many times this requires a rewrite of at least the user interface parts, because a desktop is very different from a touchscreen/stylus use case for example.

My worry is, how do we make sure that ported applications, like the Rythmbox for the 770 will not end up as a orphan fork of the parent project? It's not a simple problem - if an application has a clean separation of the "core" and "ui" this could be possible by having a separate UI version in the source tree and the same tarball could be used to build them all. FBReader is one example of this.

Many of the nice, polished applications we develop for our desktop today would also make sense in an embedded car computer or a handheld, or a linux-based phone. But the resource limits are more restrictive, and the user interface needs to be approached from a different angle. Yet, it would be sad if the "core" would end up being forked, and the project would not stay in touch with the "parent". Synergy is what makes things better, and I would hate to see more "orphans".

Things to avoid when integrating Linux with hardware

We got the Samsung ultra-mobile PC (the "origami" device I think?) to play with at the office, and I thought of sharing my experience with you. Maybe this will help us, Novell, Ubuntu or someone else who might be thinking of bundling Linux with laptops or other hardware in the future.. But let's move on. This opinion below is biased, is solely my own and not of my employer's etc etc.. you get the idea.

The box was nice, very Apple'isque black shiny cardboard and the device itself looked nice, though the glossy "piano black" finish gets fingerprinted quickly. The thing has an integrated flip-stand in the back to make it stand upright by itself when on a table. *snap!* All I can say is it took 2 seconds to break it, way too fragile design.

Otherwise the device feels nice and solid, though a bit large for something that is not a laptop (no keyboard!) or something you can put on your pocket (ipaq or a nokia770 or whatever) But it's a cute geek toy anyway. Costy one, though.

What really boggled my mind was the user experience after turning the unit on. Up until this point, it was smooooth (if we don't count the unlucky "snap" earlier). One gets greeted with the standard XP boot screen, and I started to enjoy it. But just then a wet towel gets thrown at your face from the screen: Create an user account! Come on, this is a tablet! Why not just have one preset there? Up comes the familiar windows user account creation tool, on the 800x480 screen. But since this is a tablet version of XP, and since we have no keyboard, we also get this pretty large popup keyboard window that is on top of everything. No, not the fancy translucent one you saw on the origami preview photos (we'll get to that later) - but a simple and functional floating window. The only problem is, it obscures the user account wizard, so I cannot see anything. Splat! What's even worse, is that if you try to move it on the bottom of the screen to interact with the user account tool, it promptly moves itself back inside the screen area. Argh..

Anyway. Off I went to create the account and everything was nice again. XP boots, we get the standard XP desktop etcetera. The start menu and applications menu are their usual overpopulated ones you are used in a default XP installation. The biggest problem is, this device has vertical resolution of 480 pixels, so nothing really fits. The menus grow several sub-menus deep, all dialogs etc have their buttons clipped off screen and interaction is cumbersome at least. Someone could have done a very good job here customizing the menus with useful things and hiding the stuff nobody needs.

Welcome!

What is even worse at this point, just when you start to doubt how much they really did to integrate the XP installation with the device, it dawns on you: not much at all. More wizards, license agreements, antivirus software activation and update! - and Windows update. Windows Media Player Setup Wizard! Everything starts up at once. It finds new devices (hey, look, we have a bluetooth adapter! and wavelan! Who knew?) At this point I seriously gave up. What started with great anticipation and curiosity and impression of a smooth experience turned out to be a total flop. They just built the device and slapped XP tablet edition on it. Without thinking about you, the user at all. Gee, thanks!

Handy menu to open the on-screen-keyboard

I know I am not the best person to write about this, as I am very biased due my work with Gnome, Linux and the Nokia 770 community and user interface, but uhh.. this is how it feels to be ignored as a user. Please, let's not do this with Linux. It feels like crap. It would not have taken that much effort to make it a lot better.