[maemo-developers] Features to improve the platform

[From: Allan Doyle]

I'm not sure how to package my wishes as feature requests, and I'm  
not sure they are really feature requests anyway. They are closer to  
philosophy...

There's a lot of power in the ability to develop applications in  
Javascript, even if those applications never connect to the web. A  
single html page, coupled with some Javascript, that loads either  
from a file: URL or from an on-board web server can do quite a lot.

As you know, yesterday Apple basically said that the Javascript/AJAX  
app is the way to do 3rd party app development on the iPhone. A lot  
of people have grumbled about this being too little, they want a  
*real* SDK. But it also sounds like they are going to provide access  
to on-board apps via a javascript API, making it possible to load a  
single web page that does a lot of very interesting things without  
really needing to continuously send messages back and forth to a web  
server.

Another way of thinking of this is that it's possible to use some  
very simple development methodologies that require *no* knowledge of  
gtk, c, c++, scratchbox, busybox, etc. to create some very powerful,  
slick applications with quite sophisticated user interfaces. In  
particular, you could use the Maemo platform to create appliance- 
level functionality that completely hides the underlying general- 
purpose mechanism with just a web page.

However, the current OS2007 has a couple of features that get in the  
way of being able to do this.

First, the browser won't work unless you're connected to a network.  
Use Minimo, people say, and it will be ok. But I don't see that as a  
satisfying answer. Minimo is great, but it's not very stable, and  
it's not supported by Nokia. Furthermore, the Maemo browser supported  
offline use quite well under IT2006.

Second, the browser has a new feature under IT2007 that it did not  
have in IT2006. It now nicely informs you of its progress in loading  
pages. In full screen mode, this causes a status bar to pop up each  
time you access a web page, either directly or via AJAX. That, in  
turn, causes the window size to change and the web page has to either  
adjust or things bounce around a bit while it's loading. This makes  
it harder to develop web-page apps that don't spook naive users.

Also, if there were a standard way to access Maemo features directly  
from Javascript, the web-page apps could be made even better. Imagine  
how nice it would be to be able to get events from the buttons  
calling callbacks in your web-page app.

Being able to launch a video directly javascript, being able to  
control music/audio playback, etc. would add to the experience. This  
could be done, I supposed with a javascript wrapper around some DBus  
code, or again, by making available an on-board http service that  
bridges you to an API.

In the end, I think it's great that a lot of Linux/X-Windows apps  
just port to Maemo. But at the same time, I think there's a largely  
unexplored, new space that with a few tweaks could become a  
significant source of innovation.

	Allan


On Jun 12, 2007, at 06:00, <quim.gil at nokia.com> <quim.gil at nokia.com>  
wrote:
> You know about http://maemo.org/intro/roadmap.html
>
> We have been putting more flesh into it at a platform level. We  
> will keep making each entry a link describing details about the  
> feature and facilitating focused discussion around it.
>
> At the end of the roadmap page there are instruction to submit your  
> own feature requests to be, if approved, roadmapped and developed.  
> We really want to see this process happening. There are some  
> platform related feature requests submitted in bugzilla, but most  
> of them are about end user features. We would like to improve the  
> maemo offer for developers by implementing good and well formulated  
> ideas received from the community.
>
> So please, if you have ideas for improvement have a look to the  
> procedure in the roadmap page and file our feature requests in  
> bugzilla.
>
> Quim
>
>
-- 
Allan Doyle
http://museum.mit.edu/mwow
+1.781.433.2695