New idea for a Pandora GUI


Odd besides some stuff like battery applets (which needs hacking) it actually works faster and more robustly than XFCE - which is a bag of bloated bolts - often bundled with a bunch of gnome services, it just aint what it used to be!


Shame really....


Theres a bunch of posts about it working on the pandora installed via ipkg from the angstrom repos on the gp32x forum - so you need to be doing it off SD boot really, but it would need more support to turn it into a firmware image...

Well, don't forget that the lxde we tried is now 1,5 years old :)


lxde was the first try for a GUI, and we started with the current OS version November 2009.


A lot has changed in lxde since then.
 
Odd besides some stuff like battery applets (which needs hacking) it actually works faster and more robustly than XFCE - which is a bag of bloated bolts - often bundled with a bunch of gnome services, it just aint what it used to be!


Shame really....


Theres a bunch of posts about it working on the pandora installed via ipkg from the angstrom repos on the gp32x forum - so you need to be doing it off SD boot really, but it would need more support to turn it into a firmware image...

Well, don't forget that the lxde we tried is now 1,5 years old :)


lxde was the first try for a GUI, and we started with the current OS version November 2009.


A lot has changed in lxde since then.
A lot has changed in xfce, too.
 
A lot has changed in xfce, too.

There is a nice report from 2010 which is xfce 4.6 (it is 4.8 now) where lxde beats it memory wise.


http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_desktop_vitals&num=1


The main improvements is that they have finally brought in a virtual file system to deal with network shares.... but when I tested 4.6 xfce was starting to bloat. that is in terms of memory and install space. They might have sorted it out in 4.8 I'll need to give it a go to see.
 
So much text, three bottles of wine, I can still type, why can't you fucking learn to program?


Coding isn't difficult. A few days and you would have the basics. Christ on a broomstick.
I'm assuming that this was partly also aimed at me since I wrote quite a lot of text, in which case I'd have to ask if you actually read that text. The reasons for why I'm not programing this are included in it. If parts of that text are not understandable for anyone, just ask.

[...] besides some stuff like battery applets (which needs hacking) it [lxde, explanatory note] actually works faster and more robustly than XFCE - which is a bag of bloated bolts - often bundled with a bunch of gnome services, it just aint what it used to be!
Yeah, I've switched over from Gnome to lxde about a year ago myself actually, after having made good experiences with it on my netbook. I used to use KDE, but in my not-so-humble opinion that has become quite silly with its built-in social features. But I think we're getting too far off-topic here.
 
I tend not to use the touchscreen too much on the Panda; then again, I'm mostly using it for emulation and coding/code-testing/etc, not much as a web-browser. For minimenu I've built it so 'touch to run' or 'touch to change to that tab', but I've not built in gestures or anything like that .. "swipe to change to next tab". If someone wants to make a good case for gestures -- that people are interested in that metaphor of operation, it might be worth pursuing. *shrug*


jeff
 
Update: New, low effort sample pix added!
Please don't get me wrong, It's not my intention to bad-mouth your idea, I'm just trying to help improve it. The validity of my previous comments remains. In addition, with your pictures I can see some more problems:


What will you do if people want more than 5 desktops? At one point, having a single button with text on it for every desktop will get pretty messy and confusing when having more than 5 desktops, no matter how you display the buttons. On the other hand, when having <= 5 desktops, it always only takes a maximum of 2 "flicks" to reach any desktop, whereas by using the desktop bar you need 2 clicks (one on the Pandora button, one on the desktop bar) and need to refocus your concentration in the process (as soon as the desktop bar shows up), and if you want to close the desktop bar after changing to another desktop then you'd even have to do 3 clicks and refocus your concentration once. So I'd say that the current design of the desktop bar is improvable. What about putting it at the top and showing it all the time, with maximized windows automatically covering it, and using symbols instead of text? By separating these symbols in groups of four, an overview would remain, since 4 is the maximum number of elements a human brain can count instantly without thinking and looking around. Like so:



Code:
      -- Desktop bar (every "O" is another desktop)                     

      |                                                                 

      V                                                                 


|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

|                O O O O | O O O O | O O O O | O O O O                 |

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

|                        |         V         |                         |

|                        ---------------------                         |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|                                                                      |

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

| P ---------  ---------- ---------                       -  - 12:34  -|

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|


The symbols could be micro-pictograms indicating the location of items on the respective desktop, that way their look would be coherent which would avoid confusion while making the desktops more identifiable through their symbols.


When the drawer is opened and the sorting buttons appear (by the way, it's much better to use "Recent" instead of "Date", since "Date" is frequently misinterpreted as "Date installed" or something else), what will you do if people want more than 5 buttons (which they most probably will, since the way of sorting is also a personal preference)? Making the user scroll them left/right or up/down would be confusing and more often than not need more effort than just scrolling through the application icons. Stacking them in several rows would take up valuable space that could otherwise be used for displaying more application icons at once. So there's room for improvement too. The first idea that comes to my mind here is a rainbow color system where the applications' icons are sorted by their dominating color. Some of the (all except for one?) sorting buttons are replaced by a rainbow slider, and by touching the slider/scrolling on it using an analog nub, the application list will scroll to the selected color. That'd have some accessibility issues though, so it might be good to build in an alternative, like for instance a search box that automatically opens up as a button on the keyboard gets pushed when the drawer is opened.


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For minimenu I've built it so 'touch to run' or 'touch to change to that tab', but I've not built in gestures or anything like that .. "swipe to change to next tab". If someone wants to make a good case for gestures -- that people are interested in that metaphor of operation, it might be worth pursuing.
Just that people are interested in something doesn't mean that it will turn out to be useful. Personally, I pay a lot of attention to communicating with users who suggest a feature. Very often suggestions turn out to be a case of argumentum ad populum, in which case implementing them more often than not would be a particularly bad thing.


Also, by copying something because it's "hot" (~="has turned out to be very useful in some other projects") without thinking twice about its actual usefulness, more often than not a software can become good, but probably not excellent.


Anyway, not having a Pandora I can't really say anything about how useful or not gestures would be in minimenu. Just be aware of the dangers of "sparklingarbage features".


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edit-08jan2011-05:39GMT+1:

[*]Some minor changes
 
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