What Is Your Best Desktop Environnement For Pda?

[lardman]

* don't have "Files" and "Folders" but a "Bag of Things" with search filters and tabs (e.g. ABC-DEF, Today-Yesterday-LastWeek)

Wasn't this why people didn't/don't like the DocTab (Sharp 1.xx and Current Opie)?

If it's well implemented it may work, but it depends what level of user you're aiming at. I do quite like being able to organise where my files are kept.


Si

[koen]

* don't have "Files" and "Folders" but a "Bag of Things" with search filters and tabs (e.g. ABC-DEF, Today-Yesterday-LastWeek)

Wasn't this why people didn't/don't like the DocTab (Sharp 1.xx and Current Opie)?

If it's well implemented it may work, but it depends what level of user you're aiming at. I do quite like being able to organise where my files are kept.
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I'd advocate making 'people' first class objects (like the newton and Nokia IT2006) and following the gimmie[1] design model.

[1] [a href=\"http://beatnik.infogami.com/Gimmie]http://beatnik.infogami.com/Gimmie[/url]

[amrein]

Yes, gimmie is an interesting peace of software. I'm curious to see what it will become.

  The answer is Newton!  Yeah,  it may seem like I'm biased looking at the avatar I'm using,  but I speak from the perspective of having used almost every PDA and desktop environment of our days.
  The thing is that Apple actually did what you wanted,  they started from scratch with the pen interface in mind and poured lots of money into it.

I missed the Newton  . It wasn't a success in Europe because of the already top selling device: The Psion Series 3 Classic (1991). When people begun to talk about it, Palm device were already there. Now I've begun to understand why people are crying against Apple to release a new PDA. They didn't really started it from scratch thought. They took a lot of ideas from the competition (keyboard based) and added marvelous ideas to have a touchscreen driven interface. As PalmOS, they did a great job. Too late to prevent Palm to win the market (well, they wasn't called "Palm" at that time)

  It is not easy to explain the user experience you get when using a newton,  take a few minutes to watch this video.  It is the first newton model (launched at 1992!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64QuJdJmCbA...related&search=

  That's "whole-screen" handwriting recognition,  printing to hundreds of printers out-of-the-box,  application inter-operation, etc.  Look at the way you select text!

  These are the user interface guidelines published by apple,  there's some philosopy in it!:UserInterfaceGuidelinesOS2.0.pdf

   Read at least the first pages of chapter 1,  and I'm sure that the next time you're developing a program you will remember it.

Amazing demo! It was made so much years ago but it's still amazing. The UserInterfaceGuidelinesOS2.0.pdf is very interesting too. I found that most enterprise of this period shared there GUI ideas without knowing it. Psion has the same ideas in there C SDK for Sibo device for exemple (1991).

It's like reading "How do palmOS and other touchscreen based PDA has born".

I found a lot of great website arroung application and OS screenshots but nothing like this demo. There's so much thing on the web:

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots
http://lowendmac.com/orchard/06/0207.html

[lpotter]

* don't have "Files" and "Folders" but a "Bag of Things" with search filters and tabs (e.g. ABC-DEF, Today-Yesterday-LastWeek)

Wasn't this why people didn't/don't like the DocTab (Sharp 1.xx and Current Opie)?

If it's well implemented it may work, but it depends what level of user you're aiming at. I do quite like being able to organise where my files are kept.


Si
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It wasn't popular because many people didn't know how categories work. It is outside of the well known 'desktop interface' paradigm (which doesn't work well on a small screen device), because it is designed to be simple. You can think of a category as a directory, if you like, only it doesn't have sub-categories.

[lpotter]

I'd like to see a small-systems environment tailored for screens from 320x240 to 800x600 recreated from scratch with the needs of embedded computing in mind. It should contain a set of convincing stock applications (PIM, Multimedia, Networking) that fit nicely into a no-less-but-astonishing UI, but should also contain a way to run "plain" X applications (for those geeks).

sounds like qtopia + xqt to me.

It should be using modern Linux technologies (like dbus, sysfs, udev) under the hood to create a snappy event based system with low power requirement. No polling is allowed in any case!

It should be fast.

It should be extensible -- but not too much. Since I'm the one preaching the choice-is-not-freedom-when-you-can-only-choose-from-insufficient-alternatives, I rather have a couple of killer apps than hundreds or thousands of sucky ones. Same goes for distributions btw and UI environments, btw.

Having to edit configuration files or dropping to the console must be a NO. NO! I mean it, really. NO NO NEVER!

Last but not least you need to make a comprehensive set of guidelines and a strong framework available in an SDK. To make it fun developing for the framework. Encourage multiple languages, but focus on one.
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ahh, ha! you're talking about qtopia 4!

[dhns]

* don't have "Files" and "Folders" but a "Bag of Things" with search filters and tabs (e.g. ABC-DEF, Today-Yesterday-LastWeek)

If it's well implemented it may work, but it depends what level of user you're aiming at. I do quite like being able to organise where my files are kept.

Yes, a great implementation is crucial. What about having objects in a list. And allowing to filter things (like the Application, Settings, Files tabs on SharpROM). But: ewach document has an attribute "Folder" where you can organize things. And, you can filter by Folders. So, Folders simply become a tag for documents that you can edit. And moving files around is simply changing the tag (the system could really move the file in its hierarchy).

I think the issue was that you could not properly define these document attributes. There should be one attribute for the physical storage location (builtin memory, CF, SD, network drive). One attribute for a filename (just a second tag) and a third one for the file path. So, listing a folder is the same as finding all entries with a given folder path attribute.

-- hns

[dhns]

I'd advocate making 'people' first class objects (like the newton and Nokia IT2006) and following the gimmie[1] design model.

[1] http://beatnik.infogami.com/Gimmie
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Looks like a good idea. People can be the visual representation of .vcf documents...

-- hns

[koen]

I'd advocate making 'people' first class objects (like the newton and Nokia IT2006) and following the gimmie[1] design model.

[1] http://beatnik.infogami.com/Gimmie
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Looks like a good idea. People can be the visual representation of .vcf documents...
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Actually the other way around since people are first class objects. A .vcf is a means to transport information on a person to another device, not an object by itself.

[amrein]

Some of the ideas of this thread are coming true. I just read a review of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10:

http://madpenguin.org/cms/index.php/?m=show&id=7150&page=3