A plea for some fore thought.... (was Re: calendar questions)

[jg pa dec com (Jim Gettys)]

I second the complaint...  Or rather, this is a polite request for people
to start thinking about how things can be made to work on small displays;
in particular, I'm thinking along the lines of PDA displays...

For example, take look at:

http://www.research.digital.com/wrl/projects/Itsy/index.html
and
http://www.research.digital.com/wrl/projects/RocknScroll/RocknScrollOverview.htm

It runs Linux, of course...

It has a 320x200 pixel screen (on .18mm pitch).  A friend of mine
(Keith Packard, who did alot/most of the portable frame buffer code for
the X11 server) is porting X to this device, starting this week.

For input/output, we have a touchscreen, some buttons, and a G sensor,
and audio in/out.  Keyboard, what keyboard?  Mouse, what mouse?

For those of you not familiar with Bob Scheifler's "Hands Off X!"
work (speech recognition control of the X Window System), you should
come to Linux Expo (I'll show part of a tape he made 7 years ago!).

One of the first applications one would like, of course, on such a device,
is a calendar program...

Time to start rethinking GUI work; nice as Gnome is, I'd also like some 
of the applications, at least, to be usable on such devices. I'm not sure 
we can cram gnome into this generation of Itsy, but you know the relentless 
tide of technology as well as I do.  Itsy has maybe 100-200 times the 
compute, and many times the memory that we had when developing X in the 
first place (the place where it is starved is the amount of non-volitile 
memory, where we had disks that are MUCH larger than Itsy's flash ROM)...  
This class of device is something that you will be buying within a year 
or two, so I the time to start thinking about this is NOW! 

			- Jim Gettys