iLiad development: maemo? Alone? Familiar?

[arivero]

Still, we have a machine three times faster than the Nokia 770 (according the bogomips loop) and four times faster than a librie. We could do something creative.

My own intention, primary, is to be able to read .tex documents and djvu scans from the P2P network. So I am sorry I am not going to be creative :-(

[Laurens]

Originally Posted by ali

However, the disappointing truth is that the software on the Iliad is just a cheap collection of desktop software ports.

That's indeed very disappointing. I haven't followed the many Iliad discussions going on recently, so this is news to me. I can imagine developers sitting on the fence on whether to develop Iliad-specific software. I presume their API is not cross-platform.

[ali]

Originally Posted by DHer

which part of power saving shouldn't work, in your opinion?

Clocking down the processor, check, making the whole thingie hibernate, check. Both i can even do on my notebook running linux. Anything else? Ok, switching wlan off. Here i trust in iRex.

You can write software that does things efficiently. keep filesystem access low. do not spread things among processes that need inter-process communication protocols. Do not use a windowmanager that checks all the time if some window decorations have to be drawn, windows have to be moved or updated, if you don't intend to actually show some windows. Write applications that *know* that the device is single-user and essentially single-task, so they can throttle the processor when there's no user interaction - as opposed to when some heuristics notices there's no processor load.

And concerning the pdf renderer: what's easier to do: write your own alternative pdf viewer for a running linux with an X server or do everything from scratch on a new device with strange new custom-built OS which most probably would never receive a proper SDK?

I don't know. I remember someone describing a commercial Zaurus pdf viewer (should be easy to port) that was written from scratch for this cpu and unbelievably fast. For 670 Euros I'd expect a little bit more than xpdf. But it looks to me like they took the easy road everywhere. As if everything was temporary dirty hacks that became permanent.

[R2D2]

Originally Posted by ali

I don't know. I remember someone describing a commercial Zaurus pdf viewer (should be easy to port) that was written from scratch for this cpu and unbelievably fast.

Picsel Browser. Seeing is believing:

little review with video

EDIT:

The interesting thing was, that it did open huge PDF, all it needed was enough memory...