If you follow my blogs and my tweets, you know me as an Android fan boy. There are a number of reasons why but the main ones are that it provides a huge leap in usability and I can build from source myself and get it running on any device I want. And that includes x86 PCs, some provided by AOSP itself and a lot from the valiant effort put on by the android-x86 gang. And now having seen live action videos of the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer, the Android tablet that transforms into a netbook, I am even more convinced how cool it would be to have Android as my PC environment.
But, there's a problem. The applications I use, and that of course includes Eclipse, don't run on Android. I also spend a lot of time doing embedded system platform builds and the Android user-space is missing almost every utility I would need, including the gnu compilers. Now nothing technical prevents these things from being ported over to Android as it is built on a Linux/FreeBSD inspired base and you could probably work around the few twists that come with it. And I do know a few people that would love to see Eclipse running on these Android netbook type devices. And maybe there is a future in that.
On the other hand, I have everything I want on Linux. But I find the usability horrible. I've had a chance to play with GNOME 3 with Fedora 15 and it is a big improvement, but I fear we'll be living a long time with the legacy GTK-based tools which are really getting out-dated. Even Qt comes with it's own set of issues.
I blame it all on X in the end. It probably doesn't deserve it, but I've been an X user ever since I built X11R2 myself 20+ years ago. It's old and it's done. The new effort behind the Wayland display server provides a much better architecture IMHO. It gets rid of all the X legacy and builds directly on top of EGL and OpenGL ES. That should give us the flexibility to do some really good things with usability with the help of accelerated graphics hardware and physics engines. That's what Android Honeycomb does, and there's no reason why we couldn't provide an equivalent environment for Linux. It's just a matter of someone driving the vision in that direction.
And who knows. Once Wayland is in place, how much effort would it be to provide the Android run-time mixed in with the Linux user-space. The RIM guys have figured that out with the PlayBook and their Android support someone astutely coined FrankenBerry. Wayland could easily support a client that drew at the command of an Android app.
No matter how you slice it, it's a great time to be in the software business. The mobile guys are driving innovation in usability. Us desktop guys need to find a way to catch up.
I have an Android phone, and I love it. The UI gets the job done, and I have very few complaints with how things are handled.
ReplyDeleteBut there's no way in hell that I want Android OS on my Desktop. It's been designed for a clumsy imprecise input device on an extremely small screen. When it comes to an actual desktop, I want a few very simple features that Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and Windows all provide excellently.
I am an Ubuntu/Gnome user. I've tried KDE and Unity, and looked at video of Gnome 3. I plan on sticking with Gnome 2.x for as long as possible, then switching to XFCE when that becomes impractical.
Why? The Apple UI that has become so popular in recent years seems to be emulated by Canonical, Microsoft, Gnome, and even Google. But I am not a fan. I see it as consuming screen real estate, and making basic features such as task switching and opening moderately used programs overly difficult with no real benefit. It doesn't decrease the amount of mouse movement necessary or the amount of clicking. If anything, it encourages me to increase my usage of keyboard shortcuts. Which isn't a sign of a good GUI.
Anyway, short and simple of all this is that the most common complaint I hear about Eclipse (in terms of UI), is that people don't like the default colours. This means you are currently doing a fine job. There's honestly no need to shoehorn a completely new UI in there, unless you really anticipate people wanting to write code on a touch screen.
Great points David. In a previous post I suggested Android for the Desktop, but I have came to the same conclusion you have. There are things missing that make it difficult for large multi-screen desktop scenarios. The lack of multi-window support being the one that blocks me.
ReplyDeleteEveryone has different needs and wants in desktop GUI design. It would be great to get everyone's good ideas together in a legacy free environment and see what we could come up with. That's why I'm excited about Wayland. It disrupts the stack and opens the door.
Android is great, but does it really have any promises of longevity that would outlast the browser? I appreciate the business model protections around the EPL and compiled Java code (such as the Dalvik VM conveys), but I'm not convinced that the browser isn't a better platform on which to focus. I know there are some efforts to remote the Eclipse interface into the browser. Do you think you can educate us on them?
ReplyDeleteI think people put too much faith in the browser. I don't remember anyone saying they wish Angry Birds was a browser based app. It could and probably will, but will it be any better? I doubt it.
ReplyDeleteOne more reason why Eclipse SWT should be ported to Qt: http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/
ReplyDeleteThese guys are porting Qt to Android.