Post by Peter QuirkOf course, it would involve changing some or all of the BitPim
interface to HTML,
I await your patch :-)
Post by Peter Quirkwhich in turn may provide opportunities for skinning and other
added-value.
I have never understood the fascination with skinning, and it
certainly doesn't apply to BitPim. (I think it is a crutch
for really bad design as well.) You could argue that it has
some benefit for single function applications such as
winamp. Even skins for more complex apps like Firefox
basically just change the icons.
Post by Peter QuirkThere's no doubt that a browser-based interface might make the
display of rich content easier.
Ummmm, actually there is lots of doubt. If doing everything
in a browser made rich content easier then people would have
started doing it when browsers first came out. (As an aside
I actually worked on the first commercial browser and added
many features common today :-)
As a simple example, you can't integrate with the native operating
system drag and drop, clipboard or printing. Heck you can't
even find out what the user's settings are in the OS (eg do
they want dark orange backgrounds?)
Using CSS you can treat HTML+DOM as a form of GDI. However it
is a fairly poor API both from the user and from the programmer
point of view.
Post by Peter QuirkAnyway, I encourage people to read the article and to check out
the highly pertinent demo. The proposal is still in development,
but stable enough for some proof-of-concept work.
I don't see the potential that you are seeing. While there may be
some appeal in the user effectively composing their own user
interface dynamically, that isn't the best thing. A well designed
UI will always better. I don't believe users want to be "programmers",
they do want to get their job done.
If you have ideas about improving the user interface, go ahead mocking
them up and post them here. I am 100% certain the UI can be improved.
However do make sure you also include SMS, wallpaper, ringtones etc
as well as consider interoperability with the OS (drag & drop, clipboard,
printing).
In retrospect, there are some things I would have done differently
if I had to start BitPim again. The most immediate one would have
been componentization of the underlying parts so they could be
used from COM/DLLs and the equivalent on Linux and Mac. I would
also have split the phone interface code from those modules which
are seperate from the gui. ie internally it would be like BitFling
is always in use. I have also briefly looked at using XUL for
the UI but that doesn't have all the needed features.
Roger