I have a simple question about Android in which I have not found the simple answer to... (Although I think I know, I just want some clarification). I recently switched over to Windows Phone 7 because of various reasons, I will not name them here as that is an entirely different subject, however one of the reasons i switched was because of overall responsiveness of the OS. Why does Android's touch response feel sooo clunky? Yeah transitions and app launches are nice and quick, but I mean like pinch-to-zoom, and scrolling... I have played with the latest and greatest both rooted (with and without custom rom) and non rooted (with or without OEM UI), Motorola Xoom, Atrix 4G whatever is being claimed latest and greatest. But no matter what they all have the same touch response lag no matter what. This, believe it or not, is a major deal breaker for me, and before the majority of you speak, I'll speak for you; "why is something so simple and small, barely even considered a nuisance, be such a nuisance?" for me, i love fluidity, so, it just is. At this question however i do retort; if its such a "simple" or "small" nuisance, why can't it "simply" be coded to feel as fluid as Windows Phone 7, or iOS?
Luisraul924 said:
I have a simple question about Android in which I have not found the simple answer to... (Although I think I know, I just want some clarification). I recently switched over to Windows Phone 7 because of various reasons, I will not name them here as that is an entirely different subject, however one of the reasons i switched was because of overall responsiveness of the OS. Why does Android's touch response feel sooo clunky? Yeah transitions and app launches are nice and quick, but I mean like pinch-to-zoom, and scrolling... I have played with the latest and greatest both rooted (with and without custom rom) and non rooted (with or without OEM UI), Motorola Xoom, Atrix 4G whatever is being claimed latest and greatest. But no matter what they all have the same touch response lag no matter what. This, believe it or not, is a major deal breaker for me, and before the majority of you speak, I'll speak for you; "why is something so simple and small, barely even considered a nuisance, be such a nuisance?" for me, i love fluidity, so, it just is. At this question however i do retort; if its such a "simple" or "small" nuisance, why can't it "simply" be coded to feel as fluid as Windows Phone 7, or iOS?
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I will try to answer since I've been using android before. android now as I believe is still in development stage. especially because it started from open source, where many developers get involved to participate in android development. unlike windows or the IOS platform. development is only done by the company itself through microsoft and apple. Except for third-party application development
android is a system (for run smoothly) with very powerful hardware. so that the source code would require a very complicated of encoding. Its a very difficult job to sync between the needs of software with hardware which is available. and vice versa. in an application such as pinching and scrolling there is more than one command which contains a lot of code. and should be remembered that this is a system. which are all related to each other for the overall operations to run smoothly based on the minimum demand of the hardware required. if there is one character in which is wrong of encoding or difference may cause the application not running properly.
for high-end android device such as Xoom, atrik 4G I'm sure the hardware is not an issue. I'm sure it was more caused by the complexity of encoding in one of the applications listed that is running inside in the whole operating system, making it not running smoothly. because so many commands which must be running at the same time is what make pinching and scrolling activity to be "clunky" like you said. you can differentiate by turning off the internet connection or turn off unnecessary applications running in the background. But I'm sure very soon android operating system will have a system which is more stable and efficient in encoding such as those held by the windows or apple.
My answer may be added by other members of the more expert in these matters. as a newbie, i am just trying to help based on the knowledge I had acquired over the years. CMIIW
Yeah I figured it would be something like that, I owned a Droid (1st gen.) and I had multiple setups from completely stock to my favorite, Cyanogenmod (always on the latest stable build, although I've already flashed CM7 RC2 and its probably the fastest its ever been at 800 MHz) everything was perfect except; scrolling and pinch-to-zoom. The scrolling is almost there, it actually lags for a bit but if I leave my finger on the page, it locks on to that position and stays there, but once I lift it to continue scrolling down or up it'll lag a bit again. The pinch zooming is just horrible no matter what. Unfortunately, given the nature of open source, and coding software in general, there is no such thing as "finished" software, so since this is open source, and the software is basically written to run on "nearly" whatever device you choose to flash it on, i don't think that problem will ever be solved. However, if Android does eventually reach that richness of responsiveness, then i will more than gladly switch back.
issues of a system running smoothly is different from one device to another device.
due to the wide variety of different android devices that causes the emergence of issues on the system stability. it was time to google as the main developer sets the standards for the development of next android os. while there is no standardization of hardware is set by google. it will be very difficult for other developers to write code/adjust performance in the operating system command. all this time writing code is must be adapted to the device from vendor itself. This will bring up the differences result of writing the code on other devices from another vendors (competitors). so if we running bencmark test or head to head test on both devices from different vendor the result will not be the same.
and if there will be a standarization set by google i believed it will not againts a spirit of an open source
I think the hardware that the WinCE (well...the shoe still fits) and Android phones are made on is essentially the same, in terms of the CPU power, the actual CPUs, the memory and the various other systems (graphics, etc.). Maybe not identical but overlapping classes and performance.
I haven't played with the new WinPhones but have noticed that every Android phone, no matter how fast and how "bare" factory, sometimes goes out to lunch. Apparently that's just the way the OS is written, it sometimes goes off to do other things internally (loading code? checking hardware states?) and you can't do anything except wait for it to come back.
But then again, almost every OS does that at times, including the main Windows OSes. That's just how they are done these days. If you had a cell phone fifteen year ago, you could turn it on and dial NOW. With any of the new cell phones? Can you do a cold power up and have a functioning phone in less than 30 seconds? Uh, no. But they call that progress, because you rarely have to power them off these days.
Every OS has tradeoffs, if the WinPhone makes you happier, by all means do it.
Rred said:
I think the hardware that the WinCE (well...the shoe still fits) and Android phones are made on is essentially the same, in terms of the CPU power, the actual CPUs, the memory and the various other systems (graphics, etc.). Maybe not identical but overlapping classes and performance.
I haven't played with the new WinPhones but have noticed that every Android phone, no matter how fast and how "bare" factory, sometimes goes out to lunch. Apparently that's just the way the OS is written, it sometimes goes off to do other things internally (loading code? checking hardware states?) and you can't do anything except wait for it to come back.
But then again, almost every OS does that at times, including the main Windows OSes. That's just how they are done these days. If you had a cell phone fifteen year ago, you could turn it on and dial NOW. With any of the new cell phones? Can you do a cold power up and have a functioning phone in less than 30 seconds? Uh, no. But they call that progress, because you rarely have to power them off these days.
Every OS has tradeoffs, if the WinPhone makes you happier, by all means do it.
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I agree with you, I do like both OS's for their own benefits, currently I do like WP7 better than Android and keeps me "happy". However if you notice; that's not my prime motive in starting this thread, I didn't come here to say one is better than the other. I just want to know why those two simple things (scrolling and pinch zooming) are not fluid on Android. You can't use the excuse that it's different hardware because Microsoft is playing that trick too. You can't use the "its busy doing other things" excuse either, while WP7 doesn't have multi-tasking, iOS does (somewhat) so it can go "do" something else but will still feel fluid. In a multi-OEM environment it is up to the OEM to optimize it for the device it runs on, which is why it baffles me that even Sense and MotoBlur and others make performance decline a bit and still has the lag. Shouldn't it be the opposite?
Nothing? So no one can tell me why Android's responsiveness (scrolling, pinch-zooming) sucks?
Luisraul924 said:
Nothing? So no one can tell me why Android's responsiveness (scrolling, pinch-zooming) sucks?
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The answer is quite simple (and the above replies are miles off the mark). Hardware acceleration.
WP7 has it, Android doesn't.
FloatingFatMan said:
The answer is quite simple (and the above replies are miles off the mark). Hardware acceleration.
WP7 has it, Android doesn't.
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So the hardware acceleration runs throughout the entire OS? I thought it was mainly just the XNA and Silverlight stuff that was accelerated (I do believe those are different than native OS code, as Microsoft isnt allowing developers to write apps with native code. Future compatibility issues I guess)
Of course it's the entire OS. Why do you think MS's minimum spec stipulations are so high? This is what Windows Mobile was so plagued with, and how MS fixed that problem.
Luis-
"So the hardware acceleration runs throughout the entire OS?"
It isn't so much that the hardware acceleration runs in the OS, but that the hardware itself has certain routines built into it, on the firmware level, so the OS can just call those routines instead of trying to calculate them.
To oversimplify a bit, for instance, a hardware accelerator for "zoom in" might be programmed into the video chip system to automatically tell it "take the 50 pixels around this spot and blow up up to 250 pixels, refresh screen" where the OS would be saying "OK, let's take this spot, draw a square with a 50 pixel radius around it, now let's take each of those pixels and transpose it over twice the radius and go fill..." sending a long slow string of commands, each computed by the CPU.
When the CPU can offload all of that into a simple "zoom" command to the video chip, the CPU is now free to do other things. Like, respond to your next input, or push the next menu onto the display.
When you have ironclad control over the hardware--it can be a great way to make systems faster. And more stable.
Rred said:
Luis-
"So the hardware acceleration runs throughout the entire OS?"
It isn't so much that the hardware acceleration runs in the OS, but that the hardware itself has certain routines built into it, on the firmware level, so the OS can just call those routines instead of trying to calculate them.
To oversimplify a bit, for instance, a hardware accelerator for "zoom in" might be programmed into the video chip system to automatically tell it "take the 50 pixels around this spot and blow up up to 250 pixels, refresh screen" where the OS would be saying "OK, let's take this spot, draw a square with a 50 pixel radius around it, now let's take each of those pixels and transpose it over twice the radius and go fill..." sending a long slow string of commands, each computed by the CPU.
When the CPU can offload all of that into a simple "zoom" command to the video chip, the CPU is now free to do other things. Like, respond to your next input, or push the next menu onto the display.
When you have ironclad control over the hardware--it can be a great way to make systems faster. And more stable.
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Great answer. Makes sense, thanks. Now given that this is an Android section lets talk more on that, will it ever be possible to have hardware acceleration on Android, Whether it be through custom ROMs or OEM devices?
"will it ever be possible to have hardware acceleration on Android,"
Possible? Sure, I've seen pigs on the wing.<G> Don't hold your breath for it though. Android is an unruly place where even ordinary hardware is often not supported by the OS and software breaks on every new phone. In order for hardware acceleration to work, the OS needs to have routines and drivers for standard hardware, which means locking down a hardware spec. Which is so very Undroid.
Can't see that happening, unless ten year from now someone invents a "standard universal Android cell phone chipset" and all the manufacturers get paid to exclusively use it. That's the ticket--use our chipset, we'll pay you to use it, and oh, yes, it will play one of "our" ads every time your screen turns on. Or you launch a new app. Or place a call.
(See? Things could get worse!<G>)
Here's an interesting discussion...
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914
burtcom said:
Here's an interesting discussion...
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914
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Well as far as I read, it was just a bunch of "me too" and "I agree" lol I got bored reading that I still dont think Google has an official statement on the matter do they?
Related
Impressions from HTC Cruise - Windows Mobile
Hello All,
I have been relatively new here, but I thought I could contribute in the forums by posting my (unbiased) views about HTC Cruise here, hoping other people may find them useful. I am a software developer, so although I do not have an experience with hi-tech PDAs and smartphones, (never owned such a device before), I am fine with the technicalities of such devices.
My everyday phone was a simple sony ericson K510i . What had always annoyed me was that in most "simple" phones, it was quite hard to control the phone via my PC, do backups, backup contacts, SMSes, etc. My sony was good, I had found "MYPhoneExplorer" which pretty much did all those things for my phone. The screen was little bit outdated in terms of resolution, but I did not mind much.
And then came iPhone (which I never owned). I was impressed by its design, usability and user friendliness. I also liked the idea of having WiFi on it. I was close to buying that phone and using one of the available tools to unlock it, (noway I would pay for a contract - I am UK based). My brother who is into mobiles and gadgets more than I am, commented on the fact that iPhone is an "old" generation phone in terms of phone technologies and overpriced. I soon realised it was quite overpriced and started looking at alternatives. I was happy to see HTC would release a really cool phone, which I could get as my Christmas gift (yes, dream on, I had my eyes on it since November and managed to get it this February)...
So, what are my impressions so far?
I dare to say, quite mixed...
On the one hand this device is really wicked and cool! It has all the things I had always liked and needed in a single device. Packing a GPS, a radio, 3G, WiFi in a nice package is just amazing. I can now listen to music, watch videos, find my way around using GPS and have a nice PDA. These are really cool things! No need to have my pockets filled with separate devices...
On the other hand, this phone costed me little bit less than 400 pounds. One can argue you can get a laptop for that price, but then again, a laptop is not a phone. The video issues has not been much of an issue for me, I encode my videos at QVGA and all is well. However, I do get *very* upset when I realise that there is hidden potential in the hardware platform which has not been utilised. What I found bad straight from the moment i used it, is that when i press the "phone-call" hard button, there really is a lag when drawing the blue rectangle above the dialpad, (I am talking about the area which shows the names of your contacts as you type the numbers below.) I mean, come on, so much CPU power, and I can see the blue area being drawn? The other things is that if a couple of applications are running, then the phone does not seem to be operating so smoothly. Again, in order to be fair, it is still very usable. However, as things stand now in the market, in terms of specifications this phone is easily on the upper part, so in my opinion it should be fast, not just "very usable".
My other bit of criticism is probably related to Windows rather than HTC cruise. I find this OS quite interesting on the device, there is a huge applications' base and the things that are missing can be coded by talented people. However, I find the platform a little bit of a pain to use in a pure phone context. Why do i have to check an option everytime I want to get back a delivery report for my SMS? Why do I have to hack the registry to make this permanent? I set a wallpaper in my phone, then I set its transparency, then I realise it is hidden by the today plugin, which I can of course disable. If I disable it I loose certain features which are accessible straight away. I can of course get a new plugin that matchs my needs. Why is it so hard to have tabs with incoming/outgoing/missed calls? This is a feature that phones that cost 10 times less have. Of course Windows 6.1 has this, but then I would have to "install" a new ROM. Simple question: Why do I have to do these things? Why dont' they get it right from the beginning? Don't get me wrong, I am a technology enthusiast and I am sure I will manage to set up the phone the way I want. A number of users out there will do the same thing. However, is this platform one that non-enthusiasts would find user-friendly?
Look at all those skins and modding. Really cool. And the moment you press a button on your really cool new Today plugin, an ungly Windows application will pop up.
I hope that my criticism will be received well here! I like the phone, Windows is cool on it, but I think Microsoft has quite some way to go in order to make their platform really simple to use and user-friendly (think iPhone for example, my parents could use that, but I am quite sure if I show them my phone, they will not know how to make a a phonecall with it!)
In many ways some requirements are contradictory: Being user-friendly means you may have to hide settings, having your platform run on a variety of hardware means you cut corners here and there. Hopefully Microsoft will get it right with version 7 and 8, screenshots look quite good.
As for HTC... They lost a little bit of their credibility with a couple of issues for me. First the sound issue with the french rom which was initially denied and then fixed by people in this forum, then of course the drivers issue. I intend to make good use of this cool phone and customise it to my needs, it just takes time.
For your information, I find these applications useful:
Coreplayer (obviously!)
TouchPal keyboard works good for me
WKTask (and get rid off that default task switcher)
MyMobiler installs on your PC and a little "daemon-service" on your phone, (which you can disable). Then it allows you to control your phone from your desktop.
PocketCM did not particularly appeal to me, so I removed it
FunContact was cool, and loved it. Unfortunately, two things were not so good:
a) Splash screen and loading time
b) sometimes it made my phone freeze
Thanks for reading this (long) post,
Michael
Good post...Here are my impressions as well.
I used to carry a Palm Tx and a Motorala SLVR. I have been looking for the most ideal device to "do it all", PDA, phone (quad band gsm, tri band umts), wifi, and gps. There was nothing realy that appealing on the market until I read about the HTC Touch Cruise.
I read about people's complaints about the "driver" issues and hardware acceleration, and decided to take the risk and bought the phone from a gsm seller online. The phone was unbranded and did not have any stupid carrier proprietary software.
For the most part, I am very happy with the Touch Cruise. I have dumped the palm pda and the slvr, and have not looked back.
I just spent the last 2 weeks traveling to UK (London), Germany (Frankfurt), and Italy (Padova). As a mobile phone, the Touch Cruise functioned flawlessly and had 3G connections where they were available. Couldn't have asked for better features out of a "world" phone.
The TomTom GPS also ran quite well (Western Europe maps). Had to drive alot in Frankfurt and never got lost. Even traffic reports were right on the money.
As for a PDA, it blows the Palm syncing and calendar features out of the water. I used to be a Palm pilot only person, but Palm has become a dinasaur in their attutude to features and interface. The pocket pc has in my opinion surpassed them.
As a portable media device, it does kind of ok . Core Media Player is a must install, microsoft's media players still suck and are not usable and dont support all codecs. This device is not really ideal for video in my opinion. You have to re-encode videos to QVGA for ppc level quality, then video will play fine. You cant simply take a wmv file and dump it on the device to view, it wont work. As for music/mp3's, it works great. I got on a 10 hour flight from UK to US, and used it play music and games, and still had 40% battery charge left over and used an hour of GPS on the way home, with 20% left over.
In all fairness, the HTC could run a little faster, but I blame Microsoft and HTC for hogging up the cpu and not using hardware acceleration.
Since media (video) is not high on my list of required features, I am quite happy with the HTC Touch Cruise.
darkazally, I tend to agree with you really...
I guess if one did not have such a device before or had a really old one, then HTC Cruise is really super. On the other hand I can see certain people's frustration with Cruise. It is mostly people who owned 3 or 4 PDAs before and were probably expecting to be blown away by its specs; I kind of sypathise with them....
I read in an article written by someone at Microsoft, that companies tend to overload Windows with their own propriatory software and then the whole experience goes downwards. He mentioned that for the next versions of windows mobile, they intend to post stricter requirements just because of this situation.
As I also read in these forums, people who got their devices from O2 (just to mention a single company), seem to have more issues with HTC's performance...
I enjoy using the phone everyday and I am in the process of customising it to my needs, though it takes some time!
Uhhh mymobiler is amazing thanks for posting that! That is frickin sweet!
Great review, I tend to agree.
As far as PIM Management, I came from using two devices, a slim panasonic phone and a Xircom Rex 6000 PDA in the early part of this decade (circa 2001), like you I converged them into a Sony Ericsson phone (T610>T616) which had limited capabilities and lacked a lot of features my Rex had. In 2006, I got my first Windows Mobile smartphone, a Qtek 8310 (HTC Tornado), and now I have the HTC Touch Cruise.
Ever since getting into Windows Mobile, I thought that HTC/Microsoft had delivered great functionality, but poor usability and way too much lag for such high powered devices. Take for instance the settings panel. There are probably over 8 programs (4+networking icons, 3+ button config icons, ect) in there that only have one check box, when I'm sure HTC/Microsoft could very easily put them into one or two easy to use program with a Help feature.
But at the end of the day, I don't care if no one can use my device as long as I understand it. Additional consolation is provided in the fact that this phone looks so damned sexy
My Own impression
First of all, I'm new here & let me introduce my self...
I'm Richard & i'm from Indonesia.
I've waited for +3 months, before I decided to buy HTC Touch Cruise.
My other candidate are Atom Life & Nokia N82.
Soon (2 days) after my pal (who own a PDA shop) introduce me to Touch Cruise, I bought it
First impression is luxury.
Second impression........Windows Mobile sucks......
I have done hard reset for 4 times now....due to mis configure the registry....
I've done quite intensive test on my Touch Cruise, including Video,Audio,GPS,3G & Internet,Battery life & Applications.
This is my score (0-10):
1. Stability : 3 -> Typical Windows product
2. Looks : 9
3. Dimension : 8
4. Features : 8
5. Usability : 8
6. User Friendliness : 6
7. Battery Life : 7
Average score : 7
The Driver issue doesn't bothered me yet, so I'm very pleased with my new Touch Cruise
NOTE:
FYI,try not to uninstall anything from your TC.
Microsoft Windows product tends to leave "garbage" into the Registry & it will slow down your TC.
Choose wisely before installing & if you have to uninstall,search & delete any leftover inside the registry.
d4rkkn16ht said:
1. Stability : 3 -> Typical Windows product
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Click to collapse
What's wrong with stability? I'd have to agree that it is probably not the best device overall, but I didn't have a single stability issue with it. Maybe, you've got a defective one?
You know, there are certain lag things that I don't think are due to video drivers. I mentioned this in another thread "Why the lag" but I used to have a Cingular 8525 and supposedly that device had video drivers. It still lagged with a phone skin when you hit the phone button. Rotating the screen was still slow. I hate little things that lag like that. it should be smooth navigation / interface.
The device doesn't have a cohesive feel to it when we have to customize the **** out of it to get it to work the way we want to. You're right when we make a today screen look good then all the underlying apps are ugly windows apps. Your transparency issue, that can only be done from within the Windows picture viewer not the HTC photo viewer. You need to install your own video player. The HTC video browser app only shows videos with certain extensions. It's like you have to have a specific app for every little thing and then it feels like there isn't a streamlined feel to the device.
I gotta give credit to HTC for trying to improve the interface with their apps, the Windows interface is archaic. It's just the combo of the 2 doesn't allow for a polished interface.
hambola said:
The device doesn't have a cohesive feel to it when we have to customize the **** out of it to get it to work the way we want to.
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On the other hand, thanks to HTC for a platform that allows us to do so and even greater kudos to all the xda-developer wizards who make it possible (and relatively easy for the most part).
Not enough can be said for xda. Although I'm a new poster I've been reading these forums for about a year now. Helped me out greatly with the 8525 and is proving to be helpful with the Cruise.
>You're right when we make a today screen look good then all the underlying apps are ugly windows apps.
I am happy we agree on this, I just wish it had a little bit of the Apple touch on it, that's all....
>Your transparency issue, that can only be done from within the Windows picture viewer not the HTC photo viewer.
All I wanted is a kind of minimal interface, so I can set my own wallpaper and not have it hidden by the huge HTC today plug-in. I have installed spb shell for a couple of weeks now and it looks great. I also discovered the HTC Home Customiser which looks cool, so, that's nice too.
>You need to install your own video player...
I think HTC should actually write a very generous paycheck for the people that developed CorePlayer. Without that one, Cruise would be a *little* bit of a disaster.
Overall I guess Windows is a versatile OS with lots and lots of space of customisation and at the end you do get it right, it just takes a lot of patience and resets to get there...
rev3nant said:
What's wrong with stability? I'd have to agree that it is probably not the best device overall, but I didn't have a single stability issue with it. Maybe, you've got a defective one?
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After some intensive test, I found some irritating bug that caused stability issues.
Quick Menu sometimes disappeared after running several applications.
System Hang at random cause.
Some system settings cannot be changed even if you've already change it.
Redundancy in Registry Entry that can cause stability issues if you change the entry. (not considered a bug if you don't change it)
and some other (not quite sure yet...)
Have you tried a different ROM?
Firstly, I've been following the leaks so far, and so I don't want to hear, oh there won't be a multitouch. The bottom line is, we don't know what the final product will be.
Secondly, it goes without saying, that I support any efforts by MS to incorporate capacitative screens. Currently, there are two known and upcoming solutions to replace the stylus, one an RF pen (a stylus that should work with cap. screens- google it!) and a solution that MS has recently invested in, called something like N-trig.
The purpose of this thread is to discuss, and make content those who are against multitouch if it comes to 6.5, or for that matter, 7.
Now, the main argument against multitouch, is that it is against single-handed usage. Here I will list why that is a moot/null/void argument:
- Using the iPhone as an example firstly (and pretty much throughout but it is not due to me having a liking for it, rather I hate it, but I hope to convey a more profound message), though there is argument over the pinch gesture in Safari (their internet browser), the double-tap to zoom is still available. So, the double-tap that we are used to in Opera, is also in Safari. So one can have it both ways. So, to sum up this point, devs would need to make sure that their programs are made for single handed usage, but that multitouch offers a different (and as some would argue, more enhanced) method of using the phone. So single-handed usage is still there, basically.
- Some games, require pressing of more than one button simultaneously. Now if buttons A, B and C are onscreen and are only viable via touch entry, then we're screwed once again as only one given button can be pressed at one time. If you're a gamer, you will know how big a limitation this is to your phone. It hurts in so many scenarios. If you're not into games, or your games are limited to puzzles: trust me, this is a biggie!
- A similar and relevant point; phones like Touch HD bear the brunt of lacking multitouch, as they don't even have a D-pad for games. So all buttons onscreen (D-pad inclusive) can only be pressed one-at-a-time!
- Whether you like this app or not, it demonstrates that some apps simply cannot do without multitouch. Why put limitations? If you want to argue it is against single-touch usage, then press one button at a time !
- Another app that is somewhat heartwarming . I've used it on an acquaintance's iPhone, and it's nice to swirl two of your fingers through the pond making multiple ripples. Again, just use single touch if you're against double ripples .
- Text entry for those of us that type at lightning speed would be hindered where we are required to press one button right next to the next one in quick succession. Why put this limitation?
- I will add more here onwards if something comes to mind. Maybe. Maybe not.
So all in all, single handed usage can still be there, and MS can enforce this in their SkyStore (app store equivalent), though granted it could be difficult. But most developers would do this, as most do what their customers want, not what I, the dev want.
LASTLY, this is not a WM bashing thread if you think like that, so stop hating! This is for improvements only!
Just to let you know...it's not all M$'s fault..Mostly HTC and the companys that make the devices. Just look at the omnia. It has a capactive touchscreen.
Good Points, and just because WM6.5 has Mutlitouch available doesn't mean devs or phone builders would HAVE to use it.
I'm a big fan of "many options."
Side Note: Moved to General Discussion.
Kraize said:
Just to let you know...it's not all M$'s fault..Mostly HTC and the companys that make the devices. Just look at the omnia. It has a capactive touchscreen.
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Is this truly true ? If so, why doesn't Samsung advertise it as much? Also, doesn't the small buttons become difficult to use?
JimmyMcGee said:
Good Points, and just because WM6.5 has Mutlitouch available doesn't mean devs or phone builders would HAVE to use it.
I'm a big fan of "many options."
Side Note: Moved to General Discussion.
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This is precisely my point! The only little niggle is that devs should make sure that productivity tools allow single handed usage as well. One way would be to enforce this through the SkyStore. Another would be to let the magic happen itself.
I really want to see what people will say against my strong defence of multitouch. Come on people!
It will raise the cost of the devices (both due to the much more expensive screen AND the need for a special, larger stylus) and create a further layer of incompatibility between WM devices (those with multi-touch and those without).
Surur
surur said:
and create a further layer if incomparability between WM devices (those with multi-touch and those without).
Surur
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Which is why everyone should have to buy a new device when Windows Mobile 7 is released.
Seems people are forgeting WM6.5 is more like Vista, a stop gap before the better OS ie Windows 7
Why WM6.5 does not have mltitouch ?
I will try to answer this question.
The big hardware manifacturers are in the begining of producin multitouch capable phones (you all know that you need multitouch capable digitizer in order to be able to use multitouch). Microsoft communicated with manifacturers and they were not ready with such devices, which is the reason multitouch to be reserved for windows mobile 7.
Seems people are forgeting WM6.5 is more like Vista, a stop gap before the better OS ie Windows 7
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Totally agree
I see no real benefit in multi-touch on small screen. granted, in games with on devices with minimal input buttons, but until device manufactures actually start releasing 3D drivers for the devices the point about gaming isn't of much substance because there will only be mediocre games.
I don't know what the masses want but I see little benefit in it on screens that one can stretch the thumb from bottom left of the device and reach the top right.
I rather draw a counter clockwise circle to zoom and a clockwise to zoom out.
the real benefit is in the screen response, not the multi-touch. aside from gaming, tell me what other real benefit is there? because I don't see it.
Text entry for those of us that type at lightning speed would be hindered where we are required to press one button right next to the next one in quick succession. Why put this limitation?
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I think this depends on the sip you're using and have no reliance on multi-touch capabilities. I see myself as a very fast typist and this is thanks to the sip I'm using.
do this, ask your friend to do this with his iPhone: press 2 keys at the same time while typing the word "Quilts", so your friend would type it like this "Qu" then "il" then "ts" and tell us what's the result. I am pretty curious as to what the results will be. I would ask my girl to do it but she's at work now.
I've been at XDA for 2 years, initially trying to get my T-Mobile MDA to perform better, and for this past year my T-Mobile WING. I've never owned an iPhone -- nor have I ever sat down to ask friends of mine who have iPhones these questions. But now I am curious:
Apple makes killer products with thoughtful attention to product design, customer usability design, graphical interface, and occasionally some software/hardware breakthroughs (like multi-touch for the iphone). Then they market to consumers like nobody else, in every sales channel. This is all the "in-front of the curtain" stuff everyone knows.
But I know from being a Mac user since 1986 with my original MacSE, all way up to the current Mac Pro desktop and MacBook Pro laptop, that "behind the curtain" they ALL lock-up at times, requiring restarts, etc. And servicing. I just got my Mac Pro desktop back from repair where a hard drive failed. ... But I am out of touch completely with the world of iPhones.
Some of you have iPhones. I'm curious on a given day, how many apps can you run simultaneously, and how often does an iPhone freeze up requiring a reset? For comparative purposes, on my "XDA-modified" Wing (HTC Herald) -- which has an old & slow processor, and very litle RAM, I can now, after many software improvements, run Google Maps, Contact Manager, Notes, Total Commander, OperaMini browser, "Photos & Videos" photo cropper, and sometimes my MP3 player all open at same time, and not crash. My MP3 player *will* cause all that to lock up, and I know this, so I don't normally do this, but under normal usage, all of the above WITHOUT the MP3 player is doable), and I task-switch between these open apps.
How much can the iPhone handle simultaneously?
Do they freeze up time to time?
If so, how often for an average user?
What's the remedy? A "restart"?
This is not a "shootout" question. It really is just curiosity because I hear all the time the many great things about the iPhone (but that it lacks video, and MMS messaging), but I have no clue at all if they generally never lock up, or if they do. thanks, in advance for any comments.
quicksite said:
How much can the iPhone handle simultaneously?
Do they freeze up time to time?
If so, how often for an average user?
What's the remedy? A "restart"?
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a) for an "average" user - 1 app at a time (the exception being itunes + whatever app you want to use.)
for someone who is willing to mod there iphone (jailbreak + backgrounder app) i'll reckon 3 - 4 apps.
b) hardly, again for an average user this would be even less, probably once a couple of months.
if you are into cutting edge stuff then more freq., maybe once a week.
c)1) hold the home button , this should force the the app to close.
2) if the above step does not work, turn of the phone by holding the power button
3)if that does not work, reboot by holding the power and home button simultaneously.
Thats being generous Yes the iPhone DOES lock up and freeze, fairly often. At least as much as a factory standard WinMo device, if not more. Of course WinMos, being much more open can be modified and as such they have the potential to be less reliable if the modding isnt careful.
rovex said:
Thats being generous Yes the iPhone DOES lock up and freeze, fairly often. At least as much as a factory standard WinMo device, if not more. Of course WinMos, being much more open can be modified and as such they have the potential to be less reliable if the modding isnt careful.
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i beg to differ, winmo requires a softrest atleast every week, on the other hand i have not had to reboot my iphone since last dec.
Well my experience is somewhat different, the iPhone i had to test (im a technology reviewer) required a reset at least every few days. Ive only just given it backafter 6 months or use so it wasnt to do with early software. My everyday phone is a Touch HD, and it does have issues, but normally only with opera, nothing else causes any problems that need a reset.
rovex said:
Thats being generous Yes the iPhone DOES lock up and freeze, fairly often. At least as much as a factory standard WinMo device, if not more. Of course WinMos, being much more open can be modified and as such they have the potential to be less reliable if the modding isnt careful.
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Just no
It hardly ever screws up, but does sometimes.
But to say more than stock WM is hilarious.
The great thing is that because it only runs one thing at a time, it never runs out of memory unlike sock wm. Backgrounder on jailbroken iphones lets you run stuff in the background. I always had mail (with 2 accounts) sms, safari and ipod in the background with no probs
Well, since i experience otherwise.. JUST YES. I love how others automatically write off your experience because they don't experience it.
Multitasking has little to do with anything, some of the stock and buyable apps for the iPhone are problematic and cause it to lock up. Im hardly the first or last person the find this.
rovex said:
Well, since i experience otherwise.. JUST YES. I love how others automatically write off your experience because they don't experience it.
Multitasking has little to do with anything, some of the stock and buyable apps for the iPhone are problematic and cause it to lock up. Im hardly the first or last person the find this.
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Well i guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.
just out of curiosity, what firmware were you running ??? and what were the stock applications that caused you to lock up.
and did you actually lock up or did the application crash???
rorydaredkign said:
Just no
It hardly ever screws up, but does sometimes.
But to say more than stock WM is hilarious.
The great thing is that because it only runs one thing at a time, it never runs out of memory unlike sock wm. Backgrounder on jailbroken iphones lets you run stuff in the background. I always had mail (with 2 accounts) sms, safari and ipod in the background with no probs
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wow you ran a mp3 player, sms and the web and it didn't freeze?? AMAZING.. /sarcasm
Apples attitude is 'my way or the highway' and as someone mentioned, windows can be tweaked opening to reliability problems.
My WinMO device hasn't required a softreset for about a month. My friends iPhone froze as soon as i ran a app, forgot what it was called.
If Microsoft made a phone that was the perfect config to their software, it'll run like a reliable phone but that's Apples territory. There is a reason why it's called "Jail"Break.
Same with the OSX and Windows.. you can't compare cause Microsoft makes it work with thousands of hardware and is bound to run into a problem somewhere. OSX is very limited so they hardly run into problems.
I've used Windows Mobile phones (standard and professional) since 2005. (Starting with the Audiovox SMT 5600) In addition, I have had a work BlackBerry since 2007, and an iPhone (now iPhone 3G) since 2008.
To answer your questions, I have rarely (maybe once every few months) had the iPhone freeze up requiring a reboot. To be honest, I rarely had a hard freeze on any of my Windows Mobile phones BUT I did restart them once a week because they just ran better that way. (Memory leaks, probably)
You can't compare the iPhone directly because by design, only a few applications run simultaneously: Mail, Phone, Safari, iPod. (And possibly Maps)
However, the iPhone seems very good at switching from application to application, with no noticeable memory leaks.
I've found that it really depends on what you expect the phone to do. I rarely talk on the phone or text; for me, it's all about email and Internet usage. The Safari browser is currently second-to-none, and the iPhone is exceptionally good at connecting to Wi-Fi whenever available seamlessly. And, since the email application uses Safari to render, it is also very good.
Thank you for all your replies. It wouldn't be the tech world if there wasn't vast -- sometimes diametrically opposed -- disagreement.
The great thing is that because it only runs one thing at a time, it never runs out of memory unlike sock wm. Backgrounder on jailbroken iphones lets you run stuff in the background. I always had mail (with 2 accounts) sms, safari and ipod in the background with no probs
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Once again, my inquiry is not for "shootout" reasons. It has to do more with the reliability of the overall user experience on the iPhone. I know from only briefly using it for 15 minutes or so, how responsive it is, and how easy the interface is to use. But it only struck me recently, given this new explosion in Apps for Touchscreen devices, that the more things people are going to want their iphones to do, DO they ever freeze up.
I was looking for an answer like "only 1 out of 100 people, and maybe then, maybe every 3-4 months, so in general it just doesn't freeze up in numbers high enough to be statistically noteworthy".
But even given the disagreement of experiences just amongst 3-4 people in this thread (a very tiny sample), it freezes more than I would have expected. That's not to lower the grade of reliability in using an iPhone to accomplish a series of tasks; it's more just to note: YES, IT DOES FREEZE UP, on occasion, but rarely.
I already know my old T-Mobile MDA, and now my new T-Mobile WING, froze up a lot, for my taste; and that was before I started modding here at XDA. But I attribute most of those freezeups to the simple hardware inadequacy issue of slow processor and not a lot of RAM. So, if I wanted to launch a bunch of things to stay in memory, to swap back and forth between apps, the WM device would lock up, requiring a soft-reset to reboot the device.
WHich is why XDA-developers has pulled off miracles by, in effect, doubling or probably more like tripling, the usefulness of my WM phone.
But regarding this:
The great thing is that because it only runs one thing at a time, it never runs out of memory unlike sock wm. Backgrounder on jailbroken iphones lets you run stuff in the background. I always had mail (with 2 accounts) sms, safari and ipod in the background with no probs
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I'm trying to interpret this correctly. Running only one thing at a time is only a great benefit if all apps open relatively instantaneously, like, in a half second. So I could hop between selecting text within a browser, then paste it in to a notes document, edit it a bit, then look up an address on Google Maps, find it, grab the link, then add it to my text doc, then snap a few pics, attach them to an email along with my edited text, and send -- perhaps with my mp3 player playing inot my earphones the whole time.
I am talking about realtime use-case scenarios, not simply the sequential moving from app to app on an iphone. So, what I am interested in NOW is doing a bit of a shootout between an iphone and a WM phone in accomplishing a real-life array of tasks -- because that's the real test of the performance of a phone. Not what it does in demo mode, but in reallife getting stuff accomplished mode.
Is anyone here interested in helping to construct a few scenarios? I mean a wide variety of stuff, from emergencies and need and ambulance and also to perform CPR on someone and finding out where they are, to going to a demonstration in Washington DC, coordinating your meeting spot, using Google Maps to track where various people are, shooting photos, updating a blog in real time, etc --- and many kinds of multi-tasking of life demands ?
I am seeing 5 if not 6 platforms now poised to battle each other in the downloadable widget/apps dept -- Apple, Google Android, Blackberry, WindowsMobile, Palm, maybe Symbian, who knows maybe Nokia --- and I am interested in how this all starts to play out when people load suff onto their phone expecting to do x, y, z at the same time, or closely in sequence -- and how each platform is poised to handle these consumer behaviors.
thanks for the headstart in learning that the iPhone, though perhaps more reliable than WM in not freezing up so often, still does have this issue to contend with from time to time.
In a sense, WindowsMobile users almost expect there will be hang ups time to time... frsutrating and irritating, but not like a major surprise. Whereas I would imagine iPhone users have very high expectations, like close to perfection, and will not take kindly to any increasing freezeups.
Just my 2 cents on this in general.
quicksite said:
I'm trying to interpret this correctly. Running only one thing at a time is only a great benefit if all apps open relatively instantaneously, like, in a half second. So I could hop between selecting text within a browser, then paste it in to a notes document, edit it a bit, then look up an address on Google Maps, find it, grab the link, then add it to my text doc, then snap a few pics, attach them to an email along with my edited text, and send -- perhaps with my mp3 player playing inot my earphones the whole time.
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you do know that the iphone cannot do almost half of the things listed here
fallenczar said:
you do know that the iphone cannot do almost half of the things listed here
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Well that's kinda why I listed them, kind of like at the start of a race, ready-set-go! And when it comes time for iphone to shoot video, race ends... or sending an MMS message.
As far as I know those are the two main things, right? But in all fairness, you just know Apple is going to have those two things added into and working in their next big product release.
So I am really aiming this for that next release... My overall premise is that the consumer marketplace has almost no clue about what all these competing devices & platforms do and can't do. But that's not because they're stupid. Rather it's because they are hyper-marketed at, very effectively, with really sharp ads that focus on different whiz-bangs -- coming at them from 3 different industry sectors all at once:
the Carriers tout their packages and calling features mixed in with snippets of cool phone, then the phone makers tout their newest whizbang devices features & differentiatable special gizmos, and the platforms come at them with their own angles, again inserting whiz bang phone devices into the ads. Then I guess you could add a 4th source -- bloviating saleasmen at Best Buy (in USA) showing people their latest most expensive phones, regardless of the bigger picture questions of platform and carriers required to use it.
This is my reason for wanting to develop several real-world use-case scenarios, just to test how well each achieves the end-objective.
quicksite said:
Well that's kinda why I listed them, kind of like at the start of a race, ready-set-go! And when it comes time for iphone to shoot video, race ends... or sending an MMS message.
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well not quite
there are a couple of video rec. and mms apps, and they work as reliably as apps on other platforms.
However, i don't think it would be fair to compare 2 platforms that are so dissimilar, one being media centric, the other being business centric.
You are right about not really being able to compare them, they are two different devices with 2 completely different intended audiences.
I have used WM since 2001 constantly and I have used my iPhone for about 2 months.
Why WM devices are more like a little mini computer in my pocket where as my iPhone is more like a pocket media device that does lots of things that WM does, but not all.
I would say that my iPhone has only crashed 1 time in 2 months and that was from some jailbreak action, never from normal use. There are a couple of things that should be clarified about the iPhone and its limitations though:
1. No copy and paste. Duh. Everyone knows that. I knew it going into the whole 2 year contact. I can't honestly say that other than entering in my signature for emails has that really been an issue.
2. MMS. Today was the first time I wanted to send an MMS and I just emailed it to their phone number instead. No biggy. Worked well.
3. No true multi tasking. I disagree with this one. While there are some things I would prefer to be able to run at the same time most programs save state when they are closed so they are exactly back where they where when you closed it. Games, utilites etc.
Heck, the free timer I downloaded is programed so well that the start time used is the actual time that you hit the button so it comes back up and keep the count running.
Are there things I miss from my WM device, sure. Are there things that the iPhone does better than WM does? Sure. Are there things WM does better than the iPhone, sure.
How much does each one crash? I'd say a touch more on WM, but that is because I have a great ROM that a dedicated chef cooked up here at XDA. Comparing stock to stock though, is no comparison. The iPhone wins hands down in that regard.
So, I've been at this for about 48 hours now (not continuously, but closer than you might think) and I figured I should take a break from modifying project files and puzzling over alignment issues to discuss the project, share some of the problems I've been having and ask if anybody can help, and so on.
The general idea is "Chromium build for Windows (on x86/x64) and build on ARM (for Linux), so there must be a way to build it for Windows on ARM". For the most part, that even looks like it's true. Probably at least 80% of 654 Visual Studio projects (no, that's not a joke) either build just fine with only minor amounts of work, or are things that we don't actually need (I'll try building the test suites... once everything else builds!!)
Areas that have given me problems (caution: some chance of brief rants ahead):
v8. Less than you might think, though. Setting the flags for Arm seems to have been enough.
Sandbox. There's a fair bit of thunking coded in assembly going on in the sandbox for x86. Not sure what's up with it (I don't know exactly how the Chromium sandbox works) but it'll have to come out or be replaced. The Linux (including ARM) sandbox seems to be SELinux-based, which doesn't help at all.
Native Client (NaCl). I think all the assembly is in test code, though, so I may just boldly #ifdef if all away.
libjpg-turbo (libjpg). Piles of carefully optimized assembly... for x86 and x64. There is a set of ARM assembly (for Linux) that Visual Studio won't compile, but something else might... or I may tweak until it works. Of course, I could also just accept the speed hit and use the version of libjpg implemented in nice, portable C.
Anything where the developers tried to use some SSE to speed things up. I may be able to replace it with NEON code, or I may just remove it and hope **** doesn't break. We'll see.
Inline assembly in general. Even when it's ARM assembly, Visual Studio / CL.exe don't want anything to do with it (__asm is apparently now an invalid keyword). I suspect I'll have to just pull the assembly out into stand-alone functions in their own files, then compile them to object files and link them back in later. If I can figure out the best way to do this (for example, I'll want to inline the asm functions) then it shouldn't impact performance. Seriously though, I kind of hate inline assembly. I can read assembly just fine, but I'm usually staring at it in a debugger or disassembly tool, not in the middle of source code I'm trying to build...
Everywhere that the current state of the CPU is cared about (exception and crash handlers, in particular) because the CONTEXT structure is, of course, CPU-specific. They're pretty easy to get past, though.
Low-level functions, like MemoryBarrier. Fortunately, it's implemented in ntdll.h... but as a macro, which breaks at least half the places it's referenced. Solution: where it breaks things, undefine the macro and just have it be an inline function that does what the macro did.
Running out of memory. Not even joking... well, OK, a little bit. I've got 32GB; I won't actually run out. Both Visual Studio and cl.exe do at times, though!. Task Manager says VS is currently using 1,928 MB, and before I restarted it, it broke 2.5GB private working set. Pretty good for a program that for some reason is still 32-bit...
Goddamn compiler flags. Seriously, every single project (I mentioned there are over 600, right?) has its LIBPATHs hardcoded to point at x86. Several projects have /D:_X86_ or similar (that's supposed to be set by the build tools, not the user, you idiots...) which plays merry hell with the #ifdef guards. Everything has /SAFESEH specified, not in the actual property table where the IDE could have removed it (unneeded and invlaid on ARM) but in the "extra stuff we'll pass on the build command line" field, which means every single .EXE/.DLL project must be modified or the linker will fail.
My current biggest goal is the JPG library; nobody wants to use a browser without it. After that, I'll tackle the sandbox, leaving NaCl for last... well, last before whatever else crops up.
Anyhow, thoughts/comments/advice are welcome... in the mean time, I'm going to go eat something (for the first time in ~22 hours) and then get some sleep.
Kudos for having the patience to look though this monster.
It's my understanding that NaCl is still a pretty niche thing at the moment. Is it possible to easily either disable it or completely hack it out, or do other more critical parts of Chromium now depend on it?
I don't think anything truly depends on it. I'll look in the VS dependency hierarchy and see how many things list it, and how awful it would be to remove them.. after I get the other stuff working. I may pass on the sandbox as well, if possible; it makes the security guy in me cringe something awful, but as they say, shipping is a feature..
great
Please make that happen !
Working on it! I've gotten over half of the projects to build and link, but some other stuff is adamantly refusing to work. I'm beginning to suspect I'll need to work from the other direction - rather than starting at the bottom and building all the dependencies, then combining them into browser components, and then eventually combining all the components into a complete piece of software, I may have to work from the top, removing components until the whole thing builds (at which point it will likely be useless, or all-but) and then seeing what I can add back in. I thought it would be faster to just assume everything can be made to work and only exclude something if it proved intractable, but at this point I've got a ton of very small components and almost no ability to combine them.
It would also help if VS was better at managing such truly immense tasks. For example, I have no simple graph of what all is and is not building, so I'm being forced to manually map that onto the VS dependency tree and see what is blocking a given component from building successfully, and how much is dependent upon it, one erroring project at a time (and there are a *lot* of erroring projects - my last attempt to build any substantial part of the system saw 50 of 400 projects fail).
GoodDayToDie said:
Working on it! I've gotten over half of the projects to build and link, but some other stuff is adamantly refusing to work. I'm beginning to suspect I'll need to work from the other direction - rather than starting at the bottom and building all the dependencies, then combining them into browser components, and then eventually combining all the components into a complete piece of software, I may have to work from the top, removing components until the whole thing builds (at which point it will likely be useless, or all-but) and then seeing what I can add back in. I thought it would be faster to just assume everything can be made to work and only exclude something if it proved intractable, but at this point I've got a ton of very small components and almost no ability to combine them.
It would also help if VS was better at managing such truly immense tasks. For example, I have no simple graph of what all is and is not building, so I'm being forced to manually map that onto the VS dependency tree and see what is blocking a given component from building successfully, and how much is dependent upon it, one erroring project at a time (and there are a *lot* of erroring projects - my last attempt to build any substantial part of the system saw 50 of 400 projects fail).
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I thinkt tht is a mutch better taktic and mutch less frustrading.
I would love to see just a minimal version of it. After that all the small componens can follow.
50 of 400 is pretty good i think. Better then i expected
Bear in mind that the entire thing is 650 projects. If 50 fail at that level, many of the higher-level ones (dependent upon the lower-level) will fail too. I'll see what I can do. I may or may not be able to get v8 actually working (without it, the JS speed will be very bad, think IE8 at best) and I may have to fall back to the legacy libjpeg (which will cut JPEG render speeds by at least a factor of 2). Skia (2D drawing library used by Chrome) has a bunch of assembly optimizations that I need to get it to use the Arm version of instead. There's a couple of total hacks with the library files I've had to pull, which may or may not result in a working final build. We'll see.
GoodDayToDie said:
Bear in mind that the entire thing is 650 projects. If 50 fail at that level, many of the higher-level ones (dependent upon the lower-level) will fail too. I'll see what I can do. I may or may not be able to get v8 actually working (without it, the JS speed will be very bad, think IE8 at best) and I may have to fall back to the legacy libjpeg (which will cut JPEG render speeds by at least a factor of 2). Skia (2D drawing library used by Chrome) has a bunch of assembly optimizations that I need to get it to use the Arm version of instead. There's a couple of total hacks with the library files I've had to pull, which may or may not result in a working final build. We'll see.
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the v8 engine ( used in nodejs ) has been ported to ARM :
I still can't link : htt p://ww w.it-wars.com/article305/compiler-node-js-pour-arm-v5
perhaps it will help you
Edit : oups, I just see that another great user of this forum made the port of nodejs to RT
Yep... but they did it without v8. That's not an encouraging result, but I feel like I'm so close...
Is there a GitHub repo so we can help or track the progress of the project ?
Sorry, not at present. There probably should be. The sheer size of the codebase is incredible (about 2.4GB) and having some way to share it practically would be good.
Also, I suspect this would go a lot faster if I don't have to repeat the work of others. I know that there's a working Webkit DLL out there, for example (though with several features, including the V8 JS engine, missing) and if I could get my hands on that it would drastically reduce the number of additional components I need to build. Currently I'm working on the sandbux, but expect that I will need to rip the whole thing out and basically have the browser run as though it was always passed the --no-sandbox parameter, at least for the first build. Too damn much assembly.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/22/google-chrome-native-client-arm-support/
This wouldn't have any impact on this project, would it?
Sent from my SCH-I535 using xda-developers app, complete with annoying signatures.
It probably means that NaCl on Windows RT will be possible in the future. At present, I'm cutting it out of the build - too much x86-specific stuff there to port it over myself, and it owuldn't be able to run x86-compiled NaCl code anyhow.
You might have bit off more than you could chew. It'd better if you put your current progress under version control on some public site so that other people may be able to help you.
It's a big and complex project. You are taking a lot of time, and understandably so. But just open up to other people and you could get this done faster.
Yeah, this is probably true. My life also got unexpectedly *busy* in the last week; a couple weeks ago I had many times as much free time as I do now, and so porting has slowed down.
My upload speed would take ages (literally probably at least a day of solid activity; it's embarassingly slow) to push the full source anywhere, but I may make the effort anyhow. I'll have to post it somewhere for GPL compliance in any case...
You may upload only the diff files, they'll probably be smaller then the whole distribution.
Not to pour cold water on you however, IE10 is already faster than the latest Chrome build in Windows Phone, Windows 8.
I don't see the point of this.
I have personally jumped from IE8 > FF > Chrome and finally back to IE10 over the years depends on its usability, smoothness, speed, etc
Speed isn't the only reason to use a browser. I actually prefer IE myself, but there are some things that other browsers do better than it (in the case of Chrome, parts of HTML5, the syncing across Google services, etc.) Also, Chrome gets updated far more often than IE; IE9 was equal with Chrome on speed at its release, and was far behind by the time IE10 came out.
The reason for this project, though, is a mixture of interest in what it takes, and a desire to benefit the community. Microsoft has deeped that only software which they have blessed may run on the Windows RT desktop. I disagree, and have chosen (among several other things) to port a web browser because I feel that it's important for users to have choice.
LastBattle said:
Not to pour cold water on you however, IE10 is already faster than the latest Chrome build in Windows Phone, Windows 8.
I don't see the point of this.
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Some websites do not get along with the trident rendering engine. Some webdevs are so "Oh f*** IE I don't care" and block access to features just because it is IE. I have experienced this first hand on IE10 on my surface where it tells me to come back when I have a decent browser, only to not have the choice to do that.
This really isn't the webdevs fault either, for years IE was the scum of the internet, only recently has IE caught up to the rest of the browsers (and in my opinion exceeded some) but the years of IE being bad have left a lot of disjointed webdevs who won't even consider giving the latest IE a chance.
This has been a problem that has been left unfixed since the very beginning of Android. Android phones can now open apps instantly with no delay just like the Iphone but What I've never understood is how the Iphone with a dual core processor can open a game instantly but on Android with these Quadcores and Octocores they are unable to open a game instantly, in fact there's a significant delay before the game opens.
What causes this?
Games open pretty much instantly on my S7
There are splash screens and level load times to deal with obviously, same as on PC, but the actual game loads pretty much straight after I hit the icon
There's still a noticable delay before the game opening animation where the screen rotates. Why does this delay exist on Android where you have phones with rediculous specs? Is it down to lack of optimization?
Theandroidfan said:
There's still a noticable delay before the game opening animation where the screen rotates. Why does this delay exist on Android where you have phones with rediculous specs? Is it down to lack of optimization?
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No delay here, maybe your phone only
I was talking about the delay between pressing on the game icon and the phone screen rotating to open the game. This has always been present on Android and so far only Sony has managed to partially solve this as games open very quickly on the recent Sony Xperia phones.
Theandroidfan said:
This has been a problem that has been left unfixed since the very beginning of Android. Android phones can now open apps instantly with no delay just like the Iphone but What I've never understood is how the Iphone with a dual core processor can open a game instantly but on Android with these Quadcores and Octocores they are unable to open a game instantly, in fact there's a significant delay before the game opens.
What causes this?
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Do you know how a computer works? If not, please go back to iPhone.
---------- Post added at 02:26 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:08 AM ----------
Actually, I'll answer your question.
iPhone starts with the letter 'i' because all apps that start with letters 'A' to 'I' are preloaded into memory, on an iPhone, at bootup; this includes 'G'ames (because g comes before i). Android starts with the letter 'A' and so only 'A'pps get preloaded.
Android does this because if it preloaded every game, that would be stupid, especially since many games have A LOT of data to be copied from nand flash storage to fast sdram volatile memory and all games actually take different times to load, depending on how much crap they have to load (nothing is actually instantaneous).You see, it has less to do with how fast the processor is, but more to do with what gets copied from large permanent storage into small fast ram, at bootup. Games are stored on non-volatile nand flash, which a phone has a LOT of compared to fast volatile sdram, which it has only a few GB of.
An OS can't just pre-load every game so that the dumb user thinks it just starts instantaneously. There isn't enough space in memory for preloading a bunch of large games.
Androids basically follow the rules of real computers.
The reason iPhone can pre-load every game, big or small, is because iPhones are actually magic, and you should go buy the iPhone 11.
I hope I didn't get too technical on you.
Also, sorry my answer was not noob-friendly. That just tends to happen when people come into a forum of intelligent Android enthusiasts and bash Android for not being as awesome as iPhone.
gruuvin said:
Do you know how a computer works? If not, please go back to iPhone.
---------- Post added at 02:26 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:08 AM ----------
Actually, I'll answer your question.
iPhone starts with the letter 'i' because all apps that start with letters 'A' to 'I' are preloaded into memory, on an iPhone, at bootup; this includes 'G'ames (because g comes before i). Android starts with the letter 'A' and so only 'A'pps get preloaded.
Android does this because if it preloaded every game, that would be stupid, especially since many games have A LOT of data to be copied from nand flash storage to fast sdram volatile memory and all games actually take different times to load, depending on how much crap they have to load (nothing is actually instantaneous).You see, it has less to do with how fast the processor is, but more to do with what gets copied from large permanent storage into small fast ram, at bootup. Games are stored on non-volatile nand flash, which a phone has a LOT of compared to fast volatile sdram, which it has only a few GB of.
An OS can't just pre-load every game so that the dumb user thinks it just starts instantaneously. There isn't enough space in memory for preloading a bunch of large games.
Androids basically follow the rules of real computers.
The reason iPhone can pre-load every game, big or small, is because iPhones are actually magic, and you should go buy the iPhone 11.
I hope I didn't get too technical on you.
Also, sorry my answer was not noob-friendly. That just tends to happen when people come into a forum of intelligent Android enthusiasts and bash Android for not being as awesome as iPhone.
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Click to collapse
Damn you're triggered. You realise I'm an Android user right? I was only asking a question. No need to get all rude and patronising. You clearly have a big ego lmao.
*Detection* said:
Games open pretty much instantly on my S7
There are splash screens and level load times to deal with obviously, same as on PC, but the actual game loads pretty much straight after I hit the icon
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Frankly saying it is such a thing as lack of optimization.
There are not only many software differences why the iPhone is faster, Hardware performance is also ahead of that of Galaxy. The important things are single core performance and multi core throughput, not a just number of cores. Besides, if multicore throughput are same, having less cores is advantageous in terms of performance.(On the other hand, if singlecore performance are same, one that having more cores is faster) And governer(which adjusts clock frequency) reactivity aslo matters, that of Galaxy's too bad
*There are also some Samsung fans just as Apple fans are.
We have to keep in mind that we use Android because many features of Android are easy to use, not to deny even the benefits of the iPhone. As the benefits of Android are obvious, the benefits of the iPhone are also clear and we must be acknowledged.
Theandroidfan said:
Damn you're triggered. You realise I'm an Android user right? I was only asking a question. No need to get all rude and patronising. You clearly have a big ego lmao.
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You can be an Android user, or an Apple user, and still not understand how a computer works.
Back to the Question:
Most Games for iPhones are optimised for the Phones, and there are not many models of iPhones as of Android Phones.
At Android, it's one App for Maybe 200 various Phones, and every Phone has its own Display resolution, own CPU/GPU, Memory etc. When an app starts, the app have to check this specs every time, and that is this small delay you can expect between pressing at the App-Icon and the first Splash screen. Especially Games have this Delay, because they have various Models for a Texture, or a Modell.
Sorry for my bad English, but I hope, that I solved your question a bit.
profi_fahrer said:
Back to the Question:
Most Games for iPhones are optimised for the Phones, and there are not many models of iPhones as of Android Phones.
At Android, it's one App for Maybe 200 various Phones, and every Phone has its own Display resolution, own CPU/GPU, Memory etc. When an app starts, the app have to check this specs every time, and that is this small delay you can expect between pressing at the App-Icon and the first Splash screen. Especially Games have this Delay, because they have various Models for a Texture, or a Modell.
Sorry for my bad English, but I hope, that I solved your question a bit.
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Click to collapse
Thank you and your English is fine!