OpenMoko progress ..

[Jay Vaughan]

As you guys know, I've become a huge fan of the OpenMoko phone:

http://www.openmoko.com/index.html

Hacking on it daily, its become a very stable and appealing platform  
- surely there have been some wrinkles in the SDK department, but as  
this is a pre-alpha release, its to be expected.  Well, things are  
becoming a lot more stable, thats for sure.  You can track the  
progress of the environment in the form of almost-daily screenshots  
here:

http://scap.linuxtogo.org/

OpenMoko is a software environment which runs currently on a number  
of different devices - not just the neo1973 phone pictured on the  
main openmoko site (also known as the GTA01) but as well on phones  
from Motorola and Samsung.  If you go through the screenshots  
collected at scap, you might notice that there have been a lot of  
improvements in the general environment - better fleshed out GUI's  
for the 'main' apps you might want to use on your phone, as well as a  
few other interesting additions.

I've decided I'm going to devote my software development efforts to  
this environment for the immediate future, and will be releasing some  
things shortly in that regard.  I recently got the Apple BT Wireless  
keyboard working with the neo, and have a patch in the works to the  
SettingsGUI to make connecting and using BT devices with the OpenMoko- 
phones very easy .. one of the other BT devices that will be  
interesting to integrate with the OpenMoko is, of course, the GP2X 
+USB_BT_Module, which gives a very powerful and easy to use interface  
to the GP2X_MidiShare environment I've integrated into Open2X ..  
maybe you can see where I'm going with this.  GP2X+USB_Midi <-- 
bluetooth--> OpenMoko_GUI ..

Anyway, another recent addition to the OpenMoko environment has been  
cairo.  This means very fluid interfaces can be built, quite rapidly,  
which do nice visualizations and things .. right now its being used  
in the onboard clock and world time apps, but it will be quite easy  
to get this capability integrated into other apps too.  My immediate  
inspiration: an OpenMoko drum machine, using a BT keyboard as the  
control surface .. ;)

;
--
Jay Vaughan