OpenMoko Coreteam in Frankfurt/Main
During most of the long easter weekend, 3/4 of the OpenMoko coreteam met in Frankfurt/Main at my place. It was a very productive meeting and we discussed a lot of topics. My wife Sabine coddled us with lots of excellent food and had to spend half of the easter vacation alone… sorry for that and thanks for everything 
We talked about administrative things, schedules, hiring people, supporting OpenEmbedded, and the state of the current hard- and software. Unfortunately most of the really hot topics discussed at the meeting could be classified as confidential, however I think I’m allowed to tell you that we worked on the design of two Neo1973 successors and we came up with something really unique and exciting…
Of course, most of you are probably more interested in the present, i.e. how far away the Phase 1 devices are. About two weeks ago I said something like two weeks — a prediction that was (of course) too shortsighted. My personal take on that is that I plan to work roughly about one more week on adding some needed features and then enforce a two-weeks feature freeze for the phase 1. There will be a pre-phase-1 snapshot image and p0 developers will be requested to help testing and bugfixing to make the phase 1 experience really stable. By the way, I’ll make sure that the phase 1 announcement will include enough information about the phase 1.5 hardware refresh so that you can make up your mind whether you want to wait or just go ahead and buy a freed phone.
Some of the discussions focused on our mid- to long-term plans with OpenMoko — both as a hardware and a software platform. UI-wise, the applications you see on the Neo1973 are really just the first iteration of our vision. We are somewhat satisfied with the status of the stylus applications, however it already has shown that we can only realize a part of our UI dreams with a toolkit like GTK+, so for some of the applications (finger, main menu, and panels come to mind) we are closely watching how projects like Clutter and EFL evolve.
Brian Murphy wrote:
What will be released first, E17 or the Neo1973?
Posted on 10-Apr-07 at 4:08 am | Permalink
Philippe wrote:
Will we then also have hacking sessions with the P0 developers? I am already waiting to join!
Posted on 10-Apr-07 at 12:24 pm | Permalink
mickey wrote:
Brian: Definitely the Neo1973
Philippe: Very good point. Internally I’m working on arranging a sponsored coding sprint once the P1 devices are out in the wild.
Posted on 10-Apr-07 at 1:10 pm | Permalink
Matthias wrote:
> Very good point. Internally I’m working > on arranging a sponsored coding sprint > once the P1 devices are out in the wild.
feel free to contact me for some sponsoring -> greentux
Posted on 10-Apr-07 at 3:09 pm | Permalink
Cedric wrote:
What do you need that the EFL doesn’t provide you ?
Posted on 11-Apr-07 at 7:46 pm | Permalink
mickey wrote:
Matthias: Thanks for the kind offer, I’ll get back to you soon!
Cedric: EFL is great, however there are quite some rough edges left, especially in the higher levels like EWL and ETK. If we are to decide on using EFL, then we will find a way to sponsor the development.
Posted on 12-Apr-07 at 11:36 pm | Permalink
Cedric wrote:
I should have said, did you already have some TODO regarding the EFL. I never played with EWL nor ETK. I will certainly do some test with them at some point, so let me know if you want me to try something with them.
Posted on 13-Apr-07 at 11:41 am | Permalink
mickey wrote:
Cedric: For a start, we would be really interested to see whether we can realize the classic OpenMoko layout for stylus application as described in the Wiki under “Look & Feel” using ETK.
Also, we’d be interested to find out the best way to realize our finger applications — either by directly using Edje or by using ETK as well.
Posted on 13-Apr-07 at 12:38 pm | Permalink
Colin wrote:
i can’t wait to by the neo1973 it looks like a great phone
Posted on 25-May-07 at 3:40 am | Permalink