Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

[updated Fri 12/22/06]
ACCESS just released an application framework for the ACCESS Linux Platform under the Mozilla Public License. This doesn't include the GUI toolkit, which is a modification of GTK+, but there's a lot there for Palm and Linux developers to sink their teeth into. It's called the Hiker Application Framework, and you can download the code and documentation here.

In a press release at the end of October, ACCESS explained their motivation for releasing this and described what the next step is now that the framework has been contributed to the Linux community:

By open sourcing the Application Framework, ACCESS’ goal is to help speed the development and adoption of mobile Linux phones and devices while taking the first step to help prevent fragmentation. The next step in preventing fragmentation will be to work with industry standards organizations, such as the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum and Open Source Developers Labs (OSDL) to determine how they may adopt the Application Framework.

I'm impressed and pleased that ACCESS is opening the source this far up the software stack. Between the Hiker Application Framework and libsqlfs (the SQLite-based persistance API that ACCESS released earlier) they have opened up a very broad swath of the software that application developers will use on a daily basis. Even just in a quick scan of the documentation I can see the hand of the original Palm OS developers who, more than just about anyone, understand what it takes to make a good user experience on a mobile device. That's hopeful to me.

This work is at least as important as lower level contributions to things like power management, since this is the level at which standards need to be established to enable native applications to run across multiple mobile Linux platforms. And that is what will determine whether Linux can create an ecosystem that competes effectively against the big proprietary platforms: Symbian and Windows Mobile.

ACCESS also offered what I think is some exemplary thinking about the software experience on a phone in contrast to a PC:

Smartphones and mobile devices have small form factors with limited memory, storage and display space, and as a result, these devices must do things differently than a PC. Furthermore, the usage model for smartphones and mobile devices is very different than a PC, typically made up of short tasks interrupted by many events such as receiving calls or messages while browsing.

Users tend to concentrate on tasks rather than applications. For example, the user will take a picture and send it, rather than launch a camera application and spend a lot of time in it. This difference affects how mobile applications need to be represented and launched, how they inter-communicate, and what resources they require. The Application Framework from ACCESS has been designed to address these needs.

I've been developing a new task-oriented user interface for my Treo that's designed to get away from the idea of application "silos." It's amazing how much this PC concept limits a phone from doing some powerful things ONLY because of the bad UI. I'm very eager to see what ACCESS and the old Palm OS team from PalmSource have come up with.

Anyway, I haven't had much time to look through the code that ACCESS delivered, but I did get a chance to scan through the short "whitepaper" that's included and the much more detailed Technical Overview. Afterward I had a few questions that Maureen O'Connell at ACCESS agreed she'd try to get answers to. Check back after the New Year.