OSDev.org

Griwes wrote:You just fail to understand that "single foreground window" limitation of some of modern mobile devices may come from OS dumbness, small screen size or CPU and/or GPU to weak to power full windowing system, not because windowing systems are broken (which they aren't ).

I think the largest reason by far is the small screen size. Every pixel is precious - if I have a browser opened on my phone, it's frustrating to try to navigate a web page when the on-screen keyboard pops up it taking over 1/3 of my screen.

As for the raster vs. vector graphics. For the underlying representation, do what you want. On a stand-alone machine, it's probably easier to pass pixels - on Brendan's distributed user interface system, it's probably easier to stream high level drawing commands.

However if you'd like to target anything from mobiles, retina-display laptops, legacy monitors, 4K televisions, then I think you should have a resolution-independent UI library. How should you accomplish this? It's up to you.

Personally, I'd port OpenGL, OpenVG, Skia, or Cairo, etc. and build my UI on top of that.

For the windowing system - again, it's up to you - it's your OS. (I'm going for a tiling/docking system.)

I see no problem in rolling your own text-mode. I wouldn't emulate the BIOS text mode, I'd make it much more powerful (like modern terminal emulators) - unicode, graphics, different font styles, etc.