Well theres a lot of buzz around the iPad, Android (on tablets) and palm’s OS on HP computers. So what do we (Ubuntu) have to do to make a good touch OS interface?
1. Big buttons
Not everyone has tiny fingers and its hard to close/minimize/resize a window if the buttons are really small.
2. Gestures
Apple have done this right with their new mouse and with all their touch interfaces. We have nothing like this yet but Synaptics is working on this.
3. On screen keyboard
There was some talk about this at the UDS.
4. Integration
The thing at the moment is that none of the main apps in the Gnome desktop (I dont know about KDE on this) arent at all suitable for touch. Apps like Gwibber are ok because its just a textbox and a few buttons but when you look at applications like evolution that have very complicated interfaces you have lots of problems.
5. Speed
If you look at the specs of the touch computers coming up the are fairly low spec. We figure pretty well here we are fast but some applications arent. Firefox is a prime example of this it takes 10 seconds to load on my computer and that is way too long (Ok my computer is fairly bad but its better than most of the touch devices coming). Open office, Gimp and Gwibber are also good examples of apps that dont load all that fast.
6. Content
This is where we fall down we have music but most of these pads coming up are best used for reading books and playing little fun games just like the iPad. Of course you could say you can get lots of ebooks across the internet but most of them use DRM so we cant view them. And we do have lots of cool little apps but none of them are suited to this environment.
With Unity I think Ubuntu is heading in the right direction in terms of interface for touch but will we address all of the issues above very soon I cant say, maybe we will be ready in 2-3 years for the big time in this space. I cant wait to get my hands on a Ubuntu touch device though.
Since Android is coming to tablets it could be interesting to try and port or emulate at least a subset of the application API into some kind of Android runner, so that people could install at least the games made for that platform. I’m thinking that Google could be interested in participating in such a project, since they unlike Apple have everything to win the more widespread the platform becomes. It may even be possible to be allowed to connect to the market, but even without that, Ubuntu could collect good open source games and offer then inside the Software center, and users could install the applications directly from owners websites (already happens for phones now).
I don’t know how big an effort that would be, but since there already exists an emulator in the SDK, and it’s open source, maybe it wouldn’t be all that hard – the rest is creating an interface to the controls of the machine running outside, so that native controls can be used, say if it has tilt or stuff like that. It’s already optimized for running on low-end devices as well.
This would also help create a bigger, single platform to develop games for, which is always attractive for developers. Wouldn’t be native Linux/Ubuntu, but on the other hand we’d be part of a big open source games (and other apps?) platform, which arguably might be better for everyone.
Well there was some talk about running Android apps locally on Ubuntu but I wouldnt know what the current situation is. I wouldnt say google would care about installing Android apps anywhere but on Android itself honestly. Well the entire Android stack is a custom version of Java so there are only a few things to go against us in porting them.
As for installing applications from websites I wouldnt really encourage it but all they need to do is package up a .deb and allow users to download it and it should be very easy to install. As well as that there is apturl to install apps that are in the repo from a url link.
The problem with games in Linux was covered really well on shot of jaq a while back but the short story of it is that most of the work is easy but the sound stuff is fairly hard because of fragmentation of the linux distro system. http://shotofjaq.org/2010/06/the-indie-revolution/