[Virtualacorn-list] Enhancing the RISC OS experience

[David J. Ruck]

ralph_valmai at ntlworld.com wrote:
> I'm probably getting a bit over confident here since you seem to have
> endorsed most of what I guessed to be possible, but what about porting,
> say, the PC version of FireFox, keeping most of the host code intact and
> simply providing a RISC OS interface to communicate and render the
> results on screen?

I don't see any value in that at all. A web browser is a very self
contained application, which wouldn't benefit at all from living with in
the emulators window, its far better to use the full speed and full
funcationality of the native code.

As long as you bridge the RISC OS URL launch mechanism, so clicking on a
URL causes the browser to display the desired page, and you set up the
browsers download directory to somewhere on the disc accessible via a
HostFS drive from RISC OS, you've got all the browser functionality without
having waste any resources recoding any of it for RISC OS.

> But, if PC versions of valuable Linux applications could be ported in the
> same way that I suggested for FireFox, i.e. keep most of the host code
> and suppling ARM code only for a RISC OS compliant user interface,
> together with i/o and screen rendering, then maybe more users could be
> attracted and the user base increased to the point where developers would
> become interested again.

But this hasn't and wont happen. Porting large complex Linux applications
to RISC OS is difficult, an enourmous of extra work is needed to make them
look and feel like RISC OS applications, and they would run far slowly
under the emulator than natively.

A much better policy would be to enhance the ability of emulated RISC OS
applications to share data with native applications, breaking down the
barrier of the emulators outer frame, and allowing things such as drag and
drop between the two enviroments.

Significant changes to the emulator and changes to the RISC OS window
manager would be needed to achive this, but it would be far more useful
that putting development resources in to effectively crippling non RISC OS
applications by dragging them inside the emulator.

Cheers
---Dave

-- 
Email: druck at druck.org.uk
Phone: +44- (0)7974 108301