[olpc-software] AbiWord, HIG

[Alan Cox]

On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 07:09:31AM -0800, Alan Kay wrote:
> Right now it has a HW bitbltter with alpha, so quite a bit can be done.

Its also a UMEM architecture (ie video shares with main memory). On the plus
side it makes direct CPU hacking on the video space cheap too. On the minus
side it burns memory bandwidth. The system uses RLE compression of scanlines
to reduce this so you want to try and generate a UI that doesn't contain
subtle horizontal shading or over abuse alpha in that direction.

> I haven't heard the recent thoughts about Cairo, but it certainly was (and 
> probably is) part of the proposed system.

How FP heavy is the current cairo given the FP performance of the old
generation geode (GX not NX) is absolutely awful. Gnome for example is near
unusable on a Geode GX because of the performance of the image scalers.