About the protocol, it’s very optimized and I really like it. TCP is just used for remote machine access, and it comes “for free”. UNIX sockets are really fast and almost overhead free, the biggest overhead here is waking up the other process, but it’s hard to do multi-application write/read access without a manager, so you often need this entity or you end with complex distributed systems that just don’t work. X11 protocol is really simple, it’s really optimized (common events, like mouse motion, have really small message). Also, remember that heavy data, such as pixmaps, are handled as shared memory (XSHM extension), not adding much overhead (just the allocation is a bit slower).

As for XCB, I have not looked at it, but lots of friends from E do, they have XCB working for all the libraries and seems it works fine. The idea is good and shows how great is the X protocol: we can have both Xlib and Xcb working, the same protocol!

Also, the model of sending commands via a connection (either TCP or UNIX pipe) seems cumbersome when all you are interested in is local graphics done as fast as possible…

Also, did you have a chance to examine XCB? Do you have any opinion about it? It seems a very interesting project.

As for x11, I’m not against of it, I actually like it and it is capable of “bling”, you just have to use the right tools.

As for OpenGL, I never said we require it, it’s just something great to benefit when you have… Evas can make use of this, as Clutter or Trolltech’s Qt (QGraphicsView).

I am not a developer. I am a network administrator, and I also have to teach my 70+ years old grandma how to read her email and how to type a document. Usability is under-rated, and I think that some concepts of EFL can help it, some can really break-it.
Whenever you design something, try to avoid giving developers the power of breaking things. This is a concept that is in direct opposition with a quote that I kinda remember, that proves to be true everywhere. It’s a fragile balance that you need to achieve between power to do cool and impressive stuff easily, an power to wreck havoc. The quote goes something like this:
“UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.”
–Doug Gwyn

I must confess that I don’t know anything about EFL, but I assume that the incredible layout manager that GTK offers is still unique.

From what I can understand, you want to do to theming in EFL what js and css did to HTML. While both can be used in a right way, they are abused in most cases and to get a working result you need a lot of hacks. I am a little reticent on whether this is feasible in real life.

The OpenGL support thing in GTK can refer to two things:
1) Use it in the UI and theming. That is generally a bad idea from my point of view, because it’s slow as hell on a non-accelerated system. Using it optionally with a wrapper such as Cairo that can use many alternate backends, is reasonable. You don’t yet have OpenGL in POS systems, on cell phones, and in some computers.
2) Use it in the app as a widget, and GTK has an OpenGL widget.

Now related to X11. Here, I’m going to quote myself from a thread of Y versus X11 on /.:
“X11 should NOT have an integrated widget set in it. That is because, it’s multi-os, multi-platform, you can’t expect all the platforms to have the same widget set, toolkit, just think embedded devices here.”
“One of the greatest things about it is it’s network transparency. X-Windows, is still ahead of it’s time. Microsoft introduced Terminal Services back in 97 or 98 for Windows NT Server TSE, long time after X-Windows existed, and it still is not as powerful as X11, it only draws the whole screen through a pipe, compresses it and sends-it to a client. X11 does a lot more than that, it has security is a number of forms (e.g. ACL based), it has support for extensions - which is soo great, and it tells the client which extensions it supports, it has speed (when not over the network) using UNIX Sockets instead of TCP. Even over the network it’s fast. If you think that running Mozilla remotely on a 56k is slow, think of the alternatives.”
“X11, contrarily to a very popular opinion doesn’t look, it shows.”
X11 wasn’t designed to be something that has bling in it. It’s up to the application to do that. Directly of you are masochistic, or using one of the many widget sets out there.

A couple of weeks ago I ported bling-it-up to OpenMoko:

http://w1xer.de/bling.html

This is a pretty dirty port - a few things are not working quite properly yet (because of blings hardcodedness around the .pngs) but it certainly shows you how easy it is to do nice graphics stuff, already, on the OpenMoko handheld ..

With a bit of work, the techniques that mirco (macslow) shows us, namely SVG sourced graphics, judicious buffer handling, and some cairo rendering, could be used to build a nice and fancy app for OpenMoko (and other linux) platforms ..

Btw. many people in the audience were impressed by the possibilities and it was really unfortunate that the timetable could not allow more demos and Q/A.

I don’t see how Nokia could have gone more the wrong way than what they had. Too bad as the hardware is good, except for that not centered webcam.

I like the Canola interface better, but it’s still not as good as the iPod Touch’s one. Still it’s the best N800 software as for the interface. I hope they would just fire the whole N800 UI’s software developers and hire other ones.