I got an iPhone for my father recently and he was blown away by the capabilities of the device I was describing him. Then I was surprised by the fact he was surprised. Then I took a step back and tried to be in his place. Then I was blown away too.

Here is this 70 year old man, he is used to mobile phones which are basically phones that call other mobile phones and ..... well... thats it! Compared to an iPhone which is thousands times more powerful than my first computer. He told me to get him the adaptor for TV, so he can see things from his iPhone to his TV (watch football matches and youtube videos). I had already done a search and I found plenty of keyboards and mouses for iPhone.��

It makes you sit back and ask "Mr Desktop / Laptop .... why we need you ?"��

For me it makes sense to have a desktop or a laptop because I do 3d graphics and I need the power of a powerful desktop GPU which can run circles around any GPU used for smartphones and tablets. So desktop/laptop is a mandatory. But I am the exception , I am "the freak".��

If computational power is not an issues, which is not for the vast majority of users out there. The size of the screen is not an issue because you can connect it to any modern screen and TV you want, the lack of keyboard is not because you can connect an external keyboard and lack of mouse is not because you can connect a mouse as well.��

And not to sound out of topic VM on Android is the single most important thing for the future of Pharo. Mobile market wont become smaller it will become much larger. Because smartphones are really lately that have turned into a full blow computers and people slowly realize it. How long before most of those people realize that they dont need their desktop ? Software migrates/ported constantly.��

I definetly would love to have Pharo on my Nexus 4 one day and run smoothly. I know its a lot of work, I don't expect it to happen any time soon, but when the time will come my mobile phone will be "Pharo Powered" ;)




On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 8:52 PM, phil@highoctane.be <phil@highoctane.be> wrote:
A good place to run Pharo for IoT would be on an ARM-based Synology box.

That would be a killer niche.

Phil
��



On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 6:35 PM, Esteban A. Maringolo <emaringolo@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Clement,

2014-06-19 12:52 GMT-03:00 Cl��ment Bera <bera.clement@gmail.com>:
> 2014-06-18 15:39 GMT+02:00 Esteban A. Maringolo <emaringolo@gmail.com>:

>> Can you share what is the intended use of the android vm that you're
>> building?

> - Deploying application on Android
> - Proving to big customers Pharo can run on ARM processor on the contrary to
> several other smalltalks

What kind of applications? Is there an business interest of running on
ARM processors? Is there a sale advantage of having this? I don't want
to sound too inquisitive nor pedantic, those are real questions.

As stated in previous mails, running on the platform is a technical
challenge per se (I couldn't make it if I wanted), but it's just a
very small part of "deploying to Android". And I'm not talking about
app stores.

Even though Android (AOSP) is Linux based, the memory/battery
constraints makes that apps or services lifecycle ��completely
different to regular unix processes. And I don't see how this fits
into the whole android environment. Last time I tried (+1yr) it the VM
was a permanent process, without access to device sensors, etc.[*]

I have a genuine interest in this topic, because my company depends
both on Pharo and Android (native) software.

But how I see this, the advantage of Pharo running on Android for
devices other than phones/tablets, more kind of "internet of things"
devices. The advantage is also that the image is an asset of the vm,
so you can update your app without having to reinstall it through the
platform app management.

Please don't let this stop you guys from doing this VM even for the
fun/sake of doing it.
But as you are making this public, I feel allowed to ask questions and
add comments. You can simply ignore them. :)

Regards,

Esteban A. Maringolo

[*] Several years ago I took a private course of "mobile squeak", and
even compiled a modified squeak VM for WinCE, running MVC based UIs.
Back then Squeak UI was way better than WinCE's, even for "business
apps". Now I think mobile expectations changed.