[Touch GSM ROM Development] evlimeca:
thanks for the PM

nice. I totally agree with this idea, although for simple information exchange, i think its a much better idea to setup a Touch IRC channel, or some other form of group chat where we can quickly discuss problems (if people are around), and post any useful information to this thread. It's already gotten horrendously long with just the people saying I'm in.

as you said the touch is a really new device, and in many ways completely different than most of the devices before it in the fact its nearly buttonless. I equate it to the dos-windows gui interface jump. If anyone is somewhat smart they can figure out where this leads. buttons are dying, and as much as some people don't like it, change is inevitable. that being said there are some things to consider.

1) despite the fact that many individuals are cooking up some extremely impressive roms. (lets not do credits now to everyone) it seems theres a real lack of community involvement in a project. goals? simple create a better more effecient rom than htc itself is producing. improving capabilities and user friendlyness across the board.

2) customization. I mean seriously i understand the lack of space on the touch, but Oo my wm6 device came with 4 different skins! look this one is orange! thats a total joke.

3) its safe to assume nobody who is ever going to flash a touch is going to ever own a touch without a memory card, and said memory card is never going to be smaller than 1gb (thats also low in my opinion)

4) This is my big one. In a globalized world, i have no idea how HTC and Microsoft have done such an amazingly horrible job with multi language support. Lets not talk about U.S. users here (and I am an American so save the attacks or defensive retorts) but Americans are the one people who have the least use for multi-language support. we Don't care what you speak, you should speak English. Anyone who is not a native English speaker, needs at the very minimum English plus their native language, and any additional languages they may speak. For me its Chinese.

In my opinion the age of GUI pocket pc's is upon us, telecommunications and media are about to make the same, if not greater leap than they did in the early 90's. In three years time the laptop and the desktop will be obsolete for anything other than gaming and graphical design. The average worker is going to carry a company issued cellphone that bluetooth's to a keyboard and a mouse, with a display hookup coming out of a phone no bigger than the touch. the touch dual is already 400mhz, overclocking might push 600. its going to be sick.

Unfortunately, I studied project management, and not CIS. what i see when reading these forums is alot of really really good programs put out by techies. but unfortunately the roms theyre cooking up are for techies, with very little thought given to what the actual average cellphone user has in mind.

now a lot of you may be thinking, who cares about the average cellphone user, they're idiots. and while people may or may not agree with you, the fact is that these people are the ones buying the phones, so its great for us to figure out a new way to tweak something with registry editor, but who's really working on the fact that audio manager sucks and makes the programs crash.

Its hard to be taken seriously by anyone, when serious flaws exist in the roms that are getting dumped out. I agree that a cooking course is a great plan. but honestly who wants to see 400,000 more new roms every day. i /care about the new WWE big storage that saved me 200k more space. i truthfully dont even use the 15 MEGS i was given with the factory rom.

therefore, i propose to move the class to a public real time chat room, work together on making one solid rom, and improving the overall quality of the users experience and using xda, to post results and field problems. but thats just my idea :P