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Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

This is great advice. I have also done some work on building a good user interface using the Pi, and was surprised by how difficult it was. There's no good Android build available for the Pi, for example – would be ideal for many of the kind of UIs you would want to implement.

In the end I have been using a Go web server with websockets to display a single-page app in Firefox running under X. It's still not totally satisfactory though – UI is slow due to the lack of HW acceleration, and there is no nice solution for on-screen keyboards, so I'll probably have to implement one in JS eventually. Touch screen support is sketchy at best.

Are there other similar platforms out there that might offer HW acceleration or working Android implementations? I also had a crack at the Orange Pi which claims to have functioning Android, but… let's say that's an overstatement.

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lack of HW acceleration

Genuine question: where does the obstacle lie here? The BCM2835 is a hardware video accelerator with a small ARM on the side. GPU libraries are available. Is it something missing from X or Firefox?

Limitation is in "developers", that is WEB developers playing with embedded systems. There is nothing stopping you from deploying dedicated OpenGL application on RPi, but this is not the 2.0 way. Bros want nodejs and responsive UIs in javascript .... you end up with this: https://youtu.be/tG70c3Zadek?t=10m49s

tldr: full minute to boot X and chromium just to implement simple 20 lines of python application.

Don't be a dick about it.

Of course you can build an OpenGL ES application on the Pi – there are people doing this. But that's a absolute frigging world away from being able to build a usable UI on it.

For example, I am building a device that interacts with a user. It basically looks like a standard iOS or Android app, in that it has a few screens of text, some form fields, select boxes, and other UI widgets. Building this sort of application as a barebones OpenGL implementation would be stupid.

Whatever floats your boat. If you can leverage existing code then this might be an excellent option. But for the general use case building a simple and/or decent user interface I would say that you probably would be way better of just using QT.

Use MOAI. I did. It freakin' rocks on the rPi and is one hell of a great way to build a delightful UI ..

The most important thing is shipping ideas. Languages and system cannot be obstacle

Using the web with embed system allow new horizons and new people play with this. Of course, we can do applications with OpenGL but the first step can be with a universal environment like a web.

Also interested in a response.

There's also a bunch of OEM options from China (pico pcs / stick pcs) that look like they might do the job but might be overpromising...

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