[yurkennis]

As Beta announcement of Bonsai for WinMobile reads, the product is still early beta in terms of both stability and performance--especially warning heavy users like myself that (a) performance maybe become an issue with several-thousands-of-items outlines, and (B) corruptions still may occur from time to time.

Three questions:
1) If we compare Bonsai performance on a latest PalmOS device with an average WinMobile device, how seriously is WinMobile version is slower? (I would be happy if you had data specifically for PalmOS Treo 680 VS a 528MHz-Qualcomm CPU-powered WinMobile HTC--but I hope that any other pair would give an idea for performance comparison)

2) If WinMobile is slower these days--how serious do you plan to improve its performance by the time WinMobile Bonsai goes out of Beta?

3) Can you give an idea of date when WinMobile can be released out of Beta? Is it more like in 3 months or in a year from now?

Thanks a lot, and have a great 2010!

[Richard Murphy]

yurkennis, on 02 January 2010 - 04:51 PM, said:

1) If we compare Bonsai performance on a latest PalmOS device with an average WinMobile device, how seriously is WinMobile version is slower? (I would be happy if you had data specifically for PalmOS Treo 680 VS a 528MHz-Qualcomm CPU-powered WinMobile HTC--but I hope that any other pair would give an idea for performance comparison)

Outline load time will be slower due to the outline data format (XML based file on WM verses DB on Palm OS). Once the outline is loaded, Bonsai should perform reasonable well but some operations, like toggling completion status, will take much too long with large outlines (this is due to the internal recalculation for supporting rollup - code ported from the desktop that needs to be optimized for the WM platform) If you have an outline with more than 1000 items, I do not think you will find Bonsai very usable (also depends on how much text the outline contains). I have a small 50 item outline I use often on my phone with no performance issues. I do not have any performance statistics comparing Palm and WM to provide.

yurkennis, on 02 January 2010 - 04:51 PM, said:

2) If WinMobile is slower these days--how serious do you plan to improve its performance by the time WinMobile Bonsai goes out of Beta?

I do not plan to release Bonsai unless it can perform well even with large outlines (but outline load time will not be instant). The WM design copied many details from the desktop app. For the most part, the desktop app performs well but does have minor issues with some uniquely formatted large outlines. This design when ported to the WM device highlighted these issues when run on slower processors found in the phones. In any case, since Bonsai is a .NET application, there will be some areas that will not be as fast as on the Palm device. A .NET application is "compiled" on the fly before it can run. This will result in slightly longer load times. The current XML format also presents some challenges as the entire outline must be parsed before Bonsai can use the outline. It is still to be determined whether this is a reasonable format or if the outline format must be switched to a database format.

yurkennis, on 02 January 2010 - 04:51 PM, said:

3) Can you give an idea of date when WinMobile can be released out of Beta? Is it more like in 3 months or in a year from now?

Given all of the current unknowns, and the fact that we are working on other projects besides Bonsai, I could not provide an estimate (and Natara does not provide release dates).

[yurkennis]

Richard Murphy, on 07 January 2010 - 11:24 AM, said:

I do not plan to release Bonsai unless it can perform well even with large outlines.

With the recent leak of HTC roadmap, we'll need to choose between 600MHz with a physical keyboard like HTC Trophy (slower manipulations with outlines, faster typing) and 1GHz with a capacitive screen keyboard like HTC HD2 (faster manipulations but slower typing).

Please, don't allow the slower manipulations (moves, cuts&pastes, promotion&demotion) to become too slow even with large outlines--and definitely faster than Palm Treo 680 ;-)

Thanks in anticipation.

This post has been edited by yurkennis: 04 February 2010 - 02:47 AM