Intel's low-power Mobile Internet Device (MID) will be used in a number of environments. The vision for this new category of devices includes the following:
- Internet anytime anywhere
- Always connected
- Rich OSV ecosystem to provide worldwide coverage to ODM/OEMs
- Rich application (proprietary and open source) ecosystem to provide a wide set of applications on the platform for targeted usage models
Multiple OSVs will be creating MID-targeted distributions and multiple ISVs may develop applications for Moblin. To the extent possible, applications written for MIDs should be able to be used with little modification in all distributions or applications themselves. This specification has three goals:
- Full Internet experience for end users
- Desktop-like browsing experience (minus the screen size issues)
- Media playback (in and out of browser); all common media formats supported
- Binary compatibility for easier application development on MID platforms: Little-to-no additional effort for application developers to support multiple MID OS platforms. This impacts both OSVs and application developers. The goal here is: Moblin compliant applications work across all moblin compliant OSV platforms, with little-to-no modification.
- Gather feedback from the community.
Moblin Compliance Specification
To help ISVs verify that their application is compatible with any Moblin-compliant OS distribution, we developed the MCT (Moblin Complinace Toolkit). This toolkit can help ISVs and community developers, who are interested in developing applications for Moblin.
MCT for ISVs currently contains a major tool called "appchk", which was developed based on the Linux Standard Base (LSB) appchk tool. This tool can be used to verify whether an application is compatible with a Moblin-compliant OS distribution and will be targeted as a minimum requirement for Moblin applications.
Notes:
- MCT is NOT a test suite which can ensure the functionality or quality of a Moblin application.
- MCT can NOT ensure good user experience for a Moblin application.
- Currently, MCT for ISVs is in beta phase and users may encounter issues and bugs when using it, which does not necessarily means the application is not compliant.
- Please contact us through the Moblin Developer mailing list to let us know your issues and concerns about the spec, as well as the tools.
- We will work with the community to gather feedback about the MCT spec and tools to evolve and improve them.