Rob.Russell wrote:
The internal design of the application will have been architected
based on Windows philosophies, and I've had nothing but terrible
experiences with other Windows applications ported to Linux.

I am the one doing the port (now joined by Olaf Hartmann), and I took
the very long (and proper) way to do it: clean up the code base,
loosen it from its Windows origins, build the rendering engine on top
of a OS-unaware painting library, and implement a painting backend for
Linux/Android (using either SDL_gfx or OpenGL). All of the other OS
specific things are abstracted too, but not all of it is implemented
on Linux yet. It's not done yet, but it will be when the season in
the northern hemisphere starts (probably XCSoar 6.1).

I just installed XCSoar 5 minutes ago on my Desire Z to check it out.
My first impressions are that it's clunky and slow, putting extra
horsepower in to emulating windows buttons instead of using android
buttons/menus in the UI. That being said, I'm going to load up the
maps and airspaces in a few weeks and give it a fair shot at winning
me over from Cumulus -- but that won't be easy.

You mean you installed XCSoar 6? There's no 5 for Android.

No, it's not putting any "extra" horsepower into emulating Windows
buttons - it just doesn't use Android's UI library, because Android's
UI library is Java only, and XCSoar is C++. Java is a lot slower than
C++. You are right that XCSoar/Android is currently quite slow, but
that is because we havn't optimized it yet, we have concentrated on
making XCSoar 6 a good release on Windows, and you can't do everything
at the same time.

We might use native Android controls at some point for some things
(like dialog boxes), but be sure that it will definitely not be a
performance advantage.

Max