Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

OK, so what was this then about?

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

As a new user (well, I will be once my N800 arrives) I'm used to qtopia on my old dying SL C860 ... ::waves at speculatrix:: ...seriously, I expect it would take a while to write qtopia stuff to the N8x0, would it not?

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

That just means they are upgrading their license to a new version of the GPL. The old version was under GPL 2, now it is under GPL 3.

Anyway, I really hope to get a Qt based maemo. A webkit based browser is IMO going to be much better than microB. I think Qt is in general prettier and more resource efficient than GTK, and being able to run KDE apps like Koffice or Amarok is going to be a huge selling point.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Nope, in theory you can run Qtopia on the n800 right now, and I'd bet that someone at either Nokia or Trolltech already is.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

If you search the forum, you will see that qtopia already runs on n800. As well as qt-4.3.3. It's a simple recompilation.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

I really hope that they ll keep Maemo on GTK ! It's one of the reason i use and dev today on the n8x0 plateform

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Well, I'm biased, so don't take my comments on Qt all too serious :) , but this is what I think.

Whether Qt or Gtk is prettier is a matter of taste. I, e.g. never really liked the look of KDE and the Qt toolkit. But in the end, it's a matter of theming. I don't think that Qt is more resource efficient that Gtk. Maybe they're on par with with each other. But if you consider that Gtk is C while Qt is (preprocessed, i.e. not clean) C++, I assume that Qt is not as resource efficient. But this also greatly depends on how well both toolkits are designed/written.
Amarok is really a very good app but I doubt it would fit the small tablet screen. You'd still need a "hildonized" version to make this really a selling point.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

If you have compelling enough services, then the OS and devices don't matter as much. If I'm Nokia and setting myself into being a services provider, then maximizing resources by using Linux and Symbian will go a long way towards making that point clearer.

Of course, I'm saying this in the mist of a community that pretty much doesn't want to hear that Nokia is developing Maemo in order to commodize it in connected appliances so they can better attract mainstream consumers to their services. Saying such here makes it seem like we are nothing more than pawns for a bigger picture, which is true to a large extent, but no one wants to ever be anyone's pawn.

In terms of short term (2-5 years), one could expect Nokia to develop the non-consumer applications of Linux with Qt, and the consumer ones with Maemo (thinking that they are about 3 models ahead of the N810 in terms of development and planning, and so it will take a while to turn the ship). I wouldn't be surprised though to see S40 be dropped for Qt as they can/do occupy the same areas in terms of a low cost mobile OS that can be ported and deployed quickly. Depending on the maturity of the Qt tools (sorry, I've not been in their ear since CES 07 to know this), it could very well be a play to make Symbian and S60 the premeir mobile OS for services, and Linux the OS for embedded devices running commodized but similar services.

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

What gave you the idea that this was true? I would love to see Nokia turn Maemo into a commodity that is deployed across many devices, and many types of devices. Even if it turns out that the NITs are an experiment and proving ground that never goes anywhere, but that Maemo shows up as a replacement for the OS on their smartphones ... I'd be ok with that.


*shrug* it is what it is. As long as we get something that we find of value, who cares what their ultimate motivation is?

Re: Nokia buys Trolltech, Ari says
 

Well, Exaile -- pretty much a Python/GTK copy of Amarok -- has been hildonized. It's slow, but works pretty well. A non-python version would run even faster.

I love KDE, although I don't like how it looks out of the box. You can already put QT on the tablet; some way of hildonizing QT apps would be even nicer, and that's what I'm going to hope for.