maemo.org - Talk

maemo.org - Talk (https://talk.maemo.org/index.php)

- MeeGo / Harmattan (https://talk.maemo.org/forumdisplay.php?f=45)

- - Tizen? (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=77986)

from
http://www.allaboutmeego.com/news/it...Mo_to_form.php

Quote:

What role for Qt?

The future of Qt in relation to Tizen is uncertain. It was not mentioned in any of today’s press releases. The Tizen website does make reference to a native development, but does not provide any further details. Instead HTML 5 is promoted as the development environment of choice and in an elastic piece of thinking is given as the reason for the need to evolve MeeGo.

However, Qt is a key component in many MeeGo related projects (e.g. part of the reference design for the GENIVI alliance for IVI devices) and, as noted above, Intel have indicated that there will be backwards compatibility with existing MeeGo netbook applications.

It seems likely that politics has a role to play here. Qt came into the MeeGo project from Nokia. Despite recent moves towards open governance, is still very much associated with Nokia. Intel were unhappy that Nokia switched to Windows Phone and the member of LiMo (including Samsung) may prefer to avoid mentioning or relying on what is perceived to be a competitor's asset.

In our opinion the likely scenario is that Qt will continue to play a major role in Tizen projects, but it will not be promoted as part of the core primary developer environment. Qt may be included as part of the default offering or it may be left to integrators to provide a version of Tizen with Qt. A possible example of how this might work in practise comes from Nomovok, who today released a press statement indicating that they would provide a version of Tizen integrated with Qt as part of their Steelrat system.

Quote:

Originally Posted by debernardis (Post 1098135)

+1 for you. I'm more and more convinced that everything's got to start over from Debian. This would be great for users and devs, not so great for the corporate always designing and announcing their own walled gardens.

i'd pick opensuse and the opensuse build service personally.

Oh well.. I will stick with the cssu and my N900 :)

That is why elop said we won't get any more meego devices. Because we are getting Tizen :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by volt (Post 1098054)

If Qt support can be announced by a third party immediately after OS announcement, that means the platform isn't so closed down. If it's open for the Qt framework, it's open for other frameworks.

I see it a little differently. It seems clear that Nomovok have had some inside knowledge of Tizen in advance and are working with Intel on it. This is why they could announce so quickly. This does not mean that the Tizen platform is particularly open in general.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Willem Liu (Post 1097829)

This is like the official end of Maemo and Meego. Maybe Nokia did see this coming and switched to WP7 just in time...

It's worse than that. It's the end of gnu/linux phones and handhelds.

Funny thing to notice: even if Nokia has screwed up big time with this whole Maemo / MeeGo / Harmattan thing, it seems that they are still the only one actually capable of doing (and achieving) something. Open development without any actual results (*cough* Intel *cough*) is totally useless: nice idea but execution worse than Nokia's current...

Intel is totally lost in mobile and apparently have no idea what on earth they're doing, they're just doing something.
And Samsungs achievements on the software front:
-

There's one solid base for Tizen :D
If they manage to ditch Qt (or somehow leave it to class B), they're already dead.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nyrath (Post 1098154)

from
http://www.allaboutmeego.com/news/it...Mo_to_form.php

" the likely scenario is that Qt will continue to play a major role in Tizen projects, but it will not be promoted as part of the core primary developer environment."

Not good enough!

Quote:

Originally Posted by -Tyler- (Post 1097868)

Come on this is better than nothing, days ago everyone is blaming and crying: Is the end of the comunity, Maemo is Dead, WebOS is dead, MeeGo is dead, no more linux mobile devices after the N9 ever, and now we have Samsumg on our team, this is really good news!! I am sorry for the QT thing but now we have HOPE when before we had only desesperation.

No, it's terrible news. There's absolutely no incentive for anyone to develop for this platform, because popular platforms like Android, iOS and ZunePhone will support HTML apps long before Tizen could possibly build any market share.

I'm actually cautiously optimistic about this. My original goal way back when I bought a Sharp Zaurus was to be able to write applications for a fairly open mobile platform using libraries which were also usable on other platforms; Qt was about the only option for this at the time. This remained true through the N810 and N900, but things have shifted. I have trouble considering something truly cross-platform unless it also runs on Android and iOS, which Qt doesn't do yet (well, it kinda sorta works on Android).

Also, Qt has moved away from native widget appearance towards QML; there are good reasons for having done so, but what stand out to me are the drawbacks of "no longer looks native on desktops", "have to rewrite the UI for different platforms", and "HTML-like system (markup language, CSS, JavaScript) without actually being able to leverage web development experience and libraries effectively". I'd already pretty much decided to give up on Qt development and focus on something like PhoneGap + Dojo Mobile, which actually can run pretty much anywhere with a little extra work and is a much more useful skill set for my day job as a web application developer.

So now my only problem is finding a source of modern devices with a mostly open software platform which can run modern web apps. Android, iOS, webOS, and Blackberry all flunk the "open" requirement. I love my N900, but I'm going to eventually want a device with new and improved hardware (and the lack of new software kind of hurts). Nokia tarnished the reputation of MeeGo and kept control of Qt in the process of flushing itself down the toilet with the Windows transition, so they're no longer seen as viable options by most people. A new open Linux platform focused on web app technologies, with the ability to also run Qt apps (for Maemo/MeeGo and KDE compatibility) and maybe Android apps (for a huge initial selection of apps) sounds just about perfect. I just hope they can actually pull it off.