Thread: Quim keynote on Maemo's switch to Qt as the main toolkit
View Single Post
Mox is offline Mox
2009-07-05 , 16:37
Posts: 5 | Thanked: 8 times | Joined on Jul 2009
#23
Originally Posted by qgil View Post
...cross-platform development over the years.

... the plan is to use the Qt 4.6 / Qt Mobility API. It's true that there are many elements that need to be in place, in different platforms and working. But... did I say in the presentation that the Harmattan project is going to be easy to implement?
I wish in all this talk about "cross-platform", some effort would be put into explaining what does it mean in practice for this context.

On one side, I can understand it in the sense that, sure, the more everybody uses just QT toolkit all over the place (desktop, mobile,...), it's easier for a developer of, say, Ovi Suite for Windows to jump over and start developing for Harmattan in the future.

But in terms of UI? Is somebody seriously claiming there's "cross-platform" UI's between desktop and mobile? Just compile away? Especially in terms of having "mainstream users" as goal, which Maemo has according to Quim.

In terms of UI, I can understand (relatively) "cross-platform" QT-based Windows application being ported to Mac OS X with smaller effort (although being truly "Mac" is really really hard).

And I could understand being able to share some UI elements between a future Symbian QT application and future Maemo harmattan QT application. But even there, there's the same thing as in the UI's in the desktop: Windows is not Mac is not Linux, Mac is not Windows is not Linux.

Thoughts?