Thread: Maemo 6 loosing source compatibility with plain Qt, and Symbian^4
View Single Post
Jaffa's Avatar
Jaffa is offline Jaffa
2009-12-15 , 23:04
Posts: 2,535 | Thanked: 6,681 times | Joined on Mar 2008 @ UK
#100
Originally Posted by conny View Post
I think most people see that there is the need for a different UI on different devices. But the differentiation should be on the visual level. Not on the API level.
And this was the mistake that was made back in 2005 with Hildon. I'm sure it was the "right" decision given the constraints and expectations at the time, but duplicating an API (GtkButton/HildonButton) to prevent back-end forking and maintenance of an internal version of Gtk+ meant much more work (in the form of retraining) for developers; and I'm not convinced much less work for Nokia.

Maybe C/Gtk+ wasn't the right technology to do a proper OO API; but Qt supposedly is. Indeed, the earlier Qt porting efforts did exactly this.

I don't care - in fact, I expect - to have to change the layout and content of my app for different platforms. I DO NOT WANT to have to learn 3 different APIs to put a button on screen depending on whether I'm targetting a desktop, Symbian or Maemo app.

Of course there also might be the need for different APIs, but that does not mean that you should have two _completely independent_ APIs with two completely different inheritance trees.
+1
__________________
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew@bleb.org | http://www.bleb.org
 

The Following 15 Users Say Thank You to Jaffa For This Useful Post: