Thread: Maemo 6 loosing source compatibility with plain Qt, and Symbian^4
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Mark Wilcox is offline Mark Wilcox
2010-01-12 , 12:15
Posts: 12 | Thanked: 125 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ York UK
#119
OK, I lost two goes at replying to this to a dodgy network connection on the train last night, so this might be a bit shorter than it should have been.

I said I would say nothing more until we had something to discuss, but since you ask some direct questions...

Are you a yellow newspaper journalist or what? ... Not to mention your dramatic remarks: "really worries", "extremely dangerous attitude".
No, I'm not a journalist trying to stir up trouble. I really want Nokia to continue to stay on top in the smartphone race. I see them as infinitely preferable to alternatives like control freak Apple or Google's ad-filled, privacy-free distopia. I just happen to believe that Nokia have a great strategy to do that which isn't working out as it should. I find that extremely frustrating and disappointing - hence the emotive language.

What's your point? Symbian doesn't have many applications because it's framework is bad
Yes, exactly that. At least it doesn't have as many applications as it should considering the device volumes compared to the competition. To clarify, in case I get misrepresented in some industry blog again, Avkon is not well suited to touch UI devices and Symbian C++ and the Avkon APIs are too complex to learn and use for most developers. This makes it both less economically viable and less fun to do - so people are less likely to do it. The Ovi store has improved things, but nowhere near as much as would be expected if the two factors you suggest were the only important ones.

for symbian you need that factory i guess (lets assume you need it).
No, I think it's a special case. Most apps can just use the standard QApplication constructor.

It runs natively.
Fantastic! That's a good start.

Yeah, I also saw tablets with win7. It's ridiculous. Old UIs are not suitable for finger oriented interfaces. It's just proves my point. Btw, almost all vendors create their own UI shells for those device to browse pictures and so on. Do you know why?
Yes, standard win 7 on tablets is bad - I agree. I bet the trolls could create a QTabletPCStyle that produced good looking apps from standard Qt code though. To get them looking really great you might need to change the layout, but otherwise the code wouldn't need to change.

Well, they all have physical soft keys, just sometimes it's part of screen.
If it's part of the screen it's not a "physical" soft key. That's the point, they're there in 5th Edition because the framework is too inflexible to allow the apps to do anything else easily.

Another example is missing hardware "home" key in n900. When there is no such a key _all_ application should have "home" button. I wonder how you would do that with Avkon.
I'm not sure I get your point here - Avkon has an "end" key that takes you "home", and a "menu" key that takes you to the main menu. Whatever your framework, it needs to intercept some commands before they get to the app - whether they be from physical keys, virtual keys drawn by the framework, or gestures (touch or other sensor, e.g. accelerometer). Every framework does this but it's not typically visible in the API, is it?

Actually yes. They do look the same. I see label here, scroll bar there. It's all the same, except that they are drawn differently. If you look at mobile frameworks, they all enforce certain style guide. For instance framework enforces where menu of application will appear.
OK, I picked two examples that were too close together for you. What about Qt on desktop systems and the current Qt port to Symbian/S60. On Symbian, the standard code to create your menu for a desktop puts it on the options softkey by default (no extra softkey API needed for that). As long as the UI framework APIs have the right level of abstraction, they can be the same across very different looking platforms.

This approach even worse. Sometimes things just don't exist, like soft keys but sometimes they don't match partially and then you get a mess. Because you need several copies of "almost" same things.
In my experience this is a sure sign that your API is at the wrong level of abstraction and it's time for some re-factoring.

I don't think we're really getting anywhere here though. The requirement I'm looking to fill is cross-platform development of the new paradigm animated UIs, with Symbian & Maemo as a minimum level of supported platforms. My assumption is that at a minimum we need a common set of QGraphicsWidgets for that. I'll test that assumption as soon as I can, then we can talk details.
Last edited by Mark Wilcox; 2010-01-12 at 12:18.
 

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