Thread: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
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attila77 is offline attila77
2010-06-16 , 15:39
Posts: 3,319 | Thanked: 5,610 times | Joined on Aug 2008 @ Finland
#121
Originally Posted by dneary View Post
Now, as an application developer, in July 2009, just as Fremantle is ramping up to get out the door and wow people on a Maemo phone, you've been told that your existing application will require porting, and that the platform you're porting to will be obsoleted by the following version. Qt 4.5 had some hacks to get it working on Maemo with qt4-hildon, but Qt 4.6 is the first fully supported version of standard Qt for Maemo, and it only came out last month on Maemo 5 with PR 1.2.

So what do you do between July 2009 and May 2010? Do you migrate your application to Fremantle? Try to re-develop it in Qt (or write a new app in Qt)?
Now, while I agree with the sentiment, there is a little hole here wrt to the Maemo Qt schedule, and a pretty pivotal one - the end of 2009. The single most important announcement for me on the Maemo summit (Oct 09) was the 2010Q1 official Fremantle support for Qt4.6 (that was the coup-de-grace), followed by actual Qt4.6 packages in extras-devel in starting with Nov 09, with a planned release Mar 09. Thus, if there was any dilemma about the future, for me it was July-Oct 09 (which were not that critical as the N900 wasn't out yet), after that, the juggernaut was already moving and there was no way back.

IMHO the two mistakes with the transition were
  • not being decisive enough to follow through the choice. There was a lot of mixed signals on the list 'if-you-code-for-today' and 'if-you-think-about-the-future', 'can-qt-do-this', 'does-widget-X-exist-in-Qt'... in retrospect (while I feel for people invested in GTK+/Hildon - and even have such stuff in Extras myself), Qt should have been driven much harder - the delay did not make it easier for Hildon people but did cause slight FUD wrt to how 'serious' the Qt future is, slowing down adoption.
  • the other, orbital size mistake was tying Qt4.6 release with PR1.2. That single thing cost the platform literally 3 months of delay for no good reason.
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