Notices

About Hancom: nevermind, it appears to be based on QT, which, I think, on the 770 equates to installing large libraries and slow performance.

Feel free to correct me...

I'd like to correct that, because the story of the Zaurus sheds and interesting light on the 770. The original, pda style zaurus was sold in the US and in Germany (I have one with a german keyboard) to the general public. The later, clamshell, mini-laptop style Zaurus were indeed only sold in Japan as a glorified dictionary, but another version, also pda-style, was sold in the US, mainly as a device to run java corporate applications.

The interesting part of the story is that Sharp tried to sell their device to the general public, but apparently did not sell enough of it. It seems that they had lots of problems supporting what they sold it for: a pda that would synchronize to a windows platform.

Jerome, you are totally right. My post was getting fat, so I oversimplified :-)

With the early "brick" models (the 5000 and 5500) Sharp made a half-hearted attempt at building an outside community. They even had a developer program with discounted units in Europe (I guess Nokia copied this for the 770 :-), and a "developer" site - that went down after a while with all its content, creating resentment (which is B.a.d.). The 6000 (with BT and/or Wifi, thus clearly for the non-japanese market) was another timid attempt at the corporate "vertical" niche, in the US. The heart of the platform (Qtopia) was closed from the start anyway.

I myself got into the game in the "clamshell" period after that, so I only knew Sharp as a maker of potentially fantastic hardware, albeit black-market expensive and hard to procure, and totally absent on the systems/software front. Progress on that side was left to freelancers such a Cacko, pdaXrom, GPE and others. Typical OSS fragmentation. When last I checked on ZUG they were still trying.

Recently I was reminded how bad things can get when I tried to use my "old" 760 with my new 54g Wifi AP secured with WPA. I ended up pairing it in ad-hoc mode with the tablet...

Nokia's approach with the 770 up to now, and the ensuing dynamics, is in a totally different league, even if it's never as fast and furious as we all would like. I just hope Ari's team doesn't fall victim to corporate logic and is given time to prove their point. I would really like to see the 880 and 990 and whatnot... just as I'd love to be riding a BMW C2 or C3 instead of a dinosaur :-)

PS: Karel, sorry for hijacking your thread :-)

Thanks, you saved me some tedious quoting of that previous big post :-)

You are right. The Zaurus GUI (Qtopia) is built on a scaled-down version of Trolltech's Qt graphic library, which is the foundation of the desktop environment KDE. While Nokia's is built on a scaled-down version of GTK, which is the low-level roots of desktop Gnome. It is hard to be further apart in the Linux world -- not quite as bad as running a Windows app on an Intel Mac, but still.

So porting the Hancom apps to run properly on the tablet would be quite some task (not to mention proper Hildon integration such as menus, full screen, task bar, hardware keys...). And I'd rather not think of running it 'as is' on a thick cushion of compatibility libs, even if such existed :-)

I'll stab at this one more time. Maybe I can say what I wanted to say the first time.

I said this, so I'll explain it. I consider lots of things contributions: coding, commenting, discussing, feedback, and feature requests are among them. However, this line, which got me started on this thread is not any of the above:

It's not contributive; it's just whining. Worse: it's complaining and rather accusatory. My point: if this is how you are going to contribute, then just be quiet. It's not helping.

I'm an open source developer. I write open source contributions on several different platforms. For a certain app I have written, it's been almost 2 months since the last release. I just can't get the time to put the features into it I want. If someone were to ask me what my problem is in cranking out that next version, I would say what I said above: just be quiet, you are not helping.

I'm grateful to all those who have contributed to the software collection for the 770. I use Maemo Mapper all the time! But I'm not kidding myself: if gnuite were to stop working on it, I'd have to be happy with the current version and be quiet, because I'm not a Bluetooth programmer. gnuite has no obligation to me.

I'll restate my original point. Be encouraging and have some patience. Hopefully, the software you want will be here. ...Hopefully...

-F

How can I help if I don't know what the problem is? The question I asked was just that: a request for information.

I'm not a programmer, I barely know how to start up a Linux system and I'm certain that there isn't much I can do to help the Abiword port. However, up until now I have aways shared with this community whatever info or tricks I had come up with that might be helpful in running a 770. It may not be groundbreaking stuff, but if I can help someone getting their Abiword documents exported and printed from the 770 with minimal fuss, that should count for something?

So I reiterate my question: I really would like to know what is holding up the port of Abiword to ITOS 2006? If it's something programmy, I'm sure I can't help. If, OTOH, the problem is that a developer needs money for food, I am prepared to Paypal any reasonable amount of moolah. If he needs a peptalk, I'll call him up and pep him to smithereens. If he needs a hug... well, someone else can do that perhaps.

Ooh! Ooh! I'll do it! ... so long as they don't check for their wallet afterward.

(Then again it'd probably be full of movie rental memberships and an expired condom)

It's not nice to imply that all programmers are geeks that cannot get laid.

It may be true, but it's not nice...

I'm a SQL developer and I've got no problems Can't say the same about 90% of the others I've encountered in the field

(I will say this though, anyone I've encountered throughout dealing with the 770 has been awesome. Going back to when I first started screwing around with Slackware, everyone now has been *so* helpful with explaining things, documenting, etc).

http://etrunko.blogspot.com/2006/08/...ost-there.html

Jay Etrunko!

I am the lowest of the lowest, not worthy to make a backup copy of his source code.

...

So, where are those Abiword wankers now, eh?