Eh? They were always using EFL to some degree, but they eventually ditched it on much of the uppermost layers from what I recall.
There was a long series of posts from Rasta, explaining how pissed-off he was about some closed aspects, & the overall approach.
I can't recall it all in detail any more, but yeah, I get all your other points & more-or-less agree...

Oh dear....
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/...s-like-plan-b/
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/...d-in-pictures/

But do note that this is ArsTechnica...
They don't have much of a clue when it comes to niche platforms*, they typically approach them with a fairly galvanised -ve perception before they've even begun closer inspection.
At least they realise Tizen/FFOS/UbuntuTouch exists, they still refuse to do more than very rare/brief coverage of Nemo/Sailfish, been a very long-standing thing, rather odd.

*they do have more technical chops than the vast swathe of tech sites out there though


Yeah but surely there's a catch or two...
Last time we all deep-dived into this, it most certainly wasn't "open source" in the broadest sense (i.e. not just raw code dumps etc).
What's different this time round, has anything changed.

Looking at them all what strikes me 1st is that all these cool icons in their varied shape, design and colour ...meant to be appealing to the eye (which they are) and meant to stick out with the colour and specific (in most cases) "iconic" design representing the trademark symbol of a corp. in some cases ("b"= "beats")....in others representing a slight twist on an almost universally symbol for that app function (ie "camera")
After all the hard thought, design and work embedding it into the psyche of populations.
Having text underneath the icons nowadays really brings to the fore some thoughts for me ...
the purpose of an icon is to represent a concept or concepts in an image...so if that is the case.
Adding text underneath icons today... to me ...means...

1- they failed to represent the icon properly and hence need to back it up with what ? words?.
So....what was the point? why bother with icons?
I mean ..isn't the whole point in the 1st place is to be as space efficient as possible on a purposely designed limited area?

2- ruins the harmonious artistic aesthetic which was the initial drive of creating said design in the 1st place.

3- considering the universally known nature of most icons today.. adding text below to ...sayyyy... an OBVIOUS camera icon... is really really beginning to piss me off with it's insult to my intelligence .



3-

I've gotta admit, this is a pet peeve of mine; I _prefer_ textual representation of concepts. I have never been able to keep track of what the bajillion different icons in use today are supposed to mean. They do provide a very concise graphical representation of a concept, but at some point, they all start to blur together. Does a microphone represent a switch to mute the microphone, an audio recording app, or perhaps an online news broadcast app? Does a book represent a PDF viewer, a Kindle-like app, or maybe some form of help documentation? Does a camera represent an app that lets you take pictures, or an app that lets you look at your library of stored images?

Ultimately, representing concepts pictographically will break down, because there are just too many concepts; it becomes too hard to learn and remember every icon. Humanity as a whole rejected pictographic and ideographic writing forms long ago; I'm really hoping that the infatuation with icons in modern GUIs eventually transforms to something more reasonable as well.

completely agree with you.
One of the reasons I like as little iconic clutter as possible.
Perhaps hardened universal standard representation for icons is what is required.
We managed to do it universally with simply with zero icon and only colour for intersection lights as example...
green=go amber=yield red=stop

hm...inevitably all languages collapse to the weight of time and the change it brings.

Nah, not really. The problem is not standardization, but rather that there are just too many icons. All the modern written forms of language have given up on tying a single icon to a single concept, and instead gone with combining a set of simpler icons together to represent a concept (or to represent a series of spoken sounds). (And yeah, spoken language also groups together combinations of simple sounds to represent a concept, rather than trying to come up with a single unique sound for each concept. )

Russia seems to be really board with Android and iOS. Time for russia to port apps for sail and Tizen

What to make of it?
http://maemo.su/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=133719#p133719

english...http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/09/fro...r-open-source/

Coderus...where are you? Time to make some money

That would be a big boon. Provided it is real and not a bubble. Has anyone in Russia heard anything?

It seems to be only for Russian developers to create localized applications for Russian market, but still... not bad

powerAmp dev is russian. Other than that i have no clue. But would be cool if this was ported to tizen, sail or ubuntu.

e-yes is from moskow too IICR