Yeah, sure, this is obviously the strategy here - being able to tell developers that using Qt, they can target Symbian and Maemo devices with the same codebase. And the motivation behind the Intel/Nokia alliance, from Nokia's side, is making sure that the same apps will also run on Moblin devices. Plus Qt runs on Windows Mobile. It's about attracting app developers by saying "if you use our technology/API, you can deploy your work on all of these devices with relatively little or no extra effort for each individual one."

I think this is a really smart move. Let's face it, on the app side, Nokia is late to the party compared to the iPhone and Android - sure, you could write Symbian apps years before both existed, but the app thing is only really exploding now, and Symbian looks pretty dead compared to the 50k apps for the iPhone and even the 5k apps for Android. With Qt, Nokia might be able to convince developers that their platform is worth an investment of time and effort by them, because it's not limited to only Nokia - Qt also runs elsewhere - and because as a well-established open source solution, it would even outlive Nokia's demise. There's less risk for the developer that way.

As for why they couldn't do that with GTK+: Maybe they could, but Qt does have a portability head start over GTK+ (it's available on more platforms - especially when you're talking commercial-grade quality - and its architecture lends itself better to adding new ones) and it's C++ as is Symbian app development already, so it's a better fit there.

Did I miss the conference were Intel said "hey we're going to use Qt too"?

Of course It'll make sense, but don't extrapolate. I

If you go to the Moblin website and look at their architecture diagram, you'll notice that it does feature Qt, yes: http://moblin.org/documentation/mobl...ew/moblin-core

Moblin is not exclusively using Qt as Harmattan will, but it's involved, yes, and as I wrote above, I imagine Nokia will try to make sure that it is robust enough to play a part in the argument they present to application developers, provided Moblin becomes successful enough to be of interest at all.

Hi Quim

Does this mean 'runtimes' are the easiest route in Harmattan? Are the runtimes limited to one type or several? Python and pyqt seem obvious, will python be officially supported?

Rich

There's confusion? I thought it was pretty obvious:

1. Maemo is going more and more mainstream (whether or not it gets there, who knows)
2. End-user applications make devices these days, but they've always been essential to Maemo devices. Other companies turn this into the ever growing number of app stores (seriously, every other company at JavaOne was announcing a new app store, whether it was a manufacturer like Sony Ericsson, a network like Orange, a software vendor like Sun...)
3. Quality needs to improve if Extras is going to get turned on by default.

Indeed, didn't the various announcements about the debmaster role make this clear? Why not the same question about a bugmaster, docmaster and webmaster? Everything relates to future products somehow, and improving the quality and sales of those devices.

The PyQt situation is interesting because unlike Qt, it's not LGPL yet. I'm sorta expecting Nokia to buy Riverbank any minute now, though.

Yeah, sticking one weird C++ dialect on top of another (exceptions, anyone?) is going to work really well...

Sure. Let me flip that question around: is Nokia willing to provide the essential support (you know, enough to boot, draw stuff on the screen and have network connectivity) for running a (community-supported) Hildon-based Mer on Harmattan devices?

That's likely to change once third-generation hardware is out. How many new packages do you see for the 770 (Hacker Editions aside)?

No, the sane thing to do would be to provide a transition path. At least one of the two GUI frameworks should be officially supported on both releases.

They say they can't do that because of lack of resources, but at the same time they admit they'll have to rewrite everything that draws on the screen to C++/Qt which is orders of magnitude more work. Something does not quite compute there...

One other thing to consider: if the "community" isn't able (or willing - unpaid volunteers have even fewer resources available) to pick up the slack in time for the Harmattan release it would mean that most existing apps simply won't work on Harmattan devices. That will hurt both sales and developer adoption, and Nokia should care about those.

Of all the things they are/could be doing wrong this is your dealbreaker? As long as performance and power management are comparable who cares if the architecture is ARM or x86 (or MIPS, PPC, SPARC, whatever)? Sure, current x86 chips don't have the power management features of current ARM chips, but there's nothing in the instruction set that dictates that, it's simply that they have been targetting the PC market so far.

Oh, and for all their faults Intel is much more open than ARM/TI.