Qtopia coming for Neo1973

[Dani Anon]

On 9/25/07, Lorn Potter <lpotter at trolltech.com> wrote:
>
>
> Carlo E. Prelz wrote:
> >       Subject: Re: Qtopia coming for Neo1973
> >       Date: mar 25 set 07 08:18:31 +0200
> >
> > Quoting Dani Anon (mrtitor at gmail.com):
> >
> >> - But QT is not free (as in beer) for commercial usage
> >
> > This is not the only reason why Qtopia is sub-optimal.
>
> It's not a reason at all. Neo is a "free" phone! If I wanted commercial
> applications, I could easily use any other phone out there. The reason
> why we are all here, is because the Neo is 'free software'. Would the
> Neo interest you as much if it wasn't as 'free'?

Tell that to all the people using Wine under Linux.

> > QT is bound to C++. With GTK you can choose to program in C, or, if
> > you really want to, in C++. With QT there is no way you can write your
> > code in C.
>
> There is no way right now because no one has written a wrapper. It's not
> impossible.
>

I thing gp is right, c might be better than c++ for small devices and
certainly you need to code in c++ to take advantage of qtopia
components.

> >
> > Also, Qtopia, by having no X server running in the background, makes
> > it much more difficult for the average developer to bring his/her own
> > window to the screen of the phone.
>
>   not really. <qt-rant>In fact, coding with Qt is much faster than gtk.
> Ask people that have done both.</qt-rant>

agree, anybody that has tried both knows it's like night and day, qt
is miles ahead in ease of development.

> > With X, there are dozens of ways to
> > paste an interactive window to the screen. They may be esthetically
> > discordant with the main theme of the phone, but your code can
> > communicate to the phone user and the phone hardware. I do not know
> > how easy it is for one's application to talk to the windowing system
> > underlying qtopia,
>
> Easier, IMHO, than with gtk/xlibs. X11 development is rather arcane.
>
> > but I have reasons to believe that a) I should have
> > to learn to code in a totally different environment, and b) that
> > environment would require coding in C++. Both things are not desirable
> > for me.
>
> fair enough reasons here.
>
> >
> > I see OpenMoko as a developer-oriented phone/system. Even if current
> > performance may be not that awe-generating, processor speeds are going
> > to increase, and optimizations will certainly be made.
>
> They haven't progressed that much in the last 6 years. Slower cpu uses
> less power.

strongly agree with all these points. With mobile devices, direct
access to the hardware is everything because it might mean an extra
hour of battery. the main problem right now is I'm not sure about the
future of openmoko if they keep using X. When I learnt openmoko was
using an X server it surprised me a lot, its a very weird decision.
Most of Linux powered extramobile devices that I know of (please
correct me if I'm wrong) have some kind of framebuffer environment in
which you can directly draw stuff on screen with little overhead.

Dani

> --
> Lorn 'ljp' Potter
> Software Engineer, Systems Group, MES, Trolltech
>
> _______________________________________________
> OpenMoko community mailing list
> community at lists.openmoko.org
> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
>