Qtopia Vs. GTK

[Bobby Martin]

> From: Tilman Baumann <tilman at baumann.name>
> Michele Renda wrote:
>
>> Hi Tilman
>>
>> I think they prefered to use an existent project, because they need
>> something running and to concentrate their energy to hardware part. They
>> want to concentrate to the project of hardware, not in GUI writing.
>>
> Openmoko is a Software project.
> The software is the only thing that helps to make this 1990ies like piece
> of hardware cool.
>
>  According me is a good idea to reuse the software wrote by other people.
>> In every case the software previously written in not trashed. It is released
>> with open licences and it can be implemented by someone who hate too much
>> Qtopia.
>>
> Hope so. The problem is that the community has little resources. Dividing
> these resources does not sound like a good idea.
> And i cant's see how it helpes to throw most of the good work away.
> (Ok, some was crap. But nothing beyond repair)
> I think this will piss of developers.
> And users.
>
> Openmoko turned into a nice mobile computing platform with a very
> technocratic view on things.
> This is a feature. I would say, _the_ feature.
>

First, I just want to disagree loudly about the preferred apps.  I much
prefer QTopia personally for most of the standard "phone"
apps.  They are much more polished, primarily due to being much older.  For
example, being able to mute the ringer on my phone
without going into terminal and moving the audio file is nice ;-)

It sounds to me as if the new direction for OM is to play the 'open' card a
lot more.  Everything is intended to give you more
choice.  I think it was a great business decision on OM's part to do the
work to get QTopia in their software stack, and
make it the initial suite of phone apps.  Lots of great work has been done
on QTopia, and it makes sense to take advantage
of it.

That doesn't mean the old apps are gone - people who like them better can
continue to develop them and install them, and
can build an "OpenMoko classic" release even if OM decides to drop them
completely.  That's the beauty of open source...



> And the gsm stuff? Does this mean we now use the qtpia gsm stack?
> letting gsmd die would probably one of the better ideas. But i rather like
> so see it replaced by something similar but working instead of a set of qt
> apis.
>

I thought it had been pretty clearly indicated that the dbus interfaces
Mickey Laurer & company are building are the new
direction for access to all of the back-end services.  I have no idea how
that integrates with QTopia, though, if at all.  I would
think it's far more likely that OM will make QTopia support the dbus
interfaces than them dropping the dbus interfaces, though.


> Is there any place where to look which back end functionalities will
> change?
> Like evolution data server, dbus apis, gsmd, PhoneKit and such...
>
> Well, we will see...
> I should better keep my mouth shut and wait until there are GTA01 builds.
>
> Regards
>  Tilman
>

If you really want a hacker's phone, I would think something like the Zad or
zhone stack are more for you.

I'm hoping that one or both of those can live alongside the official OM
release, so I can use QTopia when
I'm wanting a simple, reliable phone interface and use Zad or zhone when I
want something I can hack to
do the really cool stuff.

BTW, regarding FIC being 1990s phone hw... I must have really missed
something in the 90's.  I knew
the US was behind as far as cell phones go, but I had no idea one could buy
a phone with full bluetooth,
wifi, GPS, usb and 640x480 touchscreen support in the 90s anywhere in the
world.

Bobby

-- 
If it doesn't make you smile, you're doing something wrong.
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