clarification of Qtopia Vs. GTK

Lorn Potter lpotter at trolltech.com
Fri May 23 20:49:12 CEST 2008


On Friday 23 May 2008, community-request at lists.openmoko.org wrote:
> 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.

"You can please some of the people some of the time, but you cannot please all 
of the people all of the time. "

>
> Openmoko turned into a nice mobile computing platform with a very
> technocratic view on things.
> This is a feature. I would say, _the_ feature.

and it still exists.

>
> > Concorrence is always good for users :)
>
> Not necessarily. I prefer innovation.
> Especially in a industrey that has not produced innovation and good
> software for decades. (At least not since apple came.)

Apple has had their share of junker software/hardware.

> If anyone is in the position to change that, it's we.
>
>
> I don't like so sound to negative. I like most of the changes.
> But i think throwing the gtk apps away and replace them by the QTopia
> apps is stupid.
> I would rather like to see a transition to EFL for the gtk apps.
>
> Everything i have seen so far from qtopia apps looks bland and boring.

Qtopia is easily changed/hacked on. The source code is provided for free. You 
would be amazed at what some of Qtopia's customers are doing with it. It's 
got styles/theming, has dynamic layouting, and easy translating even for LTR 
languages.


> I like the qtopia plattform, as a plattform. But i don't think it's the
> way to build the nerdiest phone ever. Especially after so much was done
> right before in a completely different way.
>
> Qtopia AFAIK has it's own pim storage api. How would non-qt apps use them?

Qtopia pim data are stored in a sqlite database. It is not a secret, nor is it 
proprietary or locked down. So your application has a choice whether to use 
some library that can access sqlite (Qtopia has that of course), or use the 
commandline interface to sqlite.


>
> 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.

What is wrong with Qtopia's gsm stack? For the most part, it works. It doesn't 
crash, and can send and receive sms messages. and best of all, it's already 
written and working. If someone wrote/'ported' a wap stack, it would even do 
mms.
Let's put it this way. Once I got the hardware, it took me less than week to 
have Qtopia up and sending/receiving sms's and making phone calls.

>
> 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



-- 
Lorn 'ljp' Potter
Software Engineer, Systems Group, MES, Trolltech




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