Freerunner a month after

[Nicola Mfb]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 7:21 PM, Iain B. Findleton
<ifindleton at videotron.ca>wrote:

> Really depends on what your motivations and goals are, I suspect.
> Personally, I develop the applications that I want on the phone using
> TclFltk, a scripting based language that uses the FLTK tool kit. Since
> this cross platform environment works on Windows, Linux, etc. It does
> not get bogged down on all this platform dependant stuff.

I suspect that there must be other things that are pretty isolated from
> the stack, like python-gtk or java that you can use.
>
> On the other hand, if you are into the internals of the phone, your
> project will probably have a lot of trouble because of the lack of
> documentation and access. My projects are strictly user space
> applications, and so far, things are relatively speaking just fine.


Qt library works on Windows, Linux, Mac, and Windows ME too. With a single
Api you can run your applications on qtopia/2008.8/fso for example. The
library usually is used with C++, and i think this is faster then python or
java or other interpreted languages, and let's remember that we are on a
system with a slow cpu. Howewer this could be not a big issue, as a mixed
system where core feature are developed with C/C++ and lighter interfaces
with interpreted languages is acceptable.
Qt has an excellent documentation, i used it for years, qtopia supports
gta*, in the oetree are there qt recipies, om ported qtopia phone to x11, so
actually you write just one and run it on every freerunner or destkop or pda
with every distro on it.
Finally i must use qt because i developed a client for
www.openstreetmap.orgwith editor capabilities using qt library, it's
not yet released to the
public for lack of time, but when i got my freerunner i decided to
port,complete and release it.
First i tryied to download qtopia sdk virtual machine serveral time with a
slow line, but the file was trunked at 450Mb i think for an hardware problem
of the server.
After i decided to download qtopia-snapshots sources and compile SDK
directly on my host for arm and x86,  in a  couple of day i was quite
confident in new tools, new .pro specification, objects and api not
available on qtopia (QFileDialog, QInputDialog...) and so on, patched a bit
and compiled my application for qtopia. I found (it may be) a bug in qtopia
in floating point, recompiled all the sdk with double precision, find that
it now works and reported a bug to trolltech. I replaced /opt/* stuff with
my own qtopia image and finally my applications appeared on the freerunner.
The second step should be now to run my application on 2008.x and later FSO.
In the past I did a try to OE, trying to port my application for ipaq2200,
and i had to spent a lot of time, due to lack of documentation, to find some
bitbake inc files to patch and to use in order to create a bb recipie for my
application.
So i thinked i should find them in om tree, but it seems there is some
related to qtopia-core and not qtopia phone, howewer official recipie does
not fill staging area with libraries and include, so i'm in doubt how i have
to proceed, and all this is becoming a nightmare!

I have not to go deeply in the internals, but just have a little control of
Power Managment, or just interact with some gui staff, for example:

QtopiaApplication::setPowerConstraint(QtopiaApplication::DisableLightOff);

This line avoids freerunner goes to suspend when my application is running.
When it quits normal power management settings are used.
Another example is:

QSoftMenuBar::addMenuTo(...)

this add a menu under the softkeys of qtopia.
These calls is only available under qtopia and not generic qt.
I have to use qtopia-phone api to access contacts, sim, sms and so on, and
this is a different and incompatible with the fso framework.

So now, we have 2008.x with qtopia, but in the future it will be based on
FSO.
I think it would be quite nice to know if:

* qtopia phone x11 will be patched to use FSO?
* om will replace qtopia with Zenith or other gui?
* om guys will patch qtopia-phone-x11 recipie and classes to build
application?
* what are the relations between fso/oe/om stuff?

Regards

     Nicola
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