Qtopia coming for Neo1973

Ted Lemon mellon at fugue.com
Tue Sep 18 21:47:26 CEST 2007


On Sep 18, 2007, at 9:28 AM, Scott Rushforth wrote:
> Phone calling works, for both incoming and outgoing calls, the only  
> hitch was that I had to manually set the alsa levels using  
> gsmhandset.state.

That's a helpful hint.   It appears to be the case that audio doesn't  
work for other apps as well - e.g., the alarm clock doesn't make any  
noise.

I've also noticed that when I try to use bluetooth from Qtopia, my  
bluetooth daemon on my Mac hangs hard - it takes a reboot to get it  
back.   Obviously a Mac bug, but it makes using the software a little  
painful, since I need my Mac to make it work.   :'}

Having played around with Qtopia now, I have a couple of  
observations.   The UI is tight - it looks good, and generally does  
what you expect it to do.   It's a lot more complete than the  
OpenMoko UI, so even people who love gtk might want to take a look at  
it for ideas.

The dev kit appears to be linux-686 only for now, but it would be  
easy to build a set of gnu cross tools on OS X, so this would be an  
easy platform to target for people who are running OSX.   The  
libraries in the current dev kit should work with the cross-compiler  
no matter what host is used.

Someone said that they have invested a lot of work in GTK and  
wouldn't want to switch.   I'd just like to point out that in general  
it's bad practice to deeply marry your back end and UI code,  
precisely because it leads you to this kind of thinking.   You should  
try to keep them as separate as possible.   It's a little extra work  
up front, but it pays off in a big way on the back end.

Someone who wants to ultimately target OpenMoko/GTK, but wants a  
working phone now, might want to consider using Qtopia for now and  
then swapping out the Qtopia front-end for a GTK front-end later.    
Particularly if you're already familiar with GTK programming, this  
shouldn't be difficult.

I think that the GTK front end for the Neo has a lot of potential  
that the Qtopia front end may miss, so a strategy that borrows from  
both systems would be good for us early adopters.

Er, the dev kit appears to be missing openssl, which could be a problem.

Also, announcements aside, I don't see a link to the source code on  
the Qtopia/Neo page, so not all promises have yet been kept.    
Trolltech has been really good about releasing source code in the  
past, so I'm not worried about this, but without source, developing  
will be more painful.





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