Qtopia coming for Neo1973

AVee openmoko-comunity at avee.org
Tue Sep 25 17:07:51 CEST 2007


On Tuesday 25 September 2007 10:32, Dani Anon wrote:
> On 9/25/07, Lorn Potter <lpotter at trolltech.com> wrote:
> > Carlo E. Prelz wrote:
> > > 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.

I'll use commercial app if they are worth the money. But i really don't see 
how someone developing a non-free (both in speech as in beer) should get 
their toolkit for free. When you expect people to pay for *your* software you 
should not be suprised when you have to pay for a toolkit yourself. 
The SDK appears to cost 146 euro, that should be an affordable investment for 
any commercial developer. 

> 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.

Why whould plain C be better, what matters in the and is the binary that is 
spit out by the compiler. I don't see why a C++ compiler should produce a 
binary that is somehow less suitable for small devices. 
Theoretically two programs written it two totally different languages could 
still compile to identical binaries providing identical functionality. If 
your C program is indeed more suitable for small devices it just means your 
C++ compiler needs to be improved. You do realize that C++ was explicitly 
designed with embedded software in mind?

> > > 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.

And if I where developing a pure basic phone, I'd drop the X server right 
away. But for a device like the Neo 1973 i'm not that sure. There are quit 
some existing applications I'd like to run on that thing and most of them are 
X applications. Losing X is good thing,not being able to use all that code 
out there is not. I'm not totaly convinced of either approach yet, I guess 
both have their place.

AVee

-- 
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look
like a nail.




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