On Thursday 11 November 2010 22:15:26 Quim Gil wrote: > For the big majority of application developers targeting MeeGo, the Qt / > Qt Mobility APIs should suffice (plus OpenGL ES for the specific segment > willing to use it). If any of these developers is not finding what he is > looking for, then bugs against Qt Mobility are welcome (I asked the > maintainers and this is the answer they gave).
It depends on what you mean by "application". If you mean the sort of apps that you find in the Apple iStore or on Ovi then I agree: the majority of app developers have what they need in Qt (although there is a substantial minority who need platform APIs as well -- even 10% would be a lot of developers). On the other hand, I don't agree that it is true for the large applications that don't exist in the handset world today but which many people are working on (like the mobile device equivalent of application suites routinely found on PCs such as MS Office/OpenOffice or Kdepim, or social network integrators, or augmented reality experiences and more). Those sorts of applications are multi-faceted and will build on many libraries of their own and others, require carefully tuned databases, specialised backup and synchronisation, will provide their own APIs and be extendible with other applications layered on top, plugins, etc. As we say in the telecom network world, "one man's service is another man's enabler" -- a mantra which is only just starting to be adopted in the handset app world. Proprietary platforms, of course, deliberately try to make it hard for people to develop those sorts of large applications (particularly the ones which provide an "environment" in which the user spends most of their time) because they would compete with the device brand itself for the "mindshare" of the user. Apple wants people to buy an iPhone and get lots of apps which add value to it. They don't want people to decide they need a certain application and then go looking for a device to run it on. But MeeGo, controlled by the LF and supporting a range of devices, should be taking the opposite approach: it should be encouraging people to build compelling and exciting environments, re-using free software, and running on a large range of platforms. I am disappointed that the LF appear to have let MeeGo compliance be captured by Intel and Nokia to make it hard to create these game-changing applications. MeeGo compliance certainly should sit on clear principles, and those principles should be that a compliant platform offers all the APIs and tools to allow creation of these sorts of new applications, as well as the openness to allow users to install them. Maybe a philosophical discussion over a Guinness next week! Graham _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
