Slashdot Mirror
Nokia's Maemo Switching To Qt
suka writes "During a keynote at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Nokia's Quim Gil announced that a future release of Maemo is going to be built around Qt. Maemo Harmattan is going to switch away from GTK+ / Hildon, derStandard.at reports from the conference." Michael Pyne also writes with a post describing day one of the conference from a KDE perspective.
You don't think they bought Qt because they thought it was better?
Fromt TFA: "Nokias motivation for this move as being mostly driven through the desire for easier cross-platform-development, citing Maemo, Symbian and the desktop as examples."
One thing that sounds incredible wrong to me is the fact that they are saying that Qt was chosen to make "easier cross-platform-development". The applications that were ported directly from desktop to Maemo (Xchat is the first one the comes to my mind) have an incredible bad look in the device. Building an interface for a device that runs in a small screen (4.1 inches) with a small resolution (800x480) that also uses a large pointer (e.g., most of the screen is designed to thumb usage) is not the same as building an interface for normal computer screens and resolutions.
The move is simple political: Nokia controls Qt now, so they will use their own toolkit. It's not based on merits of the toolkit (or problems of the other.) But hey! Why tell people the truth, right?
With the Mono infection and the reliance on GTK, the best thing would be for GNOME to go away. It started because Qt wasn't LGPL. That no longer applies, so let it die.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The real story is the Nokia / Intel announcement of cooperation on Atom/mobile products. Intel seems rather focused on Mobilin for MID with a long term strategy for handsets. While Nokia will be pushing their Ovi stores/maps/content with a new UI for Symbian. I doubt that Nokia ever looked on Maemo for more than an R&D effort. Commercially it was never a success nor a viable consumer product - a geek toy yes, a popular consumer product never. Maemo is irrelevant. The real thing to watch is the Intel/Nokia relationship on handsets - see how that evolves from processor choice to OS. Sean
Most of the development seemed to revolve around fixing deficiencies wit hteh OS(alternate environments, media players, web browsers and other things that got done right the first time in android/iphone/pre).
Fully agree. Some of my most-used apps are competitors for built-in ones (Canola and MPlayer top the list, MaemoMapper, I also used Modest in competition with its built-in email some time ago).
KDE devs who were never interested in writing gtk for the n800 may now get excited about the 900 and pick it up.
...and the existing pool of Gtk+ developers get frustrated after Yet Another API Change, and leave.
There's never going to be the glut of third-party apps that the iPhone enjoys, when the API isn't stable - and you'd have much better luck again if you could keep the ABI stable for more than a year or two...
I really love my N810 in some ways - but in others, it's fallen flat. Can't play full-res video, GPS is slow to lock, the built-in-browser is slow and painful, finger-scrolling doesn't always trigger properly (and text highlights instead), there's inconsistent use of finger-sized vs. stylus-sized controls, the touchpanel needs entirely too much pressure to be comfortable for extended use... my replacement for it will come when I (eventually) buy an Android phone.
Another problem with their choice is that it ties them to C++; the trend in mobile development, however, is towards other languages, like Javascript (Pre), Java (Android), Objective-C (iPhone), and C# (Windows Mobile).
Actually, I think this will end up being a competitive advantage in the long run. If Nokia smartphones end up being the *only* smartphones that run (mostly) raw native code compiled straight for the metal, they will end up being the fastest in the long run, given equivalent hardware.
That would be fine if Symbian actually ended up being the fastest and having the best UI of the bunch, but it's actually the slowest and least responsive of the bunch.
The problem with Symbian isn't C++ - it's C++ done horribly wrong, and series of unfortunate technical choices (e.g. pervasive client-server architecture).
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Nokia has won more design awards for phones than Apple, by a long shot.
Yes, but Nokia has been in the phone business for how many years compared to the short time Apple has been there... so its hardly surprising they have more awards.
No, they won't. C++ is fast for small inner loops because programmers there can take full advantage of its features. Big applications end up being slow and bloated in C++ because programmers simply cannot manage the complexity anymore: all their time goes into chasing pointer bugs and dealing with include files, and little remains for performance tuning and algorithms.
That's bollocks. C++ is not really that much less productive than Java/C# if you have a good platform toolkit to go with it (Qt). With Qt, you don't really manage your memory manually most of the time, the classes do it themselves through implicit sharing.
Admittedly, C++ is much less productive than Python & other dynamic languages, but that's not the issue at table here; we are comparing against Java, C#, ObjC.
And what is this "long run" you're speaking of anyway? If it takes 5 years for Nokia to optimize their current C++ applications, do you think anybody will care?
The phone applications easily have a life span of several years. They get improved, but rarely rewritten.
This applies even more so to "platform" level stuff. If you write more of that in C++ than Java, you'll have a faster platform, given equivalent algorithms.
There is no "in the long run" for software; what counts is what you can deliver in 3-6 months, not in a few years.
It seems Nokia was able to turn a profit with Symbian, even if Symbian is widely dreaded as the least productive programming environment in existence. I believe they will do great with Qt, and attract a great deal of third party interest as well.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Pretty much everything I've done with Qt tells me KDE should be a much better desktop than Gnome. But the truth is that most of the large desktop distributions use Gnome, Ubuntu is much bigger than Kubuntu and same goes for the others. None of the big three hitters Firefox, OpenOffice or GIMP are KDE applications - ok not all are Gnome apps either but there's not many "killer KDE apps" around. Don't get me wrong, they're all perfectly okay but nothing really rocks the boat.
The think I like least about each of Firefox, OpenOffice and GIMP is the user interface, for which I blame GTK. For example, Firefox's application chooser dialog makes me want to slit my wrists.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?