Re: Summary of GNOME Mobile GUADEC BOF

["Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri" <barbieri profusion mobi>]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 8:42 PM, Matthew Allum <mallum openedhand com> wrote:
> Hi;
>
> Hi;
>
> I unfortunately didn't make GUADEC this year, therefor nor the mobile
> meeting :(. Many thanks for such an extensive and interesting summary.
> I've added some quick thoughts from myself Id of hopefully raised if
> there in person.
>
> On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 14:39 -0700, Dave Neary wrote:
>>
>>
>> The third part of the meeting was a fairly wide-ranging discussion on
>> GNOME's place in the industry, particularly in light of recent "bad
>> press" (or, at least, potential bad press). Chris Blizzard suggested
>> that if Nokia were to change its licencing policy for QT that GNOME
>> would then have some hard choices to make - a business friendly QT
>> licence could help them supercede GTK+ as the toolkit of choice (Mark
>> Shuttleworth supported this & added to it that he felt it would be
>> entirely possible to have a GNOME experience built on QT if the
>> licencing were right).
>
> Yeah, though my thoughts are even if Nokia were to change the license to
> something more liberal/business friendly GTK+ still has the advantage in
> that its 'neutral' and not owned/controlled by a single entity. With
> devices converging more and more and thus new competitors being formed
> all the time, its questionable as to depend a major piece of technology
> ultimately controlled by a competitor - especially if there are good
> compelling alternates.

Hum, this is not of all good and bad, so let's be careful. On one hand
a single entity can mean getting things done: easily have a target and
get it done. OTH we can easily have a bad target, of course ;-)


> My more extreme thoughts would be that for mobile at least it doesn't
> really matter - Qt and GTK+ are dead there. The iphone came and made
> them into antiques. Its now all about running the full UI on OpenGL to
> be relevant. Neither of which GTK nor Qt can do nor were designed to do.

Qt's canvas is very powerful. It's very capable, optimized (both in
software and hardware) and easy to use. So Qt widgets are still not
capable or designed to do so, but it is in their plans to rewrite the
whole widgets to be on top of canvas, something like efl does.


> We have a lot of nice stuff below the UI in GNOME Mobile and I really
> believe we're ahead by quite a margin in being able to build OpenGL
> based UI's with GNOME Mobile technologies (obviously Im biased however).

very true :-)


>> On a positive note: it was reiterated that the GNOME platform has been
>> extremely successful in being adopted - it's part of maemo, Ubuntu
>> Mobile, LiMo, moblin, ALP, and is already being used and deployed in
>> devices by a wide range of companies including Vernier, iRex, Garmin,
>> Nokia, OpenMoko, OLPC (who haven't abandoned Sugar), and others I'm
>> forgetting. We have an opportunity to communicate about GNOME Mobile
>> being the common platform for a whole range of devices and initiatives,
>> to show the world (press & application developers) that mobile linux
>> isn't as fragmented as it might appear. And we have some new
>> technologies like Clutter arriving which have tremendous potential to
>> provide a rich 2.5D and 3D application framework to developers.
>
> Yes yes !! :-)
>
> I think the biggest downside to Clutter currently is there is nothing
> (public) in terms of an application that really proves substantially
> what it can do. Things are beginning to crop up though - Entertainer (a
> media box type app) for example is looking really nice. Mobile h/w with
> GL drivers etc is not all that accessible to o/s devs, but even thats
> changing with things like the Zoom kit. Difficult underlying
> infrastructure problems to be solved to of which the iPhone pretty much
> cleverly works around (but I think that is beginning to show cracks now
> 3rd party apps).
>
> Another downside the fact that people keep using this oblique 2.5D term
> in describing Clutter ;P That makes me think its some kind of Populous
> style isometric game engine. It makes me cringe like being referred to
> as 'Matt'. Do I really going to have to write some kind of crack 1980's
> necromancer style virtual office type UI with Clutter to kill this
> description ? ;-)
>
> Anyway, I degress, what I mean to say is Im wanting to encourage people
> to grab Clutter, play with it, hopefully like it and then build amazing
> useful beautiful things with it. We're heavily focused at OH in
> improving the Clutter core continually and will do our best to help
> other building cool stuff with Clutter.

suggestion: more script/theme-ability, I know some efforts using json,
but having something that requires less code (at least real code) to
get things done will help. I try to sell both Clutter and EFL
(alongside other techs, like Qt, GOOCanvas, ...) for ProFUSION clients
getting into Linux, but they often opt to go EFL due BSD license and
Edje (theme system). I know INdT suffered a lot changing from EFL to
Qt/QGraphicsView because they missed development speed of Edje, so
much they decided to write QEdje (and will present about it at aKademy
later this year). You already have some effort on this front, but I
feel we need to review these existing technologies (Edje, Flash, ...)
and try to provide something on par.

the reason is that people like effects, but often they don't have all
the skills to write all of them neither the time to write a whole
software like that, so they need easier way to get effects (what I
call script ability) and also easy way to change it (theme ability).

-- 
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
http://profusion.mobi embedded systems
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