Re: Summary of GNOME Mobile GUADEC BOF

[Matthew Allum <mallum openedhand com>]

Hi;

On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 23:56 -0300, Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri wrote:
> >
> > 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 ;-)
> 

I agree, Im just saying 

> 
> > 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.

But the Qt Canvas is limited purely to 2D right ? and Id disagree its
optimised when it comes to OpenGL and OpenGL ES, maybe software but
thats irrelevant in above context. The animation API it has is not so
nice etc. It suffers from a lot of the same issues as Evas but I think
it can at least rotate things (unlike Evas iirc). 

> >
> > 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).
> 

I think its even more than this in the need to have great visual tools
to build such applications (with also use scripting etc).

  == Matthew