Re: Goal for GNOME Mobile?

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Mon, 2008-11-10 at 18:29 +0000, Ross Burton wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-11-10 at 14:08 +0200, Quim Gil wrote:
> > The trap of keeping the GNOME identity tied to a specific technology
> > (GTK+) as a best replacement for a lack of identity and vision (*).
> > This approach worked during the first decade of GNOME, I just wonder
> > whether it can be kept for the mobile decade.
> 
> I was meaning to bring this point up over the weekend as part of the
> Clutter inclusion question.  During the meeting at GUADEC there was a
> general consensus that:
> 
> a) Clutter should be added to GNOME Mobile
> b) The best way of determining if something can be considered to be
> using "GNOME Mobile" -- given the flexibility and freedom inherent in
> the stack -- would be to say "uses either Clutter or GTK+".
> 
> So, do we still agree that Clutter should sit alongside GTK+ in the
> GNOME Mobile 2.26 diagram,

Clutter and GTK+ are not equivalent UI toolkits and we shouldn't confuse
people by suggesting that they are. There are no windows, buttons,
menus, etc, in Clutter.

And saying "You can implement them yourself" does not make it equivalent
to GTK+, for which you don't need to implement them yourself.

I would welcome Clutter in the GNOME Mobile release set, but not as an
alternative to GTK+. We should recomend it for 
- some specialist user interaction within a GTK+-based user interface.
- the basis of a complete specialist self-implemented UI toolkit, until
generic clutter-based UI toolkits exist for reuse.

>  as an optional/complementary user interface
> library?  Devices can use just GTK+ and be GNOME Mobile (Vernier,
> current Maemo), or have a primarily GTK+ interface with Clutter parts
> and be GNOME Mobile (Ubuntu Mobile, Maemo Fremantle I imagine), or be
> purely Clutter and still be GNOME Mobile (nothing here yet).

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com