Re: What would you do to encourage application developers on GNOME Mobile?

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi Stormy,

I tend to favour the grand gesture over "death by a thousand cuts" where
we try to spread the budget over 4 or 5 different experiments to see
what sticks.

Stormy Peters wrote:
> Some that have come up:
> 
> * Pay a consulting company to make sure GTK+ apps run well on Maemo/MeeGo.
> * Buy devices to hand out to developers.
> * Invest in GTK+ documentation for developers.
> * Invest in marketing/events.
> * Provide bounties for GTK+ mobile applications. (Have a list of things
> we need or need improved like multitouch.)
> * Create documentation for how to port GTK+ apps to Maemo/MeeGo (if needed.)
> * Have a GTK+ mobile application contest.
> 
> Thoughts? Ideas?

I'm not a fan of paying a development company to port apps, or buying
devices, or investing in marketing/events. I'm not a fan of bounties in
general - they're too passive IMHO.

I really like the idea of a porting contest, accompanied by a porting
guide & MeeGo UX guidelines/HIG. Show, then encourage. I suggest that
you would need to have substantial funds dedicated to the marketing &
animation budget for the contest to ensure its success.

Another option which I like is a big announcement that we're improving
GNOME development tools to make it much easier to make GNOME
applications in general (and MeeGo applications in particular) would
also be great - making Glade much better in general, and for MeeGo in
particular, would be great. We could work with Eclipse in parallel to
ensure that Eclipse for GTK+ or Clutter based apps targeting MeeGo is a
great IDE.

In my mind with $50K you can make a big bump in one or the other of
these, but not both. The question becomes: what is the biggest gap right
now, and would give the biggest bump to MeeGo? Development tools or
platform awareness & more GNOME apps on the platform?

I lean more towards the application porting contest & infrastructure,
because there's a decent risk that with the "improve development tools"
bet you end up with almost nothing at the end - a developer tool that
isn't a home-run, with some new features that don't make a big splash.

With a contest, decent marketing & some good prizes, you should at least
end up with some nice ported applications, and more developers improving
the porting & developer docs at the same time. An "OK" result with this
seems pretty good.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org