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

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 06:11 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote:
> Nokia recently approved a budget for the GNOME Foundation to encourage
> GNOME
> applications on Maemo 5 and MeeGo. We have around $50,000. In Maemo 5
> and
> MeeGo, GTK+ is "community supported". This funding is to help us to
> encourage and ensure that happens in the best way possible.
> 
> What would you do with that budget to encourage more application
> developers
> to choose GTK+ for mobile development and to ensure those applications
> run
> on MeeGo? 

I'm not clear about this. Is this about GTK+ on Maemo 5 (e.g. the
current N900 software) or Meego (for instance, Maemo 6).

If this is just about Maemo 5 then you can ignore the rest of this
email. 

If we are talking about Maemo 6, then you need to know that it will be a
large amount of work to make GTK+ and libhildon properly supported on
Maemo 6. So far Nokia has only said that the community may support it.
But:
a) That won't be enough, just as it wasn't enough to get Qt supported on
Maemo 5.
b) The community won't have access to the necessary information until
far too late. This needs people who have are on the inside at Nokia.
(like, say, Openismus. Ahem.).
c) It will probably require changes to the GTK+ and hildon API on Maemo
6, just as Qt has API changes on Maemo 5. So it will get conceptual,
which will slow things donw.

There wouldn't be much money left over, if any, for extra stuff like
documentation and application porting. But keeping GTK+ viable on Maemo
6 (Meego) would at least keep GTK+ on mobile alive on a major platform
so we can do the more interesting things that we should have done long
ago. Such as moving most of libhildon into GTK+ itself, by removing
duplication and adding abstractions, reducing the fragmentation across
GNOME mobile platforms.


-- 
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com