Re: Opie's future

On Sun, 20 Nov 2005 12:21 am, Marcin Juszkiewicz
wrote:
> I was thinking about writing in that thread
since few days but wanted to
> look what other developers see.
>
> Dnia środa, 16 listopada 2005 17:22,
Michael 'Mickey' Lauer napisał:
> > If you recapitulate the history of Opie you
will notice that there was
> > a time when we had ~20 contributors. Most of
them have jumped ship due
> > to several reasons. The most important ones
are:
> >
> > * Sharp dropping the Zaurus from all but the
japanese markets
> > * No attractive Qtopia devices since years
>
> Those are interesting. Trolltech is telling us
that many companies are
> going to release (or released) Qtopia (Phone
or PDA) devices. Maybe there

We have been saying we have a lot of new Qtopia
customers. It is really beyond our control if
they actually release a product or not. There
are also many Pda devices that never made it to
production. This has nothing to do with the
platform.

> was few of them in Asia but I did not notice
any of them in Europe.
> Recently Nokia released 770 and it was
prepared to launch in such way
> that every IT service wrote something about
it. For me it looks like
> 'attractive !Qtopia device' - where are Qtopia
ones? I does not want much

We want to know also!
There is the Archos Pma430 that is available.
Many more are in the works. It is the nature of
business that not all of them are going to get
product released.

> - portrait LinuxPDA with VGA screen, SD slot
and BT/WiFi (or atleast one
> of them + CF slot) - it does not even need to
have a keyboard. But there
> is no such thing - closest is one of PocketPC
devices + Linux kernel
> without any support from vendor.
>
> > * Opie still using the (outdated)
Qt/Embedded 2.3.x
> > * OpenZaurus being binary incompatible with
Qtopia apps
>
> Those are another thing.. OE/OZ team had to
decide: use old gcc 2.95 which
> was marked obsolete by all Linux distributions
years ago (but be

That was the x11 version, the Qt Embedded
version is still maintained, it is up to version
2.3.12 now.
Qt-x11 2 was obsoleted by Qt-x11 3, but that
does not mean that it is not completely usable
still. I see many obsoleted old DOS programs and
also many old Atari games available and useable
still, even though they are obsoleted for years.
The word obsolete is overused and subjective
anyway.

> compatible with Qtopia) or go ahead and use
something fresh (gcc 3.x).
> Now many of apps prepared for Qtopia
enviroment need patches to get built
> (even to get build with newer QT/E 2.3.x then
2.3.2 used by Sharp). Not
> to mention that most of those apps are
unmaintained since 2002. If Qtopia
> platform is so great why they are not maintained?
There are many reasons. Open Source developers
working on projects come and go. Take Opie for
example, I have seen a great many developers
work on it, then go somewhere else. This does
not mean the software is not any good.

One of the main reasons for lack of interest is
that OZ is incompatible with all the apps out
there, and developing a 3rd party app takes too
much effort, as there is no toolchain available.
Whenever someone asks, they get told -"use
openembedded".. blah! Not a good choice for
someone that only wants to develop one
application in their spare time. OZ kept raising
the barrier for 3rd party development (first
gcc3, and then softfloat), splitting it up, and
making it more and more difficult.
And then people blame Qtopia.

> Since I have VGA device I tweaked OPIE in many
places to get it looking
> better on !QVGA screen. But I do not feel that
Qtopia platform has any
> future with QT/Embedded (any version). How
many killer apps we have?
> Nearly zero. There is no RTF editor, no
OpenDocument viewer/editor,
> spreadsheets does not exists... I do not want
to stick with
> sharp-compat-libs and tools written in 2001-2003.
>
> For me future of OPIE is going to QT/X11 4.x
instead of keeping on
> Qt/Embedded (even 4.x). This way we can get
best from two worlds -
best of both worlds, with least amount of effort
- Xqt.

> selected (maintained) OPIE apps and any killer
apps from X11 world. I do
> not see any future in QT/Embedded world but
thats because I want my
> Zaurus (and who know which will replace it) to
be not only PDA with PIM
> and few apps but something closer to 'Personal
Mobile Tool' like it has
> written on case.
And Nokia calls its pda a "Tablet", but it does
not make it so.... my simpad is more a tablet
than the nokia.

> If I have an article to proofread and fix why
I have to
> convert it to plain text first to edit it on
PDA? I want to start
> something which will open OpenDocument (or any
other format with
> formatting) and give me possibility to fix it
without losing alarms from
> PIM suite. And I don't want to go to X11 world
without OPIE - prefer QT
> then GTK (and GPE enviroment needs lot of
tweaking).




-- 
Lorn 'ljp' Potter
Trolltech Qtopia Community Manager
Opie Core Developer
http://qtopia.net




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