[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] RFC: Qtopia Nokia N770 (maemo) porting layer

[From: Florian Boor]

Hello,

Clemens Eisserer wrote:
>>From this point of view I think GTK2 was the completly wrong choice as
> Maemo's GUI toolkit. Its slow (mameo contains even a hacked version
> which tries to speed it up a bit) and heavyweight (megs of code
> splitted in many different shared-libs), but it was choosen for
> compatibility as the whole Xserver based approach. (fox-toolkit  or
> fltk are much more efficient)

I really don't share this opinion. Compared to fltk and fox GTK is much more
powerful and comes with a complete system abstraction layer and - if someone
doesn't like C - almost independent from the language used.
The performance of the latest maemo software is pretty good having the large
display and the slow CPU in mind, i can remember other devices with faster CPUs
behave much worse. If you are interested in trying plain GTK in a more
comparable environment you might want to try a GPE image you can easily create
using OpenEmbedded.
There are other reasons to port Qt, but not this one.

> I think with this decision in mind a port of QT would not be that bad
> either since it would allow running apps on your Maemo powered device
> which would not be able to run otherwise or would not look that good.

So the argument is to add another huge toolkit because GTK is too big? I can
remember someone else explained that situation before... on the other hand you
can take the device and run your own Qt based filesystem on it. But then you
won't need to port the tookit but port your applications to work with the 770
hardware capabilities.

Greetings

Florian

-- 
The dream of yesterday                  Florian Boor
is the hope of today                    Tel: 0271-771091-14
and the reality of tomorrow.            Fax: 0271-771091-19
[Robert Hutchings Goddard, 1904]        florian.boor at kernelconcepts.de

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