Thread: Maemo 6 loosing source compatibility with plain Qt, and Symbian^4
View Single Post
Mark Wilcox is offline Mark Wilcox
2009-12-14 , 14:56
Posts: 12 | Thanked: 125 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ York UK
#92
Hi,

I'll start by saying I work for the Symbian Foundation but these are my own opinions, not those of my employer. I'll also add that I'm a big Maemo fan too - I've had an N800 for ages, and my N900 is sat at the local DHL office ready to be delivered tomorrow. :-)

The criticism on this thread is spot on. Mameo DUI and Symbian DUI are not the same thing (as I understand it, the Symbian side of things accidentally stole the term from Maemo).

I've investigated this myself (and I used to be a software architect at Nokia, so you might consider I have some idea what I'm talking about) and I've also talked to people whose opinions I respect in the Qt, Symbian and Maemo organisations. We all agree - this Direct UI madness is a big mistake Nokia is making and it's going to come back to bite them.

To quote Tomas Junnonen from earlier in this thread:
Those of you who have been following the developer blogs of Qt will no doubt have seen a lot of exciting new features emerging just this year, such as the animation and state frameworks, multitouch, Qt/3D and of course everything related to GraphicsView. For those not familiar with the concept, the Qt Graphics View framework removes the limitations of traditional Qt or Gtk-like UIs (such as widgets being restricted to small rectangular areas, no real overlapping widgets etc.) and just gives you this great big canvas on which you can arbitrarily draw, animate, scale and rotate items to your hearts content.

So you've already got all these great new capabilities in (or soon to be in) Qt itself. But by themselves these are just the individual building blocks. When you instantiate a GraphicsView it literally looks like a piece of white paper. In order to take that and create a useful application out of it, it's going to take a lot of code. You're going to need widgets, layouts, transitions & animations, probably theming so things look consistent if you're ever going to have more than one application etc. <snip> ... One day Qt may grow to include everything, although that too would have its downsides, but we are not yet there today.
This analysis is spot on. The UI paradigm is changing - people building UIs with standard QWidgets will find them looking "old" on these rebuilt Symbian^4 and Maemo 6 products. The new UI paradigm needs some new widgets built for the GraphicsView framework. However, the very LAST THING developers need is two completely separate implementations of essentially they same thing with different APIs - one for Symbian and one for Maemo. The idea that pure Qt apps will be OK on both is pretty pointless if you have to build your own set of widgets that's portable between the two.

The very concept that Maemo and Symbian (via Orbit - currently being renamed Symbian^4 UI framework) should build new UI frameworks on top of Qt, which is supposed to be a cross-platform application and UI framework should have set alarm bells off everywhere! When you consider that Qt is owned by Nokia, along with Maemo and almost all of the Symbian development teams - it seems almost inexcusable that there should be any framework built on top of Qt. However, given that there could be a desire to preseve the quality of Qt by not expanding the team working on it too fast or diluting the quality of the engineers, and at the same time a business need to build some products on top of the technology, you might be able to excuse a common set of widgets etc on top of Qt for mobile devices. Unfortunately two separate sets is just insane and WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!

Of course there and plenty of smart people in Nokia and this was not the original plan. The thing called Orbit was meant to be cross-platform. I heard from a fairly senior guy who sat on strategy meetings that the teams involved were basically looking for reasons to diverge and build separate frameworks from day 1 - as soon as the strategy was laid out.

Why? Well there were two teams building UI frameworks before Qt was acquired and a lot of people that would like to justify their jobs! Also, building a new UI framework on GraphicsView is interesting and challenging work which the engineers in both camps would love to do. Could they not have worked together on a single one? Apparently not.

Quim Gil, who I generally have a lot of respect for, seems to be in defensive mode here:
About these comments saying that Maemo and Symbian must accomplish more or less the same. If that would be true then the question would not be why to have two different UI frameworks on top of Qt but why having two different platforms to start with. <snip> ... Therefore the strategy of deploying a Qt based framework and the priorities obviously differ. If each platform should make compromises to half satisfy the other we will end up having two not good enough platforms. The ultimate point of covergence is Qt, a framework that is getting a big load of testing and innovation from two teams having champion products in the pipeline.
This is just wrong. It shows total priority on building products rather than building a platform for developers. As I've said, pure Qt is not enough any more, not when the platforms build their apps with different widget sets. This problem was solved by Qt for the various desktop platforms right down to phones and coffee machines - the same solution could work again. Different styles for different platforms and in some cases platform specific private implementations of classes.

There is absolutely no reason why you can't build completely different looking apps and platforms with the same application and UI framework.

I realise that Nokia employees can't agree with me publicly and criticise the actions of their colleagues and the company they're working for. However, people with the influence of Quim Gil need to recognise the mistake that is being made and work to fix it before it's too late, or at least minimize the damage if it is indeed past the point of no return.

I invite you to do the same: come up with plain Qt 4.6 applications running on Maemo 5 or Symbian, try to run them in different platforms (e.g. Harmattan as soon as we have an SDK out) and then complain if you are unhappy about the results.

About the Maemo 6 UI Framework (or the future Symbian UI framework based on Qt for that matter) do just do the same: have a look, see if they provide something interesting for you, try to extend your plain Qt 4.6 apps using them, see how much work that brings and whether it's worth the effort and then we can talk properly.
I've done this, plain Qt apps can and do work across platforms. The future frameworks for Maemo and Symbian do offer something of interest to almost every developer - access to special platform input methods and the core widgets that the platform applications are built with. Don't you think 3rd party app developers will want the advantages of the GraphicsView framework for the same reasons the platform application developers do?

Waiting until these things have shipped will be too late. The Symbian one is not yet available for anyone outside Nokia to compare with what Maemo are building. By the time they do and all start ranting at once, it'll be too late for you to do anything about it and another own goal for Nokia.

Developers will want to build different UIs for different form factors in the future, and Qt's technologies, particularly QML should make that feasible in terms of time and effort. However, make the fragmentation optional or at least only reflecting real physical differences like screen size and input capabilities - don't create it artificially along political boundaries within Nokia's organisation.

Qt - cross-platform applicaitons for all Nokia devices.
QGraphicsView - excellent technology for creating next generation UIs.

Great strategy, botched implementation - PLEASE do everything you can to fix it.

Mark
 

The Following 42 Users Say Thank You to Mark Wilcox For This Useful Post: