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Posts: 35 | Thanked: 64 times | Joined on Aug 2006 @ Somerville, MA
#41
PortaBase is a Qt app now available for the N900, as I mentioned in a similar thread.

Some thoughts on the process of making an existing Qt app available for the N900:
  • It takes a little while to figure out how to compile and package software of any kind for the N900. This isn't a huge obstacle, but it does mean that most Qt apps won't get ported to the N900 unless the app developers already have an interest in the platform or somebody volunteers to port it for them.
  • A straight recompile of Qt apps originally written for PC operating systems can work, but will probably be hard to use and just look wrong; changes must be made to accommodate the screen size and platform UI conventions (and implemented such that everything still looks ok on the original platform). This is much, much easier than rewriting the code to use a completely different UI library, but depending on the size of the application it can still take days or weeks to get everything looking just right.
  • Developing in the SDK can get you most of the way to a working app, but there are inevitably a few things you can't test properly until actually installing it on the device. Most of the people who were planning to release apps once PR1.2 came out are probably in this stage, doing testing and last-minute bugfixes.
  • Even after finishing development and releasing an app for public usage, it's not likely to be bug-free; it goes into extras-devel, where people who expect some instability try it out and break it in ways that didn't occur to the developer(s). Even apps which have been stable on other platforms for a long time aren't immune to this because of the platform-specific adaptations I mentioned above; that's new, largely untested code.
  • Eventually, after internal and public testing and a couple of repository promotions, the software appears as installable to the general public in the extras repository. The perceived lack of Qt applications is because the few days since PR1.2 was released isn't yet long enough for software go from "ready for testing on the device" to "tested on the device by a lot of people and deemed stable enough to run on people's phones".

As a side note, porting apps from other platforms is hardly the only benefit to having Qt on the N900. The Qt framework is extremely capable, very well documented, and as often as possible "does the right thing" without you needing to manually fiddle with stuff. My personal experience has been that Qt apps tend to hit "mostly stable and feature-complete" a lot faster than GTK+ apps. So hopefully we'll start seeing apps with somewhat faster development cycles (although expecting results in the first few days is pretty unrealistic).
 

The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to jmbowman For This Useful Post:
Posts: 75 | Thanked: 9 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ Verona, Italy
#42
Thanks jmbowman!

But, on qt-apps there are a looooooot of apps to port.... why we have 100 console emulator????
 
Banned | Posts: 138 | Thanked: 45 times | Joined on Feb 2010
#43
" The Qt framework is extremely capable, very well documented, and as often as possible "does the right thing""

What Licence does QT now operate under ??
 
Posts: 362 | Thanked: 143 times | Joined on Mar 2008
#44
Originally Posted by williamparrales View Post
that and the stupid chuck norris threads
Sorry, I take exception to that... it was fun in my book
 
Posts: 1,746 | Thanked: 2,100 times | Joined on Sep 2009
#45
Originally Posted by garyc2010 View Post
" The Qt framework is extremely capable, very well documented, and as often as possible "does the right thing""

What Licence does QT now operate under ??
LGPL, so you can make closed-source applications without having to buy Qt.
 
Posts: 15 | Thanked: 6 times | Joined on Dec 2009
#46
Originally Posted by Jack6428 View Post
If you have a brain, you know applications don't grow on trees or suddenly show up over night...
..
@all
I'm sorry by the formulation of the question but i don't speak very well in english...
The sdk is available before the pr 1.2, no?
I want to know if with the new qt we can hope lot of applications in qt on n900 in the future?
Thanks for the usefull answers...

Last edited by flexmat; 2011-02-09 at 17:52.
 
Posts: 247 | Thanked: 37 times | Joined on Aug 2009 @ Los Angeles
#47
How do I ask for an N900 port of SatViewer?

http://qt-apps.org/content/show.php/...content=122271

..drool..drool..drool :-D
 
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just another, loser thread


 
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