Today I was thinking...too much.
Too many news in the last few days. Coupled with my imminent relocation to Canada. Coupled with Xournal demanding more and more time.
Anyway.. I gave up thinking. MeeGo didn't Go, it Came and it's going to stay.
Maemo went. And I say goodbye to it. I will miss the brand.
So now, as Maemo developer and as Maemo community member I need to choose.
And I suppose the answer is easy to reach.
MeeGo came and I am going to jump on it.
Why shouldn't I ?
I was going (actually... let's use the proper word: forced; I was forced) to move to Qt anyway.
From my developer point of view nothing will change.
If Maemo 6 was about to arrive, I'd have to learn Qt anyway if I wanted to stay up to date with it.
I hate thinking I need to rewrite to whole Xournal UI because of that.
I had to postpone a few ideas (HRW and better 'background' tools) to when the Qt transaction of Xournal will be completed.
And I don't like that. I wanted to have some fun implementing new features, whilst now I need to re-concentrate, again, on the UI.
Sure I will have the opportunity to learn Qt, I will try to implement the Xournal "Next Gen" UI that Patricia kindly developed for Xournal.
But I planned differently and I am forced to change that.
I hope Nokia won't change idea again. I hope THIS is their commitment. And that they will stick with it.
The Qt UI has to be the latest mobile UI that Xournal will have. Please.
Aniello
10 comments:
What about the Desktop version of Xournal ?
Is it also moving to Qt for the UI ?
It would be a real mess if so (without talking about the waste of time).
I would have loved to see a Clutter based UI for Xournal, which can be used on both N900 and a standard Linux Gnome desktop... u_u
Denis, the original author of Xournal, is still actively maintaining it. I assume he has no plans to move to Qt anytime soon.
About the clutter based Xournal...
I actually evaluated it, and was going for that direction...
But then again, Qt from Nokia was announced.
Are you really sure that Clutter is going to be dropped on Meego ?
Even if Nokia is basing its UI on Qt, it does not mean they won't give API "hooks" for others toolkits... Don't they ?
It would be a real mistake otherwise, because not everybody can or wants to re-code his application using Qt.
No I don't think it's going to be dropped.
I know you can embed clutter into GTK as this is specifically supported, but I know nothing about Qt.
Why not sit back, relax and wait a bit to see how things play out? If GTK+ is community-supported, you might not need to "port" your app to Qt.
Sure, it might not look that good under the new environment, but Xournal will not lose any features it has right now, and with you doing it in your spare time, I guess the time is better spent fixing bugs and implementing new features?
You can always use Qt for a new project, but as long as there is hope for GTK+ to be working on the new platform (it seems like it is - "working" is different from "officially supported"), why spend time doing stuff that (to the end user) will have little impact? (Last time I checked, people used Xournal because of its features, not because the buttons had the same style as the rest of the system..)
Porting existing (non-trivial) apps to Qt just because the other toolkit is not sacred seems to be as useful as porting C#/Mono apps to C++ just because C#/Mono is *believed* to be "evil" (think: Tomboy and GNote).
Well there's time.
I am still finishing up polishing the application and bringing back old tools that are coded in but miss an UI element to access them.
Anyway, I want Xournal to be as native as possible. That's also I spent time doing the current Fremantle UI in the first place.
It could have worked with regular menus and scrollbars etcetera.
My main contribution to Xournal and Maemo IS the Xournal's UX for Maemo.
And I plan to do so even if it means switching to Qt.
But the more I work on it and mantain the Maemo port, the more ideas I have and gather (from the community) for it.
And I'd like to bring them in as well whenever possible.
Moreover, the point of all this is to make a complain to Nokia to stick to a damn framework and let us concentrace on the features of our beloved applications.
From the MeeGo faq
http://meego.com/about/faq
"Will MeeGo support gtk, clutter, MX?"
"Yes. MeeGo will support gtk, clutter and MX and also Qt and the related development envionment."
So it seems like all options are covered.
What's MeeGo?
I started to develop in Qt4 some weeks ago.
Can this Qt port of Xournal be usable under KDE or is there Maemo-specific code in there?
Also, is there source access for your current progress or is it set aside until release?
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