How Qt could bring better third-party software to Ubuntu (ars technica)

No, I think that their organization is not terribly well thought out with different departments purposely pitted against one another in a corporate management style similar to Microsoft, which is just horrid. It makes it difficult because instead of having people work together they are competing.

But that's just a opinion. If you disagree with me I won't take it personally.

> Their Symbian OS is, frankly, a piece of crap. It's getting better with each new release, but it's still stuck in 90-s. So they brought in QT and it now allows developers to write applications for Symbian _and_ full-scale Linux simultaneously. And Nokia produces a _very_ large number of devices for this to be tempting.

Why on earth would you care about programming on Linux and Symbian if Symbian is such crap? Why not just make everything Linux? That way you don't have to give a crap about having to maintain 2 entirely separate operating systems with layers of abstractions so they can only-sorta have the ability to run the same software?

> Android is still nowhere close to being cheap. The low-end communicators with Android are still quite expensive and it'll take them at least 2-3 more years for prices to fall enough to be competitive with Symbian phones.

Right now there are several phones on the market with 300-400 dollar price tag, retail.

Some cheaper, for example:

http://www.huawei.com/news/view.do?id=11162&cid=42

Sprint is offering a 150 dollar Android phone, very soon... contract free.

http://phandroid.com/2010/10/06/huawei-ascend-150-android...

That's _cheap_ for a smartphone.

Here is the LG GT540 Optimus, which should be around 240 dollars for a unlocked verison according to the article:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/LG-GT540-Review-162490.shtml

For lots of other examples Google around for 'Entry-level Android' in Google news. ;)

One of the big boons for Android in Asia is going to be China's clamp down on so-called KIRF phones, which are look-a-likes of more expensive phones. This has left many companies with the choice of trying to figure out to make their own real smartphones and Android is the key for them. Sure most of it is shit now, but successful companies are going to rapidly improve things for themselves. Companies like Qualcomm are starting to work with them so they can crank out Android platforms for as little as $75 (probably 140-180 by the time it reaches customers, I expect) a pop. And Qualcomm seems to only have eyes for Linux anymore. (just a impression I get)

Sure Symbian will drop in price, also, but one thing to keep in mind is that these smartphones are specifically targeting Linux in order to target Android. Symbian will have to be ported to these platforms were Android is going to support them out the gate, more or less. At least by their chipset manufacturers.

The big thing I am hoping for is that these unlocked Android phones for 200-500 dollars will be widely available so that people can afford to purchase them outright without having to deal with carrier's restrictions. I think then we might see some significant activity with not only third party Android roms like Cyanogenmod, but also Maemo and a resurgence of other attempts at making Linux phone-friendly in the past.

Well, if you look at it from the OEMs' point of view, the design considerations for tablets and smartphones aren't that much different. A tablet is almost like a phone with a bigger screen. It makes sense to run Android apps on a tablet; it doesn't make sense to run Windows XP applications there. Then if you add to that the need to support ARM, the case for Android becomes even stronger.

On netbooks, on the other hand, every OEM does the same thing: they just try to stick the skinniest version of Windows on there that Microsoft will sell them. It's gotten very difficult to find Linux-based netbooks. And it is impossible to find ARM-based laptops. Microsoft's dominance on the desktop prevented that whole technological shift from ever happening. Instead, we have to make do with laptops that run too hot to ever be used on our laps. It will literally burn your crotch if you put a "laptop computer" on your lap. It's a strange world...

To try to get vaguely back on topic... I don't really understand who the "third party developers" are that Ubuntu is going after. Mobile developers? I honestly can't think of any mobile apps I would want to run on my desktop. Maybe other people can think of some?

Also, C++, which QT is based on, has some serious security issues. It's not a managed environment. The designers of Android spent a long time thinking about how to sandbox third party applications effectively. Using Java helped, and there's also a lot of work they did under the hood at the system level to make true isolation possible. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to run "third-party", non-open source code on an Ubuntu installation. It's just so, so easy to get root. Even when there's no an actual vulnerabilities to exploit, you have clueless users running sudo all the time and then executing unrelated stuff in the same shell, and stuff like that.

I really, really hate the lack of template functions in C. I can live without template classes, but the lack of template functions is horrible. Whenever I want to write something that takes a variety of arguments and outputs either a fixed result or a result of the same type, I have to hand-code all the variants or use horrid macro hacks, I can't just write

template<T> T somefunction(T a, T b) {
return a [someoperator] b;
}

I also tend to miss operator overloading. It's one of the few features I like to see used in C++ libraries, not just final C++ executables, because cautious and appropriate use of operator overloading makes working with things like complex types, binary-coded decimal types, decimal floats, etc infinitely less painful.

I sometimes wish for a pure C binding to Qt, though, just so the C-only folks who won't learn enough about C++ to see that they can adopt a restricted subset without fear can learn how nice working with Qt can be.