[Interest] Qt on Windows Phone 8

[Jason H]

As a embedded developer, I was always looking for that cross platform Nirvana. That's how I came on to Qt. But I remember back in 01 or 02, when the MS POSIX compliance was "getting there" that they threw it all out an invested .NET (largely due to a loss to Sun in court, something Google managed to avoid) which then splintered the computing landscape into Java-ites and Microsofties, a fracturing of the community that remains to this day. I gave up on both and went Qt. (MS APIs have always been too  "left of center" for me)

Anyway, MS will support something so long as it results in buy-in to a windows license. But once there you will not find them so supportive of leaving the platform. qSomethign as simple as opening ODF but not saving it correctly, or even just defaulting to .doc or docx extension in the save dialog goes a long way to make sure you keep using their apps. 

And don't get me started about Miguel de Icaza...

Anyway, back to topic, I was skeptical of Qt on WP8, but it looks like it might be possible since they are saying that WP8 shares 90% of the code with W8, including the NT kernel. I can see why they did this, with darling Nokia full of Qt apps and developers, it makes sense to just let the Qt toolkit work. Is this a tacit admission that MS tools aren't the best? I'd think so, but it depends on my hypothesis being right. If we look at the layoffs, Qt people are still employed (The linux platform people are canned, so I've read  between the lines)  and there is still a commitment to Qt for Symbian. Why not enable Qt on WP8 and let Nokia use the existing talent rather than move everyone to a toolkit they did not develop. 

The proof is in the git repository, so to speak. If we start seeing WP8 oriented checkins... But if 90% of the code is indeed shared, then there might not be anything WP8 specific over W8. 


Only time will tell.



________________________________
 From: Konstantin Tokarev <annulen at yandex.ru>
To: BRM <bm_witness at yahoo.com> 
Cc: "interest at qt-project.org" <interest at qt-project.org> 
Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2012 10:08 AM
Subject: Re: [Interest] Qt on Windows Phone 8
 


21.06.2012, 18:05, "BRM" <bm_witness at yahoo.com>:

> They also support ODF in Office, but in a way that is 100% incompatible with everyone else (For example, All formulas are written to application specific name spaces so any other application opening the file will not get formulas, just values.)

That's a problem of ODF itself which does not specify exactly how formulas should be stored.

> Microsoft's goal is to support it well enough to get people to use the platform, then enhance it such that you use extensions specific to Microsoft's platform.

I don't see anything wrong in platform-specific #ifdefs in Qt code

-- 
Regards,
Konstantin
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