[Interest] 5.8 Features?

[Shawn Rutledge]

> On 23 Jun 2016, at 07:15, ekke <ekke at ekkes-corner.org> wrote:
> 
> thx Maurice,
> 
> Am 22.06.16 um 12:22 schrieb Maurice Kalinowski:
>> > Highest prio from my personal perspective:
>> > >> - Background processing API
>> > >> - In-app Notifications: local, remote
>> > + add Windows Store to Qt Purchasing module
> there's more missing:
> - avoid flicker for android apps out-of-the-box

What does that mean, just the initial appearance at startup?  My pet peeve is that startup of Qt Android apps takes too long, compared to Java apps.  Ironically it's Java apps that are too slow on desktop platforms.  So I just wish I had a modern Qt-based phone, so that there’s one copy of the libs in memory already.  Apps would be small and fast.

> - easy way to 'share' content with/from other apps (Intents, Deep Linking) Android, iOS
> such common use-cases should be abstracted and available via Qt API

Yes but it should be good, portable, future-proof API, to be worthwhile.  Ideally even portable between desktops and mobiles.  It’s hard to predict the future, too.  There is a disconnect that on desktop platforms you share by saving files in one application and re-opening in another, or via the clipboard, or drag-and-drop, whereas on mobile platforms this stuff got re-invented.  I’m not sure if it’s an improvement: applications seem mostly isolated now, effectively.  Not that I’ve tried very hard to use a tablet for office-y stuff, but I’m not sure if everything that was possible on the desktop is possible on those platforms.  If you extend the platform to include cloud services (since not all data is even stored locally, I guess it’s supposed to mean that inter-app sharing must include sharing of access to data which is stored only on the cloud), do you trust them: are they secure? are they going to still be there in a few years?  will they continue to have a gazillion non-interoperable ways to do similar stuff?  How much abstraction can we do, to make sharing locally or via the cloud look similar?  Would you dare to start a university degree program for example, and do all your work only on a tablet?  If you do that, can you still open anything that you did in a decade or two?  If the inter-app sharing mechanisms are hindering people from getting work done, maybe they will be re-invented again?  So it seems hard to create APIs now that won’t look foolish in retrospect later on.

The file abstraction is nice because of being so universal.  Even cloud storage (with offline caching) can be done by making it a virtual filesystem.  Yet the file abstraction does seem long in the tooth, because we no longer rely on hard disks as much, and installing flash memory as a “disk” instead of “memory” is so arbitrary - it will end some day, especially if most memory ends up being non-volatile eventually.  But what is the long-term-stable replacement for the hierarchical filesystem?  Will we keep using it just because it’s such a human-friendly metaphor?  Or will sharing between all apps end up looking more like today’s mobile APIs, where you first have to open one app, and select the data, and “send” it to another; or, one app invokes another to “pull” something?  I guess the reason is that active transfer between apps which are both running at the same time is deemed more secure than passive file-reading.  Or is there another reason?  But the protocols for that data transfer seem like shifting sand to me.
 
https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-36015 has links to some lower-level tasks like support for intents, anyway.