[Qt-interest] Qt for the iPad?

[Andrew Hodgkinson]

On 07/04/2010 17:35, Jason H wrote:

> The more I think about it the more important I think it is to get Qt
> onto Android/iPhone/Pad devices. If this is the growth sector of
> computing (and it looks like it is... aka "computers in the bedroom")

I'm kind of torn on that. On the one hand, I appreciate people more 
familiar with C++, Qt and/or an existing code they could reuse, wanting 
to see Qt on the iPad. On the other hand, the Apple frameworks, language 
and development ethos are so elegant and comparatively tightly coded that 
it's sort of a shame to bolt on an equivalent in the form of a big lump 
of compiled C++. API aside, the implementation language itself lacks many 
of the run-time features that make the Apple environment - or modern .Net 
for Microsofties :-) - so compelling. To some degree - and I apologise 
for this looking a bit like flamebait - C++ is, well, at best quaint by 
comparison when used *in this particular field*.

I suppose much boils down to just how well Qt can "get out of the way" 
and call down to the OS, minimising its footprint, while presenting the 
style of APIs that its developers expect. Mind you - that ought to always 
be a concern, even on the Desktop, but efficiency really is particularly 
important on embedded platforms, even comparatively powerful ones like 
the iPhone and iPad.

> The only concern I would have is would these few OS platforms just be
> a flash in the pan, before we transition to full OSs on them?

We may find out soon enough - if HP's rumoured tablet turns out to be a 
full Win 7 OS as expected, then we have to see if it sells well. It looks 
nice in terms of features, but seems to pay a heavy penalty in battery 
life; but this is all based on rumour. A tablet with less than a day of 
continuous running time seems to miss the point to me, but then the 
industry now seems to be very close to achieving this with enough 
horsepower for a "full blown" OS.

Meanwhile, things like iPhone OS and Android look quite like a desktop OS 
in many ways; mostly only the GUI layer is obviously different. It's not 
different because of resources (with all those iPad animations and big 
graphics, it's almost the opposite); it's different because making the 
best use of a touch screen requires it to be so.

So it's a bit silly that we're even saying this. The iPad is a 1GHz 
platform (and an efficient 1GHz per cycle at that) with decent GPU and 
256MB RAM. Not all that long ago, you'd have run Windows XP on something 
with a similar specification and called it a workstation. I really don't 
see why you couldn't take a reasonably full featured Linux distro, stick 
it on comparable hardware and get decent results - GUI aside. Battery 
management may not be quite so good but that's software; improvements 
therein would potentially benefit any mobile device using the OS.

Like or hate the iPad and/or Apple, it's a welcome change to see a 
company making such a modern design and structure of OS + front-end 
software run with such remarkable perceived performance on such a 
constrained hardware platform. In the mainstream desktop world, the way 
that software has seemed to soak up hardware improvements over the years 
has been pretty depressing. I fear the competition is doomed to produce 
numerous tablets with higher CPU speeds, but lower battery life and 
stuttering GUI performance from inefficiencies in the competing software 
stack that Apple seem to have eliminated in their own. I hope I'm wrong!

-- 
Andrew Hodgkinson, Endurance Technology
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