indeyets

Moblin has some quite interesting stuff, so at least in technical sense this may be a good thing. But we'll see what things look like when this becomes more than just a press release

In any case, this will certainly help to expand use of Maemo technologies beyond the smartphone form factor. Then if you develop Maemo applications there will also be tablets and netbooks that can run them. This makes the platform more compelling to developers.

yup. I understand that part. I wonder about fate of maemo.org site, though. some talks at irc suggest, that it will probably stay as a gateway to Nokia's flavour of meego. Anyway, that means a lot of changes

I have to admit that i did not see that coming, not at all, but very interesting; intriguing to see how it will play out in the long run.

I am really optimistic about this merge from app-developer point of view. I believe, that it can lead to a much better supported environments, tools and developer resources. And I plan to invest some time in building maemo/meego apps in the nearest future.

Yes, this is a really cool move. Interesting to see what will happens. Hopefully they really manage to get the best of both worlds.

This is pretty significant too: MeeGo is free. Code will be available for everybody under proper open source licenses. No strings attached other than making your contributions also free. The development and integration will be open, too. Everybody can invest in MeeGo and participate. It is a genuine open source project. Free for everybody to participate, contribute, and enjoy. Free. No papers to sign. Just show up!

Will MeeGo be Android-free or real free? I.e "what about power management?"

@ninnnu I'd imagine more "real free". Nokia has had a reasonably good track record of doing that with the open sourced parts of maemo. Bug tracking happens partially out in the open in Bugzilla, and commits can be found from gitorious, and licensing is usually the quite liberal LGPL.

At the same time, I'm a bit concerned with what will happen to Maemo's services enabling community involvement: application approvals, karma, community council, social news, brainstorms... there isn't much said about it yet on the relatively basic MeeGo website

Damn: MeeGo will use the .rpm format

I knew it! And now I can admit it. I wonder if it's going to be all Atom.

@ferrix Intel and ARM, as in the announcement talk
@bergie didn't notice the rpm part on the page yet, thanks.

@tkojo Okay, so that might mean two form factors then?

@bergie deb or rpm… it doesn't matter in the end. I would be ok even with ports-based solution, if it works

@ferrix theoretically even five:

* Connected TV
* Handheld
* In-Vehicle
* Media phone
* Netbook

@indeyets So far rpms' have meant only trouble. I hope that this little "typo" is soon fixed to deb.

rpms do not work, debs require (a lot) more diligence from the packager but this is not a bad thing.

@tkojo At least the Connected TV doesn't sound far-fetched. The others are pretty much BTDT.

@ferrix having an unified platform for everything between smartphones, netbooks and TV sets could be a huge thing. But then the UI concepts need some really good thinking. Maybe something like the situation with iPhone apps vs. iPad apps where you can have a slightly more fully-featured UI for the larger device. How well can Qt do such adapting UIs?

The only things that "work" better in rpms are multiarchitecture platforms and more fine-grained architecture tags (eg. OpenWrt benefits from having more than mipsel, armel and such). Both of these features are actually because rpm just doesn't care about such details. I can't say the proper solution for deb biarch is anywhere near to completion but at least the package database doesn't get borked so easily.

@bergie I haven't tried iPad dev tools yet, but to my knowledge iPhone apps works with iPad without modification but then you can provide another design (with Interface Builder) if you want.

@bergie The unification can only go so far. Of course compiling for two different targets rocks but obviously the peripheral jungle is completely different for all platforms (though TV and smartphones are limited in the same way in terms of keyboard).

I am just a bit uneasy with the reusability mythology. :)

@ferrix I think most of the "business logic" of an application can be ported pretty much anywhere, but obviously UI needs to be rethought according to device capabilities.

From TMO: With Qt4.6 the whole concept of "porting" an app is re-invented. I have written 3 apps using the Qt 4.6 platform since I bought my N900 and the thing that struck me immediately was how easy it was to move from platform to platform.

I run Linux on my desktop, Qt creator runs fine there and I have the scratchbox installed for compiling to ARM. I run windows 7 on my laptop and Qt creator works fine there and I have MADDE installed for compiling to ARM. Regardless of the environment I am on the apps compile and run. All it needs is the libs to be compiled for the platform and we already KNOW they will be for maemo and the N900. So porting an app that is based on Qt (and it sounds like they all will be in the future) is as simple as compiling the app for that platform. Since MeeGo will be multi hardware based (including ARM) I see no reason to believe devs would not compile for all platforms, including ARM.