A few for any developers

[boosalis]

I don\'t mean to be so annoying with all the recent questions. I\'ll give it rest after this rant formed as a buch of questions. If anyone developers would care to weigh in on the following thoughts please do.

1)
Are people actually developing applications for the Zaurus.

2)
What is the support from Trolltech for paying customers of Qt/Embedded and Qtopia. (I found that they really did not support old versions of QT, when I could afford a commercial license.) Anybody have complaints or recommendations about TT

3)
Anyone else getting frustrated with the stale libraries and applications Sharp is giving us for even new platforms such as the 6000 (I think it will ship with QT 2.3.5 and Qtopia 1.5).

Have any other thoughts, be it rants or raves on QT/Qtopia and the Zaurus, if so please join in.

I fear the Zaurus 6000 is going to be DOA (DEAD ON ARRIVAL).  Sigh !! I should have gone to the dark side of windows a loong time ago.

[Anonymous]

1. YES!  
2. QT even for non paying customers are very supportive (IMO)
3. No one expects any s/w from Sharp anymore.  We look to OZ and other groups.

Zack

[BlackCardinal]

My answers:

1. Yes

2.  Don\'t know

3.  No, as long as it\'s stable and supports all of the hardware.  In my opinion, there\'s no real reason to stay on the OS and Qtopia upgrade treadmills unless there are some compelling new features.  Even if new hardware is developed for the Z, there\'s no reason why a device driver can\'t be written to target the older OS.  This is why I have chosen to stick with the Sharp 3.10 ROM on my 5500.

[jorvic]

1. Yep, There are projects (like OZ) that could really use more people helping too...

2. I\'ve not heard anyone complain about Trolltech other than some disliking the Qt license.

3. I dont know because I wasnt a fan of the sharp ROM. Granted I didnt give it much of a chance I went for OZ after a day or two. I\'ve not really played with writting anything for the zaurus untill just recently. There are so feeds and so on you can always check out for other software along with the zaurus software index.

If you\'ve not noticed by now SHARP doesnt seem to like the zaurus much. Its odd how they act on things and angered me for a bit but I dealt with it. We dont need them to have a community and we dont need them for applications and the like.

I would love to try a 6000 but thats way out of my range for a handheld at this point. I got my zaurus to listen to music, act as a graphing calculator, keep track of things for me, play with Wireless networking and to play with writting things for/on an embedded system. Also it helps around work which is really nice.

[BlackCardinal]

My experiences with Sharp (I am a Sharp MiniDisc customer, too, and I used to own several Sharp calculators before the HP 48 ) is that they are an outstanding hardware manufacturer, but they don\'t really understand or care too much about the market outside of Japan.  They do a terrible job marketing, and the poor support for the Z I think is similar in that it stems from the same lack of understanding or concern.  Unfortunately, there aren\'t very many companies that do much better, either.  

No real point to this comment, other than to say that I don\'t expect much from Sharp.  I\'m very happy to see the Zaurus community pull together to make the Z a useful and vibrant platform.

[jorvic]

I\'ve not dealt with Sharp on anything other than my zaurus. I think it was a wonderful idea on what they were trying to achive and I guess it just really annoyed me that they would just abandon everyone like that. It seems like some of the embedded stuff also wants to keep their source/spec\'s closed and this seems to make it harder for linux handhelds. I know little about this and I could be wrong just from what I\'ve noticed...

The hardware for my zaurus is quite happy and at least they gave the community a start which makes/made it easier to have what we have here. They got us all started and now the community can pick up and move on which is nice.
This kind of reminds me of some video games where the users are allowed to create their own mod\'s and the like. This makes the game last much longer and allows people to shape it towards what they want/expect. All the company has to do is make the game start people doing this and they pretty well pick up the pieces and take care of it from there on.

[nilch]

1) No and Yes - I really havent seen any new application on Handango the whole of last month and also previous to that. Yes, cause there\'s some activity on the ROM side (like X11, Cacko 1.20 OZ etc) and some system level and driver level activity too. But I see the definations of \'Zaurus applications\' as more of an end user application for the common denominator user market - not the geek market who reflash ROM\'s every weekend. I think its that end-user market which will make or break (if its not already broken :roll:  ) the zaurus popularity .

2) No idea

3) A bit - again as an end-user who by default will expect the best ont eh Sharp ROM. As much as I my reflash to newer rom\'s like OZ and X11, as a developer I will always eye the nascent  default market that the Zaurus reaches out to - the common denominator user - not the geek power user. So for the common user - he is getting l;eft out of the newer versions of Qtopia which boast many more enhancements that the older one that comes factory Installed.

[jdf]

I am just learning how to develop.  I got a lot of help from this board.  The stuff I want to do is pretty simple and not for the Linux/experts like most of the folks on this board.   As a start I just experimented with a Unit Conversion program.  You can see it here.  I just finished this week!  It is simple but proved to myself that I could develop for the Zaurus.

http://www.delferro.net/zaurus

I\'d appreciate any feedback and after a short rest I have some more questions for the experts here!  Thankx everyone.

JDF

[markb]

Hi jdf,

I downloaded your ipk and installed it on my c860.
Nice app. It works great!

It initally came up magnifed in portrait mode. Just as most 5500 apps do as I fas as I know.

But I just unticked the \"Display with magnified screen\" option, and ran it again, and it came up in widescreen landscape mode.
If I flip my screen around to portrait mode, your app changes too.

That is more than the Trolltech example app does!
When I tried that on my C860 it crashed when I rotated my screen.

Congratulations on producing a nice app.

One minor request though. Something that would be nice to have:
Personally I like to install my apps onto my SD card, and keep the internal memory free.
I haven\'t created an ipk myself yet, so I don\'t know what difficulties are involved in making that work.
Quite a few apps that I\'ve downloaded won\'t install to external storage. So I guess it might be tricky to make it work.

- Mark

[BlackCardinal]

markb,

Regarding installing IPKs to the SD card... I\'ve had the same problem.  I think the only solution that a packager could do is include an installation script to set up symlinks to where the application was installed.  I\'ve come up with a solution I use on my own 5500 which works well for me, and doesn\'t require the packager to have done anything special.

You can see how I do at at my web page:

http://www.gelhaus.net/zaurus

Check the section on the scripts fixlinks and breaklinks.

[.mau.]

BlackCardinal:
afaik, Ktrove does the same trick. At least, I managed to use it...

ciao, .mau.

[boosalis]

Last week I had a nice talk with Sharp Electronics. They said that the engineering managers see very little reason to upgrade their libraries as they\'ve invested a lot of time fixing Trolltech bugs in these early versions of Qt/Qtopia and do not want to go through all that again.  

I sense the people at Trolltech are frustrated by Sharp\'s unwillingness to invest in libraies that go all the way back to the Zaurus 5000D.  

So Qtopia on the Zaurus is kind of the bastard child right now that nobody wants to commit to.  

A pitty Sharp doesn\'t get it.  I mean they \'ve developed this wonderful platform in the 6000 and they just assume let it die on the vine for lack of a bit of software maintenance.  Its like having a Ferrari and being to cheap to change the oil.  

Sharp, instead of solidifing the loyal and devote Zaurus developers around a standard OS,  seem content to let all the energy of their community be splintered amoung all the fringe OS\'es and desktops.  So instead of one great OS and desktop we have several mediocre ones.

Where\'s the logic here? They want to attrack enterpise applications, but what company is going to invest the time and money to port their applications over to the Zaurus when Sharp itself refuses to invest and believe in their own product.

If their are any enterprise developers listening here, please voice your opinion.
Or beter yet call Sharp and voice your concerns

[clivel]

Actually, I don\'t see that there is much wrong with the Qtopia libraries as they are, I haven\'t noticed any major shortcomings. However, I can\'t say the same for the Qtopia applications, which could definitely do with an upgrade.

It would be nice however if the library documentation was upgraded, it took me days of experimentation to figure out how to get my app to work on the C7xx and C8xx devices in high res mode. Emails to Sharp were ignored, Trolltech was very helpful, but unfortunately Sharp had not bothered to keep them informed.
Regards,
Clive