Here's a thought: With reports indicating that the 4th generation tablet may contain a regular GSM phone, it may steer another article series in a different direction. Initially, I had planned to write a series of articles on extracting a user from the iPhone "walled garden" and migrating to a Nokia N97 or Phone+Tablet combination. If the 4th generation tablet includes a phone, that would make it easier as the article series would be abou the migration from iTunes to maemo.
I can start on that now - but need to know a crucial question: Will existing maemo apps still work in the maemo 5 environment? If not, I'll have to wait until maemo 5 apps arrive to start writing about that migration experience.
3 comments:
The API has changed a little, and the best Maemo 5 apps will make use of new features like pannable areas (finger-based kinetic scrolling) and large, finger-friendly application menus.
Our debmaster, Jeremiah, has submitted all the apps in diablo extras to the fremantle extras-devel autobuilder to assist with migration and to get a handle on the size of the task.
Most apps should work by just re-compiling, but they will work better when the UI is customized for Fremantle (as Jaffa said: Hildon's pannable area, the new selection widgets, the new AppMenu (buttons instead of a "classic" main menu), ...).
It's not so hard to customize current apps, and there are new HIGs to help developers write consistent UIs for the new release.
I hope most of the UI niceties get backported to Mer, though, so users of current tablets can have usable touch interfaces while app developers only have to target one UI specification (the new one) without having to lock out users of N8x0 devices or write the UI twice (for Maemo 4 and Maemo 5).
Well, most of the applications work without even need to recompile. With recompile, you just get access to a slighlty better ARM instructionset, but that's it. Of course, if you want to use the new finger panning and such, you deed to adjust a bit, as Jaffa said. But I've been running tons of apps from diablo repository already for a long time.
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