Plasma Active, Sailfish, and Ubuntu Phone Developers Discussing Common APIs 63
Jolla's Sailfish, Canonical's recently announced Ubuntu Phone, and KDE's Plasma Active environments are all using Qt5's QML for interface design. Unfortunately, the set of UI components provided by each, although similar, are incompatible with the others. After a chat on IRC between developers of all three platforms, they've decided to discuss the reasons behind each implementation, in the hopes that they can work toward a common architecture. "There are also discussions underway regarding other aspects of the bigger puzzle such as common package formats and delivery strategies. We are poised, should we keep our heads straight and our feet moving, to evolve that holiest of grails in the mobile space: an open and vendor neutral application development strategy built around the commonality of QtQuick and Linux. This is our Rome, which will not be built in a day, but which can become something significant in the world if we keep our heads and follow through."
Re: Phone manufacturers won't like it (Score:5, Insightful)
A common architecture would mean the phone manufactures couldn't keep their users locked to the platform where they have all their apps.
Which is why Android has been such a market failure.
Re:wow (Score:2, Insightful)
You realize it's possible for two different pieces of software to have quite different UIs, even if they use the same base set of widgets to build that UI, right?
Oh, you're bitching about whether or not the window chrome suits your preferred aesthetics? Then we can safely disregard your bitching in its entirety.
Re:Visigoths (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh yeah, the Caliphate was totally stable! Except it wasn't. Guess what? Your history sucks just as bad as his does.
That's why assassinations, coups, and civil wars were common, and there was very little common "thread" binding together the various caliphates. See: Umayyad dynasty 7th-8th centuries; Abbasid dynasty (incidentally, they overthrew the Umayyad dynasty), 8th-13th century; Fatimid caliphate, which was coincidental with the Abbasid dynasty because it broke off from the Abbasids; the conquest of Baghdad by Mongols around 1250, after which the Caliph became more or less a titular figure who existed in secret, with absolutely no power, until the rise of the Ottomans in the 1500's.
But you know, aside from all those civil wars, rebellions, warring dynasties, and an interruption of 300 years or so under Mongol rule... the Caliphates were totally stable and long-lived. As far as spanning three continents - you're aware that the Roman empire also "spanned three continents" - in fact, the same continents that the Caliphates did? And, in fact, that's pretty much table stakes for any "empire" operating in or near the central or eastern mediterranean? Africa on the south, Europe on the north, and Asia on the East means you're on a new continent pretty much any direction you go in.
If you're going to consider the Caliphates a single, monolithic entity, then you have to also consider Rome to be one: the Roman Republic (est. ~500 BC), the Western Roman Empire (~25BC - ~500 AD), and the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, which endured from about 350 AD to ca. 1450 AD. In all, that's nearly 2000 years of Roman rule.
But I'm sure the Prophet and his followers greatly value your white knighting of their achievements. No doubt they'll install you as the next Caliph in this mythical long, unbroken line of urbane civilization and democratic governance. At best, the Caliphates existed from about 650 AD to 1924. That's about 1300 years. Comparison of ~1950 years to ~1300 years to determine which is a longer period of time is left as an exercise for you, dear reader.