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Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

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Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#111

Post by sliverstorm »

macspoofing wrote: post #89
mladenkovacevic wrote: post #68

This announcement baffles me a little bit. An Ubuntu Phone? Why did they choose to announce a phone OS and not a tablet? Phones are light communication devices for sending brief messages, checking social statuses or updating them. Ubuntu is a full featured OS used in creating and consuming long-form content. If they are hoping to engage with existing OEMs I think they would've had a much better time of it with compan…

>Phones are light communication devices for sending brief messages, checking social statuses or updating them ... ... in 2005. Phones are powerful computing devices, and they are big business.

Yup. Phones are still not as powerful as standard computers, but I would hazard the good ones are at least as fast as a laptop from 5 years ago.

(Guess what OS I was running on my laptops 5 years ago?)

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#113

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

zanny wrote: post #39

I really want to give a "fuck yeah" for using qt as the app backend. I think qt5 is amazing and hope it can really take off. Especially with Necessitas you can port Ubuntu native apps to Android easily, and then porting to the desktop is trivial. I don't think they talked enough about how you can easily write a qt5 app that can run on everything but ios (and even that is seeing some traction). I wonder how this is go…

"I wonder how this is going to conflate with their ongoing focus on the desktop towards python + gtk apps."

Are they?.

IMHO they are making Unity and everything else use Qt. Python could use Qt too.

I had a lot of apps that used gtk, it was ok in the past when the license of Qt was not LGPL, but now I'm porting everything to native and Qt.(luckily I abstracted the UI).

Gtk just has not serious support for OpenGL, mac or Windows.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#114

Post by MatthewPhillips »

tree_of_item wrote: post #74
emehrkay wrote: post #53

This is exciting. They are truly talking about a single device that does it all for you -- your phone is your computer. The phone UI looks a bit different, he says "clean and simple," but just from the video it seems like a bit much to do things. That could just be an initial reaction based on years of other phone OS usage. Why hasnt anyone run with WebOS' UI approach? The whole cards thing seems like the best approa…

If I had to guess, I'd say people are probably scared of patents surrounding WebOS's cards system.

The winners do not adopt the innovations of the losers. History is littered with products with unique innovations that were never again touched.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#116

Post by maratd »

polshaw wrote: post #102
recoiledsnake wrote: post #19

Edit: Here's the keynote video. Skip to about 6:35 sec for the new bits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU Direct link to 6:35 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU&feature=play... First thoughts: 2014 is a long way away and a whole year is an eternity in mobile space. It kind of looks like Unity in portrait mode but without the dock. What does it bring new to developers that isn't there in Android? F…

>What does it bring new to developers that isn't there in Android? Firefox OS's USP is web apps with native bindings Connect a display and you have full ubuntu. With today's smartphones already computationally competitive with your standard netbook, that alone is a massive value proposition to me. Add something like motorola's lapdock and there is 95% of all my computing needs met, all with a single, central data sto…

> Connect a display and you have full ubuntu.

I didn't see this mentioned in the keynote. I was specifically looking for it and there were zero mentions?

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#117

Post by graue »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #65
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The desktop market is more or less disappearing. On the business end of things, business has no issue paying the paltry sum of what windows + office costs. I'm not sure what else they can do in the desktop space. IMHO, Unity sucks pretty hard on the desktop and both MS and Ubuntu have taken major missteps. I also imagine Win8 SP1 will bring back some kind of classic mode. Not sure if Unity will ever be desktop-ified…

> IMHO, Unity sucks pretty hard on the desktop I used to agree with this but it has gotten incrementally a lot better in the last couple of releases. I've watched non-geeks figure out how to use it without trouble, and after all the biggest potential market for a Linux desktop OS is the population of non-geeks.

> it has gotten incrementally a lot better

I keep hearing people say this, I keep trying it again and I keep being disappointed and going back to Xfce.

I mean, every time you press Alt, the menu bar at the top of the screen flashes. That's a horrible, distracting misfeature encountered in the first 30 seconds of using the thing.

Not likely to try desktop Unity a fourth time, no matter how many people say “it's getting better”.

> the biggest potential market for a Linux desktop OS is the population of non-geeks

Are you sure? Not as long as Linux is something you have to install yourself. Do you use Unity? OS X manages to be approachable to everyone without alienating most geeks/developers.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#119

Post by idle_processor »

emehrkay wrote: post #53

This is exciting. They are truly talking about a single device that does it all for you -- your phone is your computer. The phone UI looks a bit different, he says "clean and simple," but just from the video it seems like a bit much to do things. That could just be an initial reaction based on years of other phone OS usage. Why hasnt anyone run with WebOS' UI approach? The whole cards thing seems like the best approa…

For the unfamiliar (like me) here's a video of WebOS Activity Cards from Palm's 2009 keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUSui3rH1a8

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#120

Post by elithrar »

polshaw wrote: post #102
recoiledsnake wrote: post #19

Edit: Here's the keynote video. Skip to about 6:35 sec for the new bits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU Direct link to 6:35 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU&feature=play... First thoughts: 2014 is a long way away and a whole year is an eternity in mobile space. It kind of looks like Unity in portrait mode but without the dock. What does it bring new to developers that isn't there in Android? F…

>What does it bring new to developers that isn't there in Android? Firefox OS's USP is web apps with native bindings Connect a display and you have full ubuntu. With today's smartphones already computationally competitive with your standard netbook, that alone is a massive value proposition to me. Add something like motorola's lapdock and there is 95% of all my computing needs met, all with a single, central data sto…

> Hopefully porting from linux will be fairly straightforward too.. just a new UI support?, giving apps that work from desktop to mobile. Not to mention that is has most of the FFOS advantage too.

I wouldn't trivialise the effort required to create a touch-friendly UI, especially from an existing desktop application (with the expectations that go with it).

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