[IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!

[Lucian Branescu]

Realistically, neither Qt or Gtk will work reasonably well on android in the
(near) future. And realistically, Gtk 3 will never work well in HTML 5,
since it's a desktop api.

If you develop for Android, all you can do is write apps to the API
provided. Also, the apps must be very small, because most devices have
severe internal memory limitations. Shipping Gtk/Qt would be ridiculous, and
it's likely that Qt will never really take of on Android (which is sad).

Python also won't run on Android in the near-future, at least not for
writing full applications. ASE is extremely limited and only really useful
for small scripts. Also, the CPython interpreter is HUGE when it comes to
Android.

Jython is very JVM-specific, and Android doesn't have JVM. It simply has a
VM that happens to map well to Java. Either large parts of Jython would have
to be rewritten or PyPy would have to grow a dalvik backend, and both are
very ambitious undertakings.

And even if Python did work on Android, Sugar activities will never run
there. Sugar won't work well on Android devices because Sugar is an entire
environment with its own particular HIG, which is highly incompatible with
Android's.


What could be done is to create a set of educational apps for Android. And
that's all well and good, but it has little to do with Sugar.

On Thursday, 17 February 2011 at 03:27, Seth Woodworth wrote:

There is QT for android as another avenue for porting existing applications.

But if the goal is a full featured word processing application, I suspect
there are other routes to the same goal in the Android world.

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:16 PM, Martin Sevior <msevior at gmail.com> wrote:


 The current collection of sugar apps use pyGtk for interfaces. In the
case of Write, this is a C++ library linked with Gtk-2 with the UI
written with pyGtk.

It seems to me that the minimum requirement for this idea to have the
remotest chance of reusing all the work that has gone into sugar so
far is for Gtk to have android graphics backend. Gtk-3.0 can
apparently now draw to HTML 5.

So maybe it it is possible to build such a thing for android? An
android backend to Gtk-3.0 would be extremely valuable to the Free
Software community. So much so that I wonder if there has been an
attempt to do this.

Does any one know?

Cheers

Martin
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