Nokia pushes for GTK+ 3.0

von Redaktion  |  06. August 2007, 22:47

Carlos Guerreiro, in an interview about the future of the GNOME Mobile Platform, the cooperation with One Laptop per Child and the iPhones impact on User Interface Design

A few months ago, the GNOME Mobile Platform was announced to the public. One of the main forces behind the launch of this initiative was Nokia, which uses a lot of GNOME-components in its Linux-based Internet Tablets Nokia 770 and N800. During this years GUADEC Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to sit down with Carlos Guerreiro, Nokias Manager for Open Source Software, to talk - amidst other things - about the not so different needs of personal computers and mobile devices, about the necessity for GTK+ 3.0 and the impact of the iPhone launch.

This interview is also available in a german translation.

derStandard.at: How important is the GNOME Mobile Plattform for a company like Nokia?

Carlos Guerreiro: It's quite important for us. One of the main concerns is about a fragmentation. Linux is a growing player, but it's just really the kernel. So basically when people are porting an application to any platform, they want to know how many devices are using it, how many customers they can reach. It becomes less attractive the more fragmented it is. So that's one of the main things the GNOME Mobile Platform is trying to address.

And also all of the companies that are involved in that initiative have a strategy of collaborating in that area, so organizing that better helps everybody. We can spot if we are all doing redundant things, that we should be doing together or we should do them separately, if we are betting on different horses and should maybe rethink.

One of the other goals is also to increase the awareness inside of the community to the use of the GNOME Platform in mobile devices. Especially to have the developers that contribute to the specific projects be aware of the specific needs of those mobile devices, so that whatever decisions they make, they take into consideration that their software might also be used in those kind of devices, so they try to make it run efficiently on them.

And the last point would be to increase the awareness from the outside, for instance for other companies thinking about possibly using the GNOME platform. It just makes them feel more comfortable, if they see all those other big companies already being involved.

derStandard.at: The GNOME Mobile Platform is using a subset of the "normal" GNOME desktop. So is it easy to fulfill both the needs of mobile devices and the desktop in one piece of software?

Carlos Guerreiro: Yes. It's like a subset, a relatively large subset, of the GNOME platform, plus some extra components that don't make sense in the desktop but are needed for the mobile space. Like Matchbox, which is a window manager that is optimized for applications that always take the full screen. And some of the other components have their own branches - like the dbus-version of the Evolution Data Server. But whenever that's done, there's always the kind of medium term goal to merge that back into the mainline. Mostly the same libraries are applicable to different devices, so the same GTK+ should run well on a desktop PC and also on a tablet and a mobile phone.

It's up higher in the stack where it gets more challenging, but at the level of the platform like GTK+, GStreamer, gnome-vfs you really can make one single component be useful throughout the whole range. In terms of different versions and patches that apply to GTK+, the challenges are perfectly addressable. So to give you one example: There was this issue with performance when Cairo was introduced as a hard dependency for GTK+, which led to all the mobile devices not being able to update to GTK+ versions bigger than 2.6. This has now improved to the point where we can ship 2.10 in our next major release of our tablet software, though there are other companies still stuck with 2.6.

derStandard.at: So the Cairo-version of GTK+ now finally performs the same as the older ones?

Carlos Guerreiro: It performs roughly the same for us. However it has to be noted that Cairo is used only in relatively few and well defined places, so that's not to say that Cairo as a whole is now performing well for mobile devices - or for that matter for the desktop.

derStandard.at: Does that mean, that you'd like to make stronger use of Cairo if it would be better in this respect?

Carlos Guerreiro: Yeah, sure. There's an understanding that the user experience would benefit from the more advanced drawing capabilities, that Cairo has to offer. But Cairo really isn't fully optimized at a level to allow it to be used for that. But I'm sure it will come there through a combination of optimizing Cairo itself and accelerating it through hardware.

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Nomen est Omen
12.08.2007 14:55

i'm still not really enlightened where the need in gstreamer is ?! There are some very good engines around already, like xine or mplayer, why do the gnome guys try to re-invent the wheel here?

Or did i misunderstood the gstreamer concept? is it something totally different?

speckey
18.08.2007 16:00

yes, it's a whole video/audio pipeline. (capturing, converting, streaming, ....) not only displaying video.

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