I agree with you that Qt is a great platform. E-Ink Readers lik Onyx Boox is already based on qt & qtopia.
But I hold my own opinions about Java. Embedded Java has been there for a while and it has been evolving all these years. Well I don't want to start a meaningless fight about which platform is better here... so anyway, for Amazon, that's what they've chosen and it doesn't seem that they'll change everything from Java to Qt just for a better SDK. And we'll have to live with it.
For the SDK, the apps you can develop is highly restricted. No apps such as readers and players could be developed. So I suppose they'll make some interfaces as private, e.g. file handling.
iPad and Kindle basically use different technologies so it's hard to compare. Apparently Kindle is more eye-friendly and has longer battery life, however, iPad's better at handling multimedia contents and is more powerful.
Guess the thing Amazon really needs is to improve the PDF reading experience, and add support for other formats such as epub, ppt and doc. I can see that lab126 is hiring PDF engineers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by darron
SDK? Well, here's the thing.
Amazon could and should provide as many ways to get apps on the Kindle as possible. They need Qt.
If Amazon is releasing a SDK based on the same embedded Java that's on the Kindle now, then they might as well just cut off a leg and tie one hand behind their back.
Embedded Java is awful. It's been on many, many phones for years and years... way before the iPhone. Nobody coded for it. Now, some of that was simply boneheaded barriers to entry, but there was never really a good platform there to code to.
My most recent experience with it was trying to port a modern Java Sudoku generator to it... major language features were missing on the embedded side (Generics, etc). It would probably have been easier to simply port it to C++.
I loved Java back when all I needed to be happy was a better graphics platform than Microsoft's GDI. My standards are much higher now.
There's a great enterprise niche for Java, but it has always sucked at embedded. Embedded Java is a serious mistake.
At least have the decency to run a full, modern Java. The Kindle looks like it can handle it.
Oh well. I guess the only chance they have is to maintain a much better ebook selection and lower prices than Apple.
|