Some years ago I’ve been talking, whining maybe, about how KAlgebra is more flexible than it looks, the proof is this post from 2009. A lot of time has passed since then, not as much work on KAlgebra as I’d have wanted, but we are much further. Having an N900 gived me the confidence to work on a KAlgebraMobile that probably nobody tried but most of you have installed on your system, yay! It was quite a disaster, bad timing (end of N900 era) and kdecore didn’t make it to the main repositories for some reason I can’t understand, so I that version will stay in our hearts and vcs logs but not much further.
I have this little flaw, whenever I find a new cool technology I fantasize about porting KAlgebra to it. Same happened with QtQuick (QML back then), it made sense: I always wanted to have KAlgebra working on a handheld device and there we had some good opportunity. The big problem was that I didn’t want to make KAlgebra Mobile a Harmattan application, or a Fremantle, or build the GUI from scratch, since most of you will know I’m no designer. The whole QtQuick application development process looked fuzzy to me (and still does, but less).
The whole thing changed when I was asked to try QtDesktop Components, mostly because I had to try it on something and I finally could invoke something like “Button {}”. Once I had it working, I created separate implementations for harmattan and desktop, so right now it’s quite easy to extend to different sets of components quite easily as long as they are a little API-equivalent.
In short, right now we have a KAlgebraMobile applications that can be tested and used on desktop and also used on Harmattan. It’s far more interesting the second case, mostly because on the desktop we’ve had a version of KAlgebra since many years and I didn’t have to blog about it. Anyway, as always, it’s on kde’s KAlgebra master branch, feel free to test it. If you don’t feel like, enjoy some pretty pictures!
And last but not least, big thanks to Laszlo Papp for working for KDE in Harmattan, without his work this wouldn’t have been possible. Also big thanks to Jens Bache-Wiig who is caring about desktop even if he can do mobile UI’s :). This kind of people make this community alive and prosper!!
