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Remove the GTK2 GUI #287

Merged
merged 1 commit into from
Feb 4, 2020
Merged

Remove the GTK2 GUI #287

merged 1 commit into from
Feb 4, 2020

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M4rtinK
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@M4rtinK M4rtinK commented Feb 4, 2020

After 10 years it's time to say good by to the classical modRana GTK2 GUI. This GUI started as the original Rana GUI for the Neo FreeRunner and used a custom Cairo based GUI toolkit, as back then GTK was not really suitable for dynamic graphical interfaces on mobile device.

This enabled extreme control over what was drawn, yet had quite some overhead as all elements were custom drawn and implemented. It was also not really possible to implement animations (other than the hyper optimized custom map dragging animation), so stuff like kinetic scrolling in menus was not really possible.

The next GUI modRana got was a Qt 4 + QtQuick 1.0 GUI targeting MeeGo Harmattan on the N9/950. This GUI was pretty nice, but never reached feature parity with the GTK UI, mostly due to the original MeeGo devices not having any direct successors.

The current modern Qt 5 + QtQuick 2.0 GUI originated from the effort to port modRana to Sailfish OS, starting a rather long effort to provide feature parity with the GTK GUI. This was finally reached when the modRana Qt 5 GUI could finally provide routing, PoI handling and track logging/display.

Now back to the GTK2 GUI. It's 2020 and the number of modRana users on the N900 is most likely very low (and we have a branch for N900 if we really need to do a new release :D). GTK2 is Python 2 only and Python 2 went EoL on January 1 2020. So it's time to say goodbye to the classical modRana GTK2 GUI and thanks for all the fish! :)

After 10 years it's time to say good by to the classical modRana GTK2 GUI. This GUI started as the original Rana GUI for the Neo FreeRunner and used a custom Cairo based GUI toolkit, as back then GTK was not really suitable for dynamic graphical interfaces on mobile device.

This enabled extreme control over what was drawn, yet had quite some overhead as all elements were custom drawn and implemented. It was also not really possible to implement animations (other than the hyper optimized custom map dragging animation), so stuff like kinetic scrolling in menus was not really possible.

The next GUI modRana got was a Qt 4 + QtQuick 1.0 GUI targeting MeeGo Harmattan on the N9/950. This GUI was pretty nice, but never reached feature parity with the GTK UI, mostly due to the original MeeGo devices not having any direct successors.

The current modern Qt 5 + QtQuick 2.0 GUI originated from the effort to port modRana to Sailfish OS, starting a rather long effort to provide feature parity with the GTK GUI. This was finally reached when the modRana Qt 5 GUI could finally provide routing, PoI handling and track logging/display.

Now back to the GTK2 GUI. It's 2020 and the number of modRana users on the N900 is most likely very low (and we have a branch for N900 if we really need to do a new release :D). GTK2 is Python 2 only and Python 2 went EoL on January 1 2020. So it's time to say goodbye to the classical modRana GTK2 GUI and thanks for all the fish! :)
@xypd
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xypd commented Feb 7, 2020

Thank you for the support all this time from a n900 user!

Perhaps with Leste coming along well maybe it will be easier to port and you could revisit the maemo-leste platform.

Cheers

@M4rtinK
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M4rtinK commented Feb 8, 2020

Thank you for the support all this time from a n900 user!

Thanks! :)

Perhaps with Leste coming along well maybe it will be easier to port and you could revisit the maemo-leste platform.

Sure! If they can provide new enough Qt 5 & Python 3 then modern modRana should be able to run there just as well as on Sailfish OS or Linux desktop. Also I plan to start building modRana flatpaks in the future, which could be also another option in case they plan to support applications packages as Flatpaks (Flatpak support has been recently added to Sailfish OS by the community and most modern Linux distros support Flaptpak apps out of the box).

The old GTK2 GUI is really not suitable for continued development - just look at the 9000+ lines of GTK2 GUI code in question. Let's say I can write better code now. ;-)

Cheers
Best Wishes :)

1peter10 pushed a commit to 1peter10/modrana that referenced this pull request Jul 30, 2021
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