On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 9:51 AM, Set Hallström <sakrecoer@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you for your input, Paul.

Tablets have (a) no keyboard (b) no concept of pointer motion without a drag (c) no concept of hover (d) much less screen real estate (e) multitouch (in some cases, at least). that is enough of a set of changes that any desktop application which took advantage of some of the scale of a desktop system will likely need to be reconceived fairly deeply.

What you write makes perfect sense, i guess that would explains why this smartphone/tablet thing has been arround for so long and it still is so difficult to run alternative non-proprietary software on them...? Just like it took several years for GNU/Linux distros to lower themselves to my acutaly quite poor level.

In the case of Android, there is also the fact that Google chose to make Java the runtime environment. It isn't impossible to build and run "native" (i.e. non-Java) applications for Android, but the platform certainly isn't on your side if you want to do this. This means that "simple" ports of desktop applications (at least those not written in Java already) is not necessarily trivial, and could actually be quite hard.