[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Gtk vs. Qt

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

On Maemo platform I regard Qt a bit like libSDL as I think both of them
to have similar problems:
- User interface looks different (different colors, pixmaps, font family
  & size and they don't change when device theme is changed)
- User interface works differently (no special widgets for touchscreen
  usage, uses menubar to open menus instead of a titlebar)
- Do not integrate with the input method (in Maemo this is integrated
  with the individual widget usage so that input method comes up
  automatically only when needed and goes away when not needed)
- Naively takes pointer/keyboard grabs "unnecessarily" and/or doesn't
  release them when required (in some rare cases could end up locking the UI)
- User cannot switch to SDL application through Task Navigator
  (should be easiest to fix)

I.e. there would be quite a lot work to integrate Qt library properly
to the Maemo platform in addition to it taking a lot of additional
memory as Qt libraries wouldn't be shared with the other applications.

It should be easy to test above issues with the x86 SDK.  From the X mailing
lists I've noticed that Trolltech people are also using Xephyr. :)

Then there's of course the thing that well behaving applications should
implement some callbacks e.g. for UI state saving so that memory usage
can be better managed.


	- Eero