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

[From: Shawn Gordon]

Kate, your initial work looks very promising, but I'm curious why you're 
doing a port of Qt itself instead of Qt/e, which is significantly smaller 
(less features of course)?  Lorn mentioned qt/e4, I don't know what the 
state of that is currently, but if that's what get's running in Maemo then 
we might as well port the UI to Hildon since porting to qt/e4 is probably 
going to be just about the same effort and we'd rather be native.

Basically there is a huge library of free applications and our commercial 
applications that run on qt/e2 that ships with all the Zaurus's (Zaurii) so 
any effort to get some emulation working would be most effective if it 
targeted the platform that is currently in the largest deployment.  I'm 
apparently jumping in to this whole topic late, so I don't know what has 
been discussed before, but I think we're the only hardcore commercial 
developers of qtopia applications around, so we have some specific ideas in 
this regard.

best,
shawn

At 05:15 AM 7/26/2005, Kate Alhola wrote:
>ext Eero Tamminen wrote:
>>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 application
>>
>Also the Qtopia emulation layer would be usefull for porting Qt/Qtopia 
>applications.
>
>There is work to do but it looks a like that there is lot of interest to 
>have possibility
>to port QT / Qtopia applications and so there is good reason to do this work.
>I think that it is much more usefull to do this port as open source 
>project and produce
>shared library that can be used multiple applications instead that every 
>app developper
>will make their own port and spend lot of memory with statically linking.
>
>I just checked size of native arm libqt-mt.so.3.3.4 and it was 10917826 
>bytes ( 10Mbyte !! )
>It is large and may be that many Qt applications need to be in RS-MMC card but
>still if some application is written with Qt, there is only two choices, 
>run it even
>it uses lot of memory and has some diferencies in look and feel or then 
>not run it all.
>
>Of cource the major things with Maemo intergration should be resolved like 
>this input
>methods and pointer/keyboard issues that you mentioned. Also look and feel 
>compatilble themes
>would be nice thing to have.
>
>
>
>Kate
>_______________________________________________
>maemo-developers mailing list
>maemo-developers at maemo.org
>https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers


Regards,

Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
www.thekompany.com
www.mindawn.com
949-713-3276