[maemo-developers] New apps for fremantle with Qt?

[From: Piñeiro]

From: <Karoliina.T.Salminen at nokia.com>

> These things are easier in some toolkits and harder in some others. To my knowledge, Gtk was not really designed for handheld touch user interface
> with kinetic scroll etc. on mind in the first place - it is a rather a desktop toolkit with the rather traditional mindset - 
> and some of hard core hacking obviously was required to make it function like it functions on the Maemo 5. That is a great achievement and I have
> watched that with awe and lots of respect to the developers who have made it. I can now enjoy it every day with my N900, lists etc.
> work as they should and they make this UI very desirable.

For any reason all the times that Qt advantages were mentioned, they
always talk about the kinetic scroll support as the big
advantage. Right now hildon has kinetic support, as a new container
general container was added, HildonPannableArea [1].

In the same way this "Hard core hacking" is more than debatable. Yes,
the current gtk used on maemo 5 has some maemo-specific changes
(hardcode hacks?) but this are just to support some different
requirements here, and maintained in a different branch in order to
not interfere with the normal upstream work on gtk. But most of this
changes are being constantly integrated on upstream.

> On the other hand, it was a lot easier to start the same from scratch on Startup wizard with Clutter because there
> was not the incompatible way of thinking as a barrier between the desired functionality and what is already there because there was
> nothing there already, just start from grass root level from atomic blocks (start by building a custom ClutterActor) 
> and then figure out how to stack Actors and how to animated them to get e.g. a kinetic scroll list done. As there was no base widget, there
> was no limitations of the base widget and no associated problems, just putting some lego blocks together and it was done. With some
> adjustable parameters and then fine tuning the feel with these parameters, it was actually quite efficient to do it. 

So you are suggesting that starting from almost scratch, with
basically a base widget support, *in general*, is better that start
with a toolkit with a lot of tools, because you have the control of
all that you want to do, and you can avoid the "constraints" of the
toolkit? In this case, why use gtk or Qt or Clutter? You can use
directly OpenGL and make your app. After all, the N900 has EGL
support.

> I believe Qt can be in the same position pretty much,
> if the widget is started from scratch rather basing it on some existing widget which has similar limitations than the equivalent
> in the Gtk. Qt is more like Gtk + Clutter combined rather than being equivalent of the Gtk alone. 
> 
> Kate said there is some kinetic scroll list already there in the Qt, but I don't know how its parameters match to the 
> Hildon/Gtk version we have on the Maemo 5, but I think that with some work it can be done to function 100% equally, as it works
> equally on startup wizard despite it is a completely separate implementation with a completely different kind of technology behind it.
> And despite of that, it still just works, perfectly. 
...


> I believe you (or anybody else) are very welcome to pixel perfect and fine tune the list performances of 
> the Qt equivalent widgets if someone creates the missing few hildon widget Qt equivalents.

But that was the question from the beginning in this thread. Please
read the previous comments. Most of the developers were concerned
because there are some Hildon-Gtk widgets, that provides a specific
functionality, but they doesn't exist on Qt. The question was if the
"official Qt-Nokia support" has the intention to develop this widgets,
in order to made easier have the same look&rfeel, or if they are
supposed to be created by the apps developers. And "few" is not
exactly the adjetive I would use.


[1] https://git.maemo.org/projects/hildon/?p=hildon;a=blob;f=hildon/hildon-pannable-area.h;h=51690e5f12b0b49b4144787652d13f41b18e05b3;hb=HEAD

===
API (apinheiro at igalia.com)