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

[From: Alberto Garcia]

On Sun, Sep 06, 2009 at 07:14:22PM +0200, Karoliina.T.Salminen at nokia.com wrote:

> > > > if you want to have the exact same user experience as the
> > > > preinstalled Maemo 5 applications have (as seen in all youtube
> > > > videos and the SDK), then you have much easier time and faster
> > > > development with the gtk-based hildon widgets in Maemo 5.

> > I would caution against too easily dismissing Hildon Pickers as
> > trivial "composites" that app developers can implement. [...] The
> > "combobox" in Linux desktops is pretty much a subset of the hildon
> > pickers (in terms of funtionality, not directly in terms of actual
> > UI elements). So if pickers would be trivial, then why would there
> > be a need to provide a combobox in the standard toolkit?
> 
> 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.

From a technological point of view, the new widgets in Hildon are
completely traditional and they are based on standard Gtk+ widgets.

Of course they are designed to be used on a small, touch screen
device, but what this means in terms of implementation is that we
avoided using interactions, components and sizes that were too small
or too difficult to be used with fingers in a screen like that of the
N900.

We haven't found any particular limitation in Gtk+ that made this more
difficult.

Example: HildonAppMenu is basically a window with two groups of
buttons. There's nothing strange or unexpected here, and certainly
nothing that Gtk+ was not designed to cope with. The work here was
about getting the semantics, layout, sizes, alignments, API, etc
right, not about fighting with any design limitation in Gtk+.

And the same thing applies to all other Hildon widgets.

The importance and the goal of Hildon is to provide a set of essential
widgets so

a) app developers don't have to waste their time in writing them
themselves
b) there is UI consistency between all applications

If there are no Qt equivalents for all Hildon widgets, none of these
two problems are solved, no matter how easy it is for developers to
write their own widgets or how compact the code is.

Berto
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