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

[From: Kate Alhola]

ext Alberto Garcia wrote:
> 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.
>   
Qt is using Hildon style, UI elements will have same style,
size etc as GTK counterparts.
> 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+.
>   
Same thing to Qt, it is not limitation of Qt. App menus looks
exactly same rendered with Qt than rendered with GTK.
It just uses exactly same style for elements.
> 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.
>
>   
If you think that if there is not 1 to 1 equivalent for everything, 
there is nothing. Everyone
is allowed to have their own opinion.

There is no way enforce application consistency, the important is to offer
tools to make consistent applications. Maemo Qt has very comprehensive
set of widgets and it uses Hildon style. It offers all required component
to make consistent UI even there is not in some rare cases exactly 1 to 
1 match.

The main motivator of having Qt for Fremantle is avoid developers to 
waste their
time. Qt provides easier upgrade path to Qt based Harmattan, it also 
provides
easy cross platform path to S60. Which is more wasting time, writing couple
of dozen lines of C++ or rewriting all application for other platform?   
It is also other question
that which is more wasting time, writing couple of dozen lines when you 
can save couple of
thousand lines in all application by more compact and efficient code 
with C++ and Qt.

Because there has been lot of discussion about these some widgets that
do not yet have 1 to 1 counterpart in current Maemo Qt, we are going to 
have solution
this question soon.

Kate

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