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

[From: Kate Alhola]

ext Alberto Garcia wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 07, 2009 at 05:09:25PM +0300, Kate Alhola wrote:
>
>   
>>> 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.
>>     
>
> No, I haven't said that.
>
> What I say is:
>
>  * The Fremantle UI style depends heavily on a set of widgets that
>    have been specifically designed for it.
>
>  * These include some very fundamental widgets such as HildonAppMenu,
>    HildonPickerButton and HildonStackableWindow.
>
>  * If you take a look at the N900 you'll see that these widgets are
>    used ALL OVER THE PLACE.
>
>  * Example: there's no application in the N900 using a menu other than
>    HildonAppMenu.
>
>  * If you want to use a menu in your application you must use
>    HildonAppMenu or a widget designed to mimic its look and feel, else
>    your application will look different.
>
>  * There's nothing necessarily wrong with that (e.g. Canola), but
>    developers should be aware before starting to write their apps.
>
>   
I agree that. Antonio just answered, you have HildonAppMenu and 
StackableWindow functionality in Qt.
They look exactly same than Hildon equivalents. I said already that you 
will soon see also
PickerButton functionality. Qt API is different than GTK+, that's clear 
to everyone.
> So:
>
>  * Do you want to provide Qt libs for developing Fremantle apps? Good
>
>  * Are all the widgets that have been designed as a central part of the
>    Fremantle UI available in Qt? Good
>
>  * Aren't they available yet? Fair enough, but then make sure that
>    developers are aware of this.
>   
Try to understand difference between functionality and widget.
In most of cases you don't need any special widgets.
You have StackableWindows and AppMenus but you don't
need to have separate widgets for this.

Let's get back to roots once again. There is two ways to implement
UI for mobile.
1- You can make new widgets ( Hildon)
2- You can enhance existing widgets to support mobile usecase (Qt)

The model used in Qt makes much easier to port applications because
it minimizes needs to modify your application.

> The bottom line:
>
>  * Telling people that it's completely reasonable to write Fremantle
>    apps in Qt without making clear that some fundamental Fremantle
>    widgets have not been written yet it not a good idea IMHO.
>   
Telling is very good idea, it leaves freedom of choice to developer.
I think that telling about choices and their consequences is allways
good idea. Maemo Qt is at the moment as Beta whereas Hildon for maemo 5 is
about final. That is one argument. The other argument is that Harmatan will
be Qt based, S60 will have Qt, Qt is a cross platform toolkit .Qt has 
QGraphicsView,
animation API etc for eye candy, Qt has OpenGL-ES2.0 support, it has 
webkit ...


>> 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.
>>     
>
> I'm not going to start a C vs C++ debate, but I don't think this is an
> argument here since there are already C++ bindings for Hildon:
>
> http://maemomm.garage.maemo.org/docs_unstable/tutorial/html/sec-TouchSelector.html
>
>   
It's just not C++ issue, Qt is written from scratch as C++ classes and 
it just
makes many things like writing derived classes much easier.

I know the C++ bindings, I was the one pushing maemo to support C++ .


Kate

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