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

[From: Attila Csipa]

On Monday 07 September 2009 17:21:45 Alberto Garcia wrote:
>  * The Fremantle UI style depends heavily on a set of widgets that
>    have been specifically designed for it.

I really don't want to meddle in GTK-vs-Qt discussions, but this particular 
segment scares me a bit. This sounds to me like saying coding for Fremantle is 
a one-shot affair - you have these specially designed widgets, which are there 
only on Fremantle and who knows what their future will be, even if Kate, 
Antonio et al put together specific widgets/examples for the Fremantle build of 
Qt. If there is one thing I'm afraid of it's not designing an UI for mobile 
use, it's redesigning them for each version of the OS (and the snowballing of 
ifdefs it brings). Just to clarify - I'm not talking about looks, but specific 
functionality.

> * 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.

Sigh, I said I won't comment on this, but... I'm not sure what's the 
developer's alternative. If I use GTK+, I'll happily keep using it in 
Fremantle and Harmattan, etc. If I use Qt, I certainly won't switch to GTK+ 
just for Fremantle no matter how essential some widgets might be. If I don't 
know either of them, the choice is between 'miss some functionality now' and 
'miss some functionality later and from there on' (since GTK+ folks will 
likely be in the same shoes missing out on more and more of the Qt stuff in 
Maemo 6 and beyond). So unless one plans on writing something trivial and 
quitting coding before Maemo 6 hits, there is not exactly much choice - for 
better or worse, these things are IMHO pretty much on ballistic trajectories 
now.