Re: Quim keynote on Maemo's switch to Qt as the main toolkit
 

Hi, this topic started in another thread but I guess you want to discuss more here.

About the switch GTK+/Qt in Fremantle/Harmattan, providing commercial support on both frameworks for both releases implies an amount of work that we simply can't nor want to commit. Qt in Fremantle is in pretty decent shape now and we expect to fine tune it more to make it a realistic option for developers in Fremantle. GTK+/Hildon support in Harmattan depends nowadays on the interest to support coming from players other than Maemo Devices (the Maemo community, the GNOME Mobile initiative, else...). Technically it shouldn't be that hard to port the related libraries to Harmattan and allow the current applications to run, even if not fully integrated. We can help, but the initiative needs to come from someone else. The good thing is that there is a whole Fremantle maintenance period to think and discuss this.

The Maemo API in Harmattan will be Qt based and this is all what application developers willing to deal with the native environement will need to care about. But... actually I don't expect the majority of developers willing to deal with native environments by the time Harmattan goes aout, and actually the GTK+/Qt or even C/C++ will sound to far from their interests and concerns.

GTK+/Hildon won't be used by the applications shipped with Harmattan out of the box and therefore won't be pre-installed. When we say that GTk+/Hildon will hopefully be there as community supported we really mean that. If all things go well developers interested in these libraries would find them in Extras, just like they are finding e.g. the Python bindings there now.

You can't really compare the GTK+ in 2005 and Qt now when it comes to mobile UI friendliness. You can't compare either the position of the Nokia developers working on the first Maemo release under the hood that time and the position of the Maemo developers now that the intentions about Qt have been communicated, even before Fremantle is out. For these reasons it is more feasible to say that plain Qt applications should be able to work in Harmattan much better than plain GTK+ applications have been able to run in Maemo until now. But be aware that Maemo will develop a lot more on top of the Qt & Qt Mobility APIs, as explained yesterday in the presentation (I will link to the audio file asap).

Re: Quim keynote on Maemo's switch to Qt as the main toolkit
 

Audio (the network is really slow here and I'm not able to test it, let me knoe whether the file works please): http://tinyurl.com/lvugfd

Slides: http://bit.ly/nkGtw

Re: Quim keynote on Maemo's switch to Qt as the main toolkit
 

The ones I tried under mer/lxde would be perfectly usable if an onscreen keyboard automatically popped up in input fields and there was a way to emulate a right click.

Re: Quim keynote on Maemo's switch to Qt as the main toolkit
 

Blog post: http://flors.wordpress.com/2009/07/0...ynote-at-gcds/

Re: Quim keynote on Maemo's switch to Qt as the main toolkit
 

Right mouse button is just one issue. There is many other
issues need to be taken under consideration. One big thing is
dialog layouts. If dialog is so large that part of it is outside of screen
it decreases usability of lot.

Even if you can make technically usable it does not mean
that usability is good. For small screen devices application
with good usability should be usable with finger. As example
acrelling from content pane is much more usable than tiny
scrollbars that require usage of stylus.

Maemo Qt port takes care of most of technical issues like
style and input method but it can't fix bad or unsuitablenUI design.

I strongly recommend that everyone that ports application to maemo
pays some amount of attention to usability and is just not
trying to make quick and ugly port.

Re: Quim keynote on Maemo's switch to Qt as the main toolkit
 

It works, but 24' later[1] I'm still confused :-(

I don't have strong feelings about either toolkit, but the switch (as opposed to both being available and equal) doesn't make sense to me. Apparently (11:48 onwards) the main driver for this seems to be cross-platform compatibility in general, and with SymbianOS in particular. That's a bit... naive to say the least. Portability is a lot more than skin deep, and there vast differences between the two OSs in basic things like file and network I/O, process control and signalling etc[2]. Even more significantly, the middle layer (d-bus, bluez, telepathy, gstreamer and so on on the Maemo side) is completely different. I'm sorry, but "recompiling and it more or less works" (17:26) just isn't going to happen for anything more complex than "Hello, world".

On the other hand GTK+ is reasonably cross-platform and there's even a port to Symbian OS underway. Glib has already been ported by Nokia too. Dropping GTK+, Hildon, all existing official apps[3] etc for "cross-platform compatibility" sounds like something that could only be imposed on the Maemo team from above by someone who has no real understanding of the technologies and issues involved[4].

Anyway, since it's fait accompli now, one question that becomes particularly important for prospective developers is: will Maemo 5 devices run Harmattan?

[1] Whatever happened to text btw, you'd think news as big as this would rate an announcement on maemo.org at least
[2] P.I.P.S. is incredibly buggy and if anyone considers it for production use they're in for some very interesting times.
[3] I don't envy Andre the reaction to the inevitable "WONTFIX for Harmattan"[5] storm
[4] But it does finally explain the castration of input methods :-(
[5] Not to mention the also inevitable regressions and new bugs introduced by rewriting everything for no good reason.

Re: Quim keynote on Maemo's switch to Qt as the main toolkit
 

This also happens under desktop linux. A netbook doesn't have much more screen real estate than a tablet and kde4 works pretty well there.

I personally prefer tiny scrollbars than devote scarce screen real estate to improve finger friendliness (see above).
That's my point of view, of course I cannot say it's the right one for everybody, but it is right for me.

Again, this is the same for desktop linux.

While this is true, a working but ugly application is better that one not working at all.

Re: Quim keynote on Maemo's switch to Qt as the main toolkit
 

If you allow scrolling by dragging content pane, you don't lose
any of the valuable real estate to scrollbars at all.

Re: Quim keynote on Maemo's switch to Qt as the main toolkit
 

Thanks for the audio Quim !!! (nice music in background ;))

Re: Quim keynote on Maemo's switch to Qt as the main toolkit
 

Well, QT handles network, files and I/O, so not a problem here.