Hi,

many of us here develop applications for mobile devices with varying levels of success.
there are a few key elements which should go together to produce excellent applications within our constrained environment.

liqbase makes use of all of these and manages to produce lightweight extremely responsive applications ( see here for progress: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt7qB37sLLo )

however you don't necessarily need to change the toolkit you are currently using to obtain good looking results.

On the desktop whether using GTK or QT I doubt anybody concerns themselves with the number of drawn layers in an application, the graphics cards there manage to render many many more frames than we can make use of.

On the tablets (obviously..) things are a little more constrained - even when the new device(s?) come along maintaining a heavily optimized application helps your battery.
even in the best case scenario your little computer will be held up by drawing and redrawing all these intermediate layers.
If you can cut back on the number of painted items and redundant refreshes then you can gain realistically visible improvements in performance.
think about back panels and containers within containers and make sure you disable painting of areas already pre-painted by the container.

Cutting down on the amount of UI clutter in your applications obviously helps to make a usable clean interface.
The principles of optimization are universal no matter what application you are writing and whatever toolkit you are using.
for instance, I discovered one of the best articles about optimization and simplicity from reading the forum nokia site and finding an article relating to WRT widgets:

http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/al...lopment-part-2

so, let me know - what tips and advice would you give to prospective app developers?


(*apologies for formatting, hastily pasted from notes i made lastnight)