From what I understand, you want something that looks more or less like this: If so, then you'll need to take advantage of a GUI toolkit. While the above was done using Qt which is written in C++, you can achieve similar if not identical results using GTK, which is written in C. If you must use C++, you can use maemomm which is a set of C++ bindings around GTK (and maemo/hildon widgets, I believe). While its great that you are learning C++, the same can be achieved in python. See here, here, and here for more info. (PyMaemo, PyQt4 for Maemo, and Pyside links). Note: garage seems to be down at the moment, so most of the links provided above may not work right this second. try again later if that is the case