[Qt-interest] Regarding the QT mobile orientation and the current stage

[Thiago Macieira]

Em Segunda-feira 19 Abril 2010, às 18:12:46, Patric escreveu:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> these days I was reading about Symbian and the future of QT. I just want to
> be sure that I understand the current situation correctly.

Hi Patric

Please note that the trademark is Qt with a lowercase t.

> As far as I understand, currently QT supports Nokia S60 devices, but only
> from 3th edition FP1 ? It also supports Maemo 5 on Nokia 900.

That's correct. Qt supports S60 3rd edition FP1 (a.k.a 3.1), FP2 (3.2) and 5th 
edition (5.0).

It will also support all new releases of Symbian. It's included in the 
platform release, starting with Symbian^3.

> In the future, Symbian 4 Orbit UI widget pack will be created which wil be
> specially tailored for mobile devices (Symbian, MeeGo, Windows Mobile,
> etc). As far as I understand, currently the default widgets are used and
> tailored with the default theme of the phone. Which is not so beatiful as
> the upcoming Orbit widget pack I guess ?

The current widgets will be themed to Orbit (note that's not the trademark 
name, so it will change). But they won't be as beautiful as the new widgets 
because of limitations of the QWidget model.

> So far the QT mobility project is taking control over the native services.
> 
> It's kind of strange to me how desktop applications will look on Symbian
> and Maemo. :)

They'll use the native theme, but they'll look very ugly.

A desktop application runs on a very large screen, has a keyboard and a 
precise pointer (the mouse). Mobile devices have very small screens, often no 
keyboard and the pointer is either completely missing or is large and jittery 
(touch).

That's a whole different paradigm. Some interfaces can make the migration with 
a little pain -- we did it with the Qt demo browser on the N900, for example. 
It works, the menus are accessible, you can type in the location bar, etc.

But if you try it, you'll agree it's nowhere the best use of the screen size, 
which is small. Over half of the screen is taken by the top menu bar, the 
location bar and the status bar in the bottom. If you remove the useless 
status bar and trim down the menus to fewer items, you actually get a decent 
app. Thanks to the modifications done to the Qt widgets themselves, the web 
view is already touch-enabled.

My point is: if you want to make such a jump, you may need to redesign your UI 
a bit.

This is not about Qt widgets working: they do work. You can design your new UI 
with the same building blocks as before. This is about the *design* of the UI.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
  Senior Product Manager - Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks
      PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
      E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C  966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358
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