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

[Patric]

Hi Thiago,

I see, thank you for the answer. I guess this is both for Symbian and Maemo 
when using Qt.

We're looking forward at using Maemo and Symbian as platforms for our new 
applications. What advice would you give us, should we use Qt for Maemo or 
Symbian development at the moment ? Is it mature enought or we should use 
the current GTK+ Hildon and S60 Avkon UIs.

As I understand, the current widgets will be themed with the new ones which 
are coming with Symbian 4, but they will be ugly compared to them.

And another question, will the transition between the old Qt widgets (the 
current actually, and created for mobile devices not Desktop environment) 
and the new Orbit be easy ? If we create our apps using Qt now, will we need 
to recreate the whole UI in the upcoming months ?

Thank you in advance

Regards



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Thiago Macieira" <thiago at kde.org>
To: <qt-interest at trolltech.com>
Cc: "Patric" <userqt at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, April 19, 2010 7:45 PM
Subject: Re: [Qt-interest] Regarding the QT mobile orientation and the 
current stage

Em Segunda-feira 19 Abril 2010, аs 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
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