[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Gtk vs. Qt

[From: Kate Alhola]

ext Eero Tamminen wrote:
>Hi,
>
>On Maemo platform I regard Qt a bit like libSDL as I think both of them
>to have similar problems:
>- User interface looks different (different colors, pixmaps, font family
>  & size and they don't change when device theme is changed)
>- User interface works differently (no special widgets for touchscreen
>  usage, uses menubar to open menus instead of a titlebar)
>- Do not integrate with the input method (in Maemo this is integrated
>  with the individual widget usage so that input method comes up
>  automatically only when needed and goes away when not needed)
>- Naively takes pointer/keyboard grabs "unnecessarily" and/or doesn't
>  release them when required (in some rare cases could end up locking the UI)
>- User cannot switch to SDL application through Task Navigator
>  (should be easiest to fix)
>
>I.e. there would be quite a lot work to integrate Qt library properly
>to the Maemo platform in addition to it taking a lot of additional
>memory as Qt libraries wouldn't be shared with the other application
>  
Also the Qtopia emulation layer would be usefull for porting Qt/Qtopia 
applications.

There is work to do but it looks a like that there is lot of interest to 
have possibility
to port QT / Qtopia applications and so there is good reason to do this 
work.
I think that it is much more usefull to do this port as open source 
project and produce
shared library that can be used multiple applications instead that every 
app developper
will make their own port and spend lot of memory with statically linking.

I just checked size of native arm libqt-mt.so.3.3.4 and it was 10917826 
bytes ( 10Mbyte !! )
It is large and may be that many Qt applications need to be in RS-MMC 
card but
still if some application is written with Qt, there is only two choices, 
run it even
it uses lot of memory and has some diferencies in look and feel or then 
not run it all.

Of cource the major things with Maemo intergration should be resolved 
like this input
methods and pointer/keyboard issues that you mentioned. Also look and 
feel compatilble themes
would be nice thing to have.



Kate