But it doesn't work very well (at least in the current implementation) when the content has active spots (e.g. hyperlinks) and you accidentally hit one of them.
Besides, you lose visual feedback on where you are on the whole document.
Edit: and if you're browsing a big document you can quickly go anywhere with a scrollbar, not so dragging the content pane (and IMO inertial scrolling makes things even worse).

Naive? The Qt developers at Nokia probably know well the complexity of this goal. At the end is their code and they have got some experience about cross-platform development over the years.

Qt covers a lot more than the skin. Also take into account that we are talking about Qt in the times of Harmattan. If you look at the slides you will see that the plan is to use the Qt 4.6 / Qt Mobility API. It's true that there are many elements that need to be in place, in different platforms and working. But... did I say in the presentation that the Harmattan project is going to be easy to implement?

I wish in all this talk about "cross-platform", some effort would be put into explaining what does it mean in practice for this context.

On one side, I can understand it in the sense that, sure, the more everybody uses just QT toolkit all over the place (desktop, mobile,...), it's easier for a developer of, say, Ovi Suite for Windows to jump over and start developing for Harmattan in the future.

But in terms of UI? Is somebody seriously claiming there's "cross-platform" UI's between desktop and mobile? Just compile away? Especially in terms of having "mainstream users" as goal, which Maemo has according to Quim.

In terms of UI, I can understand (relatively) "cross-platform" QT-based Windows application being ported to Mac OS X with smaller effort (although being truly "Mac" is really really hard).

And I could understand being able to share some UI elements between a future Symbian QT application and future Maemo harmattan QT application. But even there, there's the same thing as in the UI's in the desktop: Windows is not Mac is not Linux, Mac is not Windows is not Linux.

Thoughts?

"Quim keynote on Maemo's switch to Qt as the main toolkit "

I hope no one is surprised by this announcement, because they shouldn't be.


as stated above, the big question for me is whether maemo 5 devices will be able to run harmatton?

i am a kde/linux fan, so i applaud maemo's move to QT, but thatb is all the more reason why i don't wish to buy a dead-end GTK+ device.

FYI, GLib will still be officially supported and be a part of in Harmattan if I got it right.

Now we only need another switch to Enlightment and we can ditch it...

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Of course it is, I meant Nokia have ported it to Symbian :-)

Ok... not trying to be ultra-dense here; however am I reading this right that the very next step of Maemo will start the process of dropping GTK+ in favor of Qt and the Qt in Fremantle will only be community supported, much like Mer is community supported?

Just wondering if I got it right.

Yes, I think this is an important question, at least for developers. We all have to use new devices for fremantle. I really hope this will not happen for Maemo 6 again. A little bit more compatibility would be a great attraction. Sometimes I love to run some old PalmOS 3.x tools on my Tungsten.
Well, PalmOS has really disatvantages, but on the other side it is very unedifying that one cannot run just two years old tools written for Maemo 3 on Maemo 4 devices.

-Klaus

One of the major reasons Fremantle won't run on Maemo 4 devices is the lack of OpenGL support on those devices, as Fremantle makes use of the clutter OpenGL scene graph library for its user interface. While the N800 and N810 do have OpenGL hardware, the available drivers were never integrated into the OS, and as far as I know, they aren't any good anyway, which is probably why they weren't integrated.

With running Harmatten on the Fremantle device there hopefully won't be any similar problem of the older device lacking a major required capability, at least I can't think of any today.

In fact, if you look at Quim's slides, you'll notice that clutter is being dropped for Harmattan as well. Presumably what is being done with clutter in Fremantle will be done with QGraphicsView and Qt's new declarative UI technology in Fremantle. Qt's graphics stuff has multiple backends, such as software rendering, XRender, GDI and OpenGL, as well as a couple of others relevant to other platforms it supports.

So, the Harmattan desktop, being built using Qt, would presumably still make use of OpenGL acceleration -- but it might not actually require OpenGL support, unlike the Fremantle desktop. This might make it far easier for the Mer people to backport it even to the N800/N810 (but the performance of a desktop targetting a much newer and faster device might not be acceptable on them -- still, I think the switch to Qt is quite possibly great news for N800/N810 owners who don't see themselves buying a Fremantle or Harmattan device).