Last spring I started to write QuickFlickr application i.e. a Flickr client for N900. Back then I wrote this article of it. For me this is just a learning process to study QML and trying to figure out how I can write a real application using C++ for a lower layer and QML for the UI. The biggest challenge so far has been to design C++ side so that it provides usable interface to QML side. Before going too deep into details here’s the video about QuickFlickr running first on OS X and after that on N900.
Posts Tagged ‘Declarative UI’
QuickFlickr on N900
Sunday, August 15th, 2010Promoting RdUX
Monday, February 15th, 2010Now that MeeGo is a hot topic, I think it’s time to introduce RdUX – the Revolutionary Device User eXperience. So you might ask that what the heck is the RdUX and how it is related to MeeGo. Well it’s related on Meego in that way, it runs on Intel Atom based Moblin (Moblin Core from Moblin Netbook 2.1) device, which has a 7″ touch screen supporting multitouch. The other thing how it is related on MeeGo is, that it is fully based on Qt, the official MeeGo UI Toolkit.
Why do I want to promote RdUX here, is because I think it’s pretty cool to show of what guys that I’m working with made in six weeks (including linux driver development for multitouch support). Window management of RdUX uses OpenGL and it introduces pretty smooth user interface for interacting with applications. It uses gestures quite heavily and it introduces also custom gestures. Check the next video where you can see examples of basic interactions (the introduction is bit too long, but it might be worth to listen that):
Qt/3D Running on N900
Friday, January 29th, 2010Qt Labs is the place where you can follow the direction of the Qt development. Of course it’s worth to follow the Qt Roadmap also. If you are interested in about what’s happening in Qt world, it is definitely worth to follow the Labs (in my opinion).
One of the most interesting projects at the moment is Qt/3D. As you might have noticed Qt doesn’t support 3D in painting when using QPainter, but now there is ongoing project called Qt/3D which brings this to Qt world. Instead of QPainter you can use QGLPainter for 3D drawing. There has been been possibility to use OpenGL before, but what Qt/3D brings is a Qt way to do that. Which is nice.
There are good blog posts about Qt/3D in Qt Labs blog section. So it doesn’t make sense for me to write more about this subject. You can check out the blog posts:
I decided to take a look at if it is possible to run Qt/3D applications on N900 and yes, it is possible. Below is a video where I run several Qt/3D demos on N900. The following demos are ran on the video:
- cubeaccel – A simple cube demo that reacts on device accelenometer values
- pageflip – A demo which models how to switch a newspaper page
- teapot – The classic 3D “Utah Teapot”
- planets – A demo which demonstrates the animation done with QSphericalAnimation
QML – The Declarative UI on N900
Saturday, December 12th, 2009It seems that the trend with the modern mobile UI platforms will be based on some kind of web techniques (html, css, javascript) in the future. Even now there are good examples of such an environments like Palm WebOs. Web OS kind of environment for running UI will usually requires some processing power from the device in order to work smoothly with good UX. The benefit of running Web OS might be that you basically don’t need to recompile anything (on UI side) in order to make things work for example in a different device with different display size (in ideal world). Another benefit is that you’ll get the styling quite easy – you can use CSS for theming etc.
Nowadays, many mobile devices have quite much processing power (e.g. N900), so I guess we are not so far from the days when we will have more devices based on web os like techniques. Of course Qt comes to picture here, once again:) As many of you might know, Qt will provide a new module called Declarative UI (not sure if this is the official name) which is already available in qt-kinetic repository at Gitorious. You can checkout a branch: kinetic-declarativeui if you want to test it on action. I guess they will release that module with Qt 4.7, but let’s see that then.