Zchydem's Blog

Now 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):

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Maemo community members have expressed their concern of Maemo 6 UI Framework and Nokia strategy related on code compatibility and differences between Maemo 6 and Symbian DirectUI/Orbit frameworks. There are at least two threads in maemo.org and one thread in symbian.org that have ongoing discussion of these topics. You can check them from the links below. Please, let me know if you know more threads related on this topic and feel free to comment if you disagree on someting.

• Maemo.org: Maemo 6 loosing source compatibility
• Maemo.org: Nokia lacks strategic planning?
• Symbian.org: Why Orbit, when Maemo 6 will also have a new UI

I think some of the community members have made a good a point in the discussions and some of the comments are irrelevant. My point here is that there are seeds of truth in these threads. What is this article for then? I decided to write little bit about this topic, refer to some of the comments in those threads and raise couple of issues that should be taken into consideration.

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It 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.

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I guess, I can say that I have some experience of Qt. I started to use it 2001 in Åbo Akademi’s research project, but we were using PyQt at that time. Later I started to to use C++ version of Qt and now I have used Qt over 4 years in my daily job. I have mostly developed Qt applications and frameworks  in other  than standard PC platform, like for PowerPC and Arm. I also started to use Qt’s Graphics View when it was first released. So I believe that I do have  little competence to do a review for the Maemo 6 UI Framework.

I needed to divide this review to several articles, because the Maemo 6 UI Framework is really large. In the part I do a small review without going too deep and I will also tell you how to create a simple application running on top of Maemo 6 UI Framework.

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