I love how full-on Nokia has launched the new N900 handset. We work so much on the underlying technology that it’s a welcome reminder how users feel emotionally about the whole product. The enthusiastic response is real encouragement for our developers. But don’t be confused by Nokia’s odd emphasis on “mobile computing” in their text – this is a highly capable smartphone that’s about communication and lifestyle rather than mere computing for the sake of it. This is their latest greatest phone – the one that people will hunger for.

For a year or so we’ve had to keep the secret that Nokia want to make phones with Linux, though every other major handset company was already doing it, because it make so much more sense than fighting the eccentricities of all those in-house proprietary platforms. I’m glad we can talk about it now, though we have vague orders to not to go into too much detail until Nokia World 2009 next week.

This product has been the major part of our work at Openismus, and is the reason for our growth, keeping Mathias, Jan Arne, Daniel B, Karsten, and André very busy and determined, with the others helping and learning so we can build on our success. Soon the code will be in our hands.

Going Home

I’ve spent the weekend at GUADEC in Gran Canaria but I fly back today to be at home for wee Liam who I really miss. I’ve noticed that people didn’t really understand that for the past year and a half I’ve spent half the week taking care of him, and the rest of the week running the company and doing just a little coding. We should have a place in a crèche in our street starting in October so things will eventually get back to normal.

In the meantime it’s been great to see old friends but I can’t talk about doing much public work in GNOME recently, or promise to help with things.

Maemo and Qt

It’s a relief that Nokia finally announced, via Quim, that they will use Qt instead of GTK+ in future versions of Maemo, though the next version, Fremantle (Maemo 5) is still entirely GTK+. Openismus have known about this for some time and have been preparing for it, but we couldn’t talk about it. As enthusiastic C++ developers, this is less disappointing to us than to other GNOME companies, and it’s been great to see Qt’s development gradually open up to the outside world.

However, it’s clearly a rather arbitrary and disruptive decision. I suspect that some managers are dictating the Nokia-wide use of Qt even in projects that don’t otherwise share code, without understanding the difficulty of the change. UI code is never just a thin layer that can be replaced easily, even if it looks like just another block in the architecture diagram. Likewise, hundreds of C coders cannot become capable C++ coders overnight. I expect great difficulties and delays as a result of the rewrites, but Openismus will be there to help.

Openismus T-Shirts

The economy has affected the traditional GUADEC T-shirt supply, making the Openismus T-shirts even more desirable. Introduce yourself to David King if you’d like one of the last ones from his backpack before he leaves on Tuesday. André, Karsten, and Johannes are here too.

This cross-desktop conference is ideal for David because he’s been intensely learning about all of GTK+, gtkmm, and Qt in the past few months.

We have cleaned up the maemomm API reference and put the result online. Here’s an example for the Hildon::TouchSelector widget. Pages such as that are linked often from the “Programming with maemomm” book.

Like the gtkmm API reference, the maemomm API reference is partly autogenerated from the C API reference, with some clever automatic changes, and some manual overrides, so it will improve as the hildon C API reference documentation improves.

This post is a general ramble about the limits of keeping API the same on significantly different platforms. It uses Maemo’s Hildon and Maemo’s Qt as examples, but don’t get offended. Hildon’s new UI in Maemo 5 is wonderfully appropriate for small touch-screen devices, and the API is the best that the developers could do in the short time available, in their circumstances.  Not much can be changed in Hildon now anyway until a theoretical Maemo 6. And Maemo’s Qt is only just getting started.

Hildon: Secret, Then Public, Then Secret, Then Public

The first version of Maemo’s Hildon API added lots of API to hildon itself, and to the Maemo version of GTK+. It also made some inappropriate changes to default behavior. These things happen when work is done in secret, because people can’t complain until too late. Much of this was corrected in Maemo Diablo, as changes were sent upstream to GTK+.

Then Nokia made Hildon’s development secret again and added lots of new API. That’s now public again. Some simple things should be patches to GTK+ that can eventually be accepted in upstream GTK+. For other things, it’s debatable whether we would want the change in functionality to be obvious in the code (via #ifdefs), or if the standard GTK+ widgets should just behave differently when the same code runs on Maemo. For various things, both opinions are valid. But that discussion never happened because the API was not published until it was too late to change it significantly.

Too Much Simple New API

I think the new Maemo 5 Hildon API leans too much towards extra API. For instance:

• You must use HildonButton, HildonEntry and HildonTextView instead of GtkButton, GtkEntry, and  GtkTextView. These have extra features, but they could be added to the GTK+ widgets.
• You must use HildonCheckButton instead of GtkCheckButton or GtkRadioButton, though that’s really just to get a slightly different appearance.
• You must use HildonWindow instead of GtkWindow.
• HildonNote and HildonBanner add timed behaviour and convenience API that could just be in GtkDialog.
• HildonAppMenu is just a glorified grid container, needing significant changes to application code, instead of the regular GTK+ menu APIs being changed to behave differently on Maemo. Now you can’t use GtkMenu, GtkUIManager or Glade for menus. Menus really must be made simpler for Maemo applications, but that’s no reason to completely change the menu API.
• You must use HildonTouchSelector (via a HildonPickerButton) instead of a GtkComboBox. Admittedly it would be particularly difficult to make GtkComboBox act like a (pannable) HildonTouchSelector, and GtkComboBox would need extra API to allow multiple-selection. But there would be great benefits for application coders from that hard work.
• You must use HildonWizardDialog instead of GtkAssistant. This dates from before GtkAssistant existed, but the Hildon developers seem to have forgotten to deprecate it and adapt GtkAssistant for Maemo 5.
• You must use HildonFileChooserDialog instead of GtkFileChooserDialog or the other GtkFileChooserWidgets. These hildon-fm widgets have almost no documentation, so there’s no obvious reason for their existence.

Note that extra API is not just annoying when porting (requiring ifdefs) but also makes existing generic GTK+ documentation and skills less relevant to Maemo. Just because a UI has a wonderful new look and feel, that doesn’t mean you need a lots of arbitray new API to make things feel new and different for the developer too.

Too Much Surprising New Behavior

Where Hildon _has_ changed the GTK+ implementation instead of adding new API, it’s done it for situations that are too complex or where the changed behavior is annoyingly arbitrary. This is particularly annoying because there are reasonable uses of the original widgets even in a Maemo application. For instance:

• The GtkTreeView’s selection and activation behavior is apparently entirely different, though I admittedly don’t know all the details yet. It apparently feels like a different widget so it probably should be a different class. Column headers are off by default too.
• GtkEntry (ignoring that you should use HildonEntry) still defaults to auto-capitalization. I don’t think this is the common case. Most text in entry widgets is not a sentence or a name.

In these cases, the developers have justified the annoying new defaults by saying that it’s what the Maemo UI guidelines demand, ignoring that those guidelines do not say how the UI should be achieved in terms of API. Simply telling application developers to call extra API when using Maemo would have the same results without the annoyance.

Will Qt Make Better Choices?

Qt has long touted the similarity of its API across three major desktop platforms (Linux, Windows, Macintosh), though the nativeness of the results is debatable. At least Windows applications have no consistency anyway.

The Maemo Qt developers insist that they will stick to this even when porting to Maemo – probably the first popular Qt platform with a significantly different UI and desktop environment, requiring new concepts that are not yet in the Qt API.

I think that’s a good idea, though I doubt that it will really be possible. When I asked (threaded view) them, I discovered that they really hadn’t thought much about it yet and weren’t able to address my specific examples with anything other than a repeat of the Qt “deploy without rewriting the source code” mantra. Surprisingly there are not that many people working on Maemo’s Qt and it’s obviously far from ready for Maemo 5’s new UI. Nokia acquired all the Trolltech/”Qt Software” developers but if they have been redirected to work on Maemo then it’s not happening in public.

Hopefully they will at least choose to lean more towards maintaining API compatibility while adding API only where absolutely necessary. I think it must be a little of both.

David King blogged that we have draft documentation online for the Maemomm (C++) API for Maemo 5.

The text needs to be filled out a little and corrected here and there. But we have figured out how to actually use the new widgets, as shown by our example code. And the list of screenshots of the examples is probably the first time you’ll see most of the new Hildon widgets all together. It’s radically different to the previous Maemo UI, rightly so.