MeeGo Touch Framework

Revision as of 12:15, 9 November 2010

MeeGo Touch is a Qt-based application development framework targeting mobile touch screen devices. It is part of the MeeGo API (along with Qt 4.7). It provides all the necessary building blocks for creating native applications that follow the MeeGo Handset UX guidelines. The framework itself is built on top of the Qt Graphics View Framework.

Links

• Source code: http://meego.gitorious.org/meegotouch
• Documentation: http://apidocs.meego.com/mtf/
• Tutorial: http://apidocs.meego.com/mtf/tutorial.html

Architecture

(to do) (see documentation)

Relation to Qt

The Framework sits on top of Qt. It extends it and adapts it to touchscreen interface, providing convenient classes and widgets for a MeeGo application on a touch screen.

Should I use this framework to write applications for MeeGo?

See also: Forum thread discussing this topic

Reasons for using pure Qt:

• You are building an application for different devices (Handsets, Netbooks, etc...)
• You need maximum portability and API stability
• You want to port your application to non-MeeGo systems (Windows, Mac OS X, ...)
• You already have a working Qt UI for your application
• Qt is the encouraged way for MeeGo development (across all devices); MeeGo Touch Framework is no longer a part of the core MeeGo APIs

Reasons for using the MeeGo Touch Framework:

• You are building an application UI specifically for Handsets
• You want to follow the MeeGo Handset UI style very closely
• You are interested in using MeeGo widgets, notifications and automatic screen rotation
• You understand and are prepared to deal with future API changes. MeeGo Touch framework is still evolving. For instance, part (or all) of it may be included in future version of Qt. You can be confident that MeeGo Touch will continue to exist and improve, though.

Also an other new way to code Qt apps exists: Qt Quick (QML and QtDeclarative). It is still very new, but it could be interesting to write fast a small UI.

How to build and install MeeGo Touch

You can clone the Git repositories and compile it:

./configure
qmake
make install

You can also use the version included in pre-built MeeGo Handset images.

The framework must be run inside a MeeGo chroot environment (see the Getting Started Guide on how to set one up) or a MeeGo development device (for example the N900).