[dot] Trolltech Developer Days in Munich

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1131372683/

From: Michael Thaler <>
Dept: trolls-found-in-Munich
Date: Monday 07/Nov/2005, @08:11

Trolltech Developer Days in Munich
==================================

   The second annual Trolltech Developer Days
[http://www.trolltech.com/campaign/devday.html] took place last month in
San Jose, USA and on last week in Munich, Germany.  They featured
keynotes and presentations from Eirik Chambe-Eng, Trolltech's co-founder
and President; Matthias Ettrich, founder of KDE and Trolltech's Vice
President Software Development; Aaron Seigo, KDE Core Contributor and
many others.  Read on for a summary of some of the keynotes and
presentations given in Munich.

     Eirik Chambe-Eng

     The first keynote by Eirik Chambe-Eng, Trolltech's co-founder and
president, gave an overview of the company's current situation and
future plans:

     Trolltech continues to grow at an impressive rate, they increased
their staff from 80 to 140 employees in the last twelve months. A second
round of fundraising, which brought $6.7 million of disposable money to
the company, was recently completed. Trolltech has opened an office in
China. And of course the long awaited Qt 4 was released. In the coming
twelve months Trolltech will become a professional service organisation.
They will develop new products that complement and expand the usage of
Qt. A continued focus on making Qt easier to use, faster, leaner and
better will be kept and it is expected that Qtopia
[http://www.trolltech.com/products/qtopia/] will explode in the phone
market.

     One of the new products complementing and expanding the usage of Qt
will be a thin client architecture called Qt/Coco, named after designer
Coco Chanel who said one can never be too rich or too thin.  It is
targeted at enterprise users and it will allow server side Qt apps to be
deployed on thin, universal clients in an organisation, with the goal to
dramatically reduce administration costs. Currently, Qt/Coco is in the
prototype stage and it already shows amazing performance (ten times
faster than X11). Trolltech is also developing Java-bindings for Qt
called Qt/Java, which will allow Java developers to use the Qt API. A
prototype will be available in the first quarter of 2006.

     Qtopia is another success story for Trolltech. The company
currently has 85 customers using Qtopia, from which 30 are mobile phone
builders. Linux is the disruptive force in the handset industry and
Trolltech's goal is that 100 million handsets are sold using Qtopia by
2008. Qtopia 4, which is currently under development, will be based on
Qt 4. Some of its highlights will be a native sandbox for safe execution
of programs, an integrated SQL database on every device and advanced
graphics due to the new Arthur painting subsystem in Qt4. Some of the
advantages of Qtopia over .Net are: customisability of the user
interface, lower memory consumption and the availability of the source
code.

     Matthias Ettrich

     The second keynote by Matthias Ettrich, founder of KDE and
Trolltech's Vice President of Software Development gave an overview of
Qt 4:

     The design goals of Qt 4 were to enhance the capabilities, to
increase the flexibility and to lay a solid foundation for the future.
Mostly Qt 4 turned out as an immediate success. The clean Qt 4 code base
allows Trolltech to turn quickly and there are successful and fast ports
from Qt 3. Qt 4 has also been quickly adopted in the open source world.
However, some users are dissatisfied with the speed of certain painting
operations and the qt3to4 porting tool and the Qt3Support library partly
failed to deliver: some ported applications compiled, but looked very
odd when running. Qt 4.1 brings many small bug fixes, based on customer
feedback. Arthur, the painting subsystem of Qt 4, is optimised,
including accelerations using OpenGL. It also included a highly improved
and extended Qt3Support library and an enhanced Qt Designer with an
action editor. Qt 4.1 also includes a new painting backend for Arthur: a
SVG backend that renders SVGs either using the native rendering backend
(e.g. Render on X11, core graphics on MacOSX) or OpenGL.

     For the future, Trolltech is porting Qt 4 to Windows Vista and it
is improving the embedded and the MacOSX version of Qt 4. Also the Qt 3
to Qt 4 migration experience will be further improved. New features
according to customer needs will be integrated. Some examples could be:
scripting in dialogues, printing (currently there is no cross platform
preview function available), desktop integration (systray, mimetypes,
help system), high-level mainwindow integration in native platforms
(e.g. always use SDI on MacOSX), cross desktop IPC, improvements to the
help system (currently there is no infrastructure for a context
sensitive help system) and a component model.

     Aaron Seigo

     After lunch, Aaron Seigo talked about Qt and the Future of the KDE
interface.

     Aaron first summarised some facts about KDE 3.  It is based on
monolithic libraries, has an attractive interface which is limited by
the current desktop imaging techniques, has lots of features and lots of
applications. KDE 4's library layout will follow Qt 4's more modular
approach. The libraries will be split into modular components and
frameworks and the naming and API consistency will be improved.

     Next Aaron discussed the merits of the single click interface.
Single clicks are good because they are easier to learn and more
predictable then double clicks. In addition they are quicker. The
downsides are that it is not straight-forward how the user can select
something. And single click actions still have to be learnt. An
alternative approach that shares the advantages of the single click
interface, but does not have the disadvantages, is a mouse-over based
interface. The basic idea is that a (transparent) menu opens if the
mouse is over an icon. This context menu presents options like select
and activate that can be performed with an object. The image below shows
a mockup of such a mouse-over based interface.

     Mockup of a mouse-over based interface
 [http://kubuntu.org/~jr/dot/qt-developer-day-finder-ideas.png]
     Subsequently, Aaron discussed how desktop usage has changed over
the years and that the desktop itself has not follow this change.  In
1984 users were typically running one application and only managed a few
files. Thus it made sense to put those files on the desktop. Today most
users run several applications at once and have thousands of files on
their hard disks. Thus putting files on the desktop is not useful
anymore. To accommodate this Konqueror will be reworked for KDE 4. It
will offer a simple and direct interface to browse the web and a content
manager to manage files, context and data. KDE will also make use of new
X.org features to allow e.g. transparent menus as shown in the image
above. Control centre and the workspace utilities will be reworked and,
of course, kicker will be replaced by Plasma. Plasma aims at making the
desktop useful again. It will use organic shapes to make the user
experience more natural, e.g. widgets will have round corners. Widgets
will be extendable, stackable and tearable. It will also introduce
universal widgets which can be put everywhere on the desktop. There are
numerous applications for such universal widgets: hotplug actions,
messaging notifications and events. Such widgets will be easy to create
using Javascript and SVG and it will be possible to use alpha blending
to blend them with the desktop. Plasma will include a single click
installation for such widgets. Finally, panels will be replaced by
widgets. Plasma also aims to be a workflow enabler. It will allow the
desktop to float and recede. Workflow is supported by following context,
multiple custom layouts and networking widgets.

     KDE will also feature an improved KDevelop and Kontact. The MDI
mode and the toolbar configuration will be reworked and enhanced. KDE
will also feature a new default icon theme called Oxygen.

     I want to thank Matthias Ettrich who made it possible for me to
attend the Trolltech developer days in Munich