Nokia has just released our new great MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan device, N9, it is a developer device N950 and Harmattan SDK beta release. New Qt Quick components library is now part of Harmattan SDK for N9 and N950 devices. When I had my previous blog about Qt Quick components in November 2010, components were just at very early development stage. Nokia moved development as closed in January 2011 because we started to develop them for new great UI concept that you can now see in our N9 and N950 devices.
The new UI concept has only very minor effect to actual application code. Task switching is now done by swipe gesture and no home button is needed any more. Swipe gesture handling is provided by framework and it does not need anything from application side, you just does not need implement “Home” button to return task switcher any more. Because home and close buttons are not needed, you don’t need have toolbar in your page unless it is needed by menus or back button in stacked pages. Toolbar is also moved to lower side of the screen that is more natural place for it when used by finger.
This release of components implements rich set of UI elements and the required part of our N9 UX. Compared to November 2010 release, there is for example full support for dialogs. API has also evolved a lot better since. The good thing is also that now components do not need to be linked into application Qt Code, just use standard QDeclarativeView or you can test your components UI with QmlViewer.
