A Qt powered S60 interface looks a bit like this

that's amazing! When is Qt officially coming to Symbian, Symbian^4?

Don't expect Direct UI to look like the current S60 UI 😊

Cheers,

Kevin McIntyre

Not bad at all, especially the second part. The only thing I would like to see improved is the transition from icon to app, when an app is started. It should look like the icon itself is filling up the screen.

What a massive waste of clock cycles.

Is it just me, or does anyone else get annoyed by the n97 kinetic scrolling allowing drag past the bottom of the list? the 'bounce' effect when a list ends is rather painful, imo, I'd like to just flick my finger, and when the list stops, I know i can click on it, rather than have to wait for it to go 'oh, that's right, i just scrolled further than any actual results exist, wait a tick while i right myself!' yeah, small things, just something that I noticed this UI mock also does :'(

Apart from that, it looks kicking 😊 Lots of nice stuff on display, tho I can't see what phone that is running on.. perhaps an omnia? If that were an n97, that would be mightily impressive.

As a consumer I still don't understand what is Qt, even I'm trying to browse through the Qt website, seeing videos etc. I'm a little more confused with this video.

The questions come as these: What is really Qt? Is it a new interface for Symbian? Or a tool to make it easy to facelift the homescreen? If it is easy, will Symbian^2 be so flexible like this video?

Thanks in advance for your answers

This is purely a demo of how easy it is to add UI candy to S60 right now with Qt.

The top-level shell here is written with Qt and when apps are launched they're the current S60 apps on the device.

Qt is an application framework that developers use to create apps (which can and will include all the built-in apps in future). Qt will be included in Symbian^3 devices, but the built-in apps will still be largely the same and based on the current Avkon framework. In Symbian^4 the built-in apps will be re-written with Qt and, as Kevin says, you shouldn't expect them to look like the current S60 interface.

Expect Symbian^3 devices in the summer and Symbian^4 devices in early 2011.

Also note that the term S60 is effectively deprecated - there is just Symbian now.

I dont like it! i prefer the homescreen of the current s60 with live widgets! what i saw in this video was just some special effects, no more what s60 can already do now. what they need to do is redesign the whole thing not just add some special effects and think that will take on the iphone.

if i owned nokia stock right now i would sell big time cause they just seem to be out of touch with what consumers want. they dont have hip enough software designers that think ahead of the curve. i guess they just lack immagination from the ones living somewhere in cali smoking that sweet cali grass they have over there.

the Symbian UI i saw at a SF conference was rather sweet and where things shoud be heading if they want to stand a chance.

Awesome is all I can say... Looks amazing... I just hope that this comes out soon. It should not happen that when this finally hits the market, some other OS has launched a UI that makes this look yesteryear.

big_don wrote:I dont like it! i prefer the homescreen of the current s60 with live widgets! what i saw in this video was just some special effects, no more what s60 can already do now. what they need to do is redesign the whole thing not just add some special effects and think that will take on the iphone.
if i owned nokia stock right now i would sell big time cause they just seem to be out of touch with what consumers want. they dont have hip enough software designers that think ahead of the curve. i guess they just lack immagination from the ones living somewhere in cali smoking that sweet cali grass they have over there.

0:00-0:15
The multiple homescreens that you can switch to by swiping horizontally, as well as the application menu that you "pull" from the bottom with an upward swipe are copied from Android.
00:30-00:45
That 3D card stack arrangement is taken from the SE Xperia X10's Timescape app.
0:50-1:30
The vertical bar with kinetic scrolling on the left, from which you can drag application shortcuts into the homescreen, is basically Samsung's Touchwiz.

As a demo to show that Qt is powerful enough to emulate some UI elements of Symbian's competitors, it's impressive. I just hope it's not a prototype of the new UI.

@rvirga

Actually most of these are from Qt demos running on KDE (similar to plasma) for the last few years. I guess it's supposed to be a demo of the sort of things you can do and not any particular UI.

If you look, it's not even done by Nokia or Symbian - it's a 3rd party SW house.

Unregistered wrote:As a consumer I still don't understand what is Qt, even I'm trying to browse through the Qt website, seeing videos etc. I'm a little more confused with this video.

The questions come as these: What is really Qt? Is it a new interface for Symbian? Or a tool to make it easy to facelift the homescreen? If it is easy, will Symbian^2 be so flexible like this video?

Qt is a programming library to create (amongst other things) the user interface of an application. Programs use Qt to create things like views, buttons and menu's, the stuff you see on the screen. Programmers can also setup animations like the zoom effect and the page flip effect with Qt. Qt then handles the animation (most likely by telling the graphics coprocessor what it wants it to do).

In the Symbian world the closest equivalents are Avkon, the library that gives S60 phones their look and feel, and Qikon, the library that give SonyEricssons UIQ phones their look and feel.

Qt is expected to used as the only UI library in Symbian ^4, but people are pushing to get it incorporated earlier, in ^3. All the fancy effects must and will be available in Symbian ^4, but they might be there in ^3.

rvirga

0:00-0:15:
The multiple homescreens that you can switch to by swiping horizontally, as well as the application menu that you "pull" from the bottom with an upward swipe are copied from Android.

00:30-00:45
That 3D card stack arrangement is taken from the SE Xperia X10's Timescape app.

The vertical bar with kinetic scrolling on the left, from which you can drag application shortcuts into the homescreen, is basically Samsung's Touchwiz.

As a demo to show that Qt is powerful enough to emulate some UI elements of Symbian's competitors, it's impressive. I just hope it's not a prototype of the new UI.

These effects aren't from competitors. All of the "competitors" are Symbian Foundation members. And the effects aren't about power at all, but about agility and dexterity of the framework to pull off some of the things we'll be using. Wake up, now.

It's also possibly another counter point versus the "It fails, it only has 434 mHz!" argument that most ignorant Nokia-haters utilize. Look, it runs the same sort of app (Timescape) about the same speed as the Snapdragon driven X10...

Although honestly, Nokia should start putting their 600mHz SoCs inside their S60v5 handsets...

i hear Samsung will quit from Symbian Foundation member because Samsung will release own Smart OS [Bada]

@christexaport
Neither in KDE nor in Gnome you access the application menu by pulling a tab from the bottom of the screen. That's an Android UI feature.
Also, I wasn't aware that becoming a member of the SF meant signing all the company's private IP over to Symbian. Sony Ericcson and Samsung have developed the Rachael and Touchwiz UIs for use on their own handsets. Symbian should develop its own original UI.

The 3d card stack and the tear off stuff is just not necessary. iPhone seems to do what is necessary to make a nice UI without going too far. Gimmicks for the sake of it is for toys.

Unregistere, you are looking at this from the point of end-user. The video is not aimed at you at all. This is marketting for OEMs.

The point of the demo is that HTC, Samsung and Sony Ericsson can continue to innovate on their own user interfaces within the Qt framework using Symbian (or Linux). Symbian has to gain OEM market share from Android, WM7 and Maemo.

The video is basically saying you can use Symbian as one of your platforms. Do not forget that Symbian is a Real time operating system. Thus it can help players migrate their interfaces with a smart phone OS into mid-tier pricepoints. As smart phones take off this is where the current low cost touch-screen feature phones may start to struggle. Right now only Nokia and Motorola (with the Cliq) can really play in this space. And I am not convinced Motorola is making much profit on the the Cliq.

Finally, Qt is platform agnostic hence it is code once and modify slightly for each platform. This will reduce the amount of app development time for platform agnostic OEMs like Samsung and Sony Ericsson.

This is interesting because I am not sure how it prevents forking which is the threat for Android. -Lark

@rvirga
"Sony Ericcson and Samsung have developed the Rachael and Touchwiz UIs for use on their own handsets. Symbian should develop its own original UI."

You say Symbian should develop its own original UI. Symbian don't exist anymore so who is going to this? The foundation is not a dev house. The Symbian platform relies on external contributions. That means Nokia, Samsung, Sony ericsson et al. If these companies are really committed to the Symbian platform (and of course they are going to hedge their bets in other platforms - maemo, bada) then it is up to them to develop a "new original UI". And in doing this, of course you are going to see inspiration from their other platforms.

@Step

Imitate?!

All this video shows is how QT can be useful in ripping off other OS's such as Android, Mobile OSX and Samsungs Touchwiz!

I'm actually shocked there isn't more uproar about this seems as all the Nokia Fanboys keep harping on about how Apples OS is a POS and here's someone with a tech demo completely ripping it off! Haha