MeeGo specification opened for discussion: what's allowed for a 'MeeGo' package?
Mats Wichmann unveiled a draft specification of MeeGo - both for applications and distributions. A lot of discussion turned to a section regarding what a "MeeGo-compliant" package could rely on; with the spec going down a similar road to Maemo's Ovi Store: a package can depend on the Core, but everything else has to be bundled inside. Someone else said there are simply two different models: the repository-based model where the installer resolves certain dependencies (and it's easy enough to SAY something like "may only depend on components of MeeGo core, or from MeeGo compliant packages"); and one where an app may have no dependencies at all, basically "depend on MeeGo" is it, everything else is self contained. The majority of sentiment in the thread was that community packages *must* be able to depend on other community packages if MeeGo is to have any open source ecosystem at all; however the complexities in achieving that with a multi-vendor, multi-form factor OS (trying to compete with iOS and Android) may not make its path to the specification easy - or quick.
Python developers get bindings for MeeGo Touch Framework
PySide, Nokia's Python library for driving Qt applications, has now got bindings for MeeGo Touch Framework; allowing Python applications to become first class citizens on MeeGo: We've just uploaded the initial version of the libmeegotouch bindings, including a pretty big example based on the C++ example "widgetsgallery" which explores the main widgets and features. As stated in the official MeeGo Touch documentation: 'MeeGo Touch is a cross-platform application and UI framework library built on top of Qt.'
Introduction to, and status update on, Qt Quick Components
Qt Quick, a framework for building custom user interfaces on Qt, has received a nice introduction and overview thanks to Qt-team member Henrik Hartz. While UI frameworks have been built on top of Qt, we have continued to work on the quality and stability of Qt and Qt Quick. The Qt 4.7 release candidate that just came out is a quality product that we have put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into. With Qt Quick we’re ready to take the next step and start moving in the direction of offering a more complete set of features for App developers who might be less inclined to venture forth into the dungeons of C++ and build systems. Qt Quick is the answer, according to Thiago Macieira, who says developers should "follow this project's development" to achieve core features like stackable windows in Qt, without using MeeGo Touch.
Using the Menu API in Qt Web Runtime
Part 2 in the Unofficial Qt Web Runtime (WRT) tutorial features the Menu API: If there is no API, Qt WRT is merely nothing but a naive web browser. Then what APIs are supported other than standard HTML and JavaScript now? [...] As a summary, we have already supported the APIs of menus, widget object, URI schemes, web inspector, console log, some Device APIs, as well as some HTML 5 features and standard JavaScript from Qt WebKit. Let's start with the menu API. WRT provides a very fast and simple way to develop applications (especially for developers with limited experience with compiled languages like C++) for Nokia's Qt platforms. WRT should severely lower the bar to entry for application development for both Harmattan and MeeGo when they get rolling later this year. An experimental version is also available for Maemo 5, potentially giving a true multi-platform deployment across Maemo, MeeGo, Harmattan, Symbian and - in future - Android, and others supporting the W3C Widgets framework.