QML tutorials
Intel's Elliot Smith has been expanding his Qt Quick knowledge and has started writing up his experiences in a series of tutorials: These aren't part of the official developer documentation, but I'd be interested to know if they are useful, whether they replicate ongoing work, whether there are better ways to do the things covered in them, etc. So far, they cover creating a transparent window; keyboard navigation; i18n and creating full screen applications. They're written in a MeeGo context, but should provide a useful starting point in a cross-platform context.
How QML's Scene Graph will get silky, velvety smooth animations
"gunnar", on Nokia's Qt Labs blog describes the challenges in getting to silky-smooth, "velvet" animations; and how the refactoring of Qt to use a "scene graph" will help. One of the technical requirements is to be done on time. To reach 60 Hz, you need to be done in no more than 16.66 ms. If you ever shoot above, you missed your mark. That means that while doing animations, you cannot do anything else than updating a few properties and then draw the stuff. If it takes time, it either needs to be ready beforehand, or you do the work in a background thread as described in my previous post. Until recently, I was convinced that missing the mark once now and again, would not be disastrous, but it really makes the difference between velvet and sand paper. He also describes some workarounds, for problems such as display tearing on Maemo. Given the importance smooth animations seem to have on platform first-impressions, it's heartening to see particularly attention being paid to this issue.
Hildon-esque QML on Nokia N8
As mentioned earlier, Thomas Perl's experiments with building the Hildon widget set using QML is an intriguing and fascinating development. The possibilities are seen in this photo, which shows the same demo application in Gitorious running on a Nokia N8. Thomas has discussed with Carsten Munk the in-built theme's licencing, so it may be that the QML library uses the system theme on a Maemo device, and - for example - one of the open source themes, such as Marina, on non-Maemo systems.