Hildonizing wxGTK

Posted on November 25, 2007 by Vadim Zeitlin

Last week-end I have somehow managed to find myself with a couple of hours of free time and, instead of spending them on fixing random wxWidgets bugs as usual, I wanted to actually do something new and different for once and so chose to check how wx applications look on a Nokia 770 tablet. Several people have talked about porting wxWidgets to this device in the past and at least one has apparently done some work but it was almost two years ago and nothing has happened since, so I felt it was time to do something about it myself; especially as I own a N770 tablet since quite some time but, instead of writing programs for it as originally planned, I’ve so far spent time just using it (I do feel ashamed).

For those who don’t know about Nokia internet tablets line, which started with N770 but has been extended with N800 and N810 since then, they’re small handheld non-phone devices which run Linux and use a modified Gnome desktop version called Maemo. Maemo basically just adds another level of libraries, called Hildon on top of GTK+ itself. So, while GTK+ applications can mostly run on N770 without changing, they don’t have the correct look and feel before they are hildonized, that is modified to use Hildon-specific functions instead of the generic GTK+ ones – hence the somewhat barbaric adjective used in the title of this article.

This is the theory, anyhow. And I’ve decided to check how it was in practice. The first results were encouraging: after a few simple fixes, wxGTK did build for Maemo and I could run applications on my device. However they really didn’t look like they belonged here as can be seen by comparing the dialogs sample:

with a native application, such as this one:

You can immediately see several differences:

• The border of the window are not the same, the wx example doesn’t fit into the desktop.
• The menus are completely different: the native applications don’t show a menu bar but use the drop down menus attached to the window itself.
• The wx example shows a useless status bar with an even more useless resize grip (the window can’t be resized anyhow).

So I set about fixing this and after a couple of hours of hacking here is what I got:

This is already much better: the points mentioned above were corrected and I also added a new class (which is available, and hopefully will be useful, under the other platforms too) called wxNotificationMessage and which is used by the small message in the upper right part of the window (such messages are often used in Maemo UI as notifications and also message box replacements).

Of course, there are a lot of other things to do. For one, wxToolBar needs to be changed in the same way wxMenuBar was. Next, as Maemo replaces almost all of the standard GTK+ dialogs with its own ones, we need to do it too. I did it for the colour selection dialog which looks like this now if wxWidgets was built with --with-hildon option:

And the same should be done for the file selection dialogs and several other ones.

There are also less trivial things to do, like to understand how can the size of the library (and of the applications using it) be reduced to be more in line with the embedded systems capabilities. But globally I think wxWidgets is perfectly viable for developing Maemo applications and is even more convenient for doing this than raw GTK+ (which is the native toolkit of the platform) because it transparently abstracts the differences between the desktop GTK+ and Maemo systems: the dialogs sample itself hasn’t been modified at all (just extended to show the notification message) to use the correct menus and so on, everything is done inside the library so exactly the same code can be used for the desktop application without any loss in functionality. Of course, in practice you will need to adapt applications to the mobile devices by probably removing some functionality which doesn’t make sense there and simplifying the user interface. But wxWidgets already does some of this for you and hopefully will do even more in the future.

Of course, I don’t actually expect to have that much free time every week-end so the progress of wxMaemo depends on the help from others. So if you’re interested in checking out wxMaemo for yourself, don’t hesitate to grab the latest wx code from our svn and build it with the above-mentioned –with-hildon option under Scratchbox. If you are new to Maemo, notice that its web site has nice tutorial about setting up the development environment for this platform. And, of course, if you can contribute to this effort, don’t hesitate to send us patches and join us in discussions on wx-dev.

Have fun!