Qt & WeTab: Rewriting The Rules For Tablet-Based GUIs

First Ever MeeGo Tablet Uses Qt & Qt WebKit to Drive User Power with Native Performance

Establishing A New Form Factor
As a company, WeTab GmbH is a daughter company of Munich based technology innovator 4tiitoo AG. The business was formed in collaboration with other partners including Intel and Adobe to produce the WeTab, a feature-rich tablet device with an innovative user-interface fueled by an open application store concept.

The Workshop Challenge
Aware that innovation for innovation's sake often results in poor market uptake and sales, WeTab's makers wanted to produce an intelligent and intuitive system for touch screens while focusing on personal Internet usage. Starting in 2007 real usability and the creation of a 'tablet device web experience' to rival that of desktop machines were core to the strategic challenges that the company had set itself.

In parallel with the design challenge of building a widget-based user interface to enable quick access to a comprehensive world of applications, news and multimedia content -- the company also wanted to create a new wave of interest in a powerful touchscreen-based technology proposition that was optimized for mobile use in the 'entire living' environment.

The Solution
After undertaking an extensive market analysis of the technologies available to the company, WeTab settled on a number of central building blocks as the company started to assemble its product. Describing Qt as a “seminal framework” which offers developers efficient native coding opportunities to build great applications for various platforms, WeTab noted that as the standard framework of MeeGo, Qt would be well suited to the development objectives it had set itself.

WeTab selected Qt on the basis of its cross-platform interoperability and for the opportunity to build a Qt WebKit based browser. Describing the WeTab Browser as a core element of the system, the company needed high performance and customization flexibility with minimal maintenance effort as central components of its system.

“The Qt WebKit based WeTab browser lies at the heart of the WeTab system and the project's developers said that they loved the fact that Qt allowed them to spend less time and effort on maintenance,” said Sebastian Nystrom, Nokia Qt VP for Application and Service Frameworks. “The WeTab's desktop UI is also built using Qt and so here the developers told us that they really liked very scalable Qt Graphics View Framework, which allowed them to bring rapid development to their whole code base.”

The Value
As a product, the WeTab is a 11,6” slice of innovation that runs on a 1.66 GHz Intel Atom processor, which drives a Qt-based GUI and Qt WebKit-powered browser.

The machine's operating system is specifically designed for touchscreen usage and WeTab found it to be an ideal platform for Qt applications as they run natively on the device. Although Android applications will also run via a virtual machine, Qt's native performance on the device meant that the WeTab will be a great place for developers to target as an 'open source alternative' in the tablet market.

WeTab's desktop UI has been built with the Qt Creator Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Qt Creator offers an easy-to-use development IDE and the simplicity of the APIs plus the flexibility in terms of look and feel made customization challenges much easier than they might have otherwise been. As part of their total use of Qt itself, the company's developers really liked the highly scalable Qt Graphics View Framework and Qt's signals and slots mechanism, which both enabled the rapid development of the whole code base.

WeTab SDK
The WeTab SDK is now available on the WebTab site which incorporates direct connections to Qt 4.7 via tools for native C++/Qt including Qt Quick with QML. “We also got great value out of using the Qt Quick UI creation kit and it works really well. We found that we needed fewer lines of code, which meant less maintenance. Going forward, we will base more develoment on Qt Quick and plan to integrate the Qt Mobility APIs, to make application development for WeTab even faster,” said Odörfer.

The Community & The Future
WeTab says that the company believes in open source and wishes to play an active role in the open source community. At the same time, it wants to keep its platform open to stimulate creativity. What the business has realized so far is that this is only the first level of new development possibilities it has opened up by building the Qt-powered WeTab platform.

Noting that the more possibilities a platform offers, the more people should be involved in making sure it is well used – the company says that it will now be actively contributing to the development of the Qt code base repository.

“Qt is the substantive base of our GUI and our self developed apps. It is a key factor today and will be in the future. The WeTab is being sold across Germany, Austria and the Netherlands with major retailers, coming to further countries in the second quarter 2011. With our SDK now available we are looking forward to intensifying the cooperation with the Qt community,” said Odörfer.