Necessitas/TODO

Welcome to the Necessitas TODO wiki page

Qt framework

Android assets are readonly resources and are a must for any android applications, the implementation will be simple, the problem is how to handle it in Qt, my suggestion is to use the existing Qt resources mechanism: let's say that the application wants to open a file (":/path/my_file"), Qt will search for that file in the application resources, and if is not found, then it will also search it in android assets, more about android assets can be found here: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/res/AssetManager.html.

It seems somebody begin to implement this feature check http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse/issues/detail?id=4 for more informations.

OpenGL support, this, IMHO, is the hardest feature to implement. Before we go further, I'd like to make something clear: I'm not an OpenGL expert, actually I'm an OpenGL beginner! Let me start with an introduction about Android OpenGL limitations:
- you can't create more than one OpenGL context (it seems this limitation is not resent any more on latest platforms).
- you can't create more than one Window surface, actually you can create more than one, but they are useless because you can't control their Z order.
- you can create additionally Pixel buffer surfaces.

We must to implement an android plugin, Qt apps must look the same as native Android apps.

We need to find a way to use android menus or to paint them from Qt.
- using the existing Android menu system is the easiest but it has some limitations (e.g you can add a submenu to any menu (except a submenu), only menus can have icons, etc., check http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/menus.html )
- using our own menu implementation, it will be a little difficult to simulate Android's menus, but it will be very flexible.

QDesktopServices implementation (at least for openUrl) IMHO it should be handled by platform plugin .

QSystemTrayIcon must be implemented (using Android's notifications system, http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/notifications.html ).Also this one should be implemented outside qt tree (platform plugin).

We need to find a way to make qmake to compile for all android platforms at once. This feature is very important for android platform.

When I switched from qatomic_armv5.h implementation to qatomic_avr32.h (which uses the gcc builtin atomics) I had a very unpleasant surprise, all apps built with armv5 ceased to run because of ABI changes (I had to do that change because your arm5 implementation could not be compiled with thumb instructions and AFAIK it doesn't have SMP support), the problem is I don't know if the gcc builtin atomics are the best choice, because are not officially supported by Google and it may be removed from their future toolchains, Google's provides and supports some basic atomic operations (check android-ndk-r5b/platforms/android-4/arch-arm/usr/include/sys/atomics.h), I'm not an expert in this area, so, if someone can help me on this topic I'll appreciate a lot. Keep in mind that an application which was built using Qt armv5 it should work using Qt amrv7 libs.

Android comes with a few dialogs (http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Dialog.html) and I don't think Qt can use Android's native dialogs, so, if they are implemented in Qt it should not be a problem.

Find a way to compile for all android platforms at once, and handle the results corectly, (e.g. copy arm v5 libs to armeabi forlder and arm v7 libs to armeabi-v7a forlder).

Prepare the package for android market publishing, e.g. release compilation, signing, etc.

Find a way to support as many android platforms we can. Currently platforms < android-8 are not supported by all QtMobility modules.

QtWebKit 2.1.x is still 2x times slower than Google's WebKit, also the memory consumption is still insanely high (to run SunSpider benchmark, needs >200Mb)

Gestures are not working well, the panning is not smooth enough and the pinch zoom is not working at all.

Finish the WIP NDK build script to get latest Google git and build that (so we can roll out fixes quickly (e.g. https://review.source.android.com#change,21309).

Fix the plugins copying (in general, using cp, rm etc) on Windows -> 2 ways, I can provide these exes or we can get platform detection working properly and switch on it in the mkspecs)
Make it so that the Windows version can be built from Linux (mingw cross compiler support, quite a lot of work, esp. building Python which needs to run itself to compile the modules under Wine)
Fix make.exe -j support (would help with building on Windows as otherwise it requires baby-sitting).
Add support to 7za and installer-framework for symbolic links on Windows (see msdos command mklink) so there's no need to remove symlinks from the packages (and also MinGW's ln program)
Fix webkit build failure on Windows and Mac OS X
Fix installer framework so that it can install from local packages folder instead of always having to use the network -> this already works on Mac OS X (just modify config.xml to use file:/usr/www/ etc), but not on Windows (where it works partially, updates.xml is loaded but nothing else); I'm not sure about Linux, maybe add a command line option to override the repo url?