Legacy Maemo 5 Documentation/Graphical UI Tutorial/Hildon desktop
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This article is legacy documentation, and is superseded by Forum Nokia documentation. The Forum Nokia documentation is available as the Hildon 2.2 UI style guide, Fremantle master layout guide and the Hildon 2.2 widget UI specification |
The end user's desktop experience on Maemo compatible devices is provided by the Hildon Desktop, which is based on Hildon. The latter provides several libraries to interface with the desktop environment UI elements and services.
The Hildon framework's main UI elements are separated to four categories and all of them can be extended with plug-ins:
- Hildon Home is the root desktop, which can be customized by Hildon home applets.
- Hildon Status bar provides area for information and quick-access items used mainly to communicate device status changes.
- Hildon Task Navigator plug-ins implement the top-level desktop menus.
- Hildon Control Panel is a general interface for application configuration and is extended by control panel plug-ins.
GUI applications in Maemo usually contain one or more HildonWindows, which are top-level application windows. They can include a standardized menubar and a toolbar.
The Hildon framework also includes other auxiliary widgets and services specialized for the Hildon environment. Examples of these are the Hildon-FM library for file system dialogs and widgets, HildonBanner for displaying notifications to the user and HildonWizardDialog for creating wizard user interfaces. For information about Hildon's widgets, see Maemo API References.
Another important element of the Hildon framework is the Hildon Input Method API, which is an interface for creating new user input systems in addition to the included virtual keyboard and handwriting recognition.