Introducing SteelRat

Hello, and welcome to my blog, where I will try to document the development of Nomovok's SteelRat product every now and then. I will be concentrating mostly on the UX side, as that's the domain I am most involved with, however I try to cover other aspects as well.

So, to begin with, SteelRat is the name for Nomovok's MeeGo-based software platform (or rather, a family of platforms), targeting various sorts of embedded devices such as tablets, IVI systems and handsets. We demonstrated the first version of SteelRat Tablet Reference UX at the San Fransisco MeeGo Conference in this month. The tablet UX is the first one to be released, for others I'm not able to publicly give a launch date yet. SteelRat is to my understanding named as a tribute to Slippery Jim, but as the name was inherited from an earlier project the origins are a bit of a mystery. At some point our little mascot just ... evolved.

But what's SteelRat, really? First of all, we have the SteelRat platform, based on a slightly modified MeeGo and being compatible with it (compatible as in "adheres to compliance specification version this-and-that"). Ordinary MeeGo-compatible applications will run on SteelRat out-of-the-box. However, SteelRat provides certain enhancements that are not available in mainline MeeGo yet. For Steelrat 1.1 (San Francisco release) we used a MeeGo snapshot from early April as the MeeGo baseline. On top of that, we packaged a version of Qt with support for Qt Quick 2.0, also known as the QML Scenegraph. This allowed our UX developers to use all the fancy effects. Scenegraph engine makes the rendering decisions and is the #1 core feature for the up-and-coming Qt 5.0 - we simply wanted to enable it already. The same holds true to Qt Mobility, as the version in MeeGo didn't quite play together with the declarative stuff in the future Qt. In fact, our entire Qt stack is running ahead of the official MeeGo platform, and this allows us to experiment with, and deploy features which are not yet available for users of the stock platform.

On top of the platform, there is a device category specific reference UX layer, which consists of general system UX components and individual applications. The UX part itself is entirely made with Qt/QML, and decorated with GLSL shader effects to create UI that doesn't look dull and static. The UX is practically a full replacement for MeeGo UX, but as said, we do support running MeeGo-compliant applications on SteelRat.  The reference UX is designed to serve as the product UX for products that do not require extensive vendor-specific UX design, but it can also be replaced quickly with another UX implementation, thanks to the power of QML. In further posts I will provide a walkthrough of SteelRat tablet reference UX.

Oh, almost forgot: We have an existing Youtube account here where videos of SteelRat will be posted. However, the UX was basically overhauled completely since February, so any material that is there is completely obsolete and doesn't look like current SteelRat at all. I'll arrange some new videos to be uploaded soon, I'll post links here as soon as they are available!