Illumination

Illumination is a widget library written in C++ for developing cross platform applications under Linux, Windows, Mac OS and the Nokia Maemo mobile OS.

Part fo the Illumination suite were a number of games and utility applications. With the rise of Maemo I concentrated on developing applications for this platform.

The application store contained a number of applications by me and even some marketing stuff cited my application names. Nokia paid for a number of visits to some of their Maemo conferences.

Highlights of the Illumination framework are similar of VisualOberon:

• Completely font sensitive
• Dynamic layouting
• Rich number of widgets
• Fast
• MVC approach
• device and theme specific layouting and use of control
• Theme for Gnome and Maemo
• Better overall design
• Support for mobile devices

What did I learn?

My work on Illumination especially in the Maemo context taught me much about C++. I also experimented much with theming and device specific layouting. Depending on device size and OS different themes were use and even different controls and layouts were triggered. I also spent much time working on optimizing user interfaces to be on the one hand powerful on the other hand usable on small mobile devices only navigated by finger presses and gestures.

And of course Illumination also contained a small text editor….again :-)

Why did I stop?

I stopped working on Illumination close after the fall of the maemo platform and the switch to the Meego platform. Meego was based on Qt5 and getting Illumination integrated into the new platform was a major effort. Because Meego did not look like a good master plan for Nokia I decided to wait and watch. In the end I was right, platforms burned, Nokia was bought by Microsoft and so on…