Developing custom list control in 5th edition

Question

If a custom list control is to be developed for S60 5th edition phones, what is the best approach to do that?

The control should enable rich presentation of data in custom layouts. It should be possible to include images, texts, buttons in every item. Each list item should be able to expand/collapse to provide more details about the item, and the rest of the list should adapt to the display space that is left.

Do you know of any Symbian application that has a control similar to this?

As this control should be flexible as well, I have been thinking about using some UI layout that is configurable by XML. So far, I have come up with HTMLControl for Symbian. What else can you recommend? What's your best practice?

The UI is tightly linked to native code in C++, so I am not considering WRT.

Answer 1

Subclassing listboxes in S60 (Avkon) is a major pain. I've done this a few times, more or less successfully, ususally less.

It is telling that Jan-Ole wrote his custom list box for Gravity, it probably spared him a lot of effort and made the UI experience better.

So either write something from scratch that just draws on the screen, or see if you can start using Qt already. It will be shipping in Symbian^3 onwards, and does install all the way back to S60 3rd edition.