The current Metview desktop interface is based on the Motif GUI toolkit and was developed more than a decade ago. It has now been rewritten using Qt and an alpha version is already available for testing for dedicated users at ECMWF. This development was necessary to modernise the user interface and add new features which are commonly available in today's file manager applications. The usage of Qt, since it is a cross-platform application framework, will help us to migrate Metview to non-UNIX platforms in the future.
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One our design goals was to keep as much functionality as possible from the old desktop to make the migration for existing Metview users smooth and straightforward. Naturally the new desktop comes with plenty of new features such as: various icon views, folder bookmarks, improved folder navigation using breadcrumbs and a new set of icon editors. The new desktop will be probably available for external users in one of the export releases later this year.