keesj

Today I was at a Qt for N8 Training/Introduction here in Amsterdam. It was a small setup with people from Nokia Benelux.

The training covered Qt for Mobile platforms.
http://events.forum.nokia.com/invitation/qtforn8amsterdam/agenda

The Qt Mobile platform

There are great differences between Symbian and Maemo in terms of platform architecture but Nokia managed to create a single API that make most differences vanish. Credits go to the Qt toolkit. This single API might the key to the success this platform needs. It will also allow Nokia to focus on a single platform for developers. With The SDK I used today it is already possible to target the different platforms Nokia currently has without much effort. So What does that mean? It means that Nokia can offer one single attractive SDK (on windows,Linux and Mac) with different developers in mind (c++ and the HTML/js people) and this sounds like quite a good offering to me.

It must have been quite a huge effort already and we are not there yet. Linux users can't yet develop
for Symbian (as I discovered during the day) and windows user are pushed to use remote services to do the hardcore maemo debian packaging.

As I already did some Qt before I decided to focus a little QML and create a mock for the Linux OutLaws CrapAlert app (something like http://crapalert.org/). I managed to get a "UI" working very fast. After that things went down my n900 is dead and I unsuccessfully tried to install the application on the N8 from Linux.

I played with the N8 but things did not work as I expected. I even surprised myself by thinking "what are all these buttons for, do I really need to learn what they do" while I usually like lots of buttons. Overall the N900 is way better (as expected).

Still when going home I had the feeling to have learned about a useful platform with enough devices "in the wild" to make it very interesting.

Some notes I made during the day(I might be wrong here):
-I think the Qt Mobility API should not end up in Qt. it clutters the very nice Qt API's with non relevant stuff for a cross platform UI. (Effectively they are creating a cross platform platform...)
-Qt Lacks serious IPC/RPC functionality
-Bonus points for "forum Nokia", During the day I filed a bug in their JIRA database and did get an answer within 20 minutes. Now that is fanatical support!.

Get started here:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/Library/Tools_and_downloads/