Maemo Weekly News: 10 January 2011
 

Nokia's developer story: not there yet

Your editor has long been a proponent of the idea that Nokia's developer offering needs to massively improve if it was to truly compete in the next-generation mobile OS arena. Qt, Qt Developer and cross-platform SDKs are a big step in the right direction. But, as Johan Paul found, there's still some way to go: Hopefully Nokia's SDK team will be aware of these paper-cut level criticisms which mount up to a fairly large stop energy for someone wanting to experiment with a platform.



In this edition...

1. Front Page
   • Nokia's developer story: not there yet
2. Development
   • Qt in Education - course material for educational institutions
   • Discussion around N900 Community SSU as it gets closer to viability
   • PySide & QML on Maemo and MeeGo tutorial
   • Third-party components Qt Quick components
   • Modern mobile applications with Qt & QML on Intel's AppUp
3. Devices
   • Install Kubuntu Mobile on N900
4. Announcements
   • Columbus navigation toolkit

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 10 January 2011
 

As someone who has a little insight on the SDK stuff - the primary problem in this particular case is that the author, who has little-to-no experience in Qt and Symbian, went for the bleeding edge, and, not that surprisingly, managed to cut himself. I fully agree that a final, friendly, on-the-ball Qt4.7 supporting SDK cannot come too quickly, but until it does, one has to keep in mind the difference between stable software and nightly builds (no matter how much we crave what is in those nightlies).

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 10 January 2011
 

An excellent point. However so much of the collateral talks about Qt 4.7 features (whether it's Qt Quick or something else) that it becomes hard to find the appropriate resources for the stable release.

This is a slightly different problem, of course, but still a valid one. One which many open source projects suffer from as all the devs and enthusiasts build custom projects from source and developer with $VERSION-1 from their vendor (whether Nokia or Ubuntu) is left wondering what they should be doing.

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 10 January 2011
 

Well, it shouldn't be THAT hard to pick the recommended/stable one between the one on the official Nokia site and a blog post :) Another thing to consider is that the N8 is a bit specific in the sense that it shipped with 4.6(.2?) and so it's not entirely crazy that the official SDK and Ovi will not precede a firmware update that gives the users an tested/enabled Qt4.7 (one could ask why the SmartInstaller is not good enough, but that's a different story :) ).

To draw a Maemo parallel - we got the 4.7 update when PR1.3 was released. Sure, there were development builds available of in extras-devel, but that's the same thing here (with the difference that Symbian doesn't have people complaining/renaming packages to libqt4-experimental :) ). So yes, not that surprisingly, something that is experimental is, well, not there yet (not downplaying the delay - IMHO if Qt is the platform, then most devices should get it at roughly the same time, not spread out through unrelated firmware updates/certification rounds).

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 10 January 2011
 

I think that's the main point. If Qt's the platform, I'm primarily a Maemo dev. I've got Qt 4.7; Qt Mobility 1.1 & 1.2. I'm told (repeatedly) QML is the UI tool of choice (but that has problems with consistency); and I want to cash in on the 40% Symbian marketshare, so how do I test my whizzbang app on my N8 and get it into Ovi?

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 10 January 2011
 

Well, no point in getting it into Ovi until the users have it, and they will have it after their firmware update (soon TM). Of course, you will need a little lead time, so there will be beta/rc/whatever SDK releases (even sooner TM). The release on that blog really was the bleeding edge, not for folks interested developing 'real' stuff. The bottom line is that the devices/products in question started off as very separate (remember, originally Symbian^4 was supposed to be the Qt friendly one, Maemo was GTK, etc), and are converging (if somewhat slowly) towards better synchronized releases (you could already see on the MeeGo list for example that Mobility 1.2 is squarely aimed at MeeGo 1.2, I wouldn't be surprised if Qt itself was keeping an eye on MeeGo release schedules, that in turns make it easier to have aligned SDK releases, etc, etc.

Long story short - Maemo actually got a headstart with the Qt4.7 release (prior existence and it's Linux nature making it easier than the Symbian port). Now the rest of the Nokia platforms are following up in their own pace until the whole spectrum reaches feature parity around the announced target development paradigm - QtQuick.

If anything, I think it's a good thing that open development is catching up - even though having access to the bleeding edge sometimes takes time getting used to (as seen from this episode, and also from MeeGo development, etc).

Re: Maemo Weekly News: 10 January 2011
 

I think your sentence is missing "of the future". Nokia is quite clear in saying new apps should be developed using Qt and QML for the UI, and that it will be available in all *future* devices.

If you want to cash in the Symbian market, then use the SDK and tools available, and develop with Qt 4.6. If you want to make it a bit more future proof, and use QML/Qt 4.7, then you can use beta developer libraries (installing a .sis file is as easy as clicking on it on a Windows machine with Ovi Suite installed, Symbian's support of a Linux dev environment isn't there yet) to test on the N8 itself. And cash in once Qt 4.7 is deployed officially, which we know will happen soon.

As far as I am aware, this is very similar to Android, or iOS development. Android 2.3 is available, and you're free to use all the new whizzbang features. But you'd be hard pressed cashing on anything, since there are very few (if any) devices actually using it.