Yesterday saw two announcements that further the options for developers to bring their applications to the S60 platform. Qt Software announced a new technology preview of Qt for S60 and Forum Nokia released Mobile Extensions for Qt for S60. More or less at the same time Red Five Labs announced the availability of Net60 version 1.2 with many improvements and support for the S60 5th Edition touch UI.
Read on in the full article.
Who needs Net60 when Silverlight 2 is about to appear for S60 (and S40) phones?
Silverlight 2.0 is subset of the full .NET 3.5 framework with a completely rewritten XAML based User Interface and it's free. Net60 is based on the quite old .NET Compact Framework 2.0 from Oktober 2005 with old Windows Mobile UI and you need to pay royalties for every copy of a program developed with Net60.
I am very curious if availability of Silverlight 2.0 for WinMo and Symbian S60 will be announced at MIX09 next week.
While I realize that this is a work in progress, one thing that still worries me a little about the Qt demos I have seen on S60 so far is that they look "foreign" within the S60 UI, especially if you keep in mind how they would be used on the majority of phones out there that have numeric keypads.
Nokia have put a lot of effort into one-hand usability of S60, and sliders, horizontally scrolling tables, and buttons in the middle of the screen just don't fit the UI paradigm resulting from this. So I wonder to what extent Qt apps are going remain "second class citizens" in that respect, or leave a lot of ported applications confined to touch devices.
I'd be interested in seeing the plans of Nokia for the final look and feel of ported apps. Will it be possible to have applications that are both portable and "seamless"?
ciao marcus
I agree with the look of current demos, but I'm sure Qt is flexible enough to match the UI touch and feel of S60.
(that being said I think some of the best applications are the ones that don't look the same as everything else)
It's true that previous Qt/S60 demos looked alien, but exactly one of the improvements in the current Garden edition is that looks have been matched to S60, and S60 services have been exposed to Qt, so that Qt apps will be undistinguishable from direct-to-S60 apps.
Development platorms for S60 will include C++/S60, JavaME, OpenC++/Python, Silverlight and Javascript/WebWidgets, but I believe Qt will be Nokia's top choice and best supported one once it is fully integrated (think 6 months).
The example apps are part of the standard Qt distrubution (for windows and linux etc).
The hard part in porting is getting the Qt stack to compile with all APIs
S60 will no doubt release a library of mobile widgets ala Qtopia.
The important thing about full Qt is that the windows like display makes symbian capable of becoming a Netbook UI.