Since I obtained my N97 I have been lamenting the lack of a good development environment that I can use to put together my own programs (something an engineer has to do every now and then!).
Up until now, it looks like I was going to have to be satisfied with Cellular Basic.
BUT....
There is a language out there ... QT (pronounced "cute"😉 that is being ported to the Symbian 60 platform. A big advantage is that it is designed to be platform independent (i.e. a program written for one platform in QT can be compiled to run on another platform).
Here is a demo video of the things that they are doing with it so far:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAtSz3TZdCs
I have the QT DEMO application suite loaded on my N97 to play with. It takes quite a while to load the "fluidlauncher" frontend, but after it loads things go pretty quickly.
I'm especially impressed by the built-in SVG viewer function....I was wondering how I was going to be able to port AutoCAD and MicroStation drawings to my N97.
QT isn't just being ported to S60, it (in combination with a new UI model and associated widgets) will replace S60 as the application framework in S^4.
According to Forum Nokia and Symbian, initially around 10% of apps will still require some Symbian code but they expect 90% of apps to be possible to write in QT native without Symbian bridging code. I expect a lot of Forum Nokia members to release their wrappers for required native functionality as they work on them, so the 10% figure should go down quite quickly.
It's a good head start to learn QT style now and it will give a developer the best opportunity for apps on both Symbian devices and Maemo although currently there looks as though UI styles will differ on both platforms.
The QT Demo available now is still a preview, at least I expect things to improve a bit when the final release is made.
One of the nicest things is being able to build your app natively on your development desktop and get a lot of the bugs worked out there.
I've been doing some programming with qt this week but got totally stuck, my programming is a wee bit rusty and I tried for hours to get the Qwebview working but all I get is a white screen. The QT creator is a pretty cool ide, I've never liked using carbide, but saying that it might be the compiler giving me issues, hmm maybe I could give carbide another shot 😃