Our latest MWC video is a tour around the Qt stand, looking at some of the Qt enabled devices - from phones to printers and appliances. Mobile developers and users have been hearing more and more about Qt in the last 18 months. It is the future application framework for both Symbian and MeeGo (Nokia's two open platforms going forward). However as this video demonstrates Qt is already a well established technology and the 'Qt everywhere' slogan has already been realised.
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WHOA! I smell hype here!
The single code base across multiple platforms only applies to the V of the MVC. Don't get so carried away!
Still very exciting though.
It seemed to me that the marketing person of Qt was not very good at marketing and explaining the benefits of Qt. Infact Rafe (?) did much better than him in marketing. 😊
I think Nokia needs to hire better marketing people.
Unregistered wrote:WHOA! I smell hype here!The single code base across multiple platforms only applies to the V of the MVC. Don't get so carried away!
Still very exciting though.
Yeah fair enough. This video didn't go into that kind of detail. I think its fair to say you will defintely need to optimise for each platform etc... but that is so much less work than starting from scratch each time (or even low level cross platform in C or similar).
What I wanted to show off was the existing range of Qt devices 😊
Lots of luck to 'em, but I think it's going to be an uphill struggle trying to get developers onboard the dual platform strategy, even with Qt.
The advantage Nokia has, if they choose to go that way, is to figuratively throw giant bags of money developers' way and see what happens.
I sense deja vu, this write once run everywhere sounds like what Sun promised with J2ME. The Qt APIs are far from complete yet, the functionalities are way less than what Symbian C++ or even J2ME can offer.
The Qt Roadmap http://qt.nokia.com/developer/qt-roadmap shows that basic features such as Contact, Location, Network are still being developed.
I'm not sure whether Qt is going to support more low level stuff like background processing & telephony.
What worries me is that Nokia intends to sever support for Symbian C++ by Symbian ^4 which is gonna happen by next year (Symbian ^3 devices coming out this year). I'm not sure Qt would be able to replicate ALL the things that Symbian C++ can do by then. If not, then Nokia is just shooting themselves in the foot by having cool phones with pretty UI but limited functionalities.
hisyamhalim wrote: I'm not sure Qt would be able to replicate ALL the things that Symbian C++ can do by then. If not, then Nokia is just shooting themselves in the foot by having cool phones with pretty UI but limited functionalities.
That's the situation with the iPhone and it hasn't suffered for it.
QT is a UI toolkit and it would be a big jump for it to cover the lower level functionality in the Symbian SDKs. But it was always Avkon that was the problem for many people and now this sets them free.
hisyamhalim wrote:
What worries me is that Nokia intends to sever support for Symbian C++ by Symbian ^4 which is gonna happen by next year (Symbian ^3 devices coming out this year). I'm not sure Qt would be able to replicate ALL the things that Symbian C++ can do by then. If not, then Nokia is just shooting themselves in the foot by having cool phones with pretty UI but limited functionalities.
That's not quite correct. You will still be able to write things in C++ - for lower level stuff - you will have to use Qt for the application framework (AVKON equiavlent though). The idea is you have the best of both worlds. Some estimates suggest around 80% of apps can be developed in Symbian Qt - the remianing 20% will need a C++ portion.
What's really happening is Qt is replacing the AVKON part of C++, but you also get all the other Qt functionality too.