Qt Software today announced the porting of Qt to S60 on Symbian OS, the open smartphone platform. With the inclusion of the S60 platform, developers have an additional 80 million target devices that they can support with their Qt-based applications. An early technical preview of Qt for S60 is available for download from Qt Software current website.
Qt Ported to Nokia’s Symbian S60 Platform
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Eugenia Loli
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It’s clearly a tactic to make QT truly universal. I find it interesting that it would appear to somewhat clash with the gnome devs they have working on Maemo, but I’m kind of expecting Maemo to switch at some point. I’m a gnome user personally, but even I am not sure QT is not in any case the better framework.
But a) go Nokia and b) nice to see FOSS spreading through many OSes.
Maemo and S60 are different platforms, so the Gnome devs probably have little comment on this. However, the Qt port for Maemo probably *is* stomping on some toes. Apparently, the next version of Maemo (Freemantle) will give the developer a choice – Hildon or Qt. I welcome the option, personally as I can’t get on with Hildon.
I would have to lean towards the opinion that QT would be a better fit. I own a N810, and hildon can be pretty clunky at times. It’s almost as bad as having windows mobile. I was surprised to see how well full KDE could run on the little device. I think it would be a win/win for Nokia to push for convergence of platforms. Having all Nokia devices running QT would surely benefit from some developer synergy. I love my N810, but I must say, I am not a huge fan of Hildon at the moment.
It was announced some time ago, that maemo would be gaining QT support. Will be interesting to watch.
http://qt4.garage.maemo.org/
Edited 2008-10-20 12:59 UTC
I second your opinion on Hildon. I am a ruby programmer who uses Qt bindings for my GUIs and am happy with the direction this is going! Woo Hoo!
This should be nice, so long as one is alound to do stuff through the nice APIs and tools used to develop for QT, rather than through the rather nasty ones used in “ordinary” Symbian programming.
Interesting tidbit about Nokia and Qt is on blog about Munich Qt Development days
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/2008/10/18#quickies1
Few quotes:
“Scary was the keynote where the Nokia guy told us that they were looking to expand the Qt Software development team ten-fold. I mean — where are they going to find so many top-class Qt hackers? Even scarier: someone else told me Nokia is looking for 3000 Qt developers in Finland.”
Looks like Nokia is *totally* plunging into Qt.
But at the same time:
“What I didn’t get was the astonishing eagerness with which Nokia doles out N810s. I mean, these are cool little things, but still just a tiny bit too GTK-based for a Qt conference, aren’t they?”
So, Nokia/Trolltech people were throwing N810s out but without any hints about Maemo future.
IMO future of Maemo isn’t decided yet (even if it has real future at all).
Nokia provides Qt libraries for the latest Maemo version already and they’ve stated that they’ll ship Qt by default in the next major version. That’s why they give away tons of N810’s. They want people to know Qt/Linux now and Qt/Symbian later.
Still it doesn’t give us full access to phone API
When symbian is open then you can access it’s horrible api to your heart’s content…