Guest post by With the news that Nokia is choosing Windows Phone 7 as its main smart phone platform, there has been some doubts concerning its commitment towards Qt and Meego. On the QT blog, Nokia’s Director of Qt ecosystem discusses its future. Nokia re-affirms it’s committed to Qt, and also says it will be launching a Meego device later this year. Nokia after all is not the only company with an interest in this platform and tablets from other companies like Fujitsu is already starting to emerge.
Qt is the best toolkit I’ve ever worked with. The documentation especially is wonderful. When I currently work in C# and .NET there’s quite often that I find myself wish it to have some feature that Qt has.
The only thing I miss is an XML-language for doing the GUI.
Here’s to hope, hoping it will continue to live on and prosper, with or without Nokia.
Edited 2011-02-14 23:53 UTC
What about QML? MUCH better then any XML for declaring interface I ever used (XAML and Android XML)
Nope, I prefer XML. But that’s just my preference.
However, Qt is still the best IMHO.
Your really prefer bloated XML to concise QML? Strange. Well, if you are so good in XML it should be easy for you to quickly write a small XSLT that transforms a QML-like XML file into QML. Then you can write your UIs in XML even with Qt.
If things were just that simple. I want more than being able to create an XML file in vim and use it to define the interface.
But why does it matter? Why did so many get hung up on that small detail? I prefer XAML over QML. But that’s like 0.00001% of importance to me in reality. Qt is still great.
Relax, people… Will you attack me if I say that there are downsides to being multiplatform as well?
(oops!)
If you didn’t, you should try out, it’s very fun to use: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7-snapshot/qdeclarativeintroduction.html
When I was working at an innovation team, I was using it to quickly prototype highly animated interfaces, and it was very cool
the Qt designer files (*.ui) ARE XML.
That is standard Qt widgets. We are talking about QML which is javascript and has binding and property changed notifications etc. It is like silverlight but prettier and no doubt much faster.
This is not a knock in any way, shape, or form. But, it’s interesting that you quote Qt as being the best toolkit that you’ve worked on & then follow it up with 2 toolkits that began at Microsoft! lol
I know that Qt devs are going to try to put the best possible spin but the long term future of Qt does not look good. They may not have killed Qt today, but they did beat it up and drag it down to the basement, where they will let it slowly starve.
The only big product line they have that will use Qt is Symbian. But they announced that Symbian will be phased out as quickly as possible for wp7. And then Qt will be left without a mobile platform. So any mobile developer using Qt will have to switch eventually. So if your gonna have to switch eventually anyway it will be hard to convince many new devs to spend much time investing in Qt to begin with. There is meego I guess, but its not getting any significant dev effort, devices, or marketing push. A niche player at best if they don’t just decide to kill it outright down the road. And if they don’t have any devices using Qt, why will they spend good money to hire devs to hack on it. So Qt for mobile tombstone is being carved as we speak.
But Qt runs on more than mobile you may say, What about the desktop, surely it has a bright future there. Its too nice of a toolkit to die. Well that may be true, but Nokia doesn’t have much incentive to put money into a desktop toolkit. Qt may survive, it is LGPL and open source. But its days of having a strong corporate backer in Nokia are numbered. And loosing that is certain to hurt Qt quite a bit.
Hehe. Try telling it to developers of Skype, VirtualBox, Opera and many others
Don’t be surprised to see them switching to other toolkits before the year is out.
eh, I don’t see a mass exodus from Qt for desktop apps yet. Rewrites are expensive and time consuming and if it works now why go through that. The open source community should be able to maintain Qt at least and do some development. But we probably won’t see anything like the pace of development we have seen recently.
Qt is most notably used in Autodesk [7][8], Google Earth, KDE, Adobe Photoshop Album, the European Space Agency [9], OPIE, Skype, VLC media player [10], Samsung [11], Philips [12], Panasonic [13] and VirtualBox.
[7] http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use/autodesk/
[8] http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use/qt-in-visual-effects
[9] http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use/story/customer/esa-european-space-age…
[10] http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use/story/app/vlc-player/
[11] http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use/qt-in-home-media
[12] http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use/qt-in-ip-communications
[13] http://qt.nokia.com/about/news/panasonic-selects-qt-for-hd-video-sy…
You should see Intel
http://www.osnews.com/thread?462611
Qt won’t end. There’s too much people on it. But it will be seriously pushed back. Damn, I was expecting to be able to professionaly work with Qt Quick, but now there’s no hope for that..
It’s sad, because Qt Quick was the best technology for rich interfaces I ever used! (and I used a lot of them)
Let’s hope the Android Lighthouse gains some traction now: http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse
Because you know, Android maybe is that techie nerd dream and all, but, sincerelly, it isn’t cool to develop interfaces with it..
Here is to hoping that it gets acquired by either HP/Palm or even Google. It just has too much potential to die a slow painful death.
My feeling is that the best corporation out there to buy it in terms of size, investment, structure although the do lack some software nous would be… Intel.
Intel buying Qt and continuing the investment would be an excellent strategic move on all sides and would firm up Meego nicely.
ARM lovers might worry but I don’t think they’ve much to worry about. Maybe the Linaro grouping should look at ARM specific Qt opts as well as GCC/Linux etc.
Maybe you’re more right than people may think
http://www.osnews.com/thread?462611
Frankly, at this point, I would relish the irony of Qt becoming a viable and popular framework for Android.
What about following the steps that LibreOffice, Illumos or MariaDB walked away from Oracle? Would it be possible? legal? Could it have a bright future?
I found this in the blog comments.
http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php
from this: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2011/02/14…
Nokia, and now Microsoft, are committed to making sure that your contributions to and investments in the Nokia ecosystem will be worthwhile. In the coming weeks we will provide more information about programs that will help you access the Symbian and Qt opportunities more effectively.
I for one don’t see him discussing anything, it’s just a dry announcements and (mostly) mourns in the comments.
… would be if that single MeeGo device ends up gaining **relatively** more momentum / followers / coders /etc. than the WP7 side of Nokia.
Looking at the intro someone posted, http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7-snapshot/qdeclarativeintroduction.html
JavaFX looks remarkably similar to Qt.
… where Nokia and Google Join forces.
Google uses Nokia phone patents to fend off Apple.
Google uses Nokia’s Qt and Pyside, ditches Java to fend off Oracle.
Nokia uses Android to stay relevant.