Portable apps with QML
Sivan Greenberg points to a cross-platform case study using Qt Quick (that is, QML). From the article: This Qt example application demonstrates Qt Quick as a game platform. QuickHit is in principle a general shooting game, but differentiated from other similar games by its levels. Levels are Qt plug-ins which are loaded during QuickHit startup. Different levels are shown in application’s main menu. Levels can have different sounds, graphics and level QML files. Common for all levels is that your ship is at the bottom of the screen and shoots up. Sivan says, he "thinks it shows how far one might one get with Qt Quick, personally it ignited more of my imagination and gave me a few more ideas and techniques how to harness this."
FOSDEM wants Maemo developers for conference schedule app
FOSDEM, the yearly "free and open source software developers' European meeting", is seeking mobile software developers (including Maemo) for the schedule for the 2011 conference. Last year, there was a FOSDEM schedule application available for almost every phone platform. Following this success we'd like to do a new call-for-development to ask the same thing again for this edition.
Qt Mobility 1.2 technology preview for MeeGo
Qt Mobility is the umbrella term for a set of APIs which make sense when building full-featured applications using Qt. Unfortunately named, it also includes Bluetooth and connectivity APIs; where a distinction of "mobile" is increasingly blurry with modern desktops. A technology preview of the next version of Qt Mobility has been provided in source tarball and, for MeeGo, RPM form: We would like to share our source package of the Qt Mobility 1.2 APIs at a Technology Preview level of maturity and a set of RPM packages for MeeGo compatible devices. As we communicated earlier, the number one mission for Mobility 1.2 was to deliver backend support for MeeGo, so that has been the primary focus in this release. A lot of work is still on-going and there are known issues in this Technology preview. However, we want to obtain your feedback on the design of new APIs early before we mature the APIs to BETA and then ultimately finalize for our delivery to MeeGo 1.2 in early 2011.
Developing QML applications on Symbian
Marko Mattila documents his experiences moving QuickFlickr to run on Symbian, including the meta-data needed to allocate memory correctly in the .pro file: I have never developed anything on Symbian platform and the reason for this is that I couldn’t care less about the Symbian before. I have always been more into about Qt and gadgets that run Linux rather than Symbian. Now the things have changed a bit – it’s possible to develop Qt applications for Symbian platform which makes easier to start app development on Symbian for me as a Qt developer. The other reason is, thanks to Qt Ambassador program, that I happen to own N8, which btw is a pretty good HW. To be honest, I can’t praise much the UX on N8, but still, it’s a good hardware.
QML wrapper generator for building binaries online
The folks at Haltu in Finland have produced an online compiler which wraps up a QML file in a Maemo 5-compatible binary. This binary can be run on an N900 to launch a QML file, rather than launching qmlviewer. They explain the rationale for the service: Big percentage of mobile apps could be implemented by using only QML and javascript. We want to see a world where this is possible. And that is the real reason why we created this technology demo. To proof that there is no need for the developer have compiler installed. Next step is to get this technology here integrated to the mobile platform so we can get rid of this whole service :) Unfortunately, the production of binaries isn't compatible with the source-oriented approach desired for maemo.org Extras and the MeeGo community OBS. Ideally, tools would generate installable packages for testing; but also tarballs, "debian" directories and RPM spec files so that developers could quickly get started and target open source software. There were various comments at the MeeGo Conference that Qt Creator would be getting such a feature in future, which your editor was pleased to here.
Qt Mobility 1.1 for Fremantle
Attila Csipa, Forum Nokia advocate and Maemo Community Council member, announced that Qt Mobility 1.1 is now available for developer's use: We have kickstarted a community 'compatibility program' with a little Forum Nokia help which will focus on bringing the latest Qt and related tech tools/fixes/updates to developers, without having to worry about Nokia release schedules and support status. The first component that is released as part of this effort is QtMobility 1.1 (as 1.0.2 is getting long in the tooth), currently available as libqtm-11-* in extras-devel. Forum Nokia are interested in maintaing Maemo 5 as a viable Qt development platform as it both helps developers get started with Qt for Symbian and MeeGo; and shows Qt's cross-platform deliverables on actual running hardware.
NITDroid, Android for N900, installation instructions
Instructions for installing the latest release of NITDroid are now available on Talk. Talk user "ammyt" was kind enough to compile them for those who need a helping hand. Interested parties should keep in mind that installation process is involved, potentially difficult to recover from if something goes wrong and currently still experimental. It's certainly a cheaper way to investigate your Android compatability, however.
PySide (Python for Qt) second beta released
PySide has been in a bubbly state for a long time. Ever since it was announced and demonstrated at the Amsterdam summit (right before the launch of the N900), a lot of people were very enthusiastic about it. With the few PRs that have been released, the PySide dev team has had to work hard to keep up with the changes. This milestone confirms that the team is still inline with the goals they put forward, just over a year ago. The PySide team is happy to announce the second beta release of PySide: Python for Qt. PySide provides a complete set of LGPL-licensed Qt bindings for Python, including full QML and QtMobility support. Any software written for N900 using PySide will work as-is on the upcoming Harmattan and MeeGo platforms.
Tabular data for maemo.org downloads
For all of you who have always wanted to get more accurate download statistics, Amanda Lam may just have put online the webpage you were looking for: I've created a very rough PHP page that grabs the raw download count figures from the maemo.org Download Statistics [...] Now you can query the daily and monthly download counts of any Diablo and Fremantle package Bear in mind that the information provided by the website hasn't been verified, so take the values it provides with a grain of salt. For example, the download count is the sum of all the downloads across all versions – meaning that a single user who downloads four updates will count as four downloads.