In this edition...

  1. Front Page
    • Nokia's developer story: not there yet
  2. Development
    • Qt in Education - course material for educational institutions
    • Discussion around N900 Community SSU as it gets closer to viability
    • PySide & QML on Maemo and MeeGo tutorial
    • Third-party components Qt Quick components
    • Modern mobile applications with Qt & QML on Intel's AppUp
  3. Devices
    • Install Kubuntu Mobile on N900
  4. Announcements
    • Columbus navigation toolkit

Front Page

Nokia's developer story: not there yet

Your editor has long been a proponent of the idea that Nokia's developer offering needs to massively improve if it was to truly compete in the next-generation mobile OS arena. Qt, Qt Developer and cross-platform SDKs are a big step in the right direction. But, as Johan Paul found, there's still some way to go: I wanted to try Qt 4.7 on my Nokia N8 device so I headed over to Forum Nokia to grab the developer version of Qt 4.7 for Symbian^3. The first thing you notice is that the page already expects some previous Symbian development experience. "The following files will need to be installed:" and a bunch of .sis files. Ok. How? An educated guess is to copy the files over to the phone when it is in mass storage mode and install them on the phone. I'll get back to this in a moment. But just imagine if this would be the way for Apple to distribute beta framework components to their 3rd party developers. I would like the SDK to handle this for me. For example some add-on that I can install for the SDK and it will do the rest for me after I connect the phone. It would, of course, also update the SDK itself. Hopefully Nokia's SDK team will be aware of these paper-cut level criticisms which mount up to a fairly large stop energy for someone wanting to experiment with a platform.

Development

Qt in Education - course material for educational institutions

Nokia have posted a set of materials which can be used for the official teaching of Qt, say as part of a school; college or university course: The Qt in Education Course Material is developed for the purpose of teaching Qt at educational institutions. The ten lectures cover the basics of Qt in addition to some special topics. You are welcome to download them and try them out. The course material is split into lectures. Each lecture is meant to last 2 x 45 minutes. The lectures include notes for the teacher, and exercises for the students to test their skills after the class. There are also five larger lab exercises that cover topics from several lectures at once.

Discussion around N900 Community SSU as it gets closer to viability

An aside by one of your editors (and council member), Andrew Flegg in the "Ask the Council!" thread on Talk spawned a discussion about the N900 and Community SSU support for Maemo 5. Continued efforts from a number of community members (particularly Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh) has helped the community SSU for Maemo 5 to near-readiness. An excerpt from the discussion: Firstly, it is being developed by the community; specifically MohammadAG and a few others. It's being openly discussed on IRC, and has been mentioned and discussed both in TMO and MWKN. What is included, at the moment, is (OTTOMH): Updated hildon-desktop, hildon-home, Modest updated to the trunk, and community patches which have been languishing on Bugzilla integrated, PulseAudio fixes. However, most importantly, it provides a mechanism to deliver enhancements to the numerous open source components by the community, including Nokia engineers who are no longer working on them as part of their day job. This mechanism is more important than the first tranche of fixes. If you'd like to join the discussion or help out with testing and development of the Community SSU, jump on over to Talk and dive in.

PySide & QML on Maemo and MeeGo tutorial

Thomas Perl continues his exposition on Python, Qt and QML: In addition to my old PySide tutorials, there is now a proper PDF guide for PySide development on MeeGo available. Except for packaging, all steps apply to Maemo as well, and this is the document that includes the first gPodder QML UI code example (the final gPodder QML UI will be totally different and "much cooler", though).

Third-party components Qt Quick components

Nokia's Qt wiki has a page which is listing the various Qt Quick libraries third parties have written, that you can integrate into your own applications: If you have built a component in QML that you’d like to share, please add it here! It will help others who are wishing to use similar types of components or just looking for tips on building QML components in general. The ones already listed include widget sets through to custom components like scrollbars; fading containers and drag & drop support.

Modern mobile applications with Qt & QML on Intel's AppUp

Intel's developer connection programme is currently running a competition for those who can write the best articles on using MeeGo strategic technologies. Dmitry Rizshkov has written a worked example showing off Qt and QML: The better way to see the power Qt is to start coding with it. Let's write a simple application using Qt and QML. This will be an application I called 4Toddler, application will start in the fullscreen mode, it has just two buttons placed in the top right corner of the window - About and Close. The main function is to display a random image with a fireworks effect and with a random sound effect. Although nothing particularly new, it's good to see Intel's developer sites presenting the same consistent message as Nokia.

Devices

Install Kubuntu Mobile on N900

Ian Lawrence has provided notes on his experience of installing Kubuntu Mobile on his N900: Some time ago I wrote a post about a project we were working on called Ubuntu Liquid. Well since then a lot has happened.The Bossa Conference came to Manaus with a great plasma mobile talk, the project changed its name to Kubuntu Mobile, the awesome KDE and Kubuntu communities became involved and we managed to finally get a Technology Preview release out of the door for Ubuntu Maverick! The instructions are not for the faint of heart, require comfortability with command lines; repartitioning and restoring from recent backups!

Announcements

Columbus navigation toolkit

Tom Swindell has spent the last few months (the last few weeks in particular) working on his new GPS application, Columbus, which aims to provide simple GPS features like heading, Lat/Long and NMEA output (think something along the lines of the Garmin eTrex line). This is a little app I've been working on over the past few months on and off. Currently its' most notable features are NMEA data streaming over network, bluetooth or as a USB serial device. Columbus is currently available from Extras-devel, as it is still under intense development, so interested users should treat it with care.