Qt Day in Florence, Italy – live and kicking

by Daniel Kihlberg on January 27, 2012

Qt Day, Italy 2012Day one of the Qt Day in Florence, Italy is sold out. The agenda for the day is dedicated to the use of Qt in Italy from a technical as well as business perspective.

Italian business leaders such as Alberto Ciarnello from Telecom Italia and Mario Fumagalli from Mixel have been telling us about why Qt has been a compelling choice for them. We have also heard  Italian Qt developers Easy Digital present their shipping Qt based Set-Top Box, and Qt Partner M31 will be demonstrating its Qt-based automation framework.

The conference is organised by Qt Partners with Develer in the lead cooperating with M31 and Digia and Nokia. The set-up of the event is similar to Qt Developer Days and Qt Developer Conferences with its mixture of technical tracks and Qt-in-use sessions. However, this event in Florence is focused on the local developer ecosystem with over 30 sessions delivered mainly in Italian.

During the morning, Nokia’s Manuel Reverte-Castro, Head of Ecosystem Developer Experience for South Europe, took us through the Qt opportunities in the mobile space, providing various examples of developers and companies that make money with Qt on the Nokia store. Burkhard Stubert, from Nokia, also delivered an engaging keynote session about Qt 5 and the Qt Project, and how you make a good ROI from targeting multiple platforms with Qt. [click to continue…]

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Qt Contributors Day, wikis and the contribution process

by Knut Yrvin on January 25, 2012

It’s impossible to do every single thing perfectly when opening up the whole development of Qt. Hence the Qt contribution process has to be improved, helping everyone to make Qt even better. I’ll highlight some the suggestions brought up at Qt Contribution Days. Here is my take on a Troll approach on how to achieve excellence and learning how to make Qt even better than today.

Contributors at Qt Contribution Days in Munich and San Francisco

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Qt-powered: Open source desktop publishing with Scribus

by David Stone on January 19, 2012

Scribus screenshot

Image source - scribus.net

Version 1.4.0 of the popular open source desktop publishing program, Scribus, was released recently. This is great news for the community at large, but it also is a mark of pride for the Qt team.

The new version of Scribus has moved to Qt 4, “tuning for cross-platform compatibility” and taking advantage of some of the best new features in Qt 4.7.4 including Qt Quick, improved image caching technology and Qt Creator.

For the uninitiated, Scribus is a professional page layout tool with press-ready output to PDF files. Underneath its modern and user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as colour separations, CMYK and Spot Color support. It is available for Apple Mac OS X Leopard (or higher), Linux as well as Windows 32 and 64-bit machines under the free and open source General Public License. [click to continue…]

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Qt for PhoneGap

by Quim Gil on January 12, 2012

PhoneGap Biolab, by Yohei Shimomae. License: CC BY-NC

Qt meets PhoneGap! Or at least this is the goal of a community project that ICS has started with the ambition of attracting both PhoneGap and Qt developers. The plan is to get Qt as a target of the PhoneGap SDK (or Apache Cordova, as it is being renamed) following roughly the Qt 5 development schedule and keeping an eye to a Qt 4 backport. The result would allow PhoneGap developers to add Qt based platforms to their targets with little or no extra effort. Needless to say contributors are welcome! Both PhoneGap and Qt are free software developed openly.

Some background

As explained at phonegap.com:

PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores. PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best… HTML and JavaScript.

With the PhoneGap SDK you can take a generic HTML5 app, connect it to native platform APIs and generate native packages ready to be published for the platforms targeted. As of today PhoneGap fully supports iOS, Android and Windows Phone, and has partial coverage for Blackberry OS, Web OS, Bada and Symbian (through WebKit).

PhoneGap is being mainly used to develop apps deeply connected to websites, catalog-like apps, basic games… This is not only about handsets, the usage for tablets is growing as well. Check their list of featured apps. Take for instance the case of the Wikipedia app, which I have followed as an occasional Wikimedia volunteer. The Wikimedia Foundation started working on an app for iOS. When they finally addressed a version for Android they decided to avoid entirely the development of another app written from scratch and they went for a PhoneGap. This will be now their basis for any mobile platform.

From a Qt perspective the PhoneGap approach sounds as familiar as provocative. As we know, one of the things that makes Qt great is the potential for cross-platform compatibility. In the past years we have also seen how Qt has grown in the orthogonal axis of platform integration: from the imperative C++ to the declarative and javascriptish Qt Quick, with a full fledged and competitive QtWebKit module serving as gateway to the pure Web languages. Other approaches have been added by the community, like for instance the Python bindings. In a way PhoneGap is an alternative technology, but on the other hand they can be combined in very interesting ways. We like experiments so here goes one more.

Bringing Qt closer to mainstream mobile developers

PhoneGap has grown mainly thanks to customers willing to pay or develop one single app running on iOS and Android. Now the Windows Phone target is getting at the same level of support, meaning that developers checking an extra box will get an extra package ready for WP devices. Wouldn’t it be nice to add a box or more for Qt enabled platforms? Offer a straight path to convert that HTML5 generic code in a native Qt app packaged and ready to be published?

Which Qt platforms, how well supported and how soon depends on many factors, being the most relevant *you*. Being a user of Nokia devices I would like to see PhoneGap apps populating the Nokia Store and apps.formeego.org of course. But for instance, being also an Ubuntu user I would be also extremely happy seeing that flow nurturing also their Software Centre. And… (what would you like to see?)  :)

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Free two-day Qt event hits Florence Italy this month

by David Stone on January 11, 2012

Qt Day, Italy 2012It’s time to kickstart your learning journey for 2012.

Join us in Florence at the end of the month  at Qt Day 2012 for two days packed with exciting technical and business focused sessions.

This is the only Italian event where you can learn directly from Nokia and certified Qt partners how to best use Qt in your development, business and industry. The majority of the sessions will be delivered in Italian.

The event commences with a Business Track on January 27th focussing on case studies and the use of Qt in commercial projects, followed by a Technical Track on January 28 where we dig more into the technicalities of what’s new in Qt, covering hot topics like Qt 5 and the Qt Project.

Highlights include a keynote from our very own Head of Ecosystem Developer Experience for South Europe, Manuel Reverte-Castro. His talk will center around the huge relevance of Qt for Nokia as a strategic short and long term development platform, which enables developers to monetize applications.

Digia, Qt Commercial will be presenting the capabilities of the Qt Commercial team as well as the Qt Commercial roadmap highlighting the planned additional features and functions, as well as information on future supported platforms.

 

Event details:

Date: January 27, 28, 2012

Location: AC Hotel Firenze Porta al Prato, Florence, Italy

Cost: Free

Web: www.qtday.it

 

More highlights, talks and speaker names will be shared soon. Stay tuned for updates.

If you are a Qt Ambassador planning to attend the event, let us know – we have some special treats for you. If you’re not yet a Qt Ambassador, check out how you can be one here

Qt Certified Partner, Develer is the main organizer of the event in collaboration with M31 , Nokia  and Digia, Qt Commercial.

For more details about the agenda, please visit http://qtday.it/

To register for the Technical Track and/or the Business Track, please go here. Seats are limited, so make sure you sign up early!

To get updates on the event, please follow @QtDay on Twitter (hashtag: #QtDayITA)

We hope to see you in Florence!

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Our holiday present to you – Qt Developer Days videos

by David Stone on December 23, 2011

You asked for them, waited for them, and we promised they would be worth the wait.

Videos of the tech sessions from Qt Developer Days have been encoded and uploaded, and are now available for your viewing pleasure.

The link you need is http://developer.qt.nokia.com/videos

Use the Qt Developer Days tag on the left side to filter our other videos out.

Huge thanks to Vladimir, Torsten, Michael and everyone else that spent time recording, reviewing, editing and publishing these videos.

Happy viewing, happy holidays, and happy new year.

David (writing from sunny Melbourne)

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Qt ecosystem continues to grow, organically and harmoniously

by Daniel Kihlberg on December 22, 2011

The year of 2011 ends on a very positive note.

The interest in Qt from the software development community is bigger than ever before, allow me to explain. Qt with Qt Quick works more powerfully than ever before, Qt 4.8 libraries are out and initial feedback is really good, on top of this, the preparations for Qt 5 are progressing well. Put simply, this is a really exciting time.

The Qt project has enjoyed a tremendous boost with over 1,000 developers now signed up and regular contributions being made. As an expression of our widespread health, working contributions from non-Nokia employees currently impacting the core modules such as Qt base and Qt creator represent over 20% of all contributions – we have a strong gene pool and you are helping to make that happen.

The Nokia Store has 10 million downloads per day and offers developers an opportunity to target 155 million Nokia devices with Qt apps – and there is ongoing momentum here, as Nokia has plans to make Qt a core part of its strategy in bringing great apps to “the next billion”.. All data points with regard to Qt on the Nokia store are up in 2011 – a lot more Qt apps are being downloaded by Nokia users (10x), so this means more revenue to Qt developers (20x). You only need to look at the Nokia N9 for a good proof point of the “power of Qt”.

During 2011 Qt apps were published on the Android Market and we also saw the first Qt app on the Apple App store and we had Ubuntu (with Unity and Ubuntu one) announced as another opportunity – added to this, RIM is also now embracing and broadening the Qt opportunity with the BlackBerry/QNX initiative. In 2008 we had approx. 250k Qt downloads from Nokia sites alone, now in 2011 it is close to two million and we have seen developers creating mobile apps with great interest shown in the IPTV/ STB market as well as in automotive… Add to all that the strong finish of the year with the Qt Developer Conferences in Tokyo and Beijing, two events that impressed me in different ways, both draw record attendance – and you can see why I am feeling upbeat!

China had the highest number of attendees ever – for any Qt developer event worldwide – with almost 1,100 participants. Japan had 30% more attendees than last year and attendees demonstrated a lot of in-depth Qt knowledge and enthusiasm for Qt 5. At both events we had all the sessions except the keynotes delivered by native speakers, and in many cases this entailed using Nokia employees from different Nokia offices around the world or local Qt partners. Huge thanks go to all of our sponsors, speakers and participants that made these such good events and also to everyone else contributing in different ways – from forums to code – in making Qt such a great product.

For more details, incl. video and pictures from the Beijing and Tokyo please read: Qt Developer events in Beijing and Tokyo, both draw record attendance

And to see the great videos from Qt Developer days: Qt video portal

Daniel Kihlberg
Global Director Qt Ecosystem
Nokia, Qt Developer Relations Team

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Qt Developer events in Beijing and Tokyo, both draw record attendance

December 22, 2011

Qt Conference in Beijing China is already one of the largest, if not the largest market, when it comes to Qt developers. The growth of Qt usage has been steady and rapid since 2008 across multiple industries. The set top box market in particular is growing very fast and it will be interesting to see [...]

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Orange Helium: a lightweight QtWebKit-based browser

December 20, 2011

Orange Labs UK is a development group that has been working with Qt on mobile web technologies for some years. Some of their project work has turned into popular customer-facing applications like Orange Wednesdays. In 2010, around the time of Qt Quick’s rise to prominence, Orange Labs began a mobile browser project to experiment with [...]

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Qt 4.8 libraries for Windows, Mac and Linux/X11 released as stand-alone download

December 15, 2011

Happy Holidays! Today we release the Qt 4.8 libraries for those of you that target Windows, Mac and Linux/X11. The stand-alone download of the Qt 4.8 libraries will be followed, in January, by a full Qt SDK update including the updated Qt 4.8 libraries as well as further improved Symbian and Nokia N9 targets based [...]

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Call for Qt on Raspberry Pi Mentors

December 2, 2011

We are impressed by the speed, depth and breath of the response to our call for Qt 5 on Raspberry Pi projects. We have more than 400 candidates for the 400 boards we expect to have as soon as the Raspberry Pi Foundation is ready! The list is growing, and if you have an idea in mind we still [...]

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Five unique keynotes highlight day two of Qt Developer Days

December 2, 2011

It was a first. Jono Bacon’s joke about early Linux user interfaces resembling “Kim Kardashian without makeup” was almost certainly the first ever reference to Ms Kardashian in a Qt keynote. And what’s more, the joke got laughs. So began the Ubuntu Community Manager’s keynote address to the capacity audience at the Hyatt Regency San [...]

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Training and contribution – Qt Developer Days S.F. day one

December 1, 2011

Qt Developer Days is go! Learning and contributing were on the agenda on the first day of Qt Developer Days San Francisco. Five training tracks provided expert tuition and guidance from Qt partners and Qt’s own engineers to hundreds of training attendees. This interview with training manager Jurgen Bocklage-Ryannel provides insights on how Qt training [...]

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