maemo.org - Talk - Qt Dev Days 2011

I'll be taking part to this year's Qt Dev Days in Munich (24th-26th of October).

If there is some interesting information that pops up (official or through discussions) related to Qt/Nokia/Maemo/MeeGo/Tizen... I will post it here.

Anybody else taking part?...

Edit1: Live coverage from Qt DevDays 2011...

Day1
Day 1 was a training day, with 5 dedicated tracks:
- Advanced Qt - a deep dive
- Programming with Qt Quick
- Designing UIs with Qt Quick
- Getting started - a Qt fast track
- Qt Apps with Nokia - Design, Develop and distribute

Some noteworthy points, beside the sessions themselves:
- Nomovok has a stand there. I discussed with the guy and he confirmed that they are providing the integration of Qt into Tizen. They see Tizen as MeeGo + the HTML5 additional overlay, and clearly not as MeeGo minus Qt. To them, there is no reason why things we were able to do with MeeGo should not be feasable with Tizen. They meet every second week with Intel to work about the integration of Qt into Tizen. Looks damn promising!

- About 900 to 1000 participants. Definitely not a lack of participants, as it was suggested by some here.

- Demonstration of Raspberry Pi, a hardware platform (Arduino-like), running Qt5. Seems very powerful, and the target price is 25$US. Release is planned in November. Setting up the environment from scratch (including compiling a Qt5 version for Raspberry Pi) takes about 3 hours, and then you're ready to develop... Demo of particle generation using QML/OpenGL.

- I've heard that those people (about 50) who registered for the last session (Qt Apps with Nokia) all got a N9... (me = fool for having chosen the wrong session...)

Day 2:
- Talk by Marco Argenti (SVP Developer Experience, Nokia) about "Qt and the broader strategy".
* 100 millions Qt-enabled smartphones on the market.
* Strong emphasis on N9 being the best ever device for developers.
* Lottery => They gave out N9 devices to... half of the attendees (each participant has either a red or blue dot on his badge... today, all the "blue dots" won cyan N9's. According to the Murphy law, I of course had a red dot... Will magenta devices be given out tomorrow to the "red dots"?... Edit 4: No! "Blue Dots", enjoy your devices! ;) )
* Dramatic increase of application submission lately
* Open governance (Qt-Project released since last Friday)
* Qt is and remains a strategic investment for Nokia (today and future!)
* ~2 millions of downloads of Qt
* Porting facilitated from Qt to Windows Phone platform, but as of today, they also released a tool for facilitating the porting the other way round: yes: porting from WP towards Qt!
* Strong believe in Cross-platform development
* Nokia store: new version in Qt+QML: they saw a significant increase in usage
* Up to 9 millions downloads a day
* Big opportunities for developing apps for the "next billion"
* ex: India: 800 millions mobile suscribers => those users will mainly experience the web through apps => Qt is core to achieve this!
* Customers liking apps based on Qt, even if they don't know what runs in the background
* People want apps easy to use, nice-looking and useful

- Rick Spencer (Director of Engineering for Ubuntu, Canonical) also gave a talk.
* Rick former "proprietary SW developer", now converted to Open-Source and no way he could go back
* Unity 2D in Ubuntu: built using Qt + QML (=> allowed better, more efficient exchange between development and design teams)
* All the Qt libraries are included by default in Ubuntu distribution, so the user does not need to download them when installing their first Qt app
* KDE desktop heavily using Qt (spontaneous applause by a small group of KDE fans in the room)
* Ubuntu One: built using Qt (now also available on MS win platform)
* Using Qt on Ubuntu: moving from just user to participant or contributor
* User Developer Summit next week, with live audio streaming over internet and IRC chat room to take part => will dsicuss about the next release in ~6 months
* "App Store": encouraged to use it! For successful paid apps, download numbers are in the range of a few hundreds (!)
* Review process: submitted apps always checked, but quick: about 2 days until app is available

Edit 2: some more coverage pouring in...

Still from Day 2:

- "Qt Roadmap, Open Governance and Qt5", by Lars Knoll, Qt Chief Architect:
* Nokia definitely is backing up Qt! That has been said and hammered extensively during this talk.
* Nokia has a growing interest in Qt, increasing its investment into it. Plus, there are job openings.
* Transition from Qt4 to Qt5: will not be as painfull as the transition from Qt3 to Qt4, as most of the stuff is implemented all right. Basically a matter of running a script for adapting header files and minor tweaks to the build system.
* Qt5 to be split into "Essentials" and "Add-on modules" (including widgets, Qt Webkit, part of Qt Mobility,...
* Qt Quick 2 built and optimized for OpenGL, with dramatic performance improvements
* Qt5 timeline:
- Feature freeze by early 2012
- Beta by March/April 2012
- Done by 1st half of 2012
* Qt Widgets supported in Qt5 (but to some extent, development on widgets is shifting towards community efforts, through Qt-Project)
* After Qt5: plan is to release twice a year, at fixed time periods (more predictable)
* In response to a question about Symbian and MeeGo:
- Symbian STAYS on Qt 4.8 = Symbian NOT supported on Qt5!
- MeeGo: tests done, works well so far, so shouldn't be a problem. (He would not tell more than this)
* Development opportunities:
- Desktop: yes, clearly in the focus
- Mobile: You will see something coming... This is all Nokia is ready to say now! (Seems clearly to indicate some big announcement by tomorrow at the Nokia World event!!)

Edit 3: some more from day 2

That was all for the keynotes. The rest of the QtDevDays consists of technical tracks, mostly not by Nokia employees, but by partner firms (Digia, KDAB, ICS, e-Gits,...). Won't report about those, since it's "just" technical. I'll post bits of information that might be relevant though...

* Interestingly, one technical track was about porting Qt/QML applications to Android, using Necessitas (3rd Alpha release coming out soon!).
* BlackBerry's BBX was mentioned, as an eventual target for Qt apps (QNX-based) with the comment "if they're still around within one year".
* The guy talking about QtWebKit presented himself, and mentioned he was "working on some other things he could not talk about"...
* Interesting (too deep for my level) talk about QPA (Qt Platform Abstraction), succeeding to QWS (Qt for Embedded Linux): can be used for Android ports, but not the remotest chance this will work for iOS.
* Session about developing with MeeGo on N9, by Yoann Lopes. Quote: "N9 is awesome, but it misses one thing: you, your apps". 75 minutes is a too short time to go very deep, but the guy basically showed the whole process, step by step, and some of the possibilities (demoed: applications "MeeSpot", "Trafikanten"). A few security-related questions were raised (about preventing an app sending over-priced SMS's), which didn't lead anywhere, by lack of enough informations about the topic. Again, question asked about the incentive for developing for a "dead platform": "Can't say anything about this, but if you develop for MeeGo now, you definitely will be able to reuse your skills." (not quoting exactly, just what I remember from it). He mentioned also again "next billion"...

Edit 4: wrap-up:

Back home now, and I had a bit more time to go through my notes, but there was not much more interesting info about N9 and MeeGo (beside the programming techniques themselves).

I've been very impressed by the quality of the presentations, the skills of the presenters, and the flawless organization!
Wow. Just wow!