Lawand's Blog

I never thought I would get this nerdy :)

A couple of days ago, a port of Qt (my favorite C++ user interface framework) for Symbian (my favorite mobile OS) and specifically, on S60 (my favorite platform) was announced^[1] :)

This is like, a great news!

Somehow, I felt that this could happen after NOKIA acquired Qt software^[2] (Trolltech previously) !
Thereby we can expect a Maemo port, which will lead to a cross-platform application sharing between the two platforms^[3].

Here are some screenshots of the fluidlauncher demo which includes S60 ports of several demo applications that are originally included in the Qt 4 (for PC) download package:

Various Style Sheets

An FTP Client

A powerful move

This port makes it easy for any application designed using Qt to be ported to the Symbian OS (including KDE apps!), and gives yet a another development option for developers interested in Symbian, so now we have C++, Java, Python with the latest Ruby port!

I think that this is one of the smart methods NOKIA use to advertise for, and empower, it’s sponsored platforms.
I mean, look at this blog post for instance, it contains a link to Pimp My Widgets contest, yet another contest that embodies the spirit of programming challenges, which mostly stimulates programmers, to use tools and program for NOKIA’s platforms.

Not to mention how developer friendly is the SDKs that they release, such as the Carbide.c++ SDK which is essentially a customized Eclipse IDE^[4] (due to it’s populerity, I guess) combined with an ARM compiler, and other necessary tools.

In practice,

I guess, this Qt port will be mostly useful on the latest version of S60 (5th generation) which supports a touch UI.

For more information,

you can check this blog entry which explains a prospective of a possible cause of NOKIA’s Qt Software acquisition.

References

1. Qt for S60 announced (trolltech.com)
2. The Nokia acquisition (trolltech.com)
3. Maemo (operating system) (Wikipedia)
4. Carbide.c++ (Wikipedia)