QtQuick 2 promises superior performance, a new particle system and a host of new possibilities:

http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qt5/qtquick2-whatsnew.html

It is also quite ripe for testing if you are into that kind of thing. This is my personally recommended approach to testing QtQuick 2 on your n9(50) at this point in time and I have to stress that these steps are not officialy sanctioned. I don’t like chroot environments, and since my builds are restricted to Qt which uses the ever rational qmake build system (lone vocal fanboi here) which respects build (qmake profile) sovereignty, I don’t feel I need one. This is an alternate build approach to the webkit team’s approach linked to below and if you would rather follow in the footsteps of wisdom you might want to tail them.

The Webkit team were gracious enough to jot down these instructions:

http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/BuildingQt5OnHarmattan

which I used to setup the sysroot subsequently employed in my mkspec, available here:

https://gitorious.org/qt-platform-mkspecs/qt-platform-mkspecs/blobs/master/5.0/linux-harmattan-g++/qmake.conf

This mkspec clearly has to be adjusted to reflect your local dev paths.

0) Realize this is dangerous and might require the reflashing of your device/loss of user data
1) Install the dependencies (as documented in the webkit teams instructions above) in your HARMATTAN_ARMEL target under scratchbox
2) Replace any fully qualified symlinks under $HARMATTAN_ARMEL/usr/lib with relative ones
3) set PKG_CONFIG_SYSROOT_DIR and PKG_CONFIG_PATH in relation to your SYSROOT
4) Run configure directly from qtbase
5) Use the resulting qmake to build the qtdeclarative module
6) Deploy Qt and the required xcb libs to the device (you will need to be root, supplement the existing files don’t override exist files)

You can use:

objdump -x ./plugins/platforms/libxcb.so

to establish what dependencies need to be fulfilled. Up until every required library is present, Qt is gonna tell you that the XCB backend does not exist.

I personally use shadow builds (build out of source) since I am targetting a wide range of devices and discard my builds with fair insane regularity. I have no hit any issues using them in Qt5 when targetting qtbase/qtdeclarative.

Similar steps would clearly probably work for the n900 but, alas, the version of xcb packaged as part of the Fremantle SDK is too old to be used with the XCB QPA backend as it stands. It will take a braver man than me with more time to kill to get that turkey airborne at this point in time. (I also managed to render my Meego 1.2.9 CE unbootable by trying to install the build dependencies, so I don’t see any really convenient avenue for QtQuick 2 experimentation on the n900. Prove me wrong)

Bon appetizer:

Graphic proof of flight, incase you are faring poorly and suspecting that I am a fibber.

Update

The Webkit guys (who tend to have their soup together) have created packages for Qt 5 (along with packing up all the xcb dependencies)

http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/BuildingQt5OnHarmattan

no money back guarantee offered, these packages could quite possibly consume your poodle.

6 1

Today we announce the release of the Qt SDK 1.1. It has been a long way towards this point, which many of you have been waiting for. Before going into any details, here are the download links:

You can also get it on the Forum Nokia web pages here. Also note that if you have installed a previous version of the Qt SDK, you will receive an update notification and be able to download all changes via the maintenance tool.

Rather than talking about the minor changes between the release candidate and the final version, let me focus on what the Qt SDK 1.1 contains and what the major improvements compared to the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 are.

• This is the first Qt SDK that allows you to create Qt 4.7 based applications and publish them on the Ovi Store, including Qt Quick applications.
• The Qt SDK 1.1 unifies the different SDKs we had before. That way it aims at desktop as well as mobile developers, which helps you to try out new platforms for your application and easily port it.
• Qt Mobility 1.1 is a major step in our offering for mobile applications. Combined with the Qt Quick binding it offers it will allow you to create really powerful and rich applications.
• Qt Creator 2.1 provides you a development environment with all the tools and features you need for creating an application.
• Qt Simulator 1.1 has received many updates to support the latest Qt and Qt Mobility version as well as a simulated environment for additional use-cases. Additional models have been added as well.
• With the Symbian Complementary Package one can install native APIs to be used in your development environment for Symbian^3 as well. This simplifies the development setup in that way, that you do not need the platform SDK anymore for using native functionality.
• The Remote Compiler allows you compile your project for all Nokia supported platforms, also from a Linux and Mac development environment.

To visualize the list of supported APIs and platforms, please check this table:

The target support for the different host operating systems can be listed as following:

If you encounter problems, please file a bug report at http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com .

In addition we would like to point out, that the Qt SDK will receive further updates in the future. Qt Creator 2.2 is almost finished and will be included when it is done. Also coming devices will be supported and feature updates will be provided to your existing installation, not requiring you to reinstall a new SDK.

7 0

Today we announce the availability of the Qt SDK 1.1 Release Candidate. This is a major step towards the final Qt SDK 1.1, building on the beta we released a couple of weeks ago. The final Qt SDK will allow you to submit your Qt 4.7 based applications to the Ovi Store.
Summarizing the most important updates compared to the beta:

• Qt 4.7.3 is included for Desktop and Symbian
• Update to Qt Mobility 1.1.2
• Qt Assistant added as separate package (due to developer request)
• Installer can use system proxy on Linux
• Notification API moved from experimental to “Additional APIs”
• Several fixes for the Qt Simulator
• Several fixes for the installation/updating workflow

Furthermore we suggest you read this important article about that Qt 4.7 will not be supported for S60 3rd Edition. Please note that you are still able to create Qt applications for those targets based on Qt 4.6.
Finally, here are the download links for you to try out the Release Candidate. Either download it directly here:

or on the Forum Nokia pages.

As always, feedback is highly welcomed. Please create an item at our bugtracker at http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com if you encounter any troubles or want to share suggestions and ideas. Note that bugs or feedback added as comments to this article might get lost and hence not handled to your satisfaction. Use the bugtracker instead

9 0

You probably have read about all the releases, which happened today already. With Qt 4.7.2 a lot of improvements and fixes for Qt Quick have been published. Qt Mobility 1.1.1 includes updates for the supported platforms. Qt Creator 2.1 will allow you to create and design your QML applications from within the IDE nicely.

What has been missing so far is a nice and convenient way to get the whole package, namely the SDK.

Hereby we would like to announce immediate availability of the Qt SDK 1.1 beta. As mentioned in our previous release, the Qt SDK describes a merger between the Nokia Qt SDK, which provided a development environment for mobile targets, and the Qt Desktop SDKs. This allows you to develop applications for all platforms, which Qt supports. Compared to the Technology Preview we have included a significant amount of updates, namely:

• Qt 4.7.2 for Symbian ^1 and Symbian ^3
• Qt 4.7.2 for the Desktop
• Qt 4.7.2 for the Qt Simulator
• Qt Mobility 1.1.1 for Symbian^1, Symbian^3 and the Qt Simulator
• Qt Creator 2.1 final
• Qt Simulator 1.1 beta
• Updates to the Symbian Complementary package, providing the toolchain and build tools for the Symbian platforms

For the Linux and Mac platforms we have also added the sis packages for Symbian, so that developers using the Remote Compiler can install Qt from their development host of choice as well. A full changelog is located in the installation package.

You can download the packages on the Forum Nokia pages or directly here on following links:

If you encounter any problem, please create an entry in our bugtracker at http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com . Please note that the comment section on this article does not suit for handling bug reports and items might be over-read or lost.

11 0

With great excitement to announce the immediate availability of the Qt SDK 1.1 Technology Preview that supports mobile and desktop platforms. The new SDK is a merge of the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 and the last Qt SDK, based on Qt 4.7.

The target of the Qt SDK 1.1 is to easily get started with Qt Quick development on Symbian, Maemo5 and the desktop. Specifically this means

• Qt Creator 2.1RC, which includes the first iteration of tooling support for Qt Quick. For all details, check our latest post about Qt Creator
• Qt 4.7.1 for Symbian (Symbian^1 and Symbian^3) is bundled in the toolchain and is also available as sis packages to install on your phone.
• Qt Mobility 1.1 for Symbian targets (both Symbian^1 and Symbian^3) adding many new features and fixes
• The N900 target allows development with Qt 4.7
• Qt Simulator uses Qt 4.7.1 as well as Qt Mobility 1.1 as a basis for development

The new Qt SDK 1.1 Technology Preview enables developers targeting desktop platforms to use the same setup, features and environment as developers targeting platforms. This eases the migration of desktop applications to mobile platforms (Have you heard about the “Qtest Mobile App Port” contest yet?).

We have received lots of feedback from developers about the Symbian support level in the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0, specifically that it was not possible to use native APIs. In this case developers were asked to install the platform SDK, which required manual efforts. Now we have simplified this by refactoring the Symbian toolchain parts completely, allowing you to enable the usage of native APIs for Symbian^3 optionally. This can be done via the installer or the maintenance tool. Further features will be coming in this area in coming releases.

In addition to this, supplementary packages have been added or received updates. The Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 already had the remote compiler integrated, which allows compilation of your project on a remotely hosted server. Several improvements made it into the latest version, also allowing compilation based on the updated Qt and Qt Mobility versions.

The Notifications API describes a unified framework to create a connection to a server for receiving notifications, of course based on Qt. It is designed to use a minimum of data bandwidth as well as behave in a battery friendly manner, as is required by today’s smart phones. This feature is located in the experimental section of the SDK and will finalize soon. For more details, follow this link.

Concurrently we have fixed bugs we received during the time between the last release and this one for the Qt Simulator and the Installers.

To summarize the platform support of this release, have a look at the following table:

As with any Technology Preview we release, deployment to development devices is possible with this SDK, but you cannot use it for production (meaning that Ovi Store will not accept those applications until it is done with the final Qt SDK 1.1).

Finally we would like to provide you the download link. You can get the Qt SDK 1.1 Technology Preview on the Forum Nokia pages or on qt.nokia.com at the following locations:

As for the previous SDK, you can chose between online and offline installers. While the offline installer provides everything in one big package, the online installer allows reducing the download size by selecting the components you are interested in. In both ways you are capable of maintaining the installation, adding new targets or removing them as you wish. Also you will get notified about updates provided by us.

We are eagerly waiting for your feedback. In case you encounter any troubles, feel free to report bugs to our JIRA system at: http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com and place the items to the corresponding category.

5 0

We’re happy to announce that Qt 4.7 was released with the latest update (PR 1.3) for the N900. This makes the N900 the first device to ship with Qt 4.7, and most notably, Qt Quick. In addition, we’re also happy that Qt Mobility 1.0.2 comes pre-installed. We’ve created a small teaser video demoing Qt Mobility and Qt Quick on the N900:

Some useful Qt for Maemo 5 links:

• Official landing page
• Documentation main page
• Maemo 5 specific documentation
• Platform Notes
• Maemo 5 specific examples
• Community wiki

As always, thanks to all Nokia internals and externals, our community for providing valuable feedback and everyone else who made this release possible

19 0

After many months of designing, coding, reviewing, testing and documenting, Qt 4.7.0 is finally ready for the big time!

Although it’s a little more than nine months since Qt’s last feature release (4.6.0 on December 1st, 2009), the seeds of some of the new stuff in 4.7 were sown much earlier. Indeed, many of the ideas behind the biggest new feature in Qt 4.7.0, QtQuick, were born more than two years ago, not long after Qt 4.4 was released. We hope you’ll benefit from the effort and care that went into bringing the implementation of those ideas to maturity.

You can download source and binary packages for Qt 4.7.0 (and binaries for the corresponding Qt SDK 2010.05) from the Qt Download Page. Alternatively, you can grab the source directly from the public repository, where the “v4.7.0″ tag matches the released packages. You can also check out the Qt 4.7 documentation.

A lot of the changes made between 4.7.0-rc1 and 4.7.0 were the result of feedback we received from the community, and this feedback is already shaping future releases, such as 4.7.1. If you would like to provide some feedback, you can do so using the Qt Bug Tracker. If you want to contribute code, documentation or autotests to Qt, all the information you need to get started can be found at qt.gitorious.org.

Finally, it’s a long-held tradition that for each feature release of Qt, we show you the people who have worked so hard to make it all happen. Therefore, I’d like to present the Qt teams from Berlin, Brisbane, Munich and Oslo. You’ll be able to meet quite a few of these folks at this year’s Qt Developer Days in Munich (Oct 11–13) and San Francisco (Nov 1–3) — a great opportunity to further your Qt skills and influence our roadmaps for Qt 4.8 and beyond.

In the meantime, we look forward to seeing the kick-ass applications we know our users will build with Qt 4.7.

Berlin Team

Brisbane Team

Munich Team

Oslo Team

15 0

We are proud to announce the availability of the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0.1 via the usual channels. As the version number indicates, the focus has been on quality and bug fixing rather than adding new features.

None the less, several new releases of the components appeared in the meantime and have been added into the SDK packages. In detail those are

• Qt Mobility 1.0.2
• Qt Creator 2.0.1
• Updated Madde toolchain for development on the N900
• Added Remote compiler support for the Mac version
• Updated example and demo section to be more suitable for mobile devices

Furthermore we have added some minor features to the Qt Simulator, which seemed crucial to the users (like missing window flags).

For those of you who have already installed the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0.0 you should have received an update notification already and that will push your installation to the new version automatically. If you are aiming for a fresh install, have a look at the download link.

In case you encounter a bug, please insert it in our bugtracker and finally for those of you interested in the changelog, click on read more to see the full list.

Happy Development everyone…

Installer Framework:
– [QTSDK-81] Visual Studio C Runtime installation error on Windows 7 64-bit
– [QTSDK-93] Updater behavior in case of non existing updates
– [QTSDK-98] Fixed Qt Mobility API prf handling for Symbian
– [QTSDK-100] Renamed “Full” installation to “Default”
– [QTSDK-102] Added Open C to Symbian toolchain
– [QTSDK-107] Fixed labelling issue for non existing updates
– [QTSDK-113] EULA and License extracted to installation directory for future reference
– [QTSDK-115] Cleanup of console output of installer binaries
– [QTSDK-122] Added remote compiler to Mac OS version
– [QTSDK-123] Linux installers now use .run extension to ease usage
– [QTSDK-129] Linux installer startup fix for Fedora 13
– [QTSDK-136] Fixed uninstallation bug in offline mode on Linux
– [QTSDK-145] Varargs compile errors on Symbian/GCCE
– [QTSDK-147] Mac OS otool requirement check added
– [QTSDK-148] Remote compiler installation via online installer fixed
– [QTSDK-151] Qt Mobility upgrade to 1.0.2 on all platforms
– [QTSDK-157] Simulator Qt version dependency on MinGW
– [QTSDK-158] Updated TRK version
– [QTSDK-159] Fixed a bug where the updater deleted itself after execution
– [QTSDK-164] Resolved a bug during uninstallation
– [QTSDK-166] Hashing check bug resolved
– [QTSDK-172] Mac OS path installation issue

Qt Simulator:
– [QTSIM-35] Added support for Navigation bar and soft keys
– [QTSIM-42] Added support for QGeoSatelliteInfoSource
– [QTSIM-44] QDialog layout and behavior issues
– [QTSIM-46] Implemented Linux Mobility Multimedia backend
– [QTSIM-58] Triggering SMS via remote control widget non functional
– [QTSIM-60] Make messaging accounts and folders mimic the device configuration
– [QTSIM-61] Qt Simulator does not show softkey area menu
– [QTSIM-63] Add support for setting more orientation settings
– [QTSIM-67] QAction bugfix for soft keys
– [QTSIM-69] Building an application with Sensors support failed on Mac
– [QTSIM-75] Application crashes if MainWindow instantiates a QPushButton after displaying QSplashScreen

23 0

It’s vacation time in Finland, which means less emails, which means more time for blogging

First, we’re happy to report that Qt 4.7 for a potential future Maemo 5 update (*) is progressing nicely. Next to dozens of Maemo 5 specific bug fixes, we’re also happy to announce that a few new features for Maemo 5 have entered 4.7-fremantle. Since the N900 doesn’t support multiple touch input, QGesture support was off by default in Qt 4.6. For Qt 4.7, we managed to add support for single touch gestures, like tap and tap-and-hold, which makes touch-friendly UIs friendlier to write. Users of Qt Mobility’s Bearer Management should be happy to know that Qt’s internal auto-connect-when-offline mechanism can be entirely disabled via QMaemoInternetConnectivity::setAutoConnectEnabled(). And on top of that, the new 4.7 features also run nicely on the N900, most notably QtDeclarative.

Qt 4.7 experimental packages can be found in Maemo’s extras-devel repository. Scratchbox SDK users can install them by running fakeroot apt-get install libqt4-experimental-dev.

Experimental support for the experimental Qt 4.7 packages for the experimental MADDE (0.6.84) environment (as shipped with the Qt Nokia SDK) can be found here. Check the README for installation instructions.

We’d like to ask all of our Qt 4.6 users to give Qt 4.7 a try. All bugs can be reported as always at bugreports.qt.nokia.com. Happy development

(*) “potential” means it might or might not happen and we have no clue if and when

15 0

Two weeks ago I announced here on Labs that we were committed to an Open Governance model for Qt and related projects. I have read all the comments posted on the blog and those sent to me by email. I even had the chance to meet Robin Burchell in person and we had a very nice chat about the process, and the issues we’re facing. He also had some constructive suggestions.

In the meantime, we’ve begun to try and address some of the low-hanging fruits I referred to. Since last week, the Qt repositories on Gitorious are synchronised at a 59-minute delay, instead of 12 hours (that is, every 15 minutes we push what the internal repositories had 59 minutes prior). The delay will remain for the time being, as a measure of safety, but we’ll revisit later the time to see if we can reduce it further.

I’ve also begun asking my colleagues about moving all of our internal and non-confidential development discussions to the open. The result has been very positive so far. For example, the Mobility programme decided to engage the MeeGo community directly in the open. Of course, Qt Creator has had its open mailing list for over a year and a half. As for Qt, we’re setting up the infrastructure, and discussing with the team working on the Qt Developer Network to see if we can reuse theirs.

What’s next, you ask? Well, the next step is to get started on discussing the Open Governance itself. For that, we’ve set up a mailing list server and a wiki:

Mailing list

http://lists.qt-labs.org

Wiki

http://qt-labs.org

I have already subscribed to the mailing list and I’ve urged my colleagues and friends to do the same. In a couple of days, I’ll start the discussion by posting some ideas we’ve been toying around internally. The delay is just to ensure that interested people have had the time to subscribe.

As the discussion goes by, we’ll record decisions and consensus on the wiki, as well as items that we haven’t had the time to discuss, but we still need to address. This is to try and avoid having anything fall through the cracks — though of course it should be understood that there will be scenarios we won’t think of.

A non-exhaustive list of what I expect to see discussed there is as follows:

• The lifetime of a patch: from “code written” to “accepted in the master repository”
• The decision-making model for accepting or rejecting contributions
• The tools that will support us in that process
• Release management: how often do we release Qt, who decides what’s in it, when we’re ready, etc.
• QA management: what kind of testing will be done, on which platforms and who is responsible for them
• Dealing with unexpected situations
• Bootstrapping of the model: how we will divide the responsibilities initially and who will first occupy the positions

Like I said, some of these aspects we’ve already begun thinking of. Some of them we’ve been doing that for years. Others we’re only beginning to understand the impact of Open Governance. And of course there are things we haven’t thought of, so we’re waiting for your contribution on them.

I’m personally expecting a couple of brilliant ideas to be put forth to solve some of the problems we’re facing

9 1

Recently I presented a small Qt 4.6 based demo on the LinuxTag in Berlin, as an example of something you could do with the Nokia Qt SDK. It combined existing projects like the Tiled map editor and the Box2D physics library with Qt Mobility’s sensors API for reading out the accelerometer. It looks like this on the N900:

Andreas has demonstrated before that integrating Box2D and QGraphicsView is easy. In this demo I have used the generic object layer support in the Tiled map editor to conveniently define the starting points and properties of some boxes, including the definition of the colliding parts of the rather minimal tile based background.

The big red boxes around the sides are a quick hack to prevent any of the dynamic boxes from leaving the scene. Since indeed, turning your device will change the gravity applied to the boxes as appropriate. This was the first time I’ve used an accelerometer and I expected it to be somewhat more complicated, but combining the sensors API in Qt Mobility with Box2D was as easy as:

    QAccelerometerReading *reading = mAccelerometer->reading();
    b2Vec2 gravity(-reading->x(), -reading->y());
    mWorld->SetGravity(gravity);

As documented, the accelerometer gives us the force applied to the device relative to freefall. When the device is in rest, this is the exact opposite of the applied gravitational force. Hence we have to reverse the x and y readings when turning them into the gravitational force applied to the Box2D world. One little caveat: as of Qt Mobility 1.0 the application will need to run as root on the N900 to be able to get any values out of the accelerometer. This is bug QTMOBILITY-326.

Here is the demo in action:

The complete sources of this demo are available on gitorious.org, on the ‘qtarcade’ branch. The repository includes the necessary classes from Tiled and Box2D so that it’s easy to try it out.

With Qt Creator 2.0 and the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 released last week, it could not be easier to start hacking and implement your own crazy ideas. Who will be the first to get his cool Qt app signed for free and distributed on the Ovi store?

19 0

A major focus of the 2.0 release is the support for developing Qt applications for Symbian and Maemo. I think, we have made great progress to make it easy and fun to develop for Symbian and Maemo.
Still setting up everything for Symbian or Maemo development is not trivial, so I wouldn’t recommend doing it manually. Instead try the Nokia Qt SDK, which we also released today. See this blog post for more information on the Nokia Qt SDK.

On the Creator side that involves major improvements to the project page, a new target selector in the mode bar, support for deploying to devices, starting applications on devices and debugging symbian and maemo targets. While those features are mobile specific, quite a few improvements are also relevant for desktop applications.

As explained in this blog post, we have removed most of the Qt Quick/QML support for the 2.0 release. We plan on releasing Qt Creator 2.1 together with Qt 4.7 and thus offer tooling for Qt Quick from the first moment. For those who like to try Qt Quick, by the end of the week our snapshots will be from the 2.1 branch. And we’ll release a 2.1 rc together with the Qt 4.7 rc.

Apart from those 2 areas, we have been working on a lot of stuff. I’ll pick a few favourites out of the changelog, but frankly a lot more was added then can be covered in a blog post. See also our previous post about the release candidate, beta and alpha.

Andre already blogged about the improved gdb support. That is with gdb 7, we use the python bindings to offer improved displays for complex types. Due to being based on python the data dumpers are more easily extended for your own types. The docs explain how to do that.

Our .pro file parser is now much faster and more accurate. And the parsed information is now used better for the codemodel, e.g. the DEFINES variable is used. Also reparsing is now multithreaded.

,
Creator 2.0 Options Dialog

The options dialog got a nice new look, which should make it faster and easier to change settings. We added a smart filter that allows your favorite option faster by typing the label. For example in the screenshots to the right, we filtered for “indentation” and Creator shows the Text Options and FakeVim pages.

Also we extended the Search in multiple files to support regexps and to also support replacing. Don’t forget that you can search for all usages of any C++ symbol with Ctrl+Shift+U and rename any C++ symbols with Ctrl+Shift+R.

The biggest external contribution to the 2.0 release is the mercurial plugin by Brian McGillion. Thanks Brian. The FakeVim plugin got quite a bit of love by Martin Aumüller, who contributed over 100 commits to it. Thanks Martin.

If my git foo is correct the 1.3.0 release and 2.0.0 release differ by almost 5000 commits by 71 different people.

You can download binary packages from here.

As always we welcome feedback via the usual channels:

• Bug Tracker
• Mailing List
• IRC: #qt-creator on Freenode

3 0

The lights start to fade, the audience goes quiet, the curtains start to rise, spotlight on, drum-roll…

I have the great pleasure to finally announce the 1.0 version of the Nokia Qt SDK. It is available for download on the usual location at Forum Nokia as of now. In addition to the final Windows and Linux versions we also added a beta version for MacOSX 10.6 as well.
In case you have been using the Release Candidate, the integrated updater will allow you to get your installation up-to-date, there is no need to reinstall.

In related news, there is now a public beta of Nokia signing Symbian apps for free and the Ovi Store will accept Qt apps starting in the next month. Read more about this.

This final release contains the following components:
• Qt Creator 2.0 final
• Qt Simulator 1.0 final
• Qt Mobility libraries
• a current version of MADDE
• Symbian packages
• Smartinstaller packages for Symbian
• the experimental Remotecompiler
• Documentation for all components

Please use our Bugtracker to report bugs and provide feedback (select the “Nokia Qt SDK installer” project).

Changelog for the 1.0 release:
• Installer:
  • [QTSDK-10] The Nokia SDK installer attempts to install by default an unsigned “USB network driver” for MS Windows (needed by Maemo?)
  • [QTSDK-57] Can’t install or upgrade the SDK on Linux/amd64
  • [QTSDK-63] Qt Creator is not killed before uninstall
  • [QTSDK-70] Mac: “internet enable” the disk images
  • [QTSDK-72] mac install missing QtMobility headers for maemo target
  • [QTSDK-74] installation completes with progress bar at 97%
  • [QTSDK-87] problems when installing with sudo
  • [QTSDK-90] Application hangs on windows when trying to use ContactManager
  • [QTSDK-92] Cannot build for Symbian with out-of-the-box Nokia Qt SDK
  • [QTSDK-96] SDKMaintenanceTool timeout for checking repository
• Simulator:
  • [QTSIM-8] make the close button in the Maemo theme functional
  • [QTSIM-40] Mobility Multimedia Examples cannot be compiled for Simulator

13 0

Today we have published the Release Candidate for the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0. This is mostly a bug-fix release based on the input we have received from your side and we highly appreciate your efforts here. The download location is at Forum Nokia at the following link. Also we have added the Release Candidate of Qt Creator 2.0 into this package.

Compared to the beta we have now everything available on gitorious as well(especially all the Qt Simulator components, as Christian already mentioned here). So if you like to get involved, get the sources and play around with them, contributions are highly welcomed.

One thing I would like to highlight is, that you cannot upgrade via the updater plugin from Qt Creator to the Release Candidate. This is due to some required changes in the infrastructure itself and we hope that this will not happen for a long time.

Furthermore it is not possible to overwrite the beta with the release candidate, as some components create files which are incompatible to each other. For instance you will not be able to install the madde component, as the postinstall step will fail with an existing configuration error message. Hence you should either install the release candidate into another directory or uninstall the beta first.

We hope you will enjoy the updated version and you can always provide feedback via our Qt Bug Tracker.

Following the full changelog for the Release Candidate:

Installer Changelog

• offline installer does not include the sources anymore to reduce the filesize of the binaries
• added stand-alone designer as component
• fixed launching sub-processes as admin, which was failing on some Microsoft Windows derivates
• [QTSDK-4] Crashed segmentation fault on Linux (metadata collision)
• [QTSDK-6] Setting up Maemo target failed
• [QTSDK-7] Proper Layout of the License Agreement to not cut the text
• [QTSDK-8] Added proxy support for installation/updating
• [QTSDK-12] Not all documentation pages did show up on every browser
• [QTSDK-27] Fixed segmentation fault on Linux
• [QTSDK-28] Fixed crash on Linux (installation on read-only target)
• [QTSDK-49] Fixed crash when no disk space is left
• [QTSDK-76] Fixed localization of Qt Creator
• [QTSDK-79] Updated Messaging API to include correct headers

Simulator Changelog

• Improved device configuration: The menu placeholders can now be set from the configuration file.
• Added menu placeholders for the N95 skin.
• Updated menu placeholders for the Maemo and N97 skins.
• It is now possible to use the Qt Mobility bearer management module when building for the Simulator.
• Added documentation on bearer management usage.
• Add mouseover highlight to on-device buttons to make them more discoverable.
• [QTSIM-2] Mobility messaging now works with mingw toolchain.
• [QTSIM-8] The ‘x’ button on the Maemo device works now.
• [QTSIM-9] The Symbian style for the N97 now uses the black theme.
• [QTSIM-10] Change the Creator start menu entry to point to qtcreator.bin; avoids problems with LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
• [QTSIM-11] The buildkey of the debug libraries no longer contains ‘release’.
• [QTSIM-13] Can now close Simulator from task bar.
• [QTSIM-15] Simulator now remembers the rotation state.
• [QTSIM-17, QTSIM-25] Fixed sensors. The plugins for the simulated sensors are now loaded correctly.
• [QTSIM-22] Fixed a potential crash when multiple scripts are run in parallel.
• [QTSIM-30] Fixed keyboard focus handling. Using the device buttons no longer removes keyboard focus from the running application.

SDK Changelog

• updated to Qt 4.6.3 on Symbian
• using public Simulator repositories(Qt, QtMobility, Simulator)
• merged MaintenanceTool and Updater to a single application
• updated TRK versions
• updated QtCreator to 2.0.0 RC
• updated MADDE to the newest release
• added experimental component remote compiler

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It has been a while since my last blog. Last time, I talked about how the Qt repository in Git was one year old. It was a humorous way of showing the growth and success of our contribution model. Or, at least, that’s what I intended…

For the past two months I have been working with a group of people inside Applications and Service Frameworks (the unit of Nokia that is responsible for Qt) on opening up our way of working even more.

The change to open the governance model more is the natural continuation of what we’ve been so far: Open Source is the foundation of the future work in Nokia, as can be seen by the Symbian Foundation, the MeeGo work we’re doing with Intel and the Linux Foundation, and especially Qt. And this is not news for Qt either: for over a decade we’ve been opening up our model: the QPL, the GPL, the LGPL, the daily snapshots, the open repository, the contribution model, etc.

Last year we created the contribution model, whereby anyone could contribute code to Qt. To enable that, the open repository was clearly necessary, as contributors need access to the latest changes and to the individual commits. It has been a success, with hundreds of merge requests integrated in Qt and Qt Creator.

The next step is even more open governance. The model we have selected is that of a typical Open Source Project. That is to say, beyond contributing code to Qt, we want to allow people to know even more where the project is going, and get involved in its actual development process and decision-making structure, like a many Open Source projects do. The rationale is very simple: we want people to be informed and involved – and involved deeper than just adding one-off patches to the projects. It’s the best thing we can do to show our community how much we want them to use, support and grow Qt with us.

A few things are clear to us that we will need to open up in order for this to happen. It’s clear that we will need to move our technical discussions to the public, as well as the decisions that affect the product, like roadmap and schedules. We will also need to somehow give the community access to the QA process, like test results and reports, coverage reports, integration reports.

And we’ll also need to open up the decision-making structure. That is to say, contributors who have shown themselves to be trustworthy and good at what they do deserve the right of having a say in the decisions. Take, for example some of the contributors of the past year: there are a couple of cases where they know the code better than people working in the Qt offices. We have come quickly to the point where we have to say “I trust you that this contribution is good”. This is part of the meritocratic process that we want to have in place.

While those basic things are clear to us, we can’t claim to have thought of everything. This is where you come in: we need input and help in making this happen. We need to come up with a way of working that works for both us and for the rest of the community. We have an idea what might work for everyone involved, but those ideas need refining.

So, what we’ll do soon is start these discussions; in public and with the public (details to be announced later). Nokians will be participating in these discussions to ensure that we can come up with a model that works for everyone. For example, there are a few legal aspects that will need to be taken care of and we have some ideas on how they could work. All of these details that we have thought of and our initial suggestions on a model will be shared, so as to get the discussions going.

We expect to reach some level of consensus soon. After we (together) come up with a model that works for everyone, please understand that it will take some extra time to adapt to it. There may be tooling work that is necessary, and there may also be changes to the/our way of working. The changes won’t happen overnight, but we have reserved some time for them to happen.

In the meantime, we can and probably will start to address some low-hanging fruits.

Anyway, these have been interesting weeks since we decided to go down this route. I’m hoping that the next weeks of discussion are equally productive.

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After a few delays, the PR 1.2 firmware for the N900 is finally released with Qt 4.6.2 shipping by default (see maemo.org for all PR 1.2 related info). This means that all the apps that up until now only ran in the SDK can finally be deployed to real devices

The final Qt packages have the version tag 4.6.2~git20100401-0maemo1+0m5 (no April Fool’s, despite the date).

Some useful information:

• A good starting point for developing with Qt for Maemo 5 is the Nokia Qt SDK.
• Here’s the Qt for Maemo 5 documentation, suggested reads are the Maemo 5 introduction page and the Maemo 5 platform notes.
• The Qt for Maemo 5 examples can be found in Maemo’s extras-devel repository. The package is called libqt4-examples-maemo5 and installs to /usr/examples/maemo5. Documentation is here.
• The Qt 4 wiki contains useful information about building, debugging, running and deploying Qt apps.
• Here’s the git repository, contributions are welcome

What’s next

If you follow the git repository, you can see that we’re working full-steam on Qt 4.7 for Maemo 5. Experimental packages will appear soon in the extras-devel repository.

Update

4.7 packages are now in Maemo’s extras-devel repository. In the Scratchbox based SDK, type apt-get install libqt4-experimental-dev to get the libs and headers.

Happy app creation

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The Qt 4.7 Beta1 was released today, and I’m happy to announce that a set of experimental Qt 4.7 packages is available for Maemo 5 as well: http://chaos.troll.no/~harald/qt4-maemo5-4.7/20100505/ (all packages in one single tarball here).

Note: The packages now strictly require PR 1.2. Please only install them in the latest Scratchbox based SDK, which already ships a pre-release of PR 1.2. Once PR 1.2 is officially released (*), the packages can also be installed on the device. MADDE and Qt Creator support is pending.

Following a request from the Maemo community, the experimental Qt packages were renamed from libqt4-maemo5 to libqt4-experimental. The packages still install to /opt/qt4-maemo5, so they don’t clash with the device’s Qt. This ensures that installing the experimental Qt 4.7 packages won’t have bad side effects on existing apps.

How to install

We suggest to remove the old libqt4-maemo5 packages first:


fakeroot apt-get remove .\*qt4-maemo5.\*


After downloading the experimental packages, install them with the dpkg utility:

x86 Scratchbox target:

fakeroot dpkg -i *i386.deb


ARM Scratchbox target:

fakeroot dpkg -i *armel.deb


The road ahead

Once PR 1.2 comes with official support for the stable Qt 4.6.2 version, experimental Qt 4.7 snapshots will be pushed to the Maemo extras-devel repository. If everything goes well, the release after PR 1.2 will ship with Qt 4.7.x (where “x” is whatever patch release is available at that time).

Feedback and contact

As always, you can use the qt-maemo-feedback mailing-list (info) or the IRC channel #qt-maemo at irc.freenode.org to get in touch with us.

Happy experimenting!

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Most changes are small but important details, like a shiny new options dialog, but also fundamental changes which aim to help development of a single application on multiple targets: the beta now extends shadow building to support different build directories per target. The code model was also improved, so that defines in the .pro file are respected in the editor as well as for auto-completion. A hard decision however was to disable the Qt Quick visual designer for 2.0 by default. Henrik has shared his thoughts in a blog post.

The alpha blog post was mentioning external contributions, but missed the biggest single contribution so far: The Mercurial plugin, written by Brian McGillion. Kudos Brian, Mercurial support was a frequently requested feature!

The bigger picture

Target support: New projects mode, popup target selector.

For all those who haven’t been following the development of Qt Creator 2.0 closely, here are most significant changes since 1.3.1: Project parsing was greatly improved, with Creator now using multiple threads in addition to honoring the .pro file defines as mentioned above.

As the version suggests, the new version also means changes in the overall functionality. The GUI is now optimized to handle multiple targets, which conceptually have become aspects of a project. This reflects in a new layout of the projects page, which now allows to set build- and run settings per target, as well as the newly introduced target selector, where you can quickly switch between different targets and projects.

People frequently suggested to separate design and code view, which was implemented for 2.0. This is especially useful when using the QML visual designer, but also works for classical .ui files. To make up for the additional space required for the new mode, the output mode was replaced with the option to enlarge the output window. And of course we introduced support for the new python backend for GDB.

For a more verbose changelog, take a look here.

Finally, Qt Creator has become the heart of the new Nokia Qt SDK, which brings the integrated Qt development experience to Maemo and Symbian developers. For the curious, Maurice answers a lot of question in his blog post. Note that we will also ship the Qt SDKs for Linux, Mac and Windows desktop development, but they are not part of this release.

Get your hands dirty!

You can download the Nokia Qt SDK, which includes the beta, or get a creator-only binary installer from the release page. Note that the Nokia Qt SDK does not contain a desktop version of Qt. If you want to develop for the desktop, why not try the Qt 4.7.0 beta?

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A release is only released as soon as you blog about it, a Troll once said. So here we go…

You probably have heard lots of buzz today about us releasing the Nokia Qt SDK. If not, find the announcements here  and here  as well as the download page here.

Still you might be wondering what this all is about. When I was asked to join this project, it has been described as “an evolution of the Qt SDK”, which still is the best way to do so. But let me go into details about the new elements contained in the package.

Targetting Nokia devices

Despite the classic Qt SDK for desktop, the Nokia Qt SDK aims at developing Qt applications for Nokia devices, which includes Symbian as well as Maemo (The N900 is still a Maemo device). Just like the Windows package, it includes a full toolchain with compilers and everything to create applications for both platforms. On the Symbian side we use a stripped version of a SDK for Qt development, while on Maemo we include Madde, the application development tool. The Qt versions included in the package are currently 4.6.2 for both operating systems, because 4.6.2 will be inside the upcoming PR1.2 on the N900 as well as it is the currently available stable Qt version on Symbian. This will change as soon as 4.7 will be mature and released. Furthermore we have added the Qt Mobility APIs 1.0 to use all the mobile features we support now.

Online, Offline installation, post-installation and updates

One of the seriously cool things about the Nokia Qt SDK is the ability to select the online installer. You probably know the basics of this from other products. Download the online installer, simply select what you want to install and only download those packages. In case you decide to add something else, simply select it in the maintenance tool (like targeting a new platform for your Qt application). Furthermore it includes an updating mechanism which will allow us to provide you frequent updates of the packages. This is especially helpful right now, as we published the beta version and want to provide bug fixes on a regular basis to you to verify that items have been resolved.

Qt Creator 2.0 beta

Qt Creator has been the choice as an IDE since day one due to the experience the developers have with creating a compelling IDE and adding the Nokia platforms as targets here. I will not go too much into the details of the upcoming 2.0 release, that is for the Qt Creator devs to do so, but extremely cool stuff has been added since the 1.3.1 release, including all aspects of the tool.

Qt Simulator

You might have seen some screenshots already like this one:

And especially those, who were with Qt/Embedded in the past might think that this is something alike qvfb, and actually it is. Well, it is for the user interface part, using shared memory to promote the content of windows to the simulator application, as well as using local sockets for IPC (this time actually QLocalSocket and not some linux implementation ).But still it allows much more, you can switch between several resolutions as well as device classes. But the most two cool features are

• Qt Mobility API simulator backends
• Scripting for Mobility APIs properties

We have created backends for all Qt Mobility APIs of the 1.0 release, which has happened today as well. It allows you to write applications targeting the simulator and check how it will behave if you eg. get out of battery, change your location, access the contacts etc etc… even before you need to start debugging on the device and run with your development computer plus phone through the city

And even more, you can script the values of the Mobility API properties, allowing you to dynamically change values and have your program respond properly to those changes. This is also very useful for QA purposes when you want to check edge-cases of your app as well. During development phasis we have written scripts which takes a jetpack tour through Berlin, you will find examples like this in the installer.

On-Device debugging for all Nokia platforms

This is what the Hackfest attendees liked the most. It could go into one of the Qt Creator features for the upcoming 2.0 release, but personally I think it is worth mentioning as a single item. Andre has been so kind to blog about it as well.

Documentation

Using APIs and tools stand and fall with a proper documentation. Thus lots of it has been added recently. This includes the new tools like the simulator, updated behavior for Qt Creator, on device debugging, as well as the API sets for Qt and the Qt Mobility APIs.

What’s next?

• Opening our repositories for eg. the simulator as merging the Nokia Qt SDK specific Qt Creator changes. We would like to avoid fragmentation of our tools hence we will use one proper codeline.
• Stabilizing all components of the Nokia Qt SDK.
• Working on the final version.
• We are trying to get the Mac version running as soon as possible, though we cannot give any promises right now.

One thing I would like to point out to every reader here: You can pretty easily see how much stuff we have included in the Nokia Qt SDK and now has been the time for us to release the beta to get public feedback and through that make the product rock-solid. Please be patient with us, it _is_ beta. However, I would like to encourage you to download it, play with it, stress-test it and send us your feedback.

Although I have tried to describe all the potential questions you might want to raise, there is probably much more in your minds. So drop your questions here or on the Forum Nokia landing page, we will try to reply as much as we can.

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This means that the time of the libqt4-maemo5-* packages has come to an end, please use and test the libqt4-* packages (4.6.2~git20100310-0maemo1+0m5), which now contain Qt 4.6.2+x in /usr/lib. To uninstall the old preview packages, just run apt-get remove libqt4-maemo5-\*.

Wait - Qt 4.6.2+x? Well, as with every Linux distribution, some smaller fixlets and features were backported. I’d like to highlight a few of them.

Up until now, kinetic scrolling was limited to 20 fps. This is a good default, since 20 fps look smooth, don’t drain too much battery and leave some CPU for background processes/threads (isn’t it nice to have multi-tasking?). However, for demo purposes, you might want to have 60 fps for that really, really smooth look, so we introduced the QAbstractKineticScroller::scrollsPerSecond property. Unfortunately, our camera cannot grab 60 fps, so no youtube video today

The second interesting feature is QAbstractKineticScroller::axisLockThreshold. Imagine that a user scrolls downwards in a QScrollArea. Now, unless he’s an android, he won’t manage to scroll down in a perfect line, usually it’s something like 100 pixels downwards and 5 pixels to the left. The axisLockThreshold property allows to lock the scrolling to the nearest X or Y axis. In our example, the 5 pixels to the left are ignored, and the view just moves 100 pixels down.

Finally, QAbstractKineticScroller::OvershootPolicy allows to set the overshooting behavior when scrolling. The default is to just do overshooting when a view is able to scroll in a particular direction. In addition to the default behavior, overshooting can now be completely disabled, or always forced on.

A note for everyone building Qt from sources - after you upgrade your SDK to PR 1.2, you should use the *-pr1.2 branches (e.g. 4.6-fremantle-pr1.2) to get the latest input method fixes.

Happy Easter Hacking

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