Improving Symbian as a Qt platform

[m_p_wilcox]

Symbian's future is now heavily tied to Qt. How could Symbian be changed to make it the best platform for Qt?

[axeljaeger]

Drop symbian signed. It burns absurd amounts of developer time.

[e8johan]

A complete, free, toolchain for Linux (and Mac) hosts... but you probably already know this :-)

[m_p_wilcox]

Symbian Signed is being reformed as fast as budget constraints and politcal issues will allow. Rest assured that stuff like getting rid of the Publisher ID requirement and even dropping mandatory test criteria completely are under serious consideration and review.

The fundamental requirement of Symbian Signed for the security model to work is that the originator of an application can be identified. That doesn't take everything that's there now by a long way. In the current design of the system, there was also a desire to centralise testing to prevent every different channel from having their own flavour of testing or certification - which is what was happening before! Many OEMs and operators seem to have relaxed about application testing and certification in the Android and iPhone era - lets see how far they've relaxed! :-)

As for a complete, free, toolchain for Linux & Mac hosts - it's on the way, have you seen this?
"http://blog.symbian.org/2010/04/21/stepping-toward-symbian-open-source-tools-on-linux-and-mac/
":http://blog.symbian.org/2010/04/21/stepping-toward-symbian-open-source-tools-on-linux-and-mac/The core elements are there but it isn't all nicely integrated yet.

Great feedback, what I was thinking about when I asked this question is how could the platform change in order to better run Qt & Qt-based apps... this was useful too though!

Anyone got any further thoughts?

[bill.king]

I think maybe promoting a qml channel in ovi, and maybe some qml design competitions. Reasoning, it's a good light technology that allows for tiny downloads, and will raise awareness up about it. Also, it's a cool technology, giving people a bit of drive to use it I think could generate some killer apps with luck :)

[tzander]

in reply to e8johan I'd like to point to a blog of mine "http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2010/04/21/symbian-development-using-linux/
":http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2010/04/21/symbian-development-using-linux/
The many steps to get the required headers etc should be improved for sure, but this is mostly a political and legal issue and therefore tends to move slower than technical solutions.

[snowpong]

Hand out Symbian devices that comes with Qt already installed for free to developers.

Throw them at them.

I don't know if SF has a budget for this, but Nokia surely do. It's a bit strange, but at the moment this doesn't seem to be happening actually. Reading "this article":http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=896 for example: "Everyone I spoke with also expressed disappointment that, unlike Google, Samsung and Microsoft, Nokia failed to provide attendees with a free device to start developing with"

Here is a crazy idea. Give out an N8 to everyone who attends Qt dev days.

[DenisKormalev]

snowpong, really good crazy idea :)

[khris]

+1 to snowpong's idea.

...and Qt's default widgets will have Look&Feel same as native UI ASAP. Developers can't wait for uiemo or S^4 release with customizing their own widgets.

[Fuzzbender]

"...and Qt’s default widgets will have Look&Feel same as native UI ASAP"

If you mean that you want to have Sym4 ("uiemo") Look'n'Feel NOW for QWidgets, then this might be possible soonish. We have a new QStyle for Sym4 and we are working on getting it out to 3rd parties. It will however require that the environment is using the "uiemo" package. Stay tuned.

[alexander]

bq. If Qt libraries are installed to memory card, startup of Qt applications is very slow due to Symbian doing additional checking of libraries found from removable media. Therefore, Qt libraries can only be installed to the phone memory (C:).