The Trolls and the Bucket of Water
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Volker Hilsheimer, well known in Qt world for many, many years now, has some thoughts and insights into the world of Nokia's Qt developers. Read his article about "Buckets of (cold) Water":http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/18/buckets-of-cold-water in the Qt blogs.
It's inspiring to read that the brilliant crowd at Nokia/Qt/Trolltech is not loosing confidence.
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A friend of mine (who is really hooked on Microsoft technologies, .NET, Silverlight, WPF etc.) was showing me the rumors of Nokia and Microsoft partnership for WP in a sarcastic way that I should look ahead on Microsoft technologies and Qt will be no longer there - at that time I highly doubt about this partnership, but I didn't deny the possibility - I was telling him that whatever happens to Nokia, Qt will be there and there is no reason for me to abandon Qt.
Here's his "tweet":http://twitter.com/betimdrenica/status/37493983974268929 after the announcement. At that time I answered no for discontinuation of Qt because I write Symbian/MeeGo apps because of Qt and I am coming from Desktop Development background to mobile with the help of Qt; on the other hand Qt has big companies that are relying their business on Qt. And of course I continue my journey with Qt.
Here are some link to those who black painted the wall: "Google Earth":http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use/story/app/google-earth/, "Qt in Use":http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use, "Wikipedia Software That Uses Qt":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_that_uses_Qt
In the last link there are Google Earth, Adobe, Autodesk, Next Limit Technologies Real Flow, Mathematica to name a few!
I'm wondering why people think that Qt will be discontinued?
I admit I am very sad about Symbian that in future will not be a part of us, but here's Volker's inspiring explanation about the mobile industry and now at least Qt developers know that MeeGo will continue and Qt will be its development framework, what do we need more?
Although I am a person who loves to dig into other platforms, one year ago (at the time when Stephen Elop wasn't the CEO of Nokia) I started writing Android apps which I have currently two published titles on the Android Market and the third being on its way, so I continue this journey with two powerful platforms at hand (as I was doing before)
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Some more insight from Volker (the other one, of course :-) ) in "comment #32ff":http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/18/buckets-of-cold-water/#comment-19420
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I am still trying to understand Qt relevance to Nokia today. Why should Nokia burn money to develop and support Qt now that it's mobile focus is with WP7 and .Net developed apps?
There is no support for Qt to run on WP7, I don't see any other viable mobile hardware in use other than Symbian that Qt has traction. Today I see Qt more as a cross-platform desktop framework, not a cross-mobile framework.
Why should Nokia invest money to fund Qt for the desktop, or for any other competing mobile platform? I admit my knowledge of the Qt mobile/embedded space is weak since I don't develop for mobile and more so because I am very new to Qt for desktop coding.
Still things don't add up, Nokia as a company needs to invest its money more so now in areas that will make it money, which seem to be WP7 the future. Qt on the desktop for Nokia doesn't make sense, Nokia is not a software company, it is a mobile hardware company from how I see things.