The age of pointless mobile benchmarks

Mobile devices are ever-more like their counterparts and we're starting to see benchmarks popping up on popular gadget sites. Sadly, most of these sites have not yet gone through the analytical phase of what most PC review sites did many many years ago and if effect turn into simple marketing vehicles. Let's see the common pitfalls !

To be clear I'm not talking about bad journalism, that result in articles like this (note how they manage to leave out from the title the ONE thing - GPU performance - that the article is about) even if the source a very reasonable article. I'll try to describe the differences why the methods and criteria established in the PC field that are starting to be applied to the mobile arena (like the Anand article above) make a lot less sense than they did for the original personal computers.

Pitfall no. 1: Level of integration - hardware

Mobile devices are nowadays mostly built around what is known as a SoC (System-on-Chip), which means that most components that would be separate chips or even replaceable units even on a notebook computer, are all rolled into one, which makes it very difficult to benchmark *single* components as they are inseparable from the rest of the system. How much is a NVidia vs ATI benchmark worth if you're comparing a Dell Inspiron 13" notebook with a NVidia card against a HP desktop one with an ATI and a 22" display ? To make it worse, some of the devices include additional video processing units (which again might be good only for some formats and bitrates) so the original chipset-style comparison is even more difficult to make.

Pitfall no. 2: Architectural differences


X86 CPUs is incremental - hardware backwards compatibility is pretty much a given, the only difference in capabilities is the in reality only in the timeframe when vendors add in extensions (like the different iterations of SSE). Mobile devices have to be a lot more transistor-count an usually binary compatibility is the first one to go. For example the relatively new Tegra2 chose to forego the NEON multimedia instructions that were common in Snapdragon and OMAP chips. OpenGL ES 2.0 is not backwards compatible with OpenGL ES 1.1, etc. Depending on what you use and how your software works, this makes things a lot murkier as the fact that device X works better with Quake 123 means nothing in terms whether what you want to run works better.

Pitfall no. 3: Form factor difference

A variation of the previous point - the resolutions are vastly different, but this does not only touch on the graphical performance, but also on our usage patterns and perception of performance. Nominally a device can have a better framerate, but because of screen size and distance-to-eye differences you might actually subjectively prefer the one with the marginally lower framerate.

Pitfall no. 4: Multicore is a sword with two edges

Any multicore design is only as good as the software that runs it. This was true on the desktop, but multicore is a whole different beast on mobile devices, as the quality of software determines whether that dual-core monster is better or, actually, worse than a well executed singlecore one, both in terms of performance and battery usage.

Pitfall no. 5: Software platform diversity

In the desktop and notebook world, just by taking Windows, Mac (and Linux of course ! :) you cover 99%+ of users. On the other hand, in mobile you literally have a jungle of OSes (there are almost a dozen OSes that are above the million mark) which are optimized for very different hardware and very different use-cases. This is not an issue in the X86 world because the application-level performance is comparable with at best a few percent difference, but on mobiles, due to drivers and being optimized for various modes of operation, the same HW can behave vastly differently with different OSes, so those extra FPS in a benchmark can again be very misleading.

Plenty more pitfalls, but let's not overdo it, so for the conclusion - since the complexity of these devices now rivals personal computers, it's only normal that people want to compare them the way they did with personal computers. The trouble is, these are not NEARLY as uniform as their bigger brethren so new ways of benchmarking will have to come up that will be less hardware or device oriented even if that means we'll have to give up FPS measures as such.

The Maemo Community Council elections - Why you should care

The maemo.org community is something of a rare bird in the mobile environment - a self-organizing community centered around Nokia's tablet line, with a very strong infrastructure and unique spot where users, developers and hackers come together resulting in a lot of synergy and powerful base compared to the niche aspect of Maemo. One of the most peculiar aspects of it is the Community Council, a representative body that deals with all things Maemo. What it can do, why should you care and, most importantly, why should you vote *TODAY* if you are a community member with enough karma ? Read on to find out ! I also hope this to shed a little light and be a short introduction of the inner workings of maemo.org to people NOT familiar with the intricate community workings of maemo.org . 

The Community Council was formed two years ago as a representative body, with a role to "represent the Maemo community's best interests to Nokia, and to act as a community conduit for Nokia-generated information." This role has recently been expanded, as Nokia has transferred control of maemo.org to the community (=the Council as a representative body). This gives it a fairly complete control over all things that happen in maemo.org, a lot of which many users are not even aware of:

• the rules that define criteria for software in extras and related repositories
• determining forum policies
• overseeing collection of documentation/wikis/howtos
• ability to issue tasks to maemo.org staff (you DO care if the forums or Extras breaks down or is difficult to use, right ?)
• disseminate important information through the Council blog
• help coordinate community events (Summits/Conferences/meetups)
• help with grassroots efforts (competitions, hackfests, anything Maemo)
• formalize concerns and issues and pass them to Nokia
• define goals/strategies for the future of maemo.org
• really, anything maemo.org related
• in fact, anything community related goes - it it's cool, support it !

So yes - if you would like more of the things above, or you have a peeve you'd like changed - the Council is the body whose attention you need. Generally - if you have an idea relating to Maemo, and you don't know who to turn to, the council is the address (with a notable exception - the Council is not Nokia Care, Nokia has proper customer care channels, the Council focuses on community aspects).

Even with fairly complete control over the maemo.org realm, I cannot emphasize enough the facilitation character of the Council when it comes to Nokia. Nokia does not obey the Council - but certainly does listen to it as it represents the most vibrant and passionate base of it's users.

I've listed a short (far from complete !) list of what the Council can do - but there are things, often sources for confusion, of what it CANNOT do. Can the Council guarantee that a particular firmware will be made available to your device ? No - it's not a community call. Can the Council force Nokia to include/exclude components from firmwares ? No - it's not a community call. 

Some of you Maemo device owners will stop (or already stopped with tldr ;) ) reading as they don't really care about this maemo.org stuff (something I doubt, as Extras, a central part of it, is the main source of applications).

However, if even if all this community-talk jibberish means nothing to you and and you define the bottom line as Apps Apps and Apps (with Flash), you should pay attention. The Community Council is in the unique position to make a strategy for the future of the community. It *does* direct the work of maemo.org people and will be pivotal in determining for example what software will be available from MeeGo repositories, or just how difficult it will be for MeeGo/Harmattan developers to support the Extras repository. They can (and IMO should !) also be the voice of the Maemo community inside MeeGo - MeeGo doesn't have a council, and if you have an itch, it won't get resolved unless you or your representatives do it.

All this brings us to the bottom line - in my opinion, the Council matters, but only to the extent of the abilities of people in there. In a worst case scenario, the people you elect to it do nothing - that's the same as if it didn't exist. However, YOU, the community member have the power to elect people who ARE capable of affecting the future of maemo.org and all the people and device it touches on, be that apps, events or other. Today is the last day of the community elections for the next term, so if you care the tinyest bit about Maemo, MeeGo, maemo.org or your Maemo device - use that voting token and make a difference.

Java mobile apps today - a technology/weapon misunderstood

When you look at the present landscape of available mobile technologies to develop apps with, you'll see an abundant offering. Depending on what platform you're developing for, you'll see a mix of native applications, web technologies and similar. These are all cool and powerful, but what is not often talked about is the scope of the applications written and how choice of these technologies is linked with business models. What am I talking about here ? People working with J2ME will be eager to point out that there are several hundred million phones capable of running such apps and that phones that have that as the primary application platform are still going strong (for example Nokia's S40 phones). Others will say that means nothing  as owners of such phones are unlikely to pay for apps and that their hardware is so limited that you couldn't make something impressive anyway. Both are right in a way, but the story doesn't end here. What is often overlooked that shiny, flashy apps, sold as a product are not the only business model here even though originally most of the J2ME offering were just that - games. Think about SMS for a moment here. It is a super simple service, basically a specialized application, that earns huge amounts of money. But is the money in selling this 'SMS application' as it would be in selling 'Angry Birds' ? No, it's in the services it supports. It's somewhat similar to the problem that some people first encountering Open Source business models have - if you give your app away, how do you make money ? And this is why Java mobile app programming of today is misunderstood - it should not be viewed as a competitor to the write-app-sell-app-...-profit business models of iOS, Android or Symbian, but as a gateway that allows addressing a huge user base otherwise currently unreachable with other technologies. You don't need super-high technologies and sophisticated devices to check for a public transport schedule, arrange reservations, inventory/availability checks, etc. In that light, it's far from dead and/or useless. It's just about realizing that you have a business that CAN benefit from such a userbase.

Flash versioning gone wrong, or, should the abusers be abused ?

A painful fact is that Flash 10.1 is not currently available for the Nokia N900 (well, at least painful for N900 owners). If we look at the bigger picture, applications (like my version-forging TweakFlashVer) uncover a few non-N900 specific problems with the way things are done in Flash land.

TweakFlashVer is an awful hack - it just makes the Flash plugin report a faked version string (much like browsers in the old times forged their agent strings). Seasoned Flash developers are naturally very displeased with such an approach, as the plugin itself does not gain any additional functionality or acceleration, it's still the same Flash it was prior to the intervention. I can hear you ask - well, what good is it, then ?

And here is the problem - cludgy as it is, it DOES work, as seen on the N900, Facebook videos work again and many sites came back to life. How is that possible ? Sadly, often the real requirements of the content presented by Flash do NOT match the requested version in the loader/web page. But why do people declare wrong versions and make lives of their own users miserable ? Because Flash is doing it wrong in the first place, and then it gets abused by webmasters and flash devs further (making TweakFlashVer an abuse of an abuse). What are the reasons for this abuse in the first place ?

• Using version detection as an upgrade mechanism. The assumption is that if someone does not have the latest version, it is simply because they simply have never been nudged into upgrading it. The developers doing this think they are making users a favor since they will be upgrading to a version which is faster, safe, but are forgetting that different platforms have different upgrade cycles, and that latest version might not be available just yet.
• Using the wrong loader. This can be caused by copy-pasting flash loader code from other projects or on-line tutorials, without matching the version requirements in the loader with the actual content. In other words - plain sloppiness.

Both of these, however, only go to show that Flash is doing it wrong in the first place, for the following reasons

• The queries should be for *features*, not versions. This important as we will be seeing Flash players with different preferred feature sets. For example, a platform with hardware video acceleration might prefer a different codec to a platform that has no such thing (currently this role is done - again, in a wrong way - by checking for Flash Lite). Not to mention the pipe dream that one day Flash becomes a real Open industry standard with multiple content player plugins, which would obviously have different, partially overlapping feature sets.
• The version requirement should not be a statically coded thing in HTML that is unrelated to the actual content. If there is (any) Flash version available,  the versioning requirement/handshake should be done *inside* Flash.
• If possible, the server should present multiple versions. Sure, Flash 10 has new features, but there is no fallback, meaning there is no systematic way of saying 'hey, give me a Flash 9 version of that content'. As it is now, the server acts as a bouncer, asks 'whatcha got' and the client says 'errr.. 9.0.260 ?' and then the server just says "you're too old for this" and slams the door.

The question in the end thus remains. There is no doubt TweakFlashVer is a super-hacky solution to frankenstein Flash in order to allow users to access the content they want, but the Flash powers that be will have to come up with two solutions before this approach becomes widespread and turns from a hack into a modus operandi of abandoned Flash platforms, like Maemo 5 and 64-bit Linux:

• A system that can address the sloppiness of it's users and their (mis)use of HTML loaders
• Change the upgrade-upgrade-upgrade mantra. Sooner or later the range of devices that will (try to) run Flash will get so wide that a version number will not guarantee anything, and the Open Screen Project changed nothing in that aspect - users of particular platform are still at the mercy of Adobe and/or their vendor if they will get Flash player in a firmware without any guarantee that a sloppy coder won't render their device obsolete in a couple of months.

Where are those mobile Qt apps ? (Part 3, Resolution)

After a short historical overview and a short list of growing pains, in this, third installment of the mobile Qt app story, I will focus on what boulders remain in the path of widespread adoption of Qt among app mobile developers. Most of the technical groundwork has been laid down, but to reach a final resolution, it needs to include a bit more than just a healthy base.


Decouple Qt releases from firmware releases

As seen from the infamous PR1.2 delay, a coupled-with-the-firmware release cycle is detrimental to the platform. If multiple devices are on the market, it would mean instant-fragmentation as developers would have to code for the Qt released with the last firmware. This is eating Android alive, too, as various handsets have different upgrade cycles. A separate distribution mechanism HAS to be employed. It will be tricky as with MeeGo and Symbian^4 Qt is part of the OS and many teams will be reluctant to bet firmware functionality on the backward compatibility of Qt. But that is not the only thing that can cause fragmentation if it isn't true that...

One mobile widget framework is enough


I harp about this regularly (and will continue to do so until I get good news from an official source :), the option to have separate widget frameworks for Symbian (Orbit/uiemo) and MeeGo (DirectUI/MeeGo Touch Framework) is something that is completely against what Qt is trying to accomplish by bridging the two OS-es. 

All you bases are belong to us

Qt is almost a country of it's own, addressing (or having a development version that addresses) various aspects of software development, both mobile and desktop. However, there is one thing where it is sorely lacking - the wizz-bang games department. Yes, QGraphicsView and 3D enablers are cool and all, but that is not enough (even with QML and UI scripting). It would certainly be an overkill and unnecessary delay to implement a complete game engine in Qt, but there are alternatives - make a Unity3D port, or, better yet, in the spirit of open source, sponsor Ogre binding (and GLES) development for Qt, with the necessary physics libs.

Build it and they will come - Ovi and devices

Professional mobile developers can and will materialize only after the market for the Qt apps materializes. The prerequisite for this is that Qt gets a first-class treatment in the Ovi store, and the QA process is not a hit-and-miss, something that developers are guessing about. Once the Ovi store really starts accepting Qt apps en masse, the question turns into how many devices can be targeted via Qt. I can hear you say "well that's like almost all Symbian handsets in the last 2-3 years". Yeah, but... 


Market share is not necessarily mindshare

Devices that can be retrofitted with Qt already exist in the (tens of) millions range. However, these devices are mostly low to midrange devices as there were no runaway Symbian successes in the high-end segment for a while now. It will be hard to convince people to target a market, no matter how objectively big if they believe/see it as a relic, which means... 

You've got to be cool

The vehicles for the Qt platform need to be cool and carriers of high tech. This is the wave Android is riding in 2010. Now, the best way to do this is having iconic devices (iPhone killers if you wish), but this is not ONLY about devices, it's about how you handle your technology in general, your devs, your community, blogs and everything related to it. Qt has to be perceived cool, a must-have even by non-tech people, not just a sticker on the corner of a box and something geeks nod over on irc. It IS the differentiating factor. Take for example the happenings of last week in the Nokia N900 land. A triple-release is done - preview of the Qt Web Runtime, a new version of Qt Mobility and the super-cool fcamera project. This triplet just oozes with tech-cool demo potential, but it just isn't leveraged, hardly getting even a blog post. Instead there is a campaign and an 'exciting news' about Ovi doing a comic (I'm sure it will be good, but... ). This points to comms issues, but also lack of

Communication/Community Focus

While I don't know how many different communities and aspects of Qt should there addressed separately, I'm pretty sure we are already overloaded, even before the hordes of the new Qt developer generations emerge. There is the Qt Developer Network, then we have Forum Nokia (home of the Nokia Qt SDK), followed by a more specific MeeGo community that is vested (well, at least the handset variant) in Qt, and the same will be true for Symbian. OTOH If you want to publish/talk about Qt development on currently available devices, you should go to maemo.org. While in community waters, we should also mention Qt Centre. Quite a handful of forums, mailing lists and irc channels to follow, and I have not even talked about communities focused squarely at end-users ! Speaking of end-users, some people who even knew about those Qt/fcam releases I mentioned above were quite discontent, because there is/was no concept of...

Control and drive expectations

The 'other' platforms and ecosystem have built up and trained users to expect certain things in a certain way, and if they are not educated, they will not understand what is going on and will easily dismiss even good news when it is not is a form they expect it in. See the above - new releases of QtMobility, WRT, etc were not treated by many as real news or support by Nokia for the N900, even though they were done by official Nokia teams. The concept of the 'holy firmware release' is still strong, because people don't understand the concept of libraries and components (as that is not how most other platforms operate).


Those would be my major points, and while they might sound a bit grim (some not even related to Qt itself), I don't think they are insurmountable at all, it just takes a little effort (some already underway) and presto, the arid Qt mobile app landscape can bloom like a savanna after a rain.

Where are those mobile Qt apps ? (Part 2, Adoption)

After my last blog post that discussed the Qt toolkit's history, present and future in the Nokia ecosystem, in this second part of my blog series I will talk about the problems of Qt adoption among developers so far and the effects these problems had on (the lack of) mobile Qt applications today.

This will not be an article about the flaws of C++, bloatedness of frameworks and similar issues. Sure, some people prefer other languages, other frameworks, or have a personal beef with Qt, but that is a different story. Here, I will talk about the WAY things happened, are happening and what could have been better handled - albeit from a Qt angle.


Are we there yet ?

Qt was originally a desktop application framework, but has been dabbling with embedded applications way before Nokia took over. However, the focus shifted dramatically and Qt (and derived technologies) went to overdrive, introducing new (and exciting !) technologies and approaches by the boatload (see MeeGo Touch, QML, etc). This not unlike what Android was/is doing - a forced growth where the race is on to pump R&D *before* the large footprint of deployed tech becomes a maintenance nightmare. On the flip side, this makes developers reluctant to write for *current* stable releases as stable is a mostly-working-kind-of-stable and they know not only there is something new and shiny coming up (it always is), but that it is coming *soon*.


Desktop vs Mobile

The long and successful history of Qt means there are (tens of) thousands of developers fairly familiar with Qt. However, this does not translate to mobile applications galore for several reasons. First of all, those people need to be motivated to write high quality mobile apps. They will not start to develop for mobile devices just because they are there, not any more than an enterprise Java developer would drop everything to make midlets. Sure, if someone is already familiar with a technology, that person will likely use it in it’s hobbies too - and that’s it, "desktop Qt people" are NOT the base that will spawn the bulk of serious mobile Qt developers/companies - those people will come from people with existing mobile background or interests. This seems to be slowly being realized now, as porting tutorials for Android and iPhone started appearing on Forum Nokia. This is an important shift, and while might be characterized as aggressive, it’s exactly those developers that need to be targeted to get the Qt ecosystem on the mobile industry radar.


The big GTK+ migration

Since July 2009, it has been known Qt will take the place of GTK+ in Maemo/MeeGo. To be precise, this is not as much about GTK+ itself, but about the GTK+ based Hildon application framework, initially developed by Nokia. It is understandable that such a major change touches on many existing developers and that such transitions are always difficult to manage. However, there were a lot of indecision and mixed signals from both Nokia and the community as to what exactly should be done "for now" and "for the future", what is or isn’t available in Qt and just how important it is for Qt to mimic/fit in the existing, but deprecated Hildon environment. In retrospect, once the strategic choice of going Qt was made, the push for Qt should have been much stronger, helped with migration plans/tutorials for existing developers.

 The big Symbian migration

Almost literally the same applies to Symbian people. While nowadays it will be hard to find large gangs of fierce AVKON supporters and the public/private API approach of Symbian, there is still a significant "why do we need Qt" notion. It has to be made clear AVKON is dead and, again, just as with GTK, handing out Qt tutorials that start from scratch will not help as much as good, targeted migration plans/tutorials for Symbian people. Just putting Qt on a Symbian handset preinstalled will NOT be a sufficient motivator for existing developers.


New vs existing developers 

As seen from my stance in the "desktop vs mobile" section, it is clear why I think people already doing or interested in apps for mobile devices are important, and there has simply not been a widely successful effort (yet) to help ease people into Qt’s way of doing things. This is well illustrated in the experience with Maemo - most Qt apps were written by people who came to Maemo *first* and *then* started doing Qt.

You have Python - use it. 

There are two Python binding projects available for Qt, both open source but neither have the status of being an "official" Nokia binding and Ovi not supporting Python apps at all. Again, from Maemo experience we see that there is a huge interest in these because even with the limited documentation and support available the number of Python apps is comparable to the number of pure C++ Qt apps due to the low entry barrier of Python.

TIMTOWDI*

Some people will snarl at this, but.. there are simply too many ways to do things. Or, rather, there aren't (sufficiently) recommended ways of doing things. Quality training material is starting to appear, but any time somebody asks how do I do a GUI there needs to be a longish discussion as to what version is being targeted, what tools are acceptable, etc, etc. If there are 5 ways of popping up a Hello World dialog (many of them quite 'old school'), know that people WILL get lost or at least discouraged when they try do merge docs from all over the net.


Show me the money

As seen/heard from many professional (as in for-money) developers on various Maemo forums, they do not really care about Qt. Sure, it’s cool and a lot friendlier than some previous approaches, but the ultimate test for them is the market. If a super-appstore existed and it required you to code in assembler, it wouldn’t matter much, these guys would just bite the bullet and do it that way. The morale ? Technical merit seems to influence adoption rate a lot less that many believe and the primary aspect are really cost and perceived benefit. Let me emphasize - this only applies to large-scale commercial development, FOSS and hobby coders *will* be affected a lot more. And while we are talking about money...

The closed door

One of the lures of application stores is that they are simple to use, accessible to one-man-show developers, and, well, 'just work'. Unfortunately, Ovi was not really ready for the Qt apps (or the N900) in the planned 'end of 2009' timeframe - whether they had more important things to do or more important holes to fix, I wouldn’t know. In any case it took a hefty extra 6 months until you could actually submit Qt applications to Ovi, and the Ovi QA process for these is still trailing the community QA process in many ways.

Chuck Norris releases PR1.2

Well, at least for onlookers it felt like it would take Chuck Norris' superpowers to get the infamous PR1.2 firmware released for the N900. This alone was not a problem, firmware delays happen, but the bundled nature of firmwares meant that Qt4.6 that was ready at the end of March could not be distributed until the end of May, a 2 month delay for no reason at all. On a side note, due to bad communications, this issue caused an outage of several weeks for community developers unlucky enough to depend on packages that have been changed in the update. While this particular incident was Maemo-specific, the Symbian counterparts are not immune to such risks.


So, does all this mean Qt is doomed, the future is grim and is all hope lost ? Not at all, as you might have noticed, many of the issues are growing pains, have already been resolved, or are at least in the phase of being taken care of. The change that is going on is really huge, a lot bigger than a lot of people realize, however, it would be not be sincere to say all will be peachy from here on. Even though the time for reaping the benefits is finally closing in, there are a few points that need to be addressed before Qt becomes a no-brainer for both commercial and community development and all those apps start pouring in. Tune in for for the final, third part of this series to see what these are.

So, where are those mobile Qt apps ? (Part 1, History)

As part of a testing and compatibility effort, Nokia announced Qt to be officially available on Maemo 5 (i.e. the Nokia N900) on the Maemo Summit in October 2009. A lot of time has passed since then, and despite the sizeable Qt developer community and popularity of Qt on desktops, the number of Qt applications remained fairly low. This is true for both among the (admittedly few) commercial apps and in the (thousands strong) Extras community repository. In this three part blog series I’ll try to analyze what are the causes for this shortage and what needs to be done to remedy this situation lest it continue onto MeeGo and future Symbian versions.

This series consists of three parts (yes, I finally realized my posts are too long) :

1. History - the timeline of Qt with regard to Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo
2. Adoption - describing what problems have hindered a "more than words" Qt adoption so far
3. Resolution - what are the remaining logjams and how to break them

As described above, in this part, I’ll write about the history of the Qt timeline in Maemo/MeeGo in order to gain some perspective:

• 2008 Jan - Nokia buys Trolltech (makers of Qt) 
• 2008 Apr - Qt support for Maemo is announced
• 2008 Oct - First Android handset released
• 2008 Dec - Qt4.5 becomes available as a community edition for Maemo 4.1
• 2009 May - Symbian^4 deprecates AVKON and carbide C++ in favor of Qt4.6 and the Nokia Qt SDK
• 2009 Jul - Qt4.6 is announced as the base application framework of Maemo 6 (Harmattan)
• 2009 Oct - Official Qt support (4.6 for 2010Q1) announced for Maemo 5 on the Maemo Summit, and beta made available
• 2009 Nov - The N900 ships with the not-overly advertised community Qt4.5 version, first post-ARM11 Android 1.6 is released
• 2010 Jan - Stable Python Qt bindings are released
• 2010 Feb - Nokia and Intel announce MeeGo, Qt4.6.2 released with Smart Installer beta allowing install of Qt apps to existing S60 devices 
• 2010 Apr - The Nokia N8 is announced, the first Symbian^3 handset that will ship with Qt4.6 preloaded, bridging old AVKON based S60 and the future Qt based Symbian^4
• 2010 May - After much delay, the PR1.2 firmware for the Nokia N900 is released with Qt4.6.2
• 2010 Jun - The Nokia Qt SDK is released and Ovi store starts accepting Qt apps 

The Qt toolkit is one of the pivotal points of Nokia’s future strategy as it will be the base of it’s MeeGo handheld user experience and also the umbrella that will unite Symbian and MeeGo from an application developer perspective in the future. We can see that this is no short term plan - it took quite some time to arrive here. Just to put things into perspective I included a few Android events. This should also make it clear how "new" the Android arrival is and how it hardly fits the Qt strategy on the platform level - though I would still like to see Qt apps on Android.

In any case, seeing the timeline it is obvious that the Qt strategy was not a whim, it was a broad, consistent strategy. Qt has come a long way, it has been available to developers living on the mobile edge for well over a years (and two decades for those that are familiar with Qt from the desktop). It fought it’s way to actual devices and stable repositories (an install base of several million handsets via the Smart Installer and the N900 since PR1.2). Ovi now accepts Qt apps. The Nokia Qt SDK is released with the nifty QtCreator IDE largely reducing the pains of the powerful-but-linux-guru-oriented scratchbox environment of the Maemo SDK. The Qt API is a lot friendlier than the AVKON APIs or the generic rag-tag Linux APIs ever were. There are already thousands of developers (both FOSS and commercial) with a lot of previous Qt experience. Qt is touted as the future of all Nokia smartphones. We should be swimming in cool Qt apps, right ? Well, sadly, as many N900 owners are painfully aware, that is still not quite the case, and while there are a few community efforts and the telltale commercial app, it’s far from a landrush. In this blog post I have outlined the Qt’s history, it’s promise on mobile platforms and all the good stuff. If you want to know where the sand is slowing the gears down and what both Nokia/Intel and the community can do to unblock the cogs, check back in a couple of days for parts two and three !