A new Qt SDK, the Qt SDK 1.2, is now available for download, and it makes it easier than ever to create rich applications with improved performance.

The new SDK includes the latest version of Qt Creator (2.4.1) as well as Qt 4.8 for desktop and embedded developers including Windows, Mac and Linux/X11 (released as stand-alone in December).

Qt mobile app downloads continue to grow in Nokia Store, and the SDK update contains mobile improvements for the Symbian and MeeGo Harmattan 1.2 targets, new Qt mobility examples in Qt Creator and easy integration of the Qt In-App Purchasing API, which enables developers to build in-app purchasing into their Qt mobile application.

Key benefits within the updated SDK include:

Qt Creator 2.4.1

Qt Creator 2.4.1 is a patch version containing some fixes and enhancements for Qt Creator 2.4.

-        Improvements in the C++ and QML editors, such as syntax highlighting in QML, and improved static QML code-checking features.

-        Improvements of the code refactoring tools

-        Reusable “schemes” for the coding styles (C++ and QML) between projects

Qt 4.8 for desktop and embedded Windows, Mac and Linux/X11

-        Qt Platform Abstraction, which makes it easier to port QtGui to new windowing systems

-        Qt Quick improvements including the possibility to embed OpenGL shader effects in Qt Quick apps with the help of a QML shader add-on.

-        Qt WebKit 2.2.1 with updated version of QtWebKit from the WebKit project, including a wide range of improvements to the HTML, CSS and JavaScript technologies.

-        Threaded Open GL making it easier, and more thread safe, to render OpenGL from more than one thread concurrently

More Qt mobility code examples.

The updated Qt SDK includes over 20 Qt Mobility examples.

In-App Purchasing

In-App Purchasing enables developers to seamlessly offer additional, premium content for purchase, such as new items/levels/functionality and try and buy application upgrades, within the confines of the app experience.

This enables new revenue opportunities within mobile Qt apps. The In-App Purchasing API beta has been available and manually installable, but now this component can be added and maintained in the Qt SDK configuration, simply by using the SDK maintenance tool.

Having the opportunity to include In-App Purchasing can increase revenue substantially for mobile developers. With strong, continued growth of Qt app downloads in Nokia Store, and the store itself continuing to grow – over 11 million downloads per day – Qt continues to be a good choice for developers creating mobile apps for the 155+ million Qt enabled Nokia phones currently in the market.

Congratulations to the team who worked on this release. We all hope you enjoy the new Qt SDK 1.2

Get started and download here

Daniel Kihlberg

Global Director Qt Ecosystem

Day one of the Qt Day in Florence, Italy is sold out. The agenda for the day is dedicated to the use of Qt in Italy from a technical as well as business perspective.

Italian business leaders such as Alberto Ciarnello from Telecom Italia and Mario Fumagalli from Mixel have been telling us about why Qt has been a compelling choice for them. We have also heard  Italian Qt developers Easy Digital present their shipping Qt based Set-Top Box, and Qt Partner M31 will be demonstrating its Qt-based automation framework.

The conference is organised by Qt Partners with Develer in the lead cooperating with M31 and Digia and Nokia. The set-up of the event is similar to Qt Developer Days and Qt Developer Conferences with its mixture of technical tracks and Qt-in-use sessions. However, this event in Florence is focused on the local developer ecosystem with over 30 sessions delivered mainly in Italian.

During the morning, Nokia’s Manuel Reverte-Castro, Head of Ecosystem Developer Experience for South Europe, took us through the Qt opportunities in the mobile space, providing various examples of developers and companies that make money with Qt on the Nokia store. Burkhard Stubert, from Nokia, also delivered an engaging keynote session about Qt 5 and the Qt Project, and how you make a good ROI from targeting multiple platforms with Qt.

Digia will present the Qt Commercial roadmap and their focus on enhancing Qt for desktop and embedded development pushing forward features and functions that benefit cross-platform development on non-mobile targets.

Developers at the event can take advantage of a real-time help desk staffed by Qt engineers, learn more about licensing, as well as how to become a Qt Ambassador or to sign up to be a Qt Partner.

Tomorrow will feature even more technical sessions, and a fully-fledged community day. We’ll be bringing highlights of both days to you in the coming days.

To learn more about the event, visit http://www.qtday.it

The event also has its own Twitter account – follow @QtDay on Twitter (event hashtag: #QtDayITA)

It’s impossible to do every single thing perfectly when opening up the whole development of Qt. Hence the Qt contribution process has to be improved, helping everyone to make Qt even better. I’ll highlight some the suggestions brought up at Qt Contribution Days. Here is my take on a Troll approach on how to achieve excellence and learning how to make Qt even better than today.

“How can we do this better? Can it be done in a simpler and more elegant way?” are two key questions which have governed the people who have developed Qt from the start. The same goes for learning. We never stop learning. Trolls like to teach themselves new things and learn from each other. A well-meant error is also also key to achieving excellence. We thrive on change and achieve excellence through trying and failing. A well-meant error, on any level, should never be punished, because it is an opportunity for us to learn and improve. Being a contributor to Qt, the values on learning and excellence apply to you too!

Ideas for the contribution process

Several topics at Qt Contributors Days addressed improvements needed to the process, and how to make the contribution process easier. I’ll highlight three of the most significant ones, and urge you to add even more suggestions for improvements at this wiki: Improving The Qt Contribution Process.

The first noteworthy contribution process suggestion at Qt Contributors Day related to making better documentation on porting Qt to a new platform. Using Qt Lighthouse, porting is easier. But it’s still an expert challenge to adapt to a new operating system or platform. Having a migration overview, an architectural guidance, some experiences, would be really appreciated. The notes from the round table on porting challenges between Qt4 and Qt5 explain this idea further.

There are a lot of new contributors joining the Qt project. Having an overview of different activities, module maintainers and such can be time consuming. In some cases you might be even a detective trying to find status and were to begin. A Qt module activity overview inspired by Canonicals Launchpad could address the need for an overview. Aggregating module data from Qt commits, e-mail lists and relevant blog posts on a status page. This includes a list of who has contributed to the module, and who the maintainers are.

Cornelius Schumacher had an interesting suggestion for making a repository automation for Qt add-ons, making it really easy to use complementary libraries. Schumacker labled this as “CPAN for Qt”: a website listing available Qt-based libraries, making it easier for developers to find useful libs and for library developers to promote their work. It’s a really interesting project which can help foster an ecosystem of Qt add-ons.

These are only three humble suggestions on how to improve the Qt and the contribution process. There were of course more issues and features suggested at Qt Contributors Day. I hope also you will contribute your suggestion. Please use this wiki-page suggesting improvements.

Image source - scribus.net

Version 1.4.0 of the popular open source desktop publishing program, Scribus, was released recently. This is great news for the community at large, but it also is a mark of pride for the Qt team.

The new version of Scribus has moved to Qt 4, “tuning for cross-platform compatibility” and taking advantage of some of the best new features in Qt 4.7.4 including Qt Quick, improved image caching technology and Qt Creator.

For the uninitiated, Scribus is a professional page layout tool with press-ready output to PDF files. Underneath its modern and user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as colour separations, CMYK and Spot Color support. It is available for Apple Mac OS X Leopard (or higher), Linux as well as Windows 32 and 64-bit machines under the free and open source General Public License.

Writing on their own developer blog the team notes, “Thanks to the port to Qt 4, the Scribus Team now also provides install files for Mac OS X 10.5 or later (DMG or pkg format), as well as a native version for OS/2 Warp 4 and eComStation. Additionally, thanks to feedback from users of other UNIX platforms, Scribus will build and run on more of those platforms as well.”

Scribus use cases are many and varied and the software has been used to create everything from CD cover sleeves and booklets, Swiss mountain village tourist brochures right up to professionally presented magazines.

Projects like Scribus are one of the key motivators for those of us here who work on Qt. Seeing quality programs being developed using Qt give us a boost in our work. We love to hear about projects like this, so if you have a cool project, whether its open source or commercial (or somewhere in-between) let us know. We might even feature you here on the Qt blog!

PhoneGap Biolab, by Yohei Shimomae. License: CC BY-NC

Qt meets PhoneGap! Or at least this is the goal of a community project that ICS has started with the ambition of attracting both PhoneGap and Qt developers. The plan is to get Qt as a target of the PhoneGap SDK (or Apache Cordova, as it is being renamed) following roughly the Qt 5 development schedule and keeping an eye to a Qt 4 backport. The result would allow PhoneGap developers to add Qt based platforms to their targets with little or no extra effort. Needless to say contributors are welcome! Both PhoneGap and Qt are free software developed openly.

Some background

As explained at phonegap.com:

PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores. PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best… HTML and JavaScript.

With the PhoneGap SDK you can take a generic HTML5 app, connect it to native platform APIs and generate native packages ready to be published for the platforms targeted. As of today PhoneGap fully supports iOS, Android and Windows Phone, and has partial coverage for Blackberry OS, Web OS, Bada and Symbian (through WebKit).

PhoneGap is being mainly used to develop apps deeply connected to websites, catalog-like apps, basic games… This is not only about handsets, the usage for tablets is growing as well. Check their list of featured apps. Take for instance the case of the Wikipedia app, which I have followed as an occasional Wikimedia volunteer. The Wikimedia Foundation started working on an app for iOS. When they finally addressed a version for Android they decided to avoid entirely the development of another app written from scratch and they went for a PhoneGap. This will be now their basis for any mobile platform.

From a Qt perspective the PhoneGap approach sounds as familiar as provocative. As we know, one of the things that makes Qt great is the potential for cross-platform compatibility. In the past years we have also seen how Qt has grown in the orthogonal axis of platform integration: from the imperative C++ to the declarative and javascriptish Qt Quick, with a full fledged and competitive QtWebKit module serving as gateway to the pure Web languages. Other approaches have been added by the community, like for instance the Python bindings. In a way PhoneGap is an alternative technology, but on the other hand they can be combined in very interesting ways. We like experiments so here goes one more.

Bringing Qt closer to mainstream mobile developers

PhoneGap has grown mainly thanks to customers willing to pay or develop one single app running on iOS and Android. Now the Windows Phone target is getting at the same level of support, meaning that developers checking an extra box will get an extra package ready for WP devices. Wouldn’t it be nice to add a box or more for Qt enabled platforms? Offer a straight path to convert that HTML5 generic code in a native Qt app packaged and ready to be published?

Which Qt platforms, how well supported and how soon depends on many factors, being the most relevant *you*. Being a user of Nokia devices I would like to see PhoneGap apps populating the Nokia Store and apps.formeego.org of course. But for instance, being also an Ubuntu user I would be also extremely happy seeing that flow nurturing also their Software Centre. And… (what would you like to see?) 

It’s time to kickstart your learning journey for 2012.

Join us in Florence at the end of the month  at Qt Day 2012 for two days packed with exciting technical and business focused sessions.

This is the only Italian event where you can learn directly from Nokia and certified Qt partners how to best use Qt in your development, business and industry. The majority of the sessions will be delivered in Italian.

The event commences with a Business Track on January 27^th focussing on case studies and the use of Qt in commercial projects, followed by a Technical Track on January 28 where we dig more into the technicalities of what’s new in Qt, covering hot topics like Qt 5 and the Qt Project.

Highlights include a keynote from our very own Head of Ecosystem Developer Experience for South Europe, Manuel Reverte-Castro. His talk will center around the huge relevance of Qt for Nokia as a strategic short and long term development platform, which enables developers to monetize applications.

Digia, Qt Commercial will be presenting the capabilities of the Qt Commercial team as well as the Qt Commercial roadmap highlighting the planned additional features and functions, as well as information on future supported platforms.

Event details:

Date: January 27, 28, 2012

Location: AC Hotel Firenze Porta al Prato, Florence, Italy

Cost: Free

Web: www.qtday.it

More highlights, talks and speaker names will be shared soon. Stay tuned for updates.

If you are a Qt Ambassador planning to attend the event, let us know – we have some special treats for you. If you’re not yet a Qt Ambassador, check out how you can be one here

Qt Certified Partner, Develer is the main organizer of the event in collaboration with M31 , Nokia  and Digia, Qt Commercial.

For more details about the agenda, please visit http://qtday.it/

To register for the Technical Track and/or the Business Track, please go here. Seats are limited, so make sure you sign up early!

To get updates on the event, please follow @QtDay on Twitter (hashtag: #QtDayITA)

We hope to see you in Florence!

You asked for them, waited for them, and we promised they would be worth the wait.

Videos of the tech sessions from Qt Developer Days have been encoded and uploaded, and are now available for your viewing pleasure.

The link you need is http://developer.qt.nokia.com/videos

Use the Qt Developer Days tag on the left side to filter our other videos out.

Huge thanks to Vladimir, Torsten, Michael and everyone else that spent time recording, reviewing, editing and publishing these videos.

Happy viewing, happy holidays, and happy new year.

David (writing from sunny Melbourne)

The year of 2011 ends on a very positive note.

The interest in Qt from the software development community is bigger than ever before, allow me to explain. Qt with Qt Quick works more powerfully than ever before, Qt 4.8 libraries are out and initial feedback is really good, on top of this, the preparations for Qt 5 are progressing well. Put simply, this is a really exciting time.

The Qt project has enjoyed a tremendous boost with over 1,000 developers now signed up and regular contributions being made. As an expression of our widespread health, working contributions from non-Nokia employees currently impacting the core modules such as Qt base and Qt creator represent over 20% of all contributions – we have a strong gene pool and you are helping to make that happen.

The Nokia Store has 10 million downloads per day and offers developers an opportunity to target 155 million Nokia devices with Qt apps – and there is ongoing momentum here, as Nokia has plans to make Qt a core part of its strategy in bringing great apps to “the next billion”.. All data points with regard to Qt on the Nokia store are up in 2011 – a lot more Qt apps are being downloaded by Nokia users (10x), so this means more revenue to Qt developers (20x). You only need to look at the Nokia N9 for a good proof point of the “power of Qt”.

During 2011 Qt apps were published on the Android Market and we also saw the first Qt app on the Apple App store and we had Ubuntu (with Unity and Ubuntu one) announced as another opportunity – added to this, RIM is also now embracing and broadening the Qt opportunity with the BlackBerry/QNX initiative. In 2008 we had approx. 250k Qt downloads from Nokia sites alone, now in 2011 it is close to two million and we have seen developers creating mobile apps with great interest shown in the IPTV/ STB market as well as in automotive… Add to all that the strong finish of the year with the Qt Developer Conferences in Tokyo and Beijing, two events that impressed me in different ways, both draw record attendance – and you can see why I am feeling upbeat!

China had the highest number of attendees ever – for any Qt developer event worldwide – with almost 1,100 participants. Japan had 30% more attendees than last year and attendees demonstrated a lot of in-depth Qt knowledge and enthusiasm for Qt 5. At both events we had all the sessions except the keynotes delivered by native speakers, and in many cases this entailed using Nokia employees from different Nokia offices around the world or local Qt partners. Huge thanks go to all of our sponsors, speakers and participants that made these such good events and also to everyone else contributing in different ways – from forums to code – in making Qt such a great product.

For more details, incl. video and pictures from the Beijing and Tokyo please read: Qt Developer events in Beijing and Tokyo, both draw record attendance

And to see the great videos from Qt Developer days: Qt video portal

Daniel Kihlberg
Global Director Qt Ecosystem
Nokia, Qt Developer Relations Team

Qt Conference in Beijing

China is already one of the largest, if not the largest market, when it comes to Qt developers. The growth of Qt usage has been steady and rapid since 2008 across multiple industries. The set top box market in particular is growing very fast and it will be interesting to see how what appeared to be strong interest in the Nokia N9 – sold out in the stores – will result in new development efforts with regard to mobile apps.

In the keynote from Chinese micro-blogging specialist Sina, the new version of Sina’s Weibo application was presented (see video). This popular social network and media app (it’s a sort of Facebook-Twitter social network hybrid) has been designed for the Nokia N9 smartphone and built in Qt. When it came to the development, it took four developers about two months to create the N9 Qt app. Sina is now working on making the app available for Symbian devices.

In the keynotes we also received some extra focus on the Chinese Nokia opportunity and learned how the Nokia Store is the number one mobile app store and how N8 and other Symbian devices remain very popular and a good target for Qt developers

All sessions provided valuable insights on local Chinese success stories with Qt, and the feedback and interest around the product was a great chance to showcase Qt and increase knowledge about the use of Qt in the desktop space.

We know from our web metrics that Qt interest levels, traffic and downloads from China are growing with every passing day. It is my belief that there is still vast growth potential in China for Qt on desktop, mobile and embedded.

Qt conference in Tokyo: live streamed and also with record attendance.

Tokyo is not just capital of Japan, it is one of the globe’s capital cities of technology and consumer electronics. Having the Qt conference in Japan gave us a great opportunity to engage with the skilled Japanese Qt programmer community, and share knowledge with them over the course of the two day event. Japanese consumer electronics runs on a wide range of platforms, and the code and skills “reuse” nature of Qt combined with the higher performance at lower price points that Qt 5 promises to deliver appeals very much to Japanese developers.

With ISB Corporation as Platinum sponsor, SRA-Software Research Associates as Gold sponsor and Digia — as well as Nomovok as Silver sponsors supported by TI and Freescale, our partners and sponsors made great contributions to make the two day event a great success.

The 15 exhibitors at the event shared the limelight with demos from community initiatives such as: Konoha Project at Yokohama National University, Kanto Qt Meet-up, Kansai Qt Meet-up, Nagoya Qt Meet-up as well as the KDE – Japan KDE Users Group

The fully booked tech track at our Japan event was designed to provide the latest and the deepest technical updates and the business track sought to provide better understanding of how Japanese companies can take advantage of Qt – and what “UI tools that are available” Qt, QML, Qt with HTML5…. An introduction to the next evolution of Qt Quick and “Live Demo Coding” also provided good examples of how easy and fast Qt Quick can take you from (literally) nothing to a good app.

The business track also had a very high attendance: Mr. Masaki Gondo explained how eSOL bundled Qt in its eT-Kernel SDK. T-Kernel is the most popular embedded RTOS in Japan, and the use of Qt enables device manufacturers using eT-Kernel to not have to replace what is a proven platform to achieve improved performance and differentiation of their products

SRA’s Mr. Ryosuke Yamada held a session entitled “Qt Everywhere” about how the community expands support platforms to Android, iOS and other platforms taking advantage of Qt’s openness. This discussion was received with great high interest before Mr. Kazuyoshi Takahashi from ISB introduced the use of Qt in health care products, a traditionally strong industry for Qt and for Japan. He also highlighted how they benefitted from the Qt partners’ ISB support services.

A device that got a lot of attention was Spider (or more specifically its UI did). Mr. Masaya Takahashi from PTP presented SPIDER, which at this point in time is available for commercial use. It is a media server that records all TV programs on eight channels for a full week. Through the use of Qt and Open GL it can be searched easily and provides a nice UX (UI overview of content incl. text input).

At the end of the day, we welcomed Mr. Teppei Asaba from Fujitsu Computer Technologies, who has developed a common Linux distribution used broadly in the Fujitsu group. He emphasized the importance of having a common foundation (back-end /business logic implementation) across various products to efficiently focus on differentiation of the UI rather than building up all products from scratch. He mentioned that the Qt Everywhere concept fully met their requirement.

At the last of six case studies, yes it was a long day, Mr. Kazumi Koganezawa introduced how SSIL adopted Qt as a framework for their product to analyze electromagnetic fields. For him it was easy to learn Qt, and an efficient way to achieve high performance graphics capability, essential for products like CAD.

The evening ended with a networking party before we had dinner with the members of the various community initiatives.

Daniel Kihlberg
Global Director Qt Ecosystem
Nokia, Qt Developer Relations Team

Orange's Helium browser running on a Nokia N900

Orange Labs UK is a development group that has been working with Qt on mobile web technologies for some years. Some of their project work has turned into popular customer-facing applications like Orange Wednesdays.

In 2010, around the time of Qt Quick’s rise to prominence, Orange Labs began a mobile browser project to experiment with QML. The result is Orange Helium, a lightweight QtWebKit-based browser.

At the time the Orange Helium project began, the only mobile port of QtQuick was on Maemo5, so that was the development platform Orange Labs UK targeted first. The team’s work revolved around browser Chrome/UI development, focused on user experience and usability at the fore.

The Orange team said that they spent a lot of time looking at the browser core, experimenting with the WebCore functionalities that QtWebKit offers (e.g. WebGL).

There was also a strong focus on browser extensions, as the team focused on designing a framework to implement mini in-browser apps, to deliver small and very focused services. In general, the Orange developers were trying as much as possible of QML and spent much of their time working on experiments aimed at comparing QML versus C++, with an eye on performance.

Within a few weeks of work, the team’s browser had reached a good level of maturity and a couple of candidate UIs were then developed. By separately compiling QtWebkit, Orange Labs managed to run some in-browser WebGL demos too on Ubuntu. After this, Orange contributed the Helium mobile browser for inclusion in the MeeGo Community Edition for the N900.

As well as wanting to show support for the MeeGo platform and Qt, the Orange Labs team is looking at the project to research and experiment with features and services that could be provided to customers using this browser as the platform. Currently the app is a simple yet useful browser allowing you to surf the web and bookmark your favourites.

The road ahead for this project continues to take shape, and is open for other ideas and contributions. All who are interested can follow (and participate in) this open source project at: http://github.com/OrangeLabsUK/Helium-Mobile-Browser

Orange Labs is eager to listen to any suggestions you might have!