Qt Labs

It's been possible to write Qt applications for Android for a while now: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/28/necessitas/

They only sold the commercial licensing: http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/07/nokia-sells-qt-licensing-and-servic… The actual development of Qt has still mainly been happening at Nokia, though with an increasing number of outside contributors thanks to the new governance model: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2012/01/10/qt-4-moved-to-open-governance/

There is already a nonprofit reponsible for the project infrastructure. http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/09/12/qt-project/ And a governeance model that looks open to the community. http://qt-project.org/wiki/The_Qt_Governance_Model

Someone already ported Qt to android along with Qt Creator integration, all-in-one installer, and a Qt library packaging system for your apps. Appears to be in development still. (edit) project page: http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/necessitas/ blog post: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/28/necessitas/

There was much gnawing of teeth when compilers started to take advantage of the “strict aliasing rule”: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/06/10/type-punning-and-strict-aliasing/ Programmers might think that it is okay to use uninitialized variables as a source of additional entropy (xoring with the real source of entropy), but it isn't, because the compiler will treat the uninitialized access as undefined behavior and eliminate code altogether: http://kqueue.org/blog/2012/06/25/more-randomness-or-less/ This 3-part blog post by Chris Lattner has various examples: http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-know.html

That sounds similar to the Steve Jobs Calculator Construction Set story (http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Calcu… For the 90% of people I imagine until something much better is forced upon them they'll be perfectly happy with what they have, be it Gmail or Outlook. For the people who want a better experience, I imagine a lot of them will have the technical ability to strike forth and do it. Essentially what you want is a backend message server and then let people communicate with it however they fancy with a high level API they can plug into their widget toolkit of choice if you go down that route. If you're into C++/Qt there's already a solution that does that (http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2009/09/21/introducing-qmf-an-advanced-mobile…

Hence QML. Right now I'm developing a desktop application with the interface done with QML and the main app in C++, and I would say the interface development is easy, as is connecting it to the C++. The caveat at present is that the standard desktop widgets are not yet fully available from QML (see [1] for a recent update). For most of my application this doesn't matter (I haven't decided how I'll do the settings dialog yet), but for enterprise apps it quite likely does. [1] http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2012/06/06/desktop-components-for-qt-5/

Nokia spun off Qt as a separate project, "truly open source", and stopped owning it directly. To me, it slightly looks like they want to stop investing in Qt, too. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAwNDA http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/10/21/the-qt-project-is-live/

Well, the project has simply transitioned to open governance, which means anyone can contribute and move up the value chain based on meritocracy. So, for example, KDE folks can now directly contribute to Qt and also directly affect its future direction. Trolltech/Nokia employees remain inside Nokia, and continue contributing actively to Qt (they are the largest contributors by far currently, I remember reading 85% of contributors being Nokia). Nokia continues to use Qt for Symbian/Meego as well as their future low-end platform, which currently only offers J2ME. They have officially announced that Qt will be used for "the next billion" which has been referred to as Meltemi software in leaks. Blog post explaining this: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/09/12/qt-project/

Well, I might be confused with exact terms, but Blackberry supports Qt on it's new platforms, meaning developers can distribute Qt apps. See http://blackberry.github.com/ndk/components.html#Qt If I'm correct, the Qt Lighthouse is integrated in Qt 4.8 (now RC1), which means easy porting for any platform, including Android. Remains to be seen if Nokia and Google come in terms with this officially though. Of course, you can already distribute Qt apps on Android, using third party ports like Necessitas: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/28/necessitas/ .

QMake can be quite helpful. Unfortunately, it may not be a good long-term choice: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2009/10/14/to-make-or-not-to-make-qmake-and-b… http://lists.qt.nokia.com/pipermail/qt5-feedback/2011-May/000042.html

Hidden flags for Nokia's Qt: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/04/01/qt-hidden-gems/

Yes. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056391 (later update: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2010/06/25/qt-for-google-native-client-previe… , transcript of Kay talk: http://blog.moryton.net/2007/12/computer-revolution-hasnt-happened-yet… ) WebGL wouldn't hurt either.

Here's some code for doing this with Qt Webkit for a local app: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2008/11/03/thumbnail-preview-of-web-page/ What you'd want to do is make a little server that does the same thing but can serve the resulting image, or just a simple utility that makes the thumbnails on demand and just saves them as images and call that from your web app.

Nokia is also finally about to catch up on the developer side, which might prove to be a big advantage. If ease of development is in any way correlated with application quality, we might see some action in the Nokia world soon. For the little glimpses that I've seen, UI development using Qt Quick and QML and is actually pretty nice. Nothing like the Symbian hell, and seemed a good deal more fun than developing for Android. (Can't say it's on par with iOS though, at least not yet.) This is the first time I'm actually _excited_ by a Nokia technology. Now is a good time to check it out, since the first phones supporting 4.7 are supposed to come out "soon" (my source at Nokia was reluctant at naming a specific date). And they just put out a new technology preview: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/01/20/qt-sdk-1-1-technology-preview-rele… If Qt / QML Quick seems a bit barebones, there's a library called Qt Components which adds things like checkboxes, progress bars etc.: http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-components