Qt on Symbian
Posted by rickb on April 19th, 2010
Yet a new platform to exercise my Qt chops on.
As you may or may not know, Qt has been acquired by Nokia. It appears that Qt will be the development environment of choice for all of Nokia current and future OS’s, including Symbian, Maemo, and the newly announced Meego.
And that’s a good thing.
Leveraging Qt
I can speak for a newbie getting into the Symbian S60 environment: If it weren’t for Qt, this would have been a much more difficult endeavor.
As it was, I was able to put together a pretty sophisticated molecular modeling app, complete with 3D OpenGLES visualization, in about six weeks, thus far. (Still putting in HTML downloads and cleaning up interaction.)
It’s not without issues. The Trolls and Nokia are still getting to grok one another. So some things (like the menu system) display some strange behavior, and Qt doesn’t support OpenGLES on Symbian, yet (at least not on the S60 devices.) So, I’ve had to ‘go native’ for the OpenGL. Not the end of the world – it just means opening up a Native Symbian window and creating a QObject-based class to serve as a controller. It’s working fine.
Trying to do this in native Symbian would have likely at least doubled the development time, I think. By leveraging the Qt knowledge already gained, the process of moving to a new platform like Symbian is greatly facilitated.
Now, if we could just get Qt on the iPhone and Android (efforts are underway for these – see here and here.)