Qt on the N900

Up until now, Qt for Maemo based devices has only been available as a community project.

Up until now?

Yes, up until now. We're happy to announce the first technology preview of Qt 4.6 for the N900 (Maemo 5). Highlights:

• Native look & feel via Hildonized style
• Hardware acceleration with OpenGL ES 2
• Input method support (hardware keyboard and software keyboard)
• Global menu integration - QMenuBar will be mapped to Maemo's global menu
• Online/offline support in libQtNetwork
• Standard Dialogs support (e.g. file dialog)
• Maemo stacked widget support
• Multimedia playback via Phonon

Most of those features were already available in the Qt 4.5 based community port and have been brushed up, extended and partially rewritten for Qt 4.6. There are still some rough edges, but we're confident that we can deliver a fully supported Qt running on the N900 during the lifetime of Qt 4.6.

Here's another of those videos straight from the lab showing Qt on the N900. Watch it if you want to get an impression of where we are now, or if you're just curious about what the color of our desks here in Munich is :)

(planet readers click here for the video)

Note that Qt for Maemo 5 can currently only be built within the Maemo scratchbox-based SDK. We're in the process of creating official packages, but it'll take a few more days until they hit upstream. For the brave ones that want to try it today, you can build the Maemo-ized Qt version with the following configure switches:

-maemo5 -opengl es2

Note that the Maemo SDK contains a full emulator, so even without owning a device, you can test how your Qt app will look and feel on a N900 device.

Download link for the source code: http://get.qt.nokia.com/qt/source/qt-x11-maemo-src-4.6.0-alpha1.tar.gz

Public git repository: http://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt-x11-maemo

Announcement on our website: http://qt.nokia.com/developer/qt-for-maemo-developers