Qt Mobility Project - Technology Preview Package

The Qt Mobility Project here at Nokia has come quite some way and the next step is to share our Technology Preview package of the APIs with you!

Our intention is to share early and share often, and so this release follows from the individual Qt Labs releases we have made available over the last few months.
At this stage in the game, the majority of the APIs themselves are of a good quality and more appropriately labeled BETA, however as work is still in progress on some of the backends the team have decided to label this package as our ‘Technical Preview’.

Upon finalization of the APIs, which is targeted for Q2 2010, they will be made available as a Qt Solution (Qt add on, for those unfamiliar with the term), and provided under the same licensing as Qt. Following this the individual APIs will incrementally will be added into future Qt releases.
You will start to see that process during 2010.

On commencing the Qt Mobility Project our initial thoughts were that the new APIs we would bring to Qt would be of use largely to our Mobile application developer communities, but as the project has evolved we see substantial value for other platforms, not just mobile.

Our project goals are unchanged; to make Qt an even more comprehensive application and UI framework by developing new APIs to meet the evolving needs developers. The Software development world is a dynamic place these days, new hardware and service technologies are being presented all the time. Developers want to take advantage of this and so it is our objective to make sure Qt can lead the way.

Within Nokia the Qt Mobility Project continues to be led by our Qt Development Frameworks team with collaboration from Symbian, Maemo, Services and several others from within Nokia R&D. We continue to adopt an open and flexible approach toward requirement input and will continue co-designing with some of Nokia’s best architects. Receiving input from the wider development community is viewed and valued as an essential part of the process.

The technology preview package contains a few example applications, which were not part of our scoped deliverable and are therefore only simple desktop implementations. They should help to get you started and we welcome contributions to polish them. In the meantime, our focus remains on the cross-platform APIs.

The continued development of the new APIs can be followed here on Qt Labs. Please continue to contribute and help us make this initiative a success for developers. We have also set up a new mailing list which you can subscribe to.

So for now, please download our Technology Preview package which contains the new APIs (source code), documentation and the aforementioned examples. It is intended that a .sis package for Symbian will follow in the next weeks, stay tuned.

Thankyou, Gerard & Alex.