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Added Sugar

Aside from the repeated corporate messaging of the terms stability and run time performance, we also learnt that Qt is presenting its roadmap with rather more clarity of late. As well as a new corporate blog (which is fairly gutsy and not that ‘corporate’ in the traditional sense at all), an expanded roadmap is now accessible from the company’s home page, as is a new closed beta programme for the first formalised Qt developer network.

In an attempt to bring in some third party affirmation of the importance of UI development, Qt brought in guest speaker Walter Bender of One Laptop Per Child fame. Bender is currently founder and executive director of Sugar Labs and was happy to share his views with us all on how we should build our strategies for UI development. “One mistake a lot of UIs make is that they try and make things too simple. The richness of life comes from its complexity. The goal with UIs should not be to reduce the complexity between humans and computers via UIs. Instead, you should think about designing learning-centric UIs. It’s not about simple, it’s about rich,” said Bender.

What Bender was saying was that when it comes to the do’s and don’ts of UI design, don’t build a Swiss Army knife. That is to say, don’t try and build all your application functionality into one part of your GUI. Bender’s approach may come across as slightly glossy, but he does understand what he’s doing. Perhaps he just presents it with more theatrical enthusiasm than we are accustomed to here in Europe.

Qt Comments

During this event the H also spoke to some highly respected members of the open source community, Frank Karlitschek, creator of openDesktop.org and member of the KDE community commented "So this event is interesting and here is why. I guess we all know about Nokia's mobile's strategy for the most part, but I think we're less sure of the company's long terms goals for the desktop. Within the KDE project, we have tried to work together with Nokia to find solutions for netbooks as well new and emerging devices,”.

“But what is probably now of most concern to developers working with Qt in general, is just how open will Nokia's development structure be in the future. Of course this software is labelled as open source, but that does not necessarily mean that it will always be developed openly within a truly open ecosystem. The next two years should be telling, this is a critical time for Nokia to prove that it can provide the right level of stewardship for Qt," added Karlitschek.

Also during the event, the H spoke personally to Nick Jones, VP & distinguished analyst at Gartner who was happy to share some strong views on the state of the Qt nation as it stands today, “Qt is an important tool for Nokia because they see it as (a) an internal tool to develop handset applications and (b) a tool which allows them to minimise the impact on developers of their current split platform strategy. So Nokia now has Symbian S60 for a wide range of smartphones, but has started introducing new high end models based on Maemo, of which the N900 is probably just the first. Qt allows developers to work with a single source, but target apps at both of these platforms. If hypothetically, (and this is definitely NOT a prediction) Nokia ever developed a Linux netbook, Qt would be useful there too. To summarise my view, Nokia’s interest in Qt isn’t just about being a good open source citizen, although I’m sure they’d be grateful for any interesting new features that come from the open source community. Qt is an important tool that solves a number of other problems for Nokia.”

With 700 engineers and programmers in attendance at Qt Developer Days 2009 Europe, this event does in fact represent the biggest Nokia developer event in the world this year. A lower key sister event is run in San Francisco at the start of November bringing the total Qt cognoscenti to just over 1,000. It is fair to say then that for now Qt holds a voice with its developer base in much the same way that it did pre-Nokia. It is also probably fair to say that the potential user boost consequences of both Nokia corporate and the LGPL will benefit the next generation of Qt. But Nokia has not won all the hearts and minds quite yet, so we will continue to watch and listen carefully in the months ahead.

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