We’ve finished analysing the results of the Qt Code Example Survey. A big thank you to the more than three hundred developers who participated – you’ve given us a lot to think about, and pointed out where we can improve!
Special thanks to our winner Tamás Gábor Barna – Tamás has been sent a brand new Nokia N9 smartphone for his detailed feedback (we’ve attached a short interview with Tamás at the end of this post).
There was a lot of feedback on individual examples, and we’ll be reviewing those comments on a case-by-case basis. At a higher level, the most common themes from the feedback were:
- Improve the architecture of examples to make it easier for developers to re-use components
- More and better documentation of the examples
- Support Qt versions before Qt 4.7
- Provide a feedback channel for developers to comment on particular examples
As a result of the feedback received we will add a new requirement to the architectural design and example review checklists: in the future our example applications will be composed from smaller re-usable components. We’ll also be improving documentation, and make sure that it’s easy to find.
We won’t be working on older versions of Qt – our focus will be to provide good coverage of what is most relevant now, and of all the new technologies coming into the framework in the near future. However, all the previous versions of our examples, for example those supporting Maemo 5 and Symbian 5th Edition, are still available in Projects, and we encourage the community to continue the development of these.
Lastly, we actually already have a really good feedback mechanism for our examples! All Nokia Developer examples are hosted in Projects. If you have any suggestions for improvement, you can create enhancement or defect tickets, start a discussion or even join the project and contribute. From the pages of the individual projects you can also read more detailed project specific documentation in the wiki and access the source and binaries of older versions. We’re looking at the example pages in the static site and also the projects’ pages to see if we can make this feedback mechanism more obvious.
Thanks again to everyone who contributed. If you have any more ideas on how we can improve our code examples offering, please contact Community Help and Support!
Regards
Hamish Willee & Tomi Paananen
A short Interview with Tamás Gábor Barna, winner of the example survey competition
How would you describe yourself?
I’m a freshly graduated electrical engineer, an open-minded gadget and new technologies enthusiastic, who likes hardware and software both.
How have you ended up in mobile software development?
I participated in the Calling All Innovators contest, and just fell in love with Qt. From there it was quite straightforward to also develop my programs for mobile platform.
What are your areas of interest in mobile business?
I don’t have specific goals, but I like making apps that makes life easier and better.
