N9 App Clinic at QtDD San Francisco

vuorisalmi | 15 December, 2011 15:10

The second instance of Qt Developer Days 2011 took place in San Francisco from 29th November to 1st December. As well as in the QtDD event in Munich a month earlier, the N9 App Doctors in white jackets were there, hosting the N9 App Clinic.

Also in San Francisco, the main purpose of the clinic was help developers with their new N9 applications or bringing their existing Qt and/or Symbian apps to Nokia N9.

Santa Claus made an early visit at the event in the form of Richard Kerris, and the lucky participants with a red dot in their badges got a brand new Nokia N9 device. After that, the N9 App Clinic helped those lucky to-be N9 developers to get started with their devices and assisted them in reducing the size of their SIM cards into the MicroSIM form-factor. The SIM cutter is indeed an essential instrument in a doctor's toolbox.

N9 App Doctors - Santa's little helpers at QtDD in San Francisco

N9 App Doctors - Santa's little helpers.

As it comes to the actual developer questions, some of the highlights of the discussions were:

  • Instructions for porting Qt applications from Symbian to Nokia N9 were asked many times. At the moment, the best place to start is the Porting Symbian Qt Apps to Nokia N9 wiki page. We are also working on improving this viewpoint in the upcoming update of the Harmattan developer library.
  • NFC and developing applications utilizing NFC features. Check the earlier article about NFC, NFC available in PR1.1 software update. Also, there is a great page about NFC at developer.nokia.com.
  • How to get started with Qt SDK and a brand new N9? Read the Getting started with Harmattan using Qt SDK section in the Harmattan developer library, we have step-by-step instructions in there. It is really easy!
  • Various discussions about application architectures while using Qt Quick and/or Qt WebKit. Here, the best place to start is the stardard Qt documentation about Qt Quick and Qt WebKit as well as the Application development frameworks section in the Harmattan developer library. 
  • Nokia N9 does not really support the traditional QtWidget based UI components. Rewriting the UI in Qt Quick (Components) is best approach and really not that hard for most of the mobile applications. Read the Qt Quick introduction by Qt and also check the Qt Quick related posts in this blog!
  • Requests for new APIs to access certain functionality, e.g. access the media playback controls on the lockscreen (PR1.1 feature) or APIs to develop own Account UI plugins, e.g. for additional sharing/IM services. We are currently looking into these and we'll see if any additional APIs could be opened and documented. Stay tuned.

We did get quite a lot of praise on N9, both the hardware and software. We even learned that N9 already has fans who are willing to spend their air mile points to fly to the Salo factory, in order to ensure that they get a recently announced white N9.

Maybe one has no needs to go that extreme to get the device - but for us, having spent years to make the N9 happen, this was really nice to hear.

It was indeed a pleasure to leave the event with a high note. Big thanks to all patients of the N9 App Clinic!

Maemo , MeeGo , Porting , Qt , N9 , Qt Quick , Documentation , NFC | Permalink | Add comment | Trackbacks (0)

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