Nokia Qt Developer Days: from the show floor
After 36 hours of developer ‘show-submersion’ I think I have a pretty good idea of how the Nokia X-factor is playing out in the Qt cross-platform world. There are very few blue Nokia logos around and everyone is wearing Qt green. The company’s staff are even still calling themselves ‘trolls’ in reverence to their former incarnation under the Trolltech brand.
The customers seem upbeat, the partners say they are making more money and Qt itself says that downloads have actually increased 250% since the licensing model went LGPL. But what of the developers? Well there are more of them – over 1000 if you add the 700 or so here to the 300 registered attendees for the sister event in San Francisco at the start of November.
But crucially – since open sourcing, there have been 400 substantial contributions to the Gitorious.org code repository in terms of patches and other submissions. Is that a lot? It would be if we could quantify the size, quality and potential usefulness of those submissions, but at this stage Qt is just saying that in total there is a spread. Predictable I suppose. But only a determined sceptic would suggest that there isn’t some true worth in most of what is there.
On the news scene, as expected, there was the first public beta of Qt 4.6 as well as Qt Creator 1.3, the upcoming new version of its cross-platform Qt Integrated Development Environment. According to Qt, these releases should allow developers to target new platforms as they feature new support for Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 - Qt 4.6 also introduces a port of Qt to the Symbian Platform with integration for the S60 framework.
To get a little extra colour and analysis of Qt from the outside, I spoke with Nick Jones, VP & distinguished analyst at Gartner, “Qt looks easier for developers to work with than native Symbian APIs and so provides some extra leverage (as my US colleagues would say) in terms of powerful graphics APIs so will probably become the de-facto Symbian and Maemo toolkit for most developers creating native apps for the Ovi store for example. But Qt is also important for Nokia in other areas. For example, Nokia has some PC applications such as PC suite. I’d guess that in the future Nokia might want PC-side applications that run on Mac, Windows and possibly Linux so Qt could help there here as well. 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.”
Gartners Jones sums up the feelings voiced by many of the attendees here. Qt was a good move for Nokia, a smart move in terms of doing the right thing ‘inside’ the industry. Commercially, both Qt partners and individual developers appear to share a “what’s not to like?” take on the fact that the Nokia mothership is hovering somewhere (supposedly) placidly in the background. There is now the undeniable presence of a bigger brand, with more muscle and better outreach for even a homegrown app taking its first steps in the big wide world.
That said, the purists are still here and one software engineer I spoke to said that he had generally had more trust in Trolltech than Nokia due to the company’s excellent standing and reputation in the open source space. In fairness, he also said that 18 months into the new ‘regime’ that he was building trust for Nokia and saw that the company respects and sees the value in so-called ‘small’ (or smaller at least) innovators.
There’s more to report on here in terms of a more clarified roadmap, a certification programme and some noteworthy corporate blogging that rivals the openness I’ve really only previously witnessed from Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, but enough for now. Back to the pretzels, the weißbier and the sessions.