Why was it different before?
A
GLOBAL ??? Today, Nokia is making moves to streamline its development
environments across device platforms, focusing squarely on Qt.
Although Nokia has long been a Qt (pronounced ???cute???) advocate, today,
the company is making Qt its sole application development framework ???
meaning, that if a developer creates their application in Qt, they???ll
be able to easily deploy it to Nokia devices on Symbian and MeeGo
platforms. Nokia is taking this approach seriously, making the
commitment to create its own applications and UI on Qt as well.
For Nokia smartphone users out there, this is great news as the move
will lead to a more compelling and engaging experience, with more apps
available for your device. Even more importantly, you can buy a Nokia
smartphone confident that any improvements introduced later to the
Symbian platform, such as the user interface, can be made available to
download on your device as well. No need to wait for Symbian^4 ??? the
improvements we were planning for Symbian^4 will be introduced as and
when they become available. In fact, we will no longer be talking
about Symbian^3 or Symbian^4 at all ??? it will be one constantly
evolving and constantly improving platform.
Also part of the announcement, Nokia will embrace the emerging HTML5
standard for Web content and applications for Symbian and MeeGo
platforms, both through in-built support in Qt and through the
browser.
Rich Green, CTO of Nokia: ???We???re making strategic technology decisions
that will accelerate our ability to offer the strongest possible
opportunity for developers and the richest possible experience for
consumers. For developers, it will open up a huge installed customer
base for their applications. For consumers, it means a more compelling
engagement with their Nokia product in terms of access to the best
applications in the marketplace and a constantly improving product
experience. We firmly believe that the choices we have made will not
only mean significant opportunity and success for our developer
partners, but for Nokia as well.???
Many of Nokia???s developers are already working in Qt and have great
things to say about it. Pixelpipe???s Brett Butterfield shared, ???We???re
now in the process of re-creating our Symbian native UIs in Qt so will
have a good story to tell. Elements of our UI that were previously
taking us hours of painstaking hand coding in Symbian are now
re-created in minutes with the Qt Creator. It???s not just the ease of
porting our existing functionality to Qt, however the ability of
adding capabilities and features beyond Symbian that has us excited.???
For more information about Qt go to qt.nokia.com/products/qt-quick/
and qt.nokia.com/products/library/modular-class-library#info_webkit.
Developers can start developing with Qt today at
www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/Qt/.