Nokia brings Qt to Symbian, Maemo

Finnish handset vendor Nokia on Tuesday unveiled the latest version of Qt, its cross platform application and user interface framework, providing support for more platforms including Symbian, Windows 7, Mac OS 10.6 and the upcoming Maemo 6.

Adding support for Symbian and Maemo gives developers the opportunity to target both of these platforms from the same codebase, which should help the applications they create reach the market faster and hit a broader audience. Of late, Nokia, which was traditionally in the Symbian camp, has been flirting more with Maemo.

To support Qt on the mobile, Nokia has released a technology preview of APIs from the Qt Mobility project, providing functionality such as location, messaging, contacts, and bearer management.

When telecoms.com recently spoke to John Forsyth, of the leadership team, Symbian Foundation, he was enthusiastic about getting the framework onto Symbian. “Application development has not been great for Symbian, there’s no sense in hiding this, and that’s due to a mixture of tools that have been good but not best in class and an environment that’s brilliant for making phones, but too complex for making applications,” he said.

“So in the roadmap we have a couple of big thrusts: Getting Qt into the platform – there are already 300,000 developers that love Qt, and it’s a fun productive environment; and there’s also the web runtime, so you will be able to program just in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and write an application that uses all the underlying native services,” Forsyth added.

Qt 4.6 will add support for more eye candy with the addition of an animation framework, plus graphics effects like opacity, drop shadows, glow, and filtering; multi-touch application support; enhanced graphics algorithms; and a cross-platform IDE for Qt development.