Zchydem's Blog

It’s been a while since I did any experiments with Qt. I decided to take a look at Qt5 and QML. The first thing was to fetch the source code and figure out how it can be built. I was really surprised that in the end I didn’t encounter any problems while building it.

Building Qt5

It took only few steps to build Qt5 on Mac.

• git clone git://gitorious.org/qt/qt5.git qt5
• cd qt5
• ./init-repository
• qtrepotools/bin/qt5_tool -c -p -b

Playing with QML

After building, you find all the stuff from qt5/qtbase directory. There is a bin directory where all the required binaries are. If you want to test how new QML with really fast scene graph works, you can try to run demos using qmlsene binary. Here’s a video where I run four different particle demos on not-so-new 13″ MacBook Pro without any big problems.

This blog post was short this time. If you are interested in what happens in the Qt development, the Qt5 is really worth to check. Naturally there are also other things happening in the background like modularization in addition to QML development. Personally, I think the best way to follow Qt development is to read Qt Labs Blog. But in the end I can’t say anything else that good work Trolls. Can’t wait that they will get Qt5 released in 2012.

Thanks for reading my blog!

I had a little break of developing Qt stuff, but after receiving N950 from Nokia, I decided to continue with QuickFlickr development. The original target HW for QuickFlickr has always been Nokia’s next “linux phone”. Even though, Nokia kindly gave me two Symbian devices, I never got so excited to do development on Symbian platform/devices.

I also feel responsible for continue my Qt Ambassador project (I need to update the project page. It’s so out-of-date) too, so here I am now, with a one preview video where QuickFlickr runs quite smoothly on N950. Let’s watch it first:)

The video above is quite heavily edited because the lack of my video shooting skills. With editing I mean that I did stupid things while shooting the video so I cut few clips away.

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I like to distribute my QML application so that everything comes with a single binary executable. In practice this means that I have defined that all my QML files are compiled into binary using Qt’s resource compiler. Resource system in Qt is quite nice, but there is annoying bug in Qt creator. Sometimes it doesn’t recompile resources even though I have modified a QML file. This means that you need to select “Clean” and “Build” from Qt creator in order to get modifications compiled. This takes time.

Some time ago, I figured out a workaround for this. You can add a custom build step to your Qt Creator’s project. This build step modifies e.g. an image that is included the project and then resources are recompiled. Here’s a screenshot how you can do it.

Custom build step to make rcc run every time you compile.

I added the custom build step to the first (touch quickflickr.png) and when my project is being compiled it notices that some of the resources have changed and it runs resource compiler too. This is far from an elegant solution, but at least it works for me and I don’t need to run “Clean & Build” which takes for ever. At least, it feels so after you have recompiled your project for the 10th time.

UPDATE: I thought, that there would have been a bug about this but couldn’t find a onet from Qt’s issue tracker so I created a new one: QTCREATORBUG-5743.

I hope this trick will help some one else too. Thanks for reading my blog and thanks for Bale to encourage me to write this “tip of the day” post. Cheers!

This is yet another blog post about the announcement of Nokia and Microsoft. I felt, I want to share my thoughts about it, but  first let’s put here a nice picture which tells more than 1000 words.

The future of Nokia? Microkia?

Mr Elop’s Memo

Before the official announcement of Nokia and Microsoft collaboration, someone leaked Mr. Elop’s memo and it gained pretty much publicity. When I read the memo, I was surprised, how much I shared the same opinions with Mr. Elop. I’ve seen how things work internally in Nokia and I truly believe that it’s time for doing some serious reorganizations inside Nokia. Actually it should have been happened years ago.

But I can’t emphasize too much that I  disagree with Mr. Elop how things ended up. Actually I’m not sure who gets most out of this deal, because Nokia stock value dropped pretty much after the announcement.

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I have never developed anything on Symbian platform and the reason for this is that I couldn’t care less about the Symbian before. I have always been more into about Qt and gadgets that run Linux rather than Symbian.

Now the things have changed a bit – it’s possible to develop Qt applications for Symbian platform which makes  easier to start app development on Symbian for me as a Qt developer. The other reason is, thanks to Qt Ambassador program, that I happen to own N8, which btw is a pretty good HW. To be honest, I can’t praise much the UX on N8, but still, it’s a good hardware.

So I have spent couple of evenings to getting familiar with Symbian development. The most natural way to start it (for me) is of course trying to port QuickFlickr for N8. Before writing more stuff, here’s the video where I run the latest version of QuickFlickr with new UI on N8.

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