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 It’s so out-of-date) too, so here I am now, with a one preview video where QuickFlickr runs quite smoothly on N950.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!

My last post about iOS application development was based on my experiments of developing FoodGarden – a shopping list and recipe application. I will release FoodGarden via d-pointer in Apple’s AppStore, hopefully quite soon. This blog post is a short introduction for the application. Let’s watch the video first.

I wanted to keep the video short and present the most of the functionality what you can do with the app. I left the boring section out i.e. adding bunch of recipes, items and sections, which you can use when creating shopping lists and recipes.

I’ve been using FoodGarden as my shopping list application lately and it seems to work pretty well. At least I haven’t found any critical bugs or annoying features.

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I’ve been a lazy blogger lately, but it doesn’t mean that I haven’t been doing anything. Actually, I’ve done quite a lot lately. I’ve started to educate myself to iOS development. Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t changed the camp from Qt development to the iOS development, but I think it’s just a sane move to do something completely different to keep mind open and to learn new things.

As I’ve mentioned in my earlier posts, I also own Mac and iPhone, so I thought that I should try code something for iPhone. This blog post is about my thoughts what it takes to start coding on iOS operating system and what it requires if you are coming from Qt world.

DISCLAIMER: This blog post might contain errors related to iOS and Objective-C because I’m really newbie in that area. Please feel free to comment if you notice any errors in the text.

The First Challenge – Objective-C

Actually the first challenge is that if you don’t own Mac, you need to buy a new computer first because iOS development can only be done on  Mac. If you happen to own Mac, then you just need to install XCode with iOS SDK which can be downloaded from http://developer.apple.com.

The real first challenge is the Objective-C programming language. I’ve coded only using C, C++, QML, Java, Python, but never using Objective-C. The syntax looks really weird like [myObject doesSomething: parameter1 andDoesSomethingMore: parameter2]. I am also lazy in a sense that, if I need to learn new things, I get bored quite fast if I can’t try things in practice soon. Instead of starting to read Objective C manuals from Apple site, I googled a bit and found this useful document: From C++ to Objective-C written by Pierre Chatelier. That piece of paper was really useful to get fast into a Objective-C world and to understand that weird syntax.

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Yesterday I was attending to Windows Phone Developer event organized by Microsoft in Helsinki. The place was crowded, there was about 600-700 developers around Finland. For me, it was bit weird event because usually when I have attended to developer events or conference there are always familiar faces, but not this time. Maybe the reason for this is that, this event was organized by Microsoft, not Nokia, Intel or Linux Foundation.

The purpose of the event was clear – Microsoft needs more Windows Phone developers and the next version of Windows Phone 7.1, code name Mango, will be mature enough to get more developer volume. Naturally, Nokia and Microsoft deal 2/11 means that they will have a solid developer foundation here in Finland too.

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