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’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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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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I’m a real newbie when it comes to OpenGL, but my personal plan is to try to learn as much as possible about OpenGL ES 2.0 and be able to understand it better e.g. how things like Qt Scene Graph works. Of course, it would be nice to be able to contribute to the Qt Scene Graph project too at some point.

Now I have spend few evenings trying to study how you can do things with OpenGL and I went little bit side tracked at some point. I started do some research how could use a QML application in 3D. The solution was actually much easier than I thought. Here’s the PoC video about running Samegame, the QML demo application rendered on a 3D cube.

As you can see from the video, it’s not perfect yet. The mouse events aren’t delivered with the correct coordinates to the QML item, but it shouldn’t be a big deal to transform them to the correct coordinates.

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