Nokia Developer News

We're ending 2011 on a very positive note.

The current interest in Qt is stronger than at any time in our past, Qt with Qt Quick is better than ever before, and the preparations for Qt 5 have been progressing well. The Qt project has enjoyed a real boost with over 1,000 developers now signed up - and now the third party independent contributions that are coming in for the core modules such as Qt base and Qt creator from non-Nokia employees – represent over 20% of the total input.

The Nokia Store, with 10 million downloads per day, now offers developers 155 million Nokia devices to target with Qt apps – and there is ongoing momentum here, as the plans are to make Qt a core part of the Nokia strategy in bringing apps to the next billion. All data points with regard to Qt on the Nokia store are up – and a lot more Qt apps are being downloaded by Nokia users (10x), so this means more revenue to Qt developers (20x). You only need to look at the Nokia N9 for a good proof point of the “power of Qt”.

Following on the recent successes of the Qt Developer Days in both Munich and San Francisco, the Qt Developer events in Tokyo and Beijing that took place earlier this month both achieved record attendance. The event in China had the highest number of attendees ever – for any Qt developer event – with nearly 1,100 participants.

At both events, all of the sessions (except the keynotes) were delivered by native speakers. In many cases this meant presentations from Nokia employees based at different Nokia offices around the world, or by local Qt partners. Thanks!

Highlights from Beijing

When it comes to Qt developers, China is already one of the largest, if not the largest market, worldwide. The growth of Qt usage in China has been steady and rapid since 2008 across multiple industries. In particular, the set top box market is growing very fast and it will be interesting to see how the strong interest in the Nokia N9 – which was sold out in the stores when we were visiting - will result in even more apps.

In Beijing, during the keynote from Chinese micro-blogging company Sina, the new version of its Qt-based Weibo social networking and media application was presented. When it came to the development, it took four developers about two months to create the Qt app for use on the Nokia N9. More about Sina Weibo is in this YouTube video. 

All sessions provided valuable insights into local Chinese success stories with Qt, and the feedback and interest around the product showcase from multiple industries was generally very positive indeed!

In the video below, Hubert Ng, Director Ecosystem and Developer Experience (EDX) at Nokia, China along with a number of attendees provide an overview of the Qt Developer Conference that was held in Beijing in December 2011: 

Highlights from Tokyo

The Qt Conference in Japan gave us a wonderful opportunity to engage with the skilled and very engaged Japanese Qt community. It also gave us the chance to share knowledge with them over the course of our two day event as well as to inform about them about the Nokia mobile app opportunities outside of Japan.

Japanese consumer electronics runs on a wide range of platforms, so the ability to re-use Qt code and skills, as well as the higher performance at lower price points that Qt 5 promises to deliver, offers great appeal to Japanese developers. Over the years the Japanese Qt community has been active in producing Qt books as well as making contributions to Qt – and we look forward in continuing working with the Japanese Qt community and to find ways to facilitate for them to contribute to the Qt project an even easier route to benefit from the potential the Nokia store offer Qt developers.

Note: Images from the Tokyo event are available in this Flickr slideshow. 

More details about the events in Beijing and Tokyo can be found in the Qt blog.

Thanks to a partnership between T-Mobile USA and Nokia, the Nokia Lumia 710 will become the first Windows Phone from Nokia to ship in the United States. The phone will be targeted at the nearly 150 million Americans who haven’t yet purchased their first smartphones. It will run on T-Mobile's 4G network, delivering high-performance hardware, Nokia's best social and Internet experience, and access to popular smartphone applications and services from Windows Phone Marketplace.

Starting 11 January 2012, the Nokia Lumia 710 will be available in the United States at T-Mobile retail stores, selected dealers and retailers, and online. The phone will sell for $49.99 (USD) after a $50 mail-in rebate and with a two-year plan.

Learn more.

Check out the Nokia Lumia 710 technical specifications.

In early October, we introduced you to the Simple Nokia Asset Creation - Online Marketing Tool. Now we are eager to know more about your experiences with the tool.

To do so, we have created a short survey regarding your use of the tool. Please take a few minutes to complete this survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/87BGSSW

Thank you for your time. We appreciate and value your feedback.

Nokia Publish thanks all our publishers for a great year! With the holiday season just around the corner, please note that we will be working with a reduced staff from 23 December 2011 through 3 January 2012.

As a result, our response time during this period may be as long as 72 hours. So we suggest that you submit your applications as early as possible. Also, should you require any assistance publishing (requests for UIDs, certificate installers, etc.), please contact your Nokia Publish support team at developer.support@nokia.com.

Thank you for your continuous support and feedback, which will help us to improve our service in the New Year.

The winners have been announced for Nokia’s App Launcher Icon Competition. To enter, developers had to create a new, original app launcher icon for Series 40, Symbian, or Nokia N9 (MeeGo) platforms using Nokia templates, then submit the icons by 30 November. A total of 196 icons were entered by 103 developers. The winners, who will receive Nokia N9 phones, were chosen by how well they communicated the essence of each app, and by how well they matched the platform’s icon philosophy. The judges also sought icons that displayed simplicity, purity, friendliness, and fun.

And the winners are:

- Melon Mobile for its (soon to be published) Baby Monitor app. The icon uses a clever background colour, links to notifications, and highlights monitoring.

- Pixle/Trismer for its Bord chalkboard-simulator app. The icons uses bold, simple elements that connect with the target audience.

- Stephen Spencer for his Meex electronic music beat-matching app.

Also, special mentions were given to eight additional app icons and their creators:

- WaterBubble from Chintan Dave
- Kontact Touch/Notes from Nuno Pinheiro
- HappyRepublic Day from Sangram.
- Bunyi (soon to be released) from Dhi Aurrahman
- Pitu Hunt from Carlos De León
- LyricsQuick from Jaakko Koskenkorva
- Get a Cab! MY from Michelle Ng
- Toshi from Janez Vreček

Learn more about the Nokia App Launcher Competition.

Download the Nokia Icon Kit (zip file).

Gedda-Headz, the publisher of a popular social multiplayer game created by Nokia Developer Champion Frank Fitzek, is one the first developers to use the new In-App Purchasing system on the new Nokia Asha 303 phone, which is based on the Series 40 platform. Players of the game, also called Gedda-Headz, will be able to use the In-App Purchasing to change and upgrade their avatars.

Nokia had earlier announced the In-App Purchasing would be available for the Series 40 phones, and that the first phone to offer the feature would be the Asha 303. The new monetisation setup is being tested now under a beta program. When fully implemented, it will let consumers pay via either credit cards or billing from more than 134 mobile operators worldwide.

 

Learn more about In-App Purchase from the Nokia Developer Library.

Monetise your Series 40 apps.

Futurice's Riku Valtasola took some time last week to discuss how they created the Qt Developer Days app in QML, mirrored the functionality in an HTML5 web app, and the challenges they faced implementing OAuth in a mobile environment. The resulting service encapsulates an entire conference agenda in a custom XML structure, allows attendees to build their personal conference schedule, and collects session feedback from attendees.

Nokia and Futurice have worked together on several successful mobile apps, including WRC Live, the official FIA World Rally Championship application for Nokia Symbian^3, Series 40 and MeeGo Harmattan phones. Check out over 100 reviews of the app posted on Nokia Store and you'll see why the Qt team selected Futurice for this project. 

After initial consultation between Futurice designers and Qt Developer Days organizers, here are the primary features agreed for the initial (2011) release of the Qt Developer Days app:

• Detailed conference schedule with information on each session and speaker
• Qt version with QML UI that helps demonstrate Qt Quick Components and custom UI construction
• HTML5 web app version with local storage for attendees without compatible mobile phones
• Updates for both versions periodically fetched from a server so organizers can communicate late-breaking information
• User control over update timing and network bearer so international travelers don't get surprised with an unexpected data bill
• User-created custom conference schedule via session tagging
• Add favorite sessions to device calendar (Symbian)
• Twitter and Facebook integration for sharing interesting sessions
• Conference area maps, session locations
• Session feedback forms

A major non-functional requirement for the application was that it must be possible to customize it relatively easily for future conferences. This requirement was satisfied through the architecture of the application, for example by designing a flexible and comprehensive XML format for modifying and storing the conference data.

The image above includes screen shots of the QML-based app. If you have worked with Qt Components you'll recognize standard features such as page-based navigation and QML ToolBar.

• Users navigate through a day's schedule by flicking a custom QML component created by Futurice (see the screen shot titled "Technical Track").
• When the user finds a session of interest, he or she can touch the star icon to add it to a favorites list (second screen from left.)
• Shortly after a favorite session ends, the user is prompted to provide feedback via a combination of check boxes (one through five stars in several categories) and an open-ended text box.

  Here is the architecture of the QML-based app:

Riku shared with us some of the architectural choices that needed to be made. At the highest level the decisions were easy:

• QML for UI and C++ for core logic and speed.
• Data models within the QML segment were a bit trickier. They went with XmlListModel for the conference agenda because it made parsing easy, but opted for JavaScript data models where possible because they're faster to develop.

Integration with social media posed a particular challenge. Each user must authorize the Qt Developer Days app to access their Twitter or Facebook account the first time they want to share something. The required OAuth processing is quite tricky, and there are not yet standard components to deal with the complex handshake. "We use embedded QWebView for rendering the authentication pages of Twitter and Facebook and it works," notes Riku, "but on Symbian this class eats a lot of memory and the user experience is not great."

The resulting app is intuitive to use and offers just the right amount of graphic interest without getting between me and what I wanted to accomplish. I even encountered several surprises that "just worked" while attending Qt Developer Days in San Francisco without me thinking about them. During the conference, a bright red cross-hair shows current time when viewing the agenda. When I added my first session to my favorites list, the app asked if I wanted to add it to my Nokia N8's calendar. When a session was over, the app popped up a polite "Feedback please" invitation to review the session.

Once the QML app was built and server-side infrastructure was in place, Futurice built an HTML5 web app that provides as much of the QML functionality as possible to users without a Qt-compatible phone. Because the web app uses the new local storage capability of HTML5, users do not need a current Internet connection when checking their agenda. However, because the UI is not built with QML, much of the "eye candy" is missing. Also missing is integration with the user's device calendar.

With experienced agile developers on both sides of the relationship, Futurice and the Qt team approached this project as a timebox and deliberately specified more features than they expected to be able to implement given the time and resources available. While there is no fixed further development plan at this point, there are a lot of cool ideas and features in the backlog which may appear in the future versions of the app for upcoming conferences. Riku is already thinking of what's next.

• Browse the HTML5 web app (note your browser's message about local storage)
• Download the QML version
• Follow Riku @RikuJ

For more about Futurice's experience with QML, check out this video with Michael Samarin, Head of Mobile Development at Futurice, talking about the Nokia Trailers, WRC Live, and Transformers 3 apps:

“I'm new to the company, but not new to Qt. We relied on it at LucasFilm” noted new VP, Global Head of Developer Relations Richard Kerris as he opened his keynote at Qt Developer Days in San Francisco last week. Richard is only a few weeks into his tenure at Nokia, and last week’s Qt Developer Days conference was the first opportunity many in the Nokia Developer Community had to meet him.

After talking about his own history as a passionate user and advocate of Qt prior to joining Nokia, he spoke at length about Qt and its role within Nokia, both now and tomorrow. He opened his presentation with a quick review of Qt milestones during 2011:

• February: Launch of Qt Quick with QML. QML has matured during the year and now is core for the future.
• February: After the new Nokia strategy announcement, Qt downloads increased.
• Mid-year: A new Qt SDK 1.0 drove Qt-based app submissions to Nokia Store. Following this the number of Qt applications being published, downloaded and monetized by developers is increasing greatly
• October: Qt is launched as an open governance project and during the year we have modularized Qt to support this. The Qt Project represents a great opportunity for developers to  contribute to Qt and have a say in Qt’s direction and development as a framework

The keynote emphasized the headline statistic of Nokia Store reaching 10 million downloads per day and the growing uptake of Qt applications as part of this. To supplement this, Richard provided the audience some drill-down data that shows just how much growth Qt developers have captured in Nokia Store, including a 10X increase in app downloads and a 20X increase in app sales in just nine months (January – September, 2011):

The audience at Qt Developer Days included developers from the entire Qt ecosystem of mobile, desktop and embedded development. The keynote gave some strong points for consideration for Qt desktop and embedded developers considering bringing their expertise to mobile -  the message for them was that the opportunity is real, and it has significant size – 155 million Qt-powered Nokia devices are in the market right now - and importantly, there is a future for developing on mobile using Qt.

In speaking to this future, Richard shared some research behind Nokia’s strategy to use Qt as a core part of its strategy to connect the next billion. An interesting insight about the vast market not currently connected to the internet was that regardless of the amount they are willing to spend on their device, their number one desire is for high quality apps.

Nokia plans to connect Qt developers to the next billion’s passion for great apps. With his clear ability to relate to developers and his personal working knowledge of Qt, Richard Kerris couldn’t have arrived at a better time.

• See Richard Kerris’ LinkedIn profile
• Follow @richardkerris

If you have posted a question on the Nokia Developer discussion boards recently, you may very likely have received a courteous reply from this month’s Nokia Developer Champion, Rahul Vala. Rahul has posted nearly 2,000 times since joining the Nokia Developer Community in 2008, despite his heavy teaching load at Gujarat (India) Technological University, where he is a lecturer in the electronics and communication department. For even more detailed insights from Rahul, developers can turn to his frequent blog entries and Wiki contributions, including a recent article, ‘How to create alarms list in Qt’. While Rahul frequently posts about Qt development, he is also expert in web technology, usability, and location-based services.

Meet Nokia Developer Champion of the month Rahul Vala.

Explore the many benefits of the Nokia Developer Champion program.