After the Qt Dev Days San Francisco, I went quickly to Natal to present a talk about Qt and KDE on mobile devices. It’s time to say thank you for the ENSL organizers – As always, I am late with my posts…

So, last week we went to Dublin, for the MeeGo Conference 2010. As more people already posted, it was a really nice event. The good surprise was the limit of the number of Intel and Nokia people, leaving space for the growing community meet – more than a thousand people attended, very well accommodated in the place chosen (the conference rooms in the Aviva Stadium) with a good work of the organization which managed to keep things working nicely.

Although the short time of the presentations, it was good to have a whole ideaof how the project is being conduced, and it looks promising. Unfortunately I left Dublin on Wednesday morning, so I lost the last day which was reserved for the ‘unconference‘ sections and the football match, but I managed to go to the Guinness Storehouse in Tuesday night, a really good choice for the conference after hours.

With the Lenovo ideapad received from the MeeGo Conference guys (thanks! :-)) in my backpack, I traveled to Berlin for the KDE Mobile Sprint, kindly hosted by KDAB in its office.

I must say, we had fun with the new devices. :-)
During the sprint, interesting discussions about MeeGo, new opportunities, QML and Qt-components. Some of the guys dedicated their time to KDE packaging for MeeGo while in parallel other ones worked in QML based widgets for plasma, tested how some applications work on the ideapad’s touchscreen, and tested plasma-mobile and plasma-tablet shells on it. The results of this sprint are being listed in this wiki page.

The first steps :-)

Check the videos in Marco’s and Artur’s posts about the sprint. Also, Till Adam showing Kontact Mobile on MeeGo.

Of course there is more work to do, but considering how things worked without special attention to this device (and for MeeGo), we can expect good news in the future.

And here a screenshot of the gallery to test the Plasma QML widgets, with a FlashingLabel, some BusyWidgets and a PushButton. It’s just the beginning.

I know, the gallery is, let's say, weird... :-P

BUT… there are people who prefer “Livin’ on the Edge“. If you are one of those and already want/need to develop with Qt 4.7 (not released yet!) for Maemo 5, using MADDE to build your applications / packages, here is an update to the procedure first published by the troll Harald Fernengel (AKA harryF). Although the title says “on MacOS X”, the steps also work on Linux.

Step-by-step:

• Install MADDE. Download it here.
• If you are not using a Debian based distro, you need to install the “Tools for Debian Packages” package of your distribution (e.g. “deb” on openSUSE, sys-apps/debianutils on Gentoo).
• Download the script fetch-qt4.7.0-latest.sh. This script downloads the libqt4-experimental packages from repository.maemo.org and installs then in your MADDE – Before you run the script, remember to adjust the MADDE_PATH variable according to the path you installed MADDE.
• Download qt4-tools-latest.tar.gz. It contains the Qt tools compiled for the correspondent version, configured for cross compiling. Extract to /opt/qt4-maemo5.
• Check if mad is in your PATH.

To build an application using your fresh environment, run /opt/qt4-maemo5/bin/qmake && make .

If you succeeded in the setup process, this should result in a armel binary ready to run on N900. To generate a deb package, you can use the tools offered by MADDE to build a skeleton of debian package and so on.

To run your application on N900, install libqt4-experimental-* packages. If QtQuick (QML) is part of your plans, qmlviewer  is in the package qt4-experimental-declarative-qmlviewer .

UPDATE (2010-06-15): For newer (or older) versions, check http://anselmolsm.org/public/qt/madde-qt47/

UPDATE (2010-09-09): Links updated to download the latest version.

In the first season, the focus was S60 devices. After the holidays, the new season is about Maemo. =)

Qt Mobile Demos are in Maemo 5 extras-devel, so now it’s easier to check them in a N900 near you. First, you need to enable the extras-devel repository/catalogue and the demos should appear if you search for “qtmobile”.

The packages are:

hyperui -> qtmobiledemo-hyperui

mybudget -> qtmobiledemo-mybudget

shoplist -> qtmobiledemo-shoplist

weather -> qtmobiledemo-weather

Future? Well, soon QAbstractKineticScroller will replace our kinetic list implementation. (Read the comments).

And yes, we have a list of known issues to solve in our free time…

The code still in the same place, http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-labs/mobile-demos

That’s all for today.

PS: Thanks to Etrunko, who helped a lot with packaging stuff =)