Comments on: What’s It Like to Develop Apps for Nokia Phones?

By: First MeeGo Smartphone Might Not Appear Until June, 2011?: Tech News «

First MeeGo Smartphone Might Not Appear Until June, 2011?: Tech News « — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 22:00:49 +0000

[...] Although the situation may appear dire for both Nokia and Intel, I’m not counting either out just yet, although I like Nokia’s chances better than Intel’s. Unlike Google Android which is composed of both open-source Linux and Google’s Dalvik virtual machine and apps, MeeGo has potential as a true open-source product for consumers that want greater control over their device. And Nokia is moving developers to its Qt cross-platform framework, which will greatly reduce the time it takes to produce an application that can run on Symbian smartphones as well as MeeGo handsets, tablets and computers: up to 50 percent less time, according to some developers. [...]

By: la

la — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:14:55 +0000

whats it like to develope for symbian? it depends entirely what you’re developing, the old ui classes are very cumbersome to use so qt helps a lot with that.

and if you don’t need to do anything that would require higher capabilities the development is pretty smooth as it doesn’t involve politics, but system plugin etc development is still an excercise in hacking – even though if the official partyline from sf/nokia would be that it should be possible to develope such(the ogg vorbis codec is a good example of this, their symbian multimedia plugin codec actually would work as a ringtone if they just had higher capabilities).

in general it’s gotten a LOT better in the past 5 years though, but introducing platsec in half-finishedly-thought-up form put it back another 3 years during that. on the plus side you can now develop with just free tools you can get from nokia without much hassle(and gcc is no longer 2.9 hahaha).

what’s it like _really_ though? well for reasons unknown I’ve spent the past few years working in developing sw for symbian, first as freelancer/indie and later as salaried. during almost that whole time there is a method described in s60 api documents that doesn’t actually work(it was introduced with symbian 7.0s / s60 2.0 ). it would be a really, really handy method for avoiding dumping stuff to filesystem in certain times. I really hope that stuff is fixed on the qt version of that api(haven’t checked yet), but as the result of all these years dealing with certificates, the sis-installer and mmf apis i’m not so sure if they’ve fixed it. also there’s a load of apis that are deemed ‘private’, except in cases when they’re not and they decide to ship them with one sdk and then leave them out of another, or just outright GIVE the apis to another developer while not giving them to another, for no particular reason except who knew who. so within the first year I had to resort to following instructions on the net on how to rebuild a header file from just having a .lib, to get access to some functionality that was essential at the time.

as an user these issues don’t bother you as you never hear about them unless you go around asking “why there isn’t a program that does x”.

By: Nokia Ovi Store Gets 2.3 M Downloads Daily: Mobile «

Nokia Ovi Store Gets 2.3 M Downloads Daily: Mobile « — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:36:00 +0000

[...] such an international presence helps all the Ovi businesses — especially the app store. In a recent interview with Nokia, the company claimed that developers reap 18 to 22 percent increased sales when apps are available [...]

By: includeapp

includeapp — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 21:54:06 +0000

hi,
you are absolutely right to mention the SmartInstaller, although unfortunatley QtCore and Qt Mobility DLLs add an extra 7MB to the download size. Nevertheless, at some point in time it is likely that many Symbian 3.x, and 5.0 devices will have somehow downloaded the Qt binaries. Indeed we have ported our tracking tool InAppTracking to Qt too. In case Qt developers are interested in tracking their mobile apps, please see http://www.includeapp.com

thanks
r.s.c.

By: hanks

hanks — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 05:48:28 +0000

Qt apps can be deployed with Smart Installer, which checks the presence of the Qt packages, downloading and installing any needed by the app that are not on the device.

http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Nokia_Smart_Installer_for_Symbian

This should work on all S60 3.1, 3.2 and 5.0 devices, except Nokia 6650 AT&T variant and Nokia N96, due to some incompatibilities.

By: 10 Million Reasons the Nokia N8 is Destined for AT&T: Tech News «

10 Million Reasons the Nokia N8 is Destined for AT&T: Tech News « — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 14:43:22 +0000

[...] from developers for the Symbian^3 platform. Current developers building apps for Nokia devices are already happy with the programming tools, but Nokia wants to catch the eye of app makers building for Apple’s iOS and Google’s [...]

By: Jonas

Jonas — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 07:13:56 +0000

If you look at the new Nokia Qt SDK [http://www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/Qt/] it does have a Macintosh version. I haven’t tried it out yet, and there are some limitations (for instance you can only compile for Maemo at the moment) [http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Nokia_Qt_SDK_v1.0_Beta#Limitations], but it is clearly a focus for Nokia to support development for Nokia products both from Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

By: includeapp

includeapp — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 21:27:52 +0000

from a developer’s business perspective, one issue is that almost all of currently sold (Nokia) Symbian devices are based on S60 (5.0). Realistically, it will take at least one or two years before devices with Qt pre-installed are common place around the world. So, today when you develop for Nokia, you are still obliged to consider S60 development, and the advanced tools such as in-app analytics or in-app adverts, etc… are out of Symbian comunity reach as they will be available for Qt only in the future. In the meantime, if you target the existing Symbian S60 consumers with your app, you might be interested in InAppTracking, the only in-app analytics tool for Symbian that we launched today (see our site http://www.includeapp.com).

cheers

r.s.c.

By: Andre

Andre — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 15:01:22 +0000

I’m pretty sure they relaxed that single developer rule recently, in addition to free Symbian signing and lower fees for publish to OVI

By: Rahul

Rahul — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 19:14:40 +0000

Interesting article. I am a hobbyist developer and in the process of developing several (free/for fun) apps for Nokia phones currently. I just happen to have a Symbian phone and am writing mostly for my own uses but will release them through Ovi store for other people too.

Before Qt, I never considered developing apps for my phone simply because it was too difficult. With Qt and regular C++ now fully supported (finally!), I can utilize my programming knowledge from regular desktop apps so it has actually been a good experience so far. Qt is still developing though its already very good. Nokia have been very responsive to bug reports and feature requests I filed and implemented several features I (and many other people) wanted within months.