Checking in at the DevCon worked really flawless – and RIM used their cool PlayBooks for the check in procedure, which was a nice detail to spot. Of course we (Robert and André) directly headed for the keynote at the Moscone conference center where lots of people were eagerly waiting for Mike Lazaridis (President and co-CEO of RIM as well as “Officer of the Order of Canada”).

Mike Lazaridis opening the DevCon.

After his apologies for the previous outages of the BlackBerry messaging infrastructure Mr. Lazaridis and his co-speakers (most notably Alec Saunders) provided news and many interesting facts like: Apparently 1% of all iPhone developers make more than $1,000 but 13% of BlackBerry devs make $100,000 or more. Now that's really cool and shows again that smaller does not necessarily mean worse. Also the BlackBerry ecosystem as a whole is growing in absolute numbers and the Java OS 7.0 devices are the most successful launch in the history of RIM.

BBM adoption is growing steadily

BlackBerry AppWorld facts

Alec Saunders busts the shrinking market myth, at least for BlackBerry Java OS subscribers

Alec gives details about app usage on BlackBerry devices

BlackBerry developers make a lot of money

What followed left many people either confused or even infuriated. The BBX platform plans were detailed somewhat (basically it's the QNX based Tablet OS further developed), but there was no mention of a Java development stack. Instead developer should either go to the native BBX C++ level or use a HTML5 approach. The only route for Java developers is to go to Android first and then come back using the Runtime for Android apps, which is in beta now. While this is definitely good for the platform to get more apps, this approach does not allow to integrate deeply into BBX and also leads to more UI fragmentation (Adobe Air, HTML, native Cascade and Android). The rest of the general session centered around games, games and games. Don't get me wrong, we love games as well (and the PlayBook has some great ones) – but the world contains more than games. And again the majority of the BlackBerry development community is not only Java based but also application centric. Also so far the Tablet OS hasn't lived up to its hype - right now RIM is even giving away one PlayBook for free when you buy two (until December 31 2011).

Previously there were rumors about a Java solution for QNX (or BlackBerry Tablet OS or BBX) and as we understood from our talks with many other developers during the DevCon, most were quite upset about the missing migration path for them. This includes many of the internal RIM employees that we met as well. It's really curious and strangely fascinating how a company seemingly under pressure from its competitors turns against both its existing developer base and their own employees at the same time.

While I understand the urge to do a clean cut, the current approach seems to be more a recipe for disaster, for corporate suicide than a well considered strategy.

Contrast Research In Motion's approach with Microsoft's Windows 8 strategy: Microsoft embraces web developers as well, but they give exactly the same interface to web, .NET and C++ developers, so everyone can leverage their existing know-how.

Where the hell is Java?!

And while speaking about a clear cut – the general session was all about announcements but not about “boring” facts like release dates for either the BBX system or the availability of QNX based phones. There is one exemption – a beta of the QNX based Tabled OS 2.0 was made available, most importantly it contains the beta of the Android runtime, but sadly neither BBM integration nor a native Email client.

For us as a service company there is one detail that keeps my interest in BBX and that's the announced Qt integration. While the Qt UI is not part of the deal since it will be replaced by the way cooler TAT Cascade UI framework, Qt will form the basis of hopefully large parts of the native API. This can possibly provide a new haven for our Qt developers to leverage their know-how on that new system. However, when discussing this option internally, it was clear there is little enthusiasm about this option. Qt developers know how it feels when a system is abandoned and the current course that RIM takes with their existing Java developer community does not increase trust in the actions of the management.

Alec Saunders in action

If you feel similar or like this new strategy, Alec Saunders (VP, Developer Relations & Ecosystems Development) invites you to mail him on alec.saunders@rim.com. This is a cool opportunity to get in touch with BlackBerry and I'm really grateful to have it – thanks, Alec!

Some more thoughts about The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) Cascade UI framework: This solution is technically really savvy & rich and there are some things that are just so beautiful. But I wasn't impressed to see their old picture stream visualization once AGAIN, after they have shown it the first time freaking four years ago (yes, on feature phones):

By now the animations are even slicker, but I still think that this eye candy would drive me mad if I actually had to use it. Beautiful but senseless usage of 3D visualization imho.

One last quibble I had about the general session was the fake conversation between Mike Lazaridis and his guests. In those times they did not talk to the audience but only to themselves. Only after a while the camera team adjusted and filmed the guys from the side of the stage, so that we could at least their face on the screens, but I still felt awkward and outside during those talks.

But not all was bad about the keynote, one thing that's been really cool was the announcement of WebGL support on BBX, they showed a slick 3D “tunneltilt” demo during the session (skip to 3:32):

After the general sessions we could pick up our PlayBooks – every attendee got one PlayBook for free – with the current beta of Tablet OS 2.0 as an option. Cool stuff, even though I would have preferred a QNX based phone somewhat

Free PlayBooks - with Tablet OS 2.0 beta of course

I can wrap up the rest of the DevCon quite quickly – many of the sessions were really good and provided deep coverage of various topics. It's also great to chat with other developers and people living in the BlackBerry ecosystem – and of course with the speaker and RIM employees. Of course we presented our new Glaze UI as well and we did not hesitate making subversive advertisement for it (well, on the electronic spray wall):

Guerilla Marketing for Glaze UI

Our session went well which surprisingly included our technical demo as well. In case you didn't know, Glaze UI allows you to rapidly design an app while it's running by placing CSS code on a server (like pastebin or your own) – and we did that live using input from the audience.

Registered DevCon attendees can watch the Glaze UI session online in a better quality.

And of course we distributed our 9th edition of our Mobile Developer's Guide to the Galaxy, which just got out of press a week earlier. Once again we were thrilled about your positive feedback, hopefully we will get even deeper BlackBerry coverage in the next edition.

San Francisco is a great city – and as a Northern European I cannot stress the cool weather enough at this time of the year. After the DevCon we visited our friends from Jibe Mobile in Montain View and while walking around in the city we spotted the Evernote office. Of course I had to take a picture of that monumental situation which resulted in us being invited into the office where we had a nice chat with the Evernote guys and even got a T-Shirt – thanks guys, you rock!

Evernote rocks, note my cool BlackBerry T-Shirt from foursquare, too!

All in all the BlackBerry DevCon was well worth a visit! Looking forward to the BlackBerry DevCon Europe, which will take place on February 7th and 8th 2012 in Amsterdam. Hopefully BlackBerry revises its strategy in regards of Java until then!

You can view the general session online here:

http://www.blackberrydevcon.com/americas/webcast

(Robert)

Accordingly the Enough Software team has had a lot of fun visiting the Freimarkt (or at least for those who could come). Also without further ado, here's the proof that we are not not all of us are shy to get wet

(Robert)

The training started at 10 o'clock with an introduction of "How to create a Windows Phone project with Visual Studio". After a little pause with snacks and drinks Robert Miles continued with a session about Silverlight programming. It is amazing how easy it is to create a simple application. With Visual Studio Microsoft really has a great IDE to develop for Windows Phone. Next point on the agenda was the fast application switching and tombstoning. I have to say that it is very easy to handle the interaction of the user when he brings the application with the Windows Button into the background. Around 13 o'clock we had a delicious lunch sponsored by Nokia .

The next step was to get a rough overview on how to create XNA Games and I have to say the same as I said about Silverlight: It is amazingly simple to create a game. At the end of the day we got an quick introduction in "How to bring your Apps into the marketplace".
Finally, we got a backpack from Nokia that included a nice phone (LG Quantum) to test and play with new applications.

All in one I have to say that it was an interesting and good event to get an overview of the Windows Phone 7 platform.

(Florian)

The conference featured presentations the whole day long. Main focus was the development for tablets using Honeycomb. While the first sessions mostly praised the genius of Motorola's new devices, the Atrix and the Xoom, the later sessions had an eye on Android Honeycomb development. Theses later sessions didn't provide a full insight, but concentrated more on conceptual aspects of tablet development. Motorola's evangelist Suzanne Alexander showed examples how non-optimized apps proved rather unuseful on the tablets and showed ways through code examples how to optimize.

One of the highlights for me was the presentation of Adobe's Mark Doherty who presented the power and abilities of Adobe Air and Flash on the Xoom. This presentation proved to me that Air and Flash are gaining performance on the handsets quickly. An Air-made website with rich 3D animation etc. was presented which ran smoothly on the Xoom and left me amazed and pondering about future possibilities: the current workflow is usually to get the design for an app from the designer and replicate the design using Android's native views and layouts. This process is mostly a long and tedius one as resources need to be adopted again and again to fit into the developed view hierachy. It seems to me that Adobe Air and Flash (with their native bindings) have the possibilities to simply skip this step which would be amazing and a real timer-saver.

The event was a bit dislocated: the classy flair of the Ritz is just too much for a herd of nerds. The already passive character of a conference was underlined by the location and I got the impression that most attendees were more into gadgets than the soft piano tunes coming from the lobby. All in all, the topics, the insights gained and the food were great thus I'm looking forward for the next AppSummit!

This conference was held for the first time last autumn in Mainz. Since it was quite a success, the organizers decided to run the show again in 2011 - even twice: One spring and one autumn edition. The general concept is to combine developer workshops with a conference and an exhibition during three days.

This time, it took place in Munich, in the Westin Grand Hotel and Enough Software went there with three guys: Ricky (developer + project manager), Olly (lead developer) and Marco (PR + Sales). We decided to skip the workshops on the first day and focus on the conference and exhibition instead which started on day 2.

The organizers of the Mobile TechCon, the Software& Support editorial have a long experience in setting up technical conferences which is something you notice very quickly. Especially the little details are something you really like to appreciate: A survival pack with tape, muesli bar and other basic stuff for the exhibitors was just one of them. Printing the program and the Wifi access details on the back of the conference badges is also a simple but useful thing.

Roundabout 400 people were registered and the lobby filled up pretty quickly once the conference program started at 9am. The program was a good mix of some basic info for decision makers and a lot of deep dives into technologies aimed at programmers.

Around eight companies had booths in the lobby (including Google, Intel and Microsoft), all of them more or less the same size than ours. It was a bit disappointing that the exhibitors did not get conference passes for everyone – that´s why we saw only some sessions. Besides, we did not want to leave the booth unattended, although it only got real crowded in the breaks.

Olly held a session about bada development which was definitely not the most discussed topic- everybody seemed to discuss rather html5 than programming for a niche platform like Samsungs bada. Nevertheless, approximately 25 people showed up- none of them ever developed for bada and Olly told them how to take the first steps.

Olly also joined Intels Appup event where he learned some basic stuff about Meego and got the ExoPC tablet, the developer version of the WeTab. After playing around with it for 2 minutes, we got the impressions it´s rather a prototype than a mass market ready device. Never discovered so many bugs in so little time.

The catering during the days was great. Some breakfast snacks, warm lunch, coffee and cake was served during almost every break.

We´ll be back for the autumn event, even if it´s just for having some beers with the nice guys from InsertEffect.

The Urania, a well-known theater, was the location of this year's conference which was a nice contrast to last years location which was far from the center of Berlin. With its classy red-padded chairs and theatre stages the feeling was much more of a show than of a conference. The Droidcon started on the first day with the barcamp. Everyone was invited to give a half-hour session or discussion of their taste. After an introduction of the team from OpenIntents which is organizing the conference each year, an introduction of each participant of the conference was held. Although a chosen speaker introduced himself and his left and right seat partner with tag words, this process really took a lot of time as several hundred people attended the kickoff. The introduction of the bar camp presenters followed: a wide range of topics was presented and (unlike other bar camps) each and every session got a room fitting to the overall interest in the presented topic. Due to conflicting interests the Enough Software team parted their way to enjoy the sessions.

In-depth discussions about AsyncTasks or Handlers were part of the show as well as companys presenting their products. On the positive side, pure advertisment sessions were not given. I remember a session called ""What makes a super phone ?" from a Samsung Promoter from last year (suprisingly, a Samsung phone had all the presented features) which really left a bad impression on me. On the negative side, some discussions and presentation really got stuck in the first minutes due to lack of preparation and the resulting enthusiasm of the participants. Although i gathered some new insights into the Android platform, a real eye opener was not presented for me.

As the bar camp closed, shuttle busses left for the aftershow party at the C-Base. After a bad, but sufficient meal at one of the worse restaurants of Berlin we decided to join the party. The C-Side revealed itself to be a unique place : build in the style of a somewhat spaceship, playing pumping techno, serving czech beer and offering a variety of old-school arcades we felt strangely comfortable. So we spend the evening hanging with the guys and girls from the befriended companies synyx and sevenval, playing multiplayer tetris, drinking and discussing bad horror movies. All in all a very nice aftershow party.

The conference started with an amazing keycode from Peter Meier of Metaio. The company is spezialized in the creation of Augmented Reality applications and presented possibilities and techniques for Augmented reality in the mobile market. Aside from 3D models and media enriching the real life through the Android camera, a study was presented that showcased the possibilities of stereoscopic cameras in handsets. The result was that objects could be placed in the camera display with real depth : in a demo, a developer from Metaio could move in front and behind an object. A very inspiring and jaw-dropping keynote.

One of the highlights with a full room of fanboys was the presentation of the Honeycomb platform by Google's own Sparky Rhodes. Unfortuanetly, the development aspects of the platform like RenderScript or the extended widgets of Android 3.0 were not part of the talk. But the shirt and figurine freebies at the end made everyone happy again.

Ronan Schwarz of OpenIntents presented a nice session about the fundamentals of Android describing the lifecycle of an activity in-depth. He reminded us that "there is no app" : Android is a framework of mashable activities which opens amazing possibilities far beyond the monolithic app approach. Also, guess which scene from Matrix was referenced.

Although a variety of interesting topics were presented both on the barcamp and on the conference, some aspects of the Droidcon were not as good. Especially the tight schedule of the sessions was bugging us : 30 minutes of time was provided for each session thou some needed (and deserved) more time. The next session immediately started after the previous one which left no time for a nice chat with the other participants and resulted in full and hectic floors between the rooms. But, although i wasn't truly inspired by the show, the mix of topics was just right and I'm looking forward to the next Droidcon.

Over the past few weeks, I compiled a list of what I think are useful and/or interesting open source iOS libraries/classes, focussing solely on components that provide some sort of drop-in UI and leaving out anything that doesn't require linking against UIKit. If there is enough interest, I may write another blog post on non-UI components in the future.

So, without further ado, here are some components that can be useful in one of your next iOS projects, or which you simply might find interesting to play around with. Some of these are well known, but hopefully you'll find something you didn't know existed.

Three20

Three20 is an open-source Objective-C library, originally developed by Joe Hewitt as part of Facebook Connect for iPhone. Three20 is probably the most well-known 3rd party library for iOS development and is in use in numerous popular iOS apps, such as Facebook, Posterous and Pulse.

The library uses modular design, so developers can choose which parts of the library to use in their own projects, or develop extensions on their own.

Among the things the library offers is a launcher which resembles the standard SpringBoard on Apple's iOS devices. Three20's URL-based navigation all across the app brings with it persistence, to ensure a smooth user experience even if the app was terminated while in the background.

One of the most popular components is the photo viewer, which uses the standard datasource pattern to mimick the user interface of Apple's own Photos app. The message composer emulates Apple's Mail app to send any kind of message and is completely customizable, including autocompletion of recipient names, based on a data source you provide.

There are also a number of clever components to facilitate the use of remote content in your app, such as an image view which takes a URL as a parameter and loads and displays the content by itself and a similar class for a table view. This is useful in a lot of cases and can vastly reduce the amount of glue code a developer has to produce.

Another notable component is the built-in HTTP disk cache, since the default iOS component only uses a RAM cache - and as we all know, RAM is a scarce resource of many iOS devices and its contents will be lost when an app is shut down.

Tapku

Perhaps the second biggest library after Three20, Tapku also emulates a lot of what Apple has built into their apps that come with iOS, but has left out of the Cocoa Touch APIs. A prominent example of this is Coverflow, which Apple uses in the iPod app when in landscape orientation. I've used Tapku in the past for its calendar component, which closely resembles what Apple uses in their Calendar app.

The library comes with an example project, so you can check out each component before you add the code to your app.

InAppSettingsKit

One of the not so strong points of iOS is user-adjustable preferences. The Apple-approved way of dealing with such preferences is to use a settings bundle, which will automatically appear in the Settings app. There are a number of advantages to this approach, such as consistency across application, but it also means that the user has to specifically look out for an entry for your app in Settings in order to make changes - or they have to be told that there is such a possibility, which is plain annoying.

Enter InAppSettingsKit, which allows you to mimic the behaviour and style found in Settings.app inside your own app, based on your settings bundle (although there are customization options). The library provides a uniform experience for your users along with great ease-of-use.

ShareKit

Many people nowadays use social networks as a large part of how they communicate with their friends and relatives, and to find information and entertainment. Users commonly share items they find interesting with their friends on social networking sites, and it can make sense for your app to allow users to easily share things.

This is where ShareKit comes in. It provides an easy method to provide sharing functionality for a number of social networks (such as Facebook, Twitter and Delicious) plus e-mail. The library's design is rather smart, to it will only offer those services which support the type of content the user wants to share, such as URLs, images, text or files. It even works offline out of the box and will persistently store items which can then be send when a connection is available.

Route-Me

Route-Me is an open-source replacement for large parts of MapKit, including support for various map sources. As of now, it supports OpenStreetMap, Microsoft VisualEarth (now Bing Maps) and CloudMade out of the box. There are classes for various other map sources, such as Yahoo!, but those are included only for demonstration purposes and are not intended to be used in an actual application for licensing reasons.

Hockey

Ever since iOS 4.0 introduced over-the-air installing, developers have been finding interesting ways to use it, especially to facilitate distribution of ad-hoc builds, which are commonly used for beta testing purposes.

Hockey uses this approach to really make it easy on users to install new versions of apps they offering code for both PHP5-enabled servers and an iOS component which allows for in-app updates, including support for update notifications.

The client library is optional though, so Hockey can also be used for installing and updating apps from Safari.

MTStatusBarOverlay

In the past few years, we've seen a lot of UI innovation come from 3rd party developers, such as Tweetie's (now Twitter for iPhone) pull to refresh (see EGOTableViewPullRefresh below) and Reeder's status bar overlays that indicate current progress without wasting valuable screen estate.

MTStatusBarOverlay replicates this status bar overlay and makes it easy for developers to implement this kind of behaviour in their own apps, along with extensions such as a detail view that pops out of the status bar.

ARAnnotatedSlider

Written by yours truly for Folio Case, this is more an example of showing how to use Key-Value-Observing (KVO) in order to react to UI changes than a complete 3rd party library, but it should be able to adopt it for usage in your own apps without too much hassle.

This example allows developers to add a callout view to UISliders, thus giving users direct feedback on their actions in the same place where they are currently focusing on anyway.

EGOTableViewPullRefresh

Ever since Loren Brichter came up with the pull-to-refresh mechanism in Tweetie (now Twitter for iPhone), other developers have tried to emulate the behaviour. One such implementation is enormego's EGOTableViewPullRefresh, which comes pretty close to Brichter's original (sans sound effects).

Cross-posted to my personal blog.

The trip started quite promising although me and Simon took separate flights. I ended up sharing my seat row with Inga and Erik, a Danish couple who was celebrating their 50th anniversary of  marriage. After they were invited to some glasses of champagne by the chief steward and had a cognac on top of that, Inga was getting a bit too communicative so I started focussing on the entertainment system. “The Cove” is a movie I definitely recommend. It is a very well-made, disturbing but still entertaining documentary about the Japanese fishing industry. In between the movies, Inga told me about the trips they did in the past. They actually made a very nice agreement when they got married: They agreed to take a time out from work every 5 years  for several months at least. Since they stuck to that plan during the past 5 decades, they apparently quit their jobs several times. The reason was that they wanted to make sure not to get stuck in routine and see the years flying by. Instead it was important for them to travel and get to know other parts of the world. I really like the idea, but the mobile business makes it difficult to disconnect for several months, because a lot of changes are constantly happening. And they happen very quickly. So maybe I should not think too long about sabbaticals...
Once off the plane and through the customs, I headed for our hotel downtown and faced the challenge of staying awake another 10 hours to attenuate the jetlag. It worked out since San Francisco is a really nice city where you see a lot of interesting stuff and people almost everywhere.
My colleague Simon arrived the next day and we took care of picking up stuff still needed for our booth. We also visited the guys from 1984Printing (www.1984printing.com) who printed the US edition of the latest version of our Mobile Developers Guide To The Galaxy. Really nice people who did a great job. Whenever you need something printed, get in touch with Amy and Richard and send them our warmest regards! The new edition of the guide now has 114 pages and deals with all major mobile platforms and their pros and cons, including Bada and Windows Phone. Besides, we included a new chapter on testing mobile apps. If you were not one of the lucky ones getting one of the 1000 hardcopies, you can still download the pdf version on our website or visit one of the upcoming events where Enough Software or WIP will be (AppsWorld, droidcon London, etc. pp).

Finally on Tuesday, the CTIA started. The good thing about the conference in general is that it starts quite late (11am), which is more friendly to developers' (and my) circadian rhythm than many other events. The keynotes took place earlier but since the topics discussed (LTE, US government energy policies, etc.) did not sound any interesting, it was not worth getting up early. Simon attended them and did not learn anything new basically. I think it is just not possible to setup  an attractive, up to date program for a mobile conference 9 months in advance. There is just too much going on.

The attendance on the first day was really good. Quite a lot people stopped by and many of them were really excited about the Mobile Developers Guide. Of course there were also several people coming up to us saying: “Oooh! You are the guys behind J2ME Polish. We use your tools, great to meet you.”. Especially the guy from Kony Labs was really happy to see us. But most of the people were more into iPhone and Android. Once they understood that Enough Software is working on all major platforms, we got some good discussions and promising talks with them as well. Caroline and Carlo from WIP dropped by later during the day and it is always nice to see them and hear about their plans for upcoming developer events. Keep your eyes open. There are several nice ideas in the pipeline...
The showfloor closed at 5 and the only aftershow event we knew about was a reception held by Beyondsoft. Since there were not that many people there and they did not have any vegetarian food options, we left early and headed for the Mission District again. Patrick from Mosync joined us and we had a really nice time hanging around in several rock clubs.

The next day started at 10:30h and Simon spend the whole morning on the Adroid Bootcamp. Here is his summary:

First of all I wasn't sure about the meaning of the word “bootcamp” or at least I wasn't sure anymore after I have seen two sessions of the android bootcamp therefore I looked it up in the dictionary just to make sure that I wasn't wrong and yep I wasn't. “Bootcamp” is a camp where people get trained, but android's bootcamp is something else since they have a lot of big sponsors you get to know a lot about them and there thoughts about android which isn't really bad because somehow it is quite informative but I wouldn't call it educational.
Anyhow the first session I attended was the keynote where the first guest speaker was Mark VandenBrink the CTO of Samsung Telecommunications America. Basically the only thing he did was talking about the Galaxy S and the new Galaxy Tab which was personally quite interesting since I was one of the two lucky winners who won a Galaxy Tab. In the Q & A session in the end one person asked about Bada which resulted in big laugh amongst the audience. Samsungs CTO also gave no concrete answer arguing that Bada plays no role in the States.
The second guest speaker was Limvirak Chea VP from InMobi who showed some statistics about mobile advertising. You can download a report after a registration at the InMobi website. For developers who are marketing there own apps InMobi announced a $ 2M World Developer Fund that means that you get 100% of the advertising revenue share as long as the $ 2M are spent (For details look at worlddevfund)

All in all I was a little bit disappointed in my first bootcamp at least from the sessions I attended. The host had a strong accent so it was difficult for me to follow him sometimes I couldn't understand at all what he was saying.

In the meantime I was alone at the booth, but of course had no chance to get bored. Although slightly less than on the first day, there were still a lot of people coming by wanting to know more about these German tekkies and what they do.
On the afternoon it was my turn to escape and attend at least one talk. Ovum held a presentation about the battle of platforms and actually it was quite interesting. The guy was summarizing a study they did and threw around a lot of numbers about marketshare, app download numbers etc. pp. The slides were extremely ugly once again (I will never understand why people do not invest a bit more time in creating graphically attractive Powerpoint. It is not that difficult...), but some numbers actually surprised me: 60% of the developers taking part in the survey were developing for 3 platforms, only very few for one or two. Depending on how you define “platform”, it seems hard to believe that we are really talking about individuals here.  At least I do not think that a developer can be really good at developing for Android, iPhone and Bada for example. The other number that surprised me was his prediction of app download marketshare. He said that in 2015, Apple will still dominate the market, but that Blackberry will be on the second position with 15% of app downloads. He saw Android as the third platform with 10%. I do not believe this neither, but that´s probably just the European vs. the US point of view.

On the evening of that second day, we went to Smaatos's Mobile Advertising Award reception. The Lufthansa application won and the company behind it, Clanmo, is getting a booth on the Mobile World Congress next year. Congratulations, see you in Barcelona!
Afterwards Patrick from Mosync joined us again and we ended up in a biker club where a weird band wearing tight leggings, really long hair and impressive moustaches was playing 70s psychedelic rock. They are called Glitter Wizard: http://www.lastfm.de/music/Glitter+Wizard/+images/33525537

The third and last day of the CTIA is usually really empty. Actually I would suggest to shorten the whole conference because there is almost nobody around.

While we already dismantling the booth, Navteq cam by. They were quite interested in knowing more about our approach with J2ME Polish and we had an interesting discussion abut cross-platform tools in general. At 3pm the show was over.

CTIA Enterprise and Applications has definitely been worth the trip: From a professional point of view we always meet all the key players from the mobile ecosystem and some companies who need our assistance for getting mobile applications done or a strategy worked out. From a personal point of view we can´t complain neither: San Francisco is a great city (it´s a pity that the organizers of the show decided to turn their back to SF) and both of us won some hardware: Simon got the new Galaxy Tablet from Samsung and both of us won a handset from Motorola (probably the Droid X- they did not tell us yet).

So see you next year- wherever CTIA is gonna move.

Let me share my thoughts about the summit!, and especially on the stream I attended dedicated to Qt development and development in Qt

Seat down and go through the content of the 2 days of conference seating comfortably in front  of your computer!

Nokia Developer Summit 2010 – Technical Stream 1: Qt SDK

“Nokia is back” was the message Nokia spread at the opening key notes of the Nokia World and Nokia Developer Summit (NDS) 2010 in London. But this statement not only referred to the new devices Nokia introduced to the public in the last couple of months and of course the brand new ones they presented here at the Nokia World. A big deal of this statement also referred to Nokia's new Qt SDK which Nokia branded under a well known credo only put in different words: “Code less, create more, deploy anywhere”.

In the following lines I will try to wrap up all the information around the new Qt SDK I have heard at the NDS. That means I will talk about of course the Nokia Qt SDK and the new Symbian^3 platform. If you haven't heard or don't know what Qt hybrid based applications, Qt smart installer, Qt Mobility, Qt Quick, QML are or stands for this blog entry might be interesting for you.

Nokia Qt SDK

The new Qt SDK from Nokia which is currently available in Version 1.0 and was released about three weeks ago is Nokia's new developer platform for Symbian and Maemo and later on for MeeGo, too. All you need now is nicely packed in one File. That means you don't have to care about installing all the different tools you needed in the past to develop your application for a specific Symbian. People who have already written a program for a Symbian platform know what I am talking about. The Qt SDK 1.0 provides Qt 4.6.3 including Qt Creator and Qt Designer, the Qt Mobility 1.0.2, a Simulator (does not work with native APIs), On-device debugging, a Symbian SDK and more. Only profiling and optimization tools are still missing. But how far does this credo “deploy anywhere” applies to the real world? Actually it is quite simple, every device which has installed Qt is theoretically deployable but more on that later. Right now the S60 3^rd and 5^th edition are capable to run Qt with a few exceptions . The Qt smart installer will help you with devices that didn't ship with an installed Qt framework by fetching the Qt Runtime when your app needs it on devices that do not have Qt already installed.

As long as you use Qt APIs you should be on the safe side. But as soon as you start using native APIs you will lose the cross platform ability. For what ever reason you have to do so you should have a look at the Qt Mobility project first. The Qt Mobility project addresses these gaps by extending existing Qt APIs or implementing new ones, so check out these two sides for more details. If you have to rely on native APIs but still want consistency on different platforms you should have a closer look to hybrid applications.

Qt Mobility Project

The Qt Mobility project is Nokia's answer to device fragmentation especially on Symbian platforms. It provides Qt API's for the following platforms:

• S60 3^rd edition FP1, S60 5^th edition and Symbian^3 (There will be no support for S40)
• Maemo 5 and the upcoming MeeGo platform
• Desktop platforms supported for several instances.

Qt mobility is primarily available via Nokia Qt SDK but it is also available independently in form of src and bin packages.
Right now the current features of Qt Mobility in the Qt SDK 4.6.3 are as follows:
Bearer Management, Contacts, Location, Messaging, Multimedia, Publish and Subscribe, Service Framework, Sensors, System Information, Versit.
Mobility 1.1 (nokia releases Qt 4.7):
Document Gallery, Feedback, Maps/Navigation, Landmarks, Camera, Organizer, Service Framework (out of process), Qt Quick Support.
Mobility 1.2 (Q1 2011):
NFC (Near Field Communication), Bluetooth, Messaging API IM support, Support for MeeGo platform.
Mobility Roadmap (tentative):
Augmented Reality APIs, Voice framework, Face APIs (for face recognition), Presence APIs.

For help check out these links:

Qt Documentation: http://doc.qt.nokia.com
Qt Developer Network: http://developer.qt.nokia.com
IRC: #qt and #qt-qml on irc.freenode.net
And of course the usual channels as references, examples demos, forums, blogs and mailing lists.

If you want to get involved in the Qt Mobility project you have the following options:

Suggestions and bug reports at http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/
Follow changes in the source code at http://qt.gitorious.org/

Qt on Symbian^3

Now let's talk a little bit more about the new Symbian^3 which is used in the Nokia N8. “Familiarity of the new” were the fancy words Nokia used to indicate that the new Symbian now has closed the gap to other smart phone OS which mainly mean support for gestures and multi touch I guess.

Here is a general Workflow of the developing process for the new Symbian platform suggested by Nokia:

Nokia Qt SDK w/ Symbian target >> Add code >> Run on device >> Debug on device >> Add Mobility >> Tweak project files >> Add Smart Installer >> Distribute.

Here you can see the Qt smart installer I have mentioned earlier. This will ensure that the correct Qt version will be installed on the targeted device so you as a developer doesn't have to care about that.

By the way Nokia will do the signing for you automatically and free of charge when submitting an App to Ovi Store. This is also true for Java applications. There is no way to sign your app without Ovi Store. If you need signing for third parties you have to contact Nokia directly.

But let's also hear from professionals who are actual working with Qt and and are not as biased as I am since Nokia gave me a free N8 at the NDS

There was a very interesting presentation by Futurice, a company who has several years of experience with Qt. Here are some advices from a professional developer's point of view that you as a developer should be aware of when using the Qt SDK to target multiple platforms.

Physical devices differences: It seems that there are only 4 different platforms right now (Maemo, S60 5^th Edition, S60 3^rd Edition and Symbian^3), but you have to be aware of the differences of the physical devices, for example S60 3^rd Edition FP 1 devices that only supports Landscape and devices that has landscape and portrait mode. So in the end you will face 7 different types of devices : Maemo, S60 5^th Ed: 640x360 Portrait & Landscape, S60 3^rd Ed. FP1: 240 x 320 Portrait & Landscape, S60 3^rd Ed. FP1: 320x240 Landscape, S60 3^rd Ed. FP2: 240x320 Portrait & Landscape, S60 3^rd Ed. FP2: 320x240 Landscape, Symbian^3: 640x360 Portrait & Landscape)

File system differences: Since you have to deal with two different OS, the Symbian and the Linux based Maemo you have to be aware of where things are stored. For instance on Symbian user application settings would be stored where the application is installed, on Linux based systems it would be somewhere else.

Access to the hardware: As mentioned earlier in the Qt Mobility Project you have to be aware of that some of the hardware like the camera is inaccessible through Qt API. Hardware access is improved with Qt 4.7 (camera is now available).

Qt default Behavior: Be aware of if you use Qt designer with the standard dialogs you will end up doing a lot of customizing. Qt GUI elements will adapt to the Look & Feel of the environment never the less there are exceptions. To summarize it when targeting multiple platforms you will be better off using custom dialogs instead of the default ones.

Qt implementation bugs: Since Nokia Qt SDK is quite new (3 months old) you have to be especially aware of bugs like the blur graphics effect which renders differently or not at all depending on the platform.

Nevertheless the experts conclusion is that Nokia has managed to pull out a quite impressive IDE in such a short time by adding plenty of new value to Qt framework for professional developers.

Qt and Graphics

Qt provides you with many options how to create your GUI. So it might be a little bit daunting for developers who are new to Qt. Here are the options and some guidelines when to use which one:

Traditional controls: These are the ones you get when using the Qt Designer. They are high level and customizing is only possible to a certain degree. Exactly the same code as on desktops.

QWidget and QPainter: Low level, provides lots of operations (fill, line, text, polygons, gradients, composition, paths, etc.), can be hardware accelerated.

QGraphicsView: Scene based, medium level, integrates with QWidgets, scope for optimization can be daunting.

QGLWidget: Very low level, basic setup, you do the hard work, complete control over GL.

Qt Quick (released with Qt 4.7 ):
Qt Quick is Nokias new Qt User Interface Creation Kit for making slick, fluid UIs. It provides a lot of new features like QML, QtDeclarative C++ classes, Qt Creator tool, Declarative UI language (JavaScript, SVG, XHR, HTML5 WebDB etc.). For more details see http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Quick.

The approach/approaches you should use will depend on various factors.
For instance if you only want to write a small personal app targeting a single platform using the traditional controls would be a good start. But if your UI is more complex and you want to develop for different platforms QWidget, QPainter or QGraphicsView would be the right choice. If you already have an existing code base & assets QGL Widget might be the right one for you. For developers who want to target multiple platforms but are depending on native code hybrid applications might be of help. Instead of using Qt widgets you can design your UI in a full web view that is build on top of webkit. Simply put use web development techniques to create the GUI and Qt C++ for your business logic (hybrid development) . And if this is still not enough variety for you feel free to combine, match or mix the different techniques with each other.

Final (side) note

Since I attended a round table with a topic on push service let me talk at the end a little bit about Nokia's new push notification service which is still in beta. Yes there will be a push service and developers can already apply to it on forum nokia. Right now there are no specific charging plans. It depends on how users/developers will take usage of it were the kind of words the guy from Nokia used. One channel to push them all, even Nokia plans to move their services to this one channel. The reason why Nokia combines all services into one channel is efficiency. In that way battery life should be improved. Developers should be aware of it and implement a setting where the user can turn on/off the push service since Nokia does not provide push service configuration for a specific application on the device.

Alright, that' all from the NDS 2010 in London. I hope you enjoyed the article.

Day one

Day two

Closing words