Qt on S60: baby steps

After following Allesandro’s videos I managed to install the Qt SDK and write a small test app for my S60 3.2 phone.

A word of advice: don’t try to be too clever with the install, use paths without spaces and install on drive C. There’s ample opportunity for improvement when it comes to getting a Symbian development environment up and running. Most of the headaches come from the Symbian tools, but the Symbian tools are needed by Qt.

Qt on S60

I proceeded to install Qt on my phone. Qt needs OpenC and the C++ standard libraries to run, so I used the qt_demos.sis installer which handles all the dependencies. The Qt install package is ~4MB in size. The Qt + dependencies package is ~11MB. It’s very big for a mobile phone, but the Smart installer should trim it down. Having the option of selecting which modules to install would be very helpful!

I expect the size to be  a problem for over-the-air installs, including Ovi store. I’ve noticed that Ovi customers are sensitive to the download sizes and most of the Ovi installs kits that I’ve seen were in the <500KB area. The biggest I’ve downloaded was Skype (4MB) and I used wireless for that one.

The install process went alright and I started some of the demos. According to Nokia, the E72 is a Tier 1 device. All the demos that I’ve tried worked, but it’s obvious that most of them were designed for touch-screen devices; the touch version of Symbian seems to get more attention, all the Qt demos I’ve seen were done on a 5800 or maybe N97. A few apps had the window overflow from the screen (a known problem – seems to happen even with layouts) while others simulated a mouse cursor which was difficult to operate with a D-pad.

It’s worth noting that the apps worked and that the issues were mostly UI related. I don’t think that programs can be ported to non-touch phones without a complete UI redesign. Take the FTP app for instance: works perfectly but it is cumbersome to use because the server lineedit, the cdup and download buttons take half of the screen leaving too little space for the tree widget.

As far as I can tell the trick to having a usable S60 3.2 UI is using lists, tabs, soft keys + menus and shortcut keys. From the OS main menu to the music player and clock almost everything is a list. The file manager displays the file system in lists. QuickOffice’s main screen is a list. It’s lists all the way down…

Maybe UIs are hard to get right in non-touch Symbian. I’ve seen few programs with a nice UI and I’ve been using Symbian on and off since Nokia 7650. I’ve bought an acclaimed Finance tracking app written in Flash from the Ovi store recently and it displays itself in portrait mode on my landscape screen making it completely unusable.

Anyway, back to Qt: I have used Qt Creator 1.3.1 for deploying to the device and debugging. The AppTRK will try to listen for debugger connections on port 1 while QtC will try to connect on something like port 17. It’s a known issue and I solved this by using the device manager to make the E72 connect on port 1.

The debugger jumped to assembly directly when encountering a breakpoint. I also tried a recent snapshot but it didn’t stop at the breakpoint at all. This is also a known issue which will hopefully be fixed in 2.0.

These two issues aside, the whole process was straightforward, not unlike developing a regular Qt program. All in all, I think that when Qt Mobility, the Smart installer and QtC 2.0 come out, Qt development will be more attractive on Symbian.

The Nokia e72

It’s nice, but not great. I had a Symbian UIQ phone before this one and while I can see that the E72 is better overall, there are little annoyances that prevent me from being completely happy with it.

I’m also not sure where this phone stands in relation to Qt. Qt development was one of the reasons that I bought it for, seeing that it’s tier 1, and the top of the line in the E series, but it doesn’t seem to be getting too much Qt-tention.

The Ovi store

I watched a presentation about getting your Qt apps on the Ovi store and the costs were 200$ for the publisher id, 10$ for signing the app and 10$ for signing the smart installer. Since the smart installer is in beta, it’s not allowed on the store yet, which means that users are looking at a few megabytes of downloads. I’m not even sure that you can publish a Qt app to the store yet, because technically it’s two downloads right now: one for Qt and one for the actual app.

One thing’s for sure: getting software from Ovi is much more convenient than the old days when you had to use various aggregator sites or buy straight from the publisher. A good Qt-Ovi integration should be a priority for Nokia.