The Nokia Qt SDK

…was just launched as a public beta. It seems this SDK was in the works for quite some time, because there are promotional videos from Nokia with testimonials from early adopters.

The SDK is a one-stop install for all the tools that you need to develop for Symbian (and Maemo). It’s basically a replacement for all the .exes and .zips and .sises that you had to download while following Allesandro’s “Setting up a Symbian development environment” videos. This is obviously a good thing (but I still didn’t dare to install it on a drive other than C).

The contents of the SDK are as follows (I’ll skip the Maemo stuff – I don’t have a device):

• The Qt Symbian SDK. This looks like a generic SDK which you can use both on touch and non-touch devices. Alessandro mentioned that it doesn’t matter if you download the SDK for Symbian 3rd or 5th because Qt treats it all the same, so I assume that this generic SDK is just a convenience.
• MinGW + Symbian toolchain. The usual.
• QtCreator. A snapshot built on the 23rd of April.
• The Qt sources. 4.6.2 + 4.7.0
• The Qt simulator. A new program that is supposed to help you get an idea about how your app looks on various devices – both non-touch and touch skins are available. You can simulate all sorts of situations such as incoming messages, having a low battery, sensor input (ambient light, etc), location changes. Very cool and very useful. Looking at the install kit, it seems to just build your app for MinGW or MSVC, my guess is that apps running under the simulator are actually running on your development OS. The simulator is fast, unlike the emulator.
• .sis setup files for Qt, the TRK and other dependencies.

What was previously the difficult task of getting a Symbian development environment up and running has now become simple. All the developers from the testimonial videos seemed thrilled with the SDK.

Interesting factoid: the testimonial videos indicate that some Qt apps might already be available in the Ovi store. The WIKITUDE app is a suspect at a size of 8.66 MB. What’s even more impressive than the size is that very few people are complaining about it! Most of the reviews are positive, and the negative ones complain that they couldn’t start the app.