The new Mobility project here at Nokia is causing quite some excitement. Our goal is to make Qt an even more comprehensive application and UI framework by developing new APIs addressing mobile functionality. Ultimately this will enable rich mobile applications to run across many more platforms… Nokia and non-Nokia platforms! Why didn’t we think of this earlier!
The Project is led by Qt but has the good fortune of having senior contributors from S60, Maemo, Services and others from within Nokia R&D. We are adopting an open and flexible approach toward Requirement Input and co-Designing with some of Nokia’s best Architects. Receiving input from the wider development community is viewed as an essential part of the process. Our plan is to release early and release often. The development of the APIs can be followed here on Qt Labs.
We intend to create APIs for many functional areas, beginning with Service Framework, Bearer Management API and soon we will be sharing our work on Contacts API, Messaging and others.
The first API to appear in our public repository is the Service framework. We plan to post the Bearer Management API in the coming weeks and more APIs will follow. Please send your feedback for any API posted in this category to qtmobility at trolltech.com.
So please contribute toward helping us make this project a success for 3rd Party developers and join us in celebrating this new project initiative! Lets ‘get mobile’ with the new Mobility APIs!
11 Responses to “The Mobility Project”
Think of the Linux users.
I’d really like to see mobile development become easier on linux (especially s60 dev).
Glad to see Qt spread. 
Good to hear that you are reviving Qtopia … but why did you kill it in the first place ?
Great news!
Is it in some way related to ofono.org? Do you plan to integrate QT with that API?
Thank you!
Awesome. If Qt becomes the primary GUI for Nokia phones I might even buy one rather than android (which forces you to use evil Java). By the way, your Qt Mobility page mentions S40, however you can’t write C++ apps for S40 - only useless Java Midlets.
I agree with hydroo : most of the development tools for mobile platforms are only available for windows. A linux SDK for S60, for example, would ease dev, for example with the availability of valgrind to test the application before porting it to the embedded platform…
Ditto Hydroo and Ben, but also thinking of the MacOSX users. SDK for them would be nice besides just Win and Linux SDKs.
Qt developers, please keep in mind another cool environment for Qt applications: the smart home!
I know that Qt can even be deployed to coffee makers with fancy touch screens, so please don’t lose touch with developments of open standards and applications in this important market niche. Afterall, bringing Qt to [smart] embedded devices that can communicate with each other in a network should open a new world of opportunities for developers and consumers.
A good place to start is the KNX Association!
@Guilhem: This is not Qtopia. I don’t think there is one gui element, besides example applications. It’s all backend framework stuff.
@Augu: This has nothing to do with ofono.
These frameworks are also targeting desktop platforms that Qt also targets. It’s not just mobile phones, but “mobility”.
@Tim _You_ can’t write C++ apps for S40 because there is no public SDK and no mechanism for installing third party native apps but the apps that ship with S40 are written in C++ (eg. it uses WebKit for the browser). The mobility project is intended to help Nokia write one app and deploy it across multiple platforms too, not just third party developers 
@Ben, @John depending on how much platform-specific code your app will need, you’ll always have the option of coding up a regular old Qt app on your favourite platform and then porting it over to the target platform later. I know, that’s not nearly the same as a native SDK for multiple platforms but then Qt doesn’t help Nokia to get a decent multi-platform cross-compiler or make any of the other platform-specific build stuff cross-platform. I use a Mac myself and would like to see a cross-platform SDK (or a least a linux-based SDK in a VMWare/VirtualBox image) for Nokia devices but I guess this will take some time.
What about iPhone?
Don’t rely on Nokia architects. I was trying to put an indicator on the status bar for a mobile application. In Java that was going to be in JSR 258. Now that is released (nearly three years late) it allows you to ‘theme’ the status bar. And you have one icon - instant messaging notification. Nokia was specification lead on this.
During that time Android has arrived and its designers understand that a smart phone may have a number of applications that want to indicate status. It’s natural; you want an indication that tells you there is a new calendar entry, news posting or email. @Kensai knows that smart home devices will have displays that can be just status indicators, nothing more.
So, please look around you. Don’t be pushed around by the 600 pound gorilla like Symbian was. Give us rich access to the status area, let us use different graphics for the signal strength for example. Let us really skin the UI. How far would winamp have got without skins? - it has 2661 skins when I looked today.