It been almost two years now, that Trolltech decided to open a Berlin office in Adlershof.
When we started (I include myself as Karsten and I were the first freshly hired guys),
there was a lot of build-it-up spirit. You can find early Trolltech Labs entries by Espen showing you how it all started.

Since then the staffing grew and grew, Berlin started to grew up its culture, while still feeling connected to Oslo.
We have made it up to 17 people by now, which is an insane increase rate compared to most other companies in Europe or even worldwide.

But after latest happenings this has changed. I guess most of you heard already some rumors, that things weren’t working out very well for us.
Less and less space for us to grow. More and more pressure on us to get along with the situation. Endless discussions between developers, managers (you know these guys that seem to know best about developers), developers with managers and managers with developers.

In the end it has been decided by management (once again these strange people), that the office will have to close and that it is time for the Trolls to move on…

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As most of you know Espen went back to Oslo a few months ago after he helped out setting up the Berlin office.

Since then, the Qt/WinCE project has been split up between Oslo and Berlin, which caused no problem at all due to modern communication ways like voice-over-ip, video-conferencing, Email, IRC and (place-your-favorite-protocol-here). But since one week the team has been reunited in Oslo.

The mission: Integrate our work back into the main development branch.

The result: Achieved on Thursday afternoon.

From now on we can follow up much easier the overall development process and catch up with all the neat features, which are supposed to come for the next release.

For those of you, who are curious about how the commit log looks like, take a short look here:

Change 281657 by espenr@espenr-radeberger on 2007/10/25 15:58:00

Fixes: complation error on Windows CE

Task: port Qt to Windows CE

AutoTest: probably borked

Details:

One year in the making. Trying hard to brake the main branch. Works for us

During the following weeks we are trying to get some of the features work, which has been made available for the other platforms already. I am currently investigating on how to get the Patternist done by Frans ported to Windows CE, while Thomas takes care of namespace issues.

So stay tuned for the next exciting news about Qt/WinCE.

It is quiet some time ago, since we announced here on the blog that three brave Trolls are on their way of porting Qt to the Windows Embedded World. We think it is time to provide you some updates on this topic.

We have just released our preview release “Kicker”. Compared to the last blog entry (QtCore/QtGui/ActiveQt), we have added QtNetwork, QtXml, QtSvg and the biggest step: We migrated to Qt 4.3 as a basis for our work.

Using 4.3 gained us a lot, especially performance-wise. We gained around a 110% speedup in the anti-aliased painting. That is a huge improvement as mobile devices usually have a slower hardware configuration than a desktop machine. Also the changes to the fileengine (using native handles on Windows) helped a lot to improve the general I/O performance and stability.

You might recognize the style from previous blog entries

The networking part took some effort. As some of you might know, Windows CE uses only a subset of the native win32 API and network wise it lacks most of the asynchronous functionality. As Trolltech provides the same quality and efficiency for each platform we support, the decision was clear to make everything also working for the Qt/CE port. So take a look at the following screenshot showing the ftp example on a Windows CE 5 emulator(x86).

Although OpenSSL is not officially supported for Windows Mobile 5, it is possible to build the libraries on your own and in that case you can use OpenSSL inside of Qt/CE. It is fully supported!

It always differs from developer to developer, what he actually uses of Qt. The remaining parts just stay untouched. While on a desktop this usually does not matter, on mobile devices it does. Space is always a big criteria during development and because of that we have decided to apply the Qfeatures system for Qt/CE. This allows you to build up your custom configuration of which classes should be build inside the separate Qt modules.

Developers, who are familiar with Windows CE, might have recognized a lot of issues when they want to communicate with the device outside of Visual Studio. Especially starting an application remotely or having file I/O inside of the terminal. We fell over this situation and decided to have some additions to the Qtest library. Internally we use a small application which is responsible for deployment, execution and result display of auto-tests.

For those of you, who are already using Windows CE 6 or Windows Mobile 6, we can just say, feel free to. We do support all these platforms also. Just take a look here:

This looks pretty much like the same screenshot we had posted before, right? But it is Windows CE 6 on ARM, believe us

Did we mention, that you can use Qt/CE also on Windows Vista? Well now we did.

Writing some words on Windows Vista. Currently we do have some minor issues as ActiveSync (the application behind the Remote API for Windows CE) is not supported anymore for Vista. Microsoft exchanged it with the “Windows Mobile Device Center”, which has the same options for regular users, but does less for developers. We are investigating on this and will find a solution for the auto test system.

I hope, we could get you up to date and you’re even more interested on our Qt/CE port. In case you cannot wait until the first tech preview is out and you want to try out the “Kicker” preview package right now, feel free to contact us at sales@trolltech.com to join the preview program.