A few weeks ago, we had an awesome insane idea: to translate Qt Creator into French. It turned out to be a terrible idea, because it was much more work than what we originally thought.

We started to translate the strings and it didn’t take us long to realize how huge Creator really is, and the list of strings to translate seemed endless. We ended up asking for help in one of the French Qt communities, Qt.developpez.com. Their response was amazing, they worked like crazy on the translations, and thanks to them, the next version of Qt will provide a French version of the tools. From Qt 4.6.0 on, you will have a French version of Qt Designer and of Qt Assistant. Qt Creator 1.3.0 is available in French entirely, including the integrations and the less known plugins.

The translation of thousands of strings, by non-profesionnals, in only a few weeks, have been quite a challenge :). Thanks to Jonathan Courtois, Alp Mestan, Florent Renault, Pierre Rossi for their amazing work on translations. Thanks to Yoann Lopes for the review of some of the tools.

Thanks to great efforts from the community, Qt Creator has translations for German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Slovenian and now French. Everybody is welcome to participate in those translations or to create a new translation via the GIT repository on gitorious. If you would like to help the French translation, you are welcome on the forums of developpez.net to meet the other translators.

---

Il y a quelques semaines, nous avons eu une idée géniale stupide : traduire tout Qt Creator en Français. Il s’est avéré que cette idée était ingérable, car cela représente bien plus de travail que ce que nous avions initialement imaginé.Après avoir commencé la traduction, nous avons rapidement réalisé à quel point Creator est immense, et la liste des chaînes à traduire semblait sans fin. Nous avons demandé de l’aide à l’une des communautés Qt francophone: Qt.developpez.com. Leur réponse a été incroyable, ils ont travaillé comme des fous sur les traductions, et grâce à eux, la prochaine version de Qt aura une version francophone des outils. À partir de Qt 4.6.0, une version française de Qt Designer et de Qt Assistant. Qt Creator sera disponible intégralement en Français, y compris les plugins dont personne n’a jamais entendu parler…La traduction de milliers de chaînes de charatères, par des amateurs, en quelques semaines, a été un véritable défi :). Merci à Jonathan Courtois, Alp Mestan, Florent Renault et Pierre Rossi pour leur travail sur les traductions. Merci a Yoann Lopes pour la vérification des traductions des outils.

Grâce aux efforts de la communauté, Qt Creator est traduit en Allemand, Espagnol, Italien, Japonais, Polonais, Russe, Slovène, et maintenant Français. Tout le monde peut aider à ces traductions, ou créer de nouvelles traductions, via le dépôt GIT sur gitorious. Si vous désirez aider la traduction française, vous êtes les bienvenus sur les forums de developpez.net pour rencontrer les autres traducteurs.

For those of you who don’t read the new Qt blog website, where Qt Marketing and Product Management talk about “corporatey” stuff (affectionately called the “PHB blog” by our developers), we’ve just announced that our brand, new bugtracker is public: see http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com.

So, I won’t repeat everything that is in the other blog (it is, after all, written by Marketing, so it should be better written than this thrown-together “reblogging”). I’d just like to highlight one important point that Adam made in his blog:

The Qt Bug Tracker isn´t simply a read-only view into the bug tracking system used by Qt developers, it is the bug tracking tracking system used by Qt developers.

The previous solution was an in-house system we had built over the years. It started as a distribution list for the Qt developers back in the day, then got an automatic tool to reply to the emails received and assign numbers, a robot to collect incoming emails and add to the database. Internally, we’ve had a rich-client to access that database and manipulate our own bugs. But communicating with the reporters was always very difficult.

This new tool is different. Everything is on the web. And you get to vote on issues, even watch if they change.

This is another step in our opening up of our development model. Enjoy!

Many people have expressed some confusion over the the S60 port of Qt and where to find the relevant branches, so I thought I’d give a little update on where things are happening:

When the port was still young, it lived in the qt-s60 repository on gitorious. Here, both the master branch and feature branches coexisted happily. This however changed when the S60 port was merged back into the 4.6 branch of Qt. After this the master branch in the qt-s60 repository became abandoned.

Since this branch will not be used for development anymore, I deleted it today. This does not mean that the repository is dead though. The Qt for S60 developers still use the repository to develop feature branches, and we will continue doing this in the near future. When they are done, they will be merged back to a branch in the Qt repository (like 4.6, 4.7 or master). So unless you want to track a specific feature branch of interest to you, all the relevant S60 development happens in qt/master.

So what about contributions? After the merge of the S60 port, the rule is simple: Submit all merge requests to the Qt repository, even if the request is based on code found only in the qt-s60 repository. This is easier for you (one single place to submit to) and for us (one single place to monitor).

A couple of other notes on contributions related to S60 code:

• Be careful when you deal with code that can throw a Symbian leave. These have to be wrapped in special conversion macros. See this page for more information: Symbian exceptions safety.
• Coding style. Traditionally Symbian has had its own coding style with a different indentation and naming scheme. This style does not apply to S60 code used in the Qt library; We still use the same style that we always have! If you need a cheat sheet to the Qt coding style, look here: Qt Coding Style. You might also want to read the Qt Coding Conventions. Update: If you are using Carbide, you can download the Qt_Code_Style.xml template. To add it, just go to Window > Preferences... > C/C++ > Code Style and import the file you just downloaded.
• There are still problems when compiling Qt for hardware using GCCE. The emulator should work fine though. We hope to get this fixed in the future.
• The rest of the contribution process should be explained in the Qt Contribution Guide.
• Update: The win32-mwc mkspec that was used in earlier releases has been deprecated and is not supported anymore. You need to use either Microsoft Visual Studio or MinGW and use “-platform win32-msvc2008″ or “-platform win32-g++”, respectively.

Scope up!

We are looking for good developers, QA people and technical writers who would like to work for Qt Software, aka Qt R&D in Nokia. All our offices have open positions.

http://www.qtsoftware.com/about/careers/job-openings (redirects to our job portal).

The Brisbane, Berlin and Oslo offices all have ads out looking for Software Engineers who would like to be a Troll, as part of Qt. As sculpturs are required to show their portfolio of er… statues…?, we require all developer candidates to submit source code together with their application. Show us your code!

http://www.qtsoftware.com/about/careers/code-specifications

You can become an active contributor to WebKit, or work on tuning innerloops in our graphics systems, perhaps interface against native I/O and network system calls, contruct new architectures and APIs, you name it. Qt covers must subjects and you can choose to work on the area that interests you the most. Our team has developers from all over the world, covering all kinds of specializations within software development.

Qt R&D has a quite flat organizational structure, with flexible work hours and several benefits that help ease your day-to-day life. Trolltech was a company founded by developers. We’re still the same people. We develop code the way developers want to work. Our development model allows great freedom to each developer.

We need your brain, your crazy ideas, your doc writing skills, your thoroughness and attention to detail, your sense of humor ;-).

So, have you ever thought about working on Qt? Well, what’ya waiting for?!

Platform: Windows XP with SP3(now we only support Qt/S60 on it.)

1. SYMBIAN Development Environment

For downloading the packages, you need to register an account in the forum of Nokia,
http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/registration/registration.html

1-1. Carbide.C++
http://www.forum.nokia.com/Tools_Docs_and_Code/Tools/IDEs/Carbide.c++/
http://sw.nokia.com/id/7710eba7-4da7-4ddc-a52a-53b506cadb4a/Carbide_cpp_v2_0_en.exe

Carbide.C++ 2.0
Carbide_cpp_v2_0_en.exe 203MB

1-2. S60 Platform SDKs for Symbian OS, for C++
http://www.forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/ec866fab-4b76-49f6-b5a5-af0631419e9c/S60_All_in_One_SDKs.html
http://sw.nokia.com/id/577ad48d-290c-4bb5-8bdf-779ea8a5bc6c/S60_5th_Edition_SDK_v1_0_en.zip

S60 Platform SDKs for Symbian OS, for C++, 5th Edition
S60_5th_Edition_SDK_v1_0_en.zip 622MB

2. Installation

Please install above 2 packages in default path.

Installation order: Carbide.C++, S60 SDK.

After Carbide.C++, you may need to install ActivePerl-5.6.1.638-MSWin32-x86.msi:

http://downloads.activestate.com/ActivePerl/Windows/5.6/ActivePerl-5.6.1.638-MSWin32-x86.msi

And you also need to use Git to get Qt from Qt S60 Git Repo, better to download this version of Git.

Please also make sure the path of our perl(default: C:\Perl\bin) should be in front of the perl from git(default: C:\Program Files\Git\bin) in PATH.

Please run this, Start->Carbide.c++ v2.0->Configure environment for WINSCW command line.

3. Build Qt with S60 5.0 Public SDK

cd C:\git
git clone git://gitorious.org/+qt-s60-developers/qt/qt-s60.git
cd qt-s60
set PATH=C:\git\qt-s60\bin;%PATH%
configure -platform win32-mwc -xplatform symbian-abld -openssl-linked -qt-sql-sqlite -system-sqlite
make debug-winscw

4. Build Examples

cd C:\git\qt-s60\examples\widgets\analogclock
qmake
make debug-winscw
C:\S60\devices\S60_5th_Edition_SDK_v1.0\epoc32\release\winscw\udeb\epoc.exe
“Menu”(or click the middle one of the 3 buttons)->QtExamples->analogclock

You got it!

BTW, it’s my first blog here.

About two weeks back, the Qt repository was made available to the public. Since then, we on the S60 team have been dying to do the same, and finally, we are able to make our branch of Qt available to all of you!

On the master branch you can see all the latest development of the S60 port, and everyone is free to clone and submit merge requests, just like for mainline Qt.

In order to compile the branch, I suggest reading the installation instructions at pepper.troll.no. There is also a very nice webcast to get you started.

Unfortunately, compiling Qt for the actual device is not possible unless you own a license to the RVCT ARM compiler. While it is possible to compile Qt with the GCCE ARM compiler, the binaries will not run due to shortcomings in GCCE when dealing with static data in DLLs. We’re hoping that this problem will be rectified in the future. Compiling for the emulator should be a breeze though, and the majority of code can be tested there.

Welcome to the world of Symbian!

The repository is located at http://gitorious.org/+qt-s60-developers/qt/qt-s60.

Update: Right now the master branch will only compile with a beta version of Open C that is not yet released to the public. We are told that it is to be released very soon, but in the meantime, it should be safe to comment out the parts that fail to compile. We are sorry for the inconvenience!

That’s right.

This weekend we integrated the animation and state machine APIs (part of the Qt Kinetic project from the road map) in Qt’s master branch.

They were both released as solutions before, and we’ve had a lot of feedback. The APIs have been through a bunch of reviews and iterations, and we’re really really proud of the results. So go and pull the latest version of the repository and try out the examples and the examples.

I’m not going to say any more about it, rather I’ll just link to a bunch of blogs that we posted earlier. (PS. some of these have screenshots and even videos)

Qt Animation Framework.

Welcome to Kinetic.

Qt State Machine Framework.

Qt Kinetic hits Plasma.

Animated Layouts with Qt Kinetic.

Qt Animation Framework reloaded.

Animated Tiles.

Qt Hierarchical State Machine Framework add-on released.

New (and last?) QtAnimationFramework Solution (wasn’t the last, by the way.)

Writing a game with the animation and the state machine API.

A full serving of the Qt State Machine Framework.

Qt Animation Framework 2.3 is out.

It’s taken a little longer than expected, but the nice and polished Qt Jambi 4.5.0_01 packages are finally ready for download on Qt Software’s server. As usual, there are both source and binary packages available, but to match the new licensing of Qt, the GPL packages have been replaced by LGPL packages this time around. Read the press release.

As has been announced earlier, this will be the final feature release of Qt Jambi from Qt Software. Patch releases and support will continue for the next year, but when Qt 4.6 comes out, Qt Software will not be releasing an official Java version. Part of me is sad about this, sure, but part of me is excited as well, because with the new licensing terms, I think there is a real chance that Qt Jambi can become a success in the wild and continue to grow, maybe even at a quicker rate, in both stability and popularity and excellence, after the official support for it has ended.

This success relies on one thing in particular: Our ability to establish a community of volunteers who want to maintain and use Qt Jambi when its official life as a Qt Software product ends. Having this community is vital. It’s what will make or break Qt Jambi in the future, so we want to do what we can to get that going.

The first step is of course to license the product under the LGPL. This means that both open and closed source users can continue to use the product.

The second step we are taking is to host a public git repository for Qt Jambi. People who wish to contribute to Qt Jambi can clone the repository and request merges to master when they feel their changes are ready for it. We will maintain the public repository for the coming year, and integrate changes that are deemed safe/tested and that pass whatever legal criteria might be required (I don’t have details on this yet, so lets call everything subject to change.)

As a third measure, we have made sure that the repository is complete, meaning that it contains the revision history from the very moment we took Qt Jambi out of research and made a product branch of it. The inner workings of Qt Jambi are complex, so being able to do a “git blame” and find the change description that explains exactly why, for instance, a particular function requires a recursion guard or a mutex lock, is a requirement when new maintainers take over control.

Fourth: As many of you know, we have always tried to keep a direct line of communication with users. So far this has been using the Qt Jambi Interest mailing list, and that will continue unless the community takes its discussion elsewhere. In addition, I want to make available as much information as possible on the processes we have established and experience we have gained while working on Qt Jambi for the past years. My current thinking is to put this here on labs in the form of blogs, but as the amount of information grows, a wiki might also be in order.

Finally, if you are interested in contributing to Qt Jambi, and you have any questions/ideas on how we can make it a success as a community project, please sign up to the mailing list and let us know. Also, clone the repository at http://gitorious.org/qt-jambi and start hacking!

If you want to learn Qt, and French is your favourite language, we have good news for you: the main Qt tutorial for Qt 4.5 is now available with French explanation. Pierre and I have translated the tutorial with the help of Kavindra and David and we have successfully got everything to work (encoding problems are more easily solved in Qt than on the Web…)

If French is your mother tongue, you will be happy to learn that there is a lot of resources available in the French Qt community. One very active community is http://qt.developpez.com/, who have translated the complete Qt tutorial. They have a forum, many original articles and new translations coming soon. Also, there is another community, QtFr, with tons of articles and an active forum.

Si vous voulez apprendre Qt et que le français est votre langue préférée, nous avons une bonne nouvelle pour vous: le tutoriel de Qt 4.5 est maintenant disponible avec les explications en français. Pierre et moi avons traduit le tutorial avec l’aide de Kavindra et de David et nous avons réussi à tout faire fonctionner (les problèmes d’encodage sont plus facile à résoudre dans Qt que sur le web…).

Si le français est votre langue maternelle, vous serez heureux d’apprendre qu’il y a énormément d’aide disponible dans la communauté francophone. Une communauté très active est sur http://qt.developpez.com/, ils ont entièrement traduit le tutoriel Qt. Ils ont aussi un forum, tout plein d’articles originaux et de nouvelles traductions sont attendues prochainement. Sans oublier la communauté QtFr qui propose des tonnes d’articles et un forum.

The news about Nokia’s intentions to acquire Trolltech is very exciting and sobering at the same time. I would characterize my own opinions and thoughts as “cautiously optimistic.” As Trolls, we are still digesting the idea, discussing it amongst ourselves, and processing the incoming information from our own management team as well as the information from Nokia.

I hope that our community, both commercial and open-source alike, don’t get too distraught about a seemingly quiet Trolltech team. We, like you, just found out about this yesterday morning and need time to absorb what this means for us, for you, for everyone. After everything sinks in, we will come out with more information in the near future, and we appreciate your patience until then.

Rest assured, Nokia has the best intentions in making this move. More information will be available soon., however the message from Nokia is clear: development, sales, open-source and community support, etc. will continue as usual. Lee Williams, Senior VP, R&D at Nokia, told us Monday that Nokia wants us to teach them how to do cross-platform and open-source development on the desktop (and not just on mobile phones). This is a bit of a special acquisition because both Trolltech, in its current organizational form, and Nokia will be working together on what the future will bring.