[Qt-interest] Qt as true mobile multi-platform framework.

[Constantin Makshin]

No offence, but US isn't the whole world.

There are quite a lot of Symbian phones, Maemo exists on Nokia N770/N800/N810 tablets and N900 tablet-phone, MeeGo is already available on some netbooks and will replace Maemo on phones (phone version is still WIP). Windows Mobile isn't completely dead, too.

Windows Phone 7 is based on .NET and doesn't support native [3rd-party] applications, so chances of Qt being ported to this platform are questionable. And it was released less than one month ago, so I guess it's a bit early to discuss its worthiness.

I agree than Android is popular, but why not use the community-developed port of Qt when it's done? Ignore something just because it's not developed by Nokia?

As for iPhone version of Qt — do you remember the restrictions Apple added to their iPhone development license that banned all intermediate layers and code that wasn't using native iOS API? Those restrictions were relaxed some time ago, but when they were active, would anyone develop a Qt port or Qt-based iPhone application knowing that it's likely to be rejected by AppStore staff?

On Friday 05 November 2010 09:14:16 David Ching wrote:
> With respect, Qt is not as relevant as a "true multi-platform framework" as 
> it was prior to the dominance of iPhone and Android, which together with RIM 
> make up almost all of the mobile market in the US.  Symbian is non-existent 
> in the US, and Mameo and MeeGo are unknown quantities (are they even 
> released yet?) that may or may not succeed.  I don't see how you can ignore 
> (or leave to "unofficial ports" the dominant market share of iPhone and 
> Android) and seriously call it true multi-platform.
> 
> Which is too bad considering there is nothing else that is, either.  Best on 
> paper at least is Silverlight, which can target Windows (native), Mac 
> (native), Linux (through Moonlight?), iPhone (through MonoTouch), and 
> Windows Phone 7 (native).  Then we read this week that MS is repositioning 
> Silverlight and its only true cross platform support will be through HTML5, 
> meaning we will probably never see Silverlight on Android.
> 
> Seems like there isn't enough money for anyone to write a true 
> multi-platform framework for all significant desktop and mobile OS's.  :-(
> 
> -- David
> 
> 
> "Constantin Makshin"  wrote in message 
> news:201011041319.22577.cmakshin at gmail.com...
> 
> Qt already works on most desktop platforms, Symbian (Symbian^3 has Qt 
> available out-of-the-box, Symbian^4 is going to replace numerous old GUI 
> libraries with Qt), [dead] Windows Mobile (AFAIK, native applications are 
> no-no on Windows Phone 7, so it's unlikely that Qt will be available there), 
> Maemo and MeeGo. There are unofficial ports of Qt to Android and iPhone.
> 
> Looking at that list, I'd say Qt is already [one of] the most portable 
> toolkit[s]. From my experience of using Qt on mobile platforms I can say 
> that most difficulties are caused by physical/hardware limitations of mobile 
> devices (small screens, input methods, etc.) you have to cope with and not 
> software ones.
> 
> So, I think, Qt can be called "true multi-platform framework" (the word 
> "mobile" is omitted intentionally).
> 
> > Paulo 
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