Using Qt on Symbian Vs Desktop

Question

Hello All,

I am using Qt for almost for 1 and half year on cross platform desktop application (Mac, Win and Linux)development. I would like to know how development differs when we go to Symbian.

Any help is appreciated

Answer 1

My experience is that desktop development is more productive than Symbian development, due to quicker implement-test cycles. It's been half a year since I did Qt on Symbian but at the time the emulator was very slow to work with and on-device debugging via Carbide and TRK was somewhat error prone.

Although the APIs are the same, there may come a time when you need to do some native development if what you want to do has not yet been covered by Qt - as we had to do pre-QT Mobility. In that case it might be a good idea to implement a PAL layer so you can easily make the switch once Qt supports it, or if you want to target other platforms like MeeGo. Since Symbian runs on a variety of devices, there may or may not be support for what you want. For example, we had problems getting OpenGL to run on some devices.

In terms of UI design, we found that the Symbian style in Qt wasn't very appealing and didn't resemble S60, so you might need to spend some effort on customizing your UI. If this hasn't changed already, it will hopefully change with upcoming Symbian and Qt versions.

Answer 2

Fredrik mentions using the Carbide IDE. Have you tried Qt Creator? The on-device debugging is very good. Also, Qt Creator introduced the Qt Simulator which is a program which runs on the desktop. Its job is to mimic the mobile device. It is scriptable via Qt Script. For example, if you're using the location APIs, this allows you to simulate moving to various locations. Here is a short blog post I wrote.

From a Linux point of view, the Symbian SDK still has windows dependencies. Nokia offers a remote compiler service which would allow you to compile on there compiler farm.