Nokia Apps Dev Kit

[John Sutherland]

You should be interested in the apparently wide range of dev technologies available from Nokia for their new apps store and beyond. Registration is free to apply to be an app developer, and they can be written in a range of languages. Details here

Also, fits with the cool new N900 coming out later this month that is intended to be an iPhone killer. Review here

[Daniel Livingstone]

N900 runs a flavour of Linux
Every other nokia smartphone runs Symbian.

Do I detect a problem for developers & getting apps to work on different Nokia devices? Hmmm...

Lets hope their QT toolkit for cross platform dev is up to sratch

[Daniel Livingstone]

Another review of the N900 - with amazing flame wars comments after:
http://gigaom.com/2009/10/19/nokia-n900/

The N900 does look like a nice bit of kit though - pre-order for £499 without contract. You can buy a lot of smarties for £500...

Still, worth asking - how many folks have Nokia smartphones currently? I've got an N95, which is pretty decent... would it be worth trying to put together a one-off event for people to learn more about developing for OVI/smartphones?

[Johnny G]

I have an N96 but I have never really thought about developing anything for it (mainly because it doesnt have a video accelerator and the games all suck on it because of that).

[Ross Forshaw]

It seems a fair amount of phones are now coming out using the Linux kernel. :)

As for the Qt toolkit, it was originally developed by TrollTech aimed directly for cross-platform development. The Desktop Environment KDE is based on Qt. The Qt libraries is very powerful & does exactly what it says on the tin. :)

[Daniel Livingstone]

They might have linux kernel, but with different screens, input devices, hardware capabilities and widget sets, it does not mean that developing for them is anything like developing for a common platform.

Thanks for the Qt history lesson... Im well aware of the history, but again given the factors above, developing for different handsets (even from the one manufacturer, with the one OS) can be a pain in the bum.

Ross Forshaw said:

It seems a fair amount of phones are now coming out using the Linux kernel. :)
As for the Qt toolkit, it was originally developed by TrollTech aimed directly for cross-platform development. The Desktop Environment KDE is based on Qt. The Qt libraries is very powerful & does exactly what it says on the tin. :)

[Ross Forshaw]

The history lesson was for those unaware of what is/was Qt. ;)

[John Sutherland]

It was the Linux thingy that caught my eye too. Lots of current hype over OSX.6 and W7, but these feel very c20th. The future, IMHO, is personal, mobile and cloud. Interesting to see Linux as a significant (perhaps) os on mobile. Does anyone know what the kernel on iPhone OS is? (or is that 'IS os'?!)