Posts Tagged: mobile dev

Qt Dev Days 2011, The Photos

Posted by & filed under moleskine to mobile, photos + text from the road, tech + web dev.

The Famed @Yeswap, aka Dennis, has arrived! The Mysterious Qt for the Next Billion Slide Digia's Tuukka Ahonien presenting Jussi and John, the N9 App Doctors Tuukka, Juha, Suvi, and Riku at the Qt Dev Days Welcome Reception Having fun at Knuckles - Juha Nokia's Richard Kerris presenting the morning's first Keynote Qt's Jeremy and Benedikte helping someone The Delicious White N9 The Qt Dev Days 2011 SF Expo All the Lovely Ladies who registered us and helped with questions Aditya, Pablo, and Oscar Mildy scary circus man with a glowing ball at the Qt DD dinner & party Jurgen and the Cotton Candy Lady Alexandra and her fabulous feather boas Magician Jay Alexander showing his tricks to awed geeks The N9 and the Lumnia attempting to have drunken phone... Riku and Juha Digia folks at the Party: Suvi, ___, Tuukka, and ___ William and Sunny Laughing while attempting to navigate/fly an AR Drone Watching an AR Drone flying Jeremy discussing the Rasperry Pi In the How to Contribute to the Qt Project Session

All photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Thurs 12.01.11 – As the Qt Dev Days 2011 wrap up and are over, I present to you a summary of the photos I took over the course of the three days of the training and conference.
I really enjoyed and learned a good deal over the course of the Qt Dev Days. One of the best parts is the high ratio of nice and smart folks I met and the conversations were good. I attend at least 3-4 conferences a year and this one rates up there with Mobilism for my fave conference of the last 2 or so years in terms of content and inspirational conversation with other attendees.
Big thanks to Qt, Nokia, Digia, Futurice and all the other sponsors for putting on a great conference.
Even bigger thanks to all the lovely folk I met, the good conversations on mobile & development that were had, and letting me take your photos. Y’all rock.
See everyone next year, if not sooner.
******
My Qt Dev Days conference notes:
Qt Dev Days 2011, Day 1: Training
Qt Dev Days 2011, Day 2: Conference Sessions
Qt Dev Days 2011, Day 3: The Last Day

PySide, from the Heights of Happiness to the Depths of Despair in less that Two Hours

Posted by & filed under moleskine to mobile, tech + web dev.

On Friday in the way of any good internet bunny trail, I found myself at the PySide website wondering what progress had been made with the Python port/binding for Qt since I last looked, downloaded, built and inspected to see if it was fit for my mobile application development purposes back in April/May (or more like was my skillset I ready for building the most recent stable version of PySide).
In the first 20 minutes of traipsing down Python and Qt based bunny trails on Friday afternoon, I found myself in raptures of happiness, as it appeared to my eyes and reading comprehension that Nokia had taken on the PySide project and was moving forward with it as a legitimate wing of Qt. I was so excited that I called a non-technology-working friend and gushed about it to her (sorry).
I tweeted asking if any of the PySide folk would be at Qt Developer Days 2011 in San Francisco next week. I was ecstatic about the prospects of using Python for the logic in my Qt Quick apps rather than C++ or Javascript.
The major reason that I love both Python and Qt Quick/QML is that the code is by and large minimal and declarative but gets the job done powerfully without excessive grammar, wordiness, and very little punctuation, which makes my minimalist loving self happy happy happy. The very idea of Python + Qt Quick sounded too deliciously good to be true.
And it appears that after some months of Nokia dedicating employees to making PySide a robust binding for Qt and Qt Quick, that Nokia is now un-dedicating said employees and will be decommissioning their involvement in PySide to an add-on for Qt.
My hopes were crushed in less than two hours. Up in happiness of the possible perfect pairing of my favorite programming/scripting language with my favorite mobile framework, only to fall down the rocks of despair and sadness that so much potential was so fast dissipated.
Matti Airas the Nokia python guru on the PySide project does write in this email that he does see a future for PySide and mobile as an add-on for Qt in the community separate from Nokia. Here’s to hoping that he is right.
Further hopes go to Python catching on as a good option to the various C languages and Java for mobile app development. And here’s to hoping that PySide folks will be at Qt Dev Days next week.
****
Update from Wed 11.23.11 – Just to clarify, this post is for NaBloPoMo and is my joke on / to myself about moderating my enthusiasms in a world where the funding of technology projects is driven by management stratagems & quarterly profits, as I get so excited upon finding out a technology has finally reached the point that it will be useful and then, in this case, less than an hour or two later after searching for more info I find out that the project has been discontinued.

The Mobile JavaScript Summit

Posted by & filed under moleskine to mobile, tech + web dev.

Mobile JavaScript Summit
This Tuesday, August 30th from 9am – 6pm (Central Time, read Texas Time), the Mobile JavaScript Summit will be coming to a browser near you. If you are a web designer/developer who is wondering how to get started with designing/developing for the mobile web and mobile apps or have already started but would love to know more about how to take the web technologies you work in and turn them to mobile, then this will be a great one-day online conference for you.
The great thing about the Environments for Humans’ Summits is that the price is low and you attend the conference on your own computer. The software used to present the conference allows the attendees to not only have a video feed of the presenter, also the slides in the main window and the ability to ask questions in real time.
Here are the talks that will be given:
Josh Clark on The New Rules of Designing for Touch
Jonathan Stark on Mobile Apps and the Enterprise
Jenifer Hanen (me) on The Realities of Mobile Design
Simon Laurent and Daniel Pinter on From “It Works” to “Wow! This is Fast!”
Lunch break
David Kaneda on Sencha Touch
Stephen Gill on Phone Gap
Marc Grabanski on jQuery Mobile
Kevin Whinnery on Appcelerator Titanium
Tom Dale on SproutCore
I presented last year at the UX Summit and really enjoyed the online format, I definitely look forward to talking about one of my favorite subjects on Tuesday.
If you would like to join us, please use the following discount code, HANEN20, at The Mobile JavaScrip Summit.

Nokia Developer Outreach Suggestions for Chanse

Posted by & filed under moleskine to mobile, tech + web dev.

Chanse Arrington Tweet
Yesterday, Chanse Arrington asked on Twitter:

“What are some things I should be doing in 2011 to get more developers on board with Nokia in the US?”

Here are my suggestions as a designer | developer who has been working on an app or two for the Nokia ecosystem:
1) Take over the Forum Nokia twitter account and use it to update followers on what is new content on Forum Nokia and what is new in developer tools for Nokia. Right now the @forumnokia twitter account is just a mimic to the various Nokia marketing tweets that are going around, but it could be SO MUCH MORE.
The Forum Nokia website is a bit of a beast and many useful parts are updated frequently but there is not a full RSS feed for the whole site and the new content is difficult to find, so use Twitter as that RSS feed. Let us know what new articles have been added, let us know about additions to the wiki, use twitter to highlight the best and most useful of Forum Nokia today not just what the upper dudes at marketing think are important this week.
Also use this twitter account to announce webinars, cool mobile & dev conferences (even non-Nokia), contests, blog posts by mobile devs who are writing about Qt/dev tutorials and tips, and what the community is up to, feature apps, etc. And like @NokiaCareUS and @womworldnokia, have @forumnokia have a set of photos of the tweeters for the account & their names so that it personalizes the account.
Use Twitter to make us excited about Forum Nokia’s content and thus excited about developing for Nokia devices.
2) Convince the Qt folk to make sure that the full Mac Qt with Symbian & Qt Mobility gets released extra super soon. Like it or not North American mobile app developers love their Macs, even if Nordic/Europeans are still PC/Windows committed. If you want to win over North America, get all of the Nokia dev tools fully working on Mac & Linux as well as Windows dev platforms. Steve Jobs has kindly convinced developers to dump their PCs for Macs over the last five plus years, so rather than fight it or be angry about it just give us all the tools we need to develop without hassle or dual boots or having to switch to another OS. Be developer OS agnostic, make great tools that work across the platforms so that developers can create great mobile apps.
3) Highlight the Qt Quick and other Nokia web runtime tools to web designers and developers on Twitter to show them how easy it is to transfer their current skill set of HTML/CSS/Javascript to developing apps for Nokia devices. There are quite a few great tools for web designers to start creating mobile apps, but they need to know where to start. Highlight videos, webinars, and online blog / Forum Nokia tutorials on how to create mobile web apps and mobile web sites from scratch.
Many of the current resources are native mobile app focused with the assumption that the developers have a full four year computer science bachelors background and are now Java or C++ engineers at large companies, when there are tons and tons of web designers and developers out there who could be reached but are currently being alienated by the current offerings.
Case in point, this last week’s Forum Nokia webinar on Qt Quick, where the presenter just assumed that the audience were C++ programmers who had already created Qt desktop apps and were moving into mobile, rather than presenting the material as a great place for web designers & developers with javascript experience to get started with Qt Quick / QML and mobile app development.
I have more ideas, but a great Forum Nokia twitter account, fully powered Qt for Mac with Mobility and Symbian, and a real outreach to web designers & developers is where I would start.