Nokia's Fumble, HP's Huge Opportunity

I had a pretty nasty day Friday as I suppose many Qt developers did.

There are suddenly a huge number of Qt developers out there who have no mobile platform.  HP and WebOS has a huge opportunity here. These devs are not going to go to .NET in any significant numbers.

If WebOS adopts Qt as a native-code platform, or even just as an alternate but supported framework... wow. Just think of it. They should take quick advantage of Nokia's massive betrayal and give these guys a home.

Nokia's marketing on Qt pre-Friday has a basis in fact.  Qt is an awesome platform to develop on, and it gives you instant support for a huge range of different OS targets. That attracts a lot of developers. At the time, I thought Nokia's purchase of Trolltech was so good it could have been divinely inspired.

They fumbled, though. They were too tied to Symbian, and they spent way too much effort there instead of on MeeGo. I don't know how much was down to politics... but surely it would have been a whole lot less painful to drop Symbian for MeeGo than what they just did.

Elop seems to fancy that his platform was burning, and he had to jump. I'd rather imagine that he saw fire and jumped in the only lifeboat, leaving the crew to burn. He could have grabbed a bucket, you know.

I don't blame Elop, really. He went with what he knew. For all I know... he was brought on specifically to do this by meddling financiers.

Instead of insisting on Elop, the finance guys should have insisted on a UI visionary to actually lead MeeGo to greatness.

Oh well. Opportunity lost. The ball's on the ground at HP's feet.

Pick it up, man!

 

(Oh, and don't worry about Nokia owning Qt... Fork it, rename it. It's even easier than what Google did with Java for Android. The KDE devs are probably going to fork Qt anyway)

Comments

[darron]

I just thought I'd add that the Qt 4.6.1 on webOS 2+ appears to be -extremely- limited in what it delivers. The QWS plugin interface might be good, but almost all widgets are left out, etc. It appears they had a very specific purpose in mind and didn't deliver many more classes than they had to.

[darron]

webOS 2.0 appears to contain Qt 4.6.1. (Check the open source page on Palm) It's possible this is part of the reason 2.0 won't fit on a Pre Plus, etc. (The system partition is -way- too small on the earlier Pre models)

So, it should be a valid target from a Preware app point of view, although I don't have 2.0 so I'm not entirely sure.

Actually, looking at the patch file they deliver it appears they have put a pretty decent effort into adding Qt support, So, things look promising.

[Gour_atmarama]

Hi!

I'm the one who hoped to use Qt along with D langauge (V2) to write multi-platform desktop GUI app, as well as having 'lite' version written for the MeeGo...

Now, I've become enthusiastic about webOS and wonder if we could, at least, from the perspective of Preware, count on having ability to use Qt(D) for webOS-2.x/3.x development?

What is the status of Qt for webOS?

Sincerely,
Gour