Autobuilder updated to PR1.3 SDK
Niels Breet has updated the maemo.org Extras autobuilder to the new PR1.3 SDK (which is an "apt-get -u dist-upgrade" away in Scratchbox): If you experience any problems, please let me know.
Development
Nokia tidies up developer story: Qt Quick & Components
Nokia is answering the complaints (particularly from those in the Maemo and MeeGo communities) about the disparate developer avenues available on top of Qt (MeeGo Touch, Qt Quick, Symbian's DirectUI) which cut down on Qt's "write once, ship anywhere" message. From now on, if you want to write a mobile application: use Qt Quick & Qt Components; preferably using the Nokia Qt SDK, which includes the Qt Creator IDE: Although Nokia has long been a Qt (pronounced “cute”) advocate, today, the company is making Qt its sole application development framework – meaning, that if a developer creates their application in Qt, they’ll be able to easily deploy it to Nokia devices on Symbian and MeeGo platforms. Nokia is taking this approach seriously, making the commitment to create its own applications and UI on Qt as well. On Maemo and Symbian, this is backed by Qt; on MeeGo by MTF (MeeGo Touch Framework); however for developers there is now a common platform to develop mobile applications for the complete range of Nokia devices.
Ready to kick tires of MeeGo app development? QtComponents for MeeGo on Ubuntu
As noted above, Nokia is betting the farm on Qt being a good-enough developer environment that it's range of platforms will have an overlapping set of applications, whilst developers have the same kind of integrated, and sophisticated, development environments that they're used to (or at least seen) on iOS and Android. However, the Qt SDK releases are still fairly bleeding edge, and the landscape is changing rapidly. As Attila Csipa says, the nice thing about Qt development is that you can get a taste of the latest bleeding edge technologies (QML, Qt Components, MTF) if you take a peek at what's going on at gitorious. The downside is, sadly, that you either need specialized SDK installs or suffer building all those packages from source, packaging them, and not blowing up your install in the process. This can be a time-consuming and daunting task. Well, if you have Ubuntu Lucid or Maverick, you're in luck as there is a shortcut to having a quick taste of the bleeding edge: the Forum Nokia Qt PPA, containing all the new and shiny goodies in a convenient form, compiled for desktops. Ville Vainio points out in the comments that MeeGo Touch Framework (MTF), following the story above, is the MeeGo backend for Qt Components, but it is not going to be pushed at third party developers directly.
Analysis of Qt contributors' ecosystem
Robin Burchell has analysed the git logs to work out who is working on Qt, and for whom: After recently writing about the broken contribution process in Qt, I got a little bit inspired to see what the current 'lay of the land' of the Qt contribution ecosystem looks like. So, I did what any self-respecting hacker would do, and wrote a quick script over the course of a few hours to generate the statistics I wanted. [...] There are a few ways in particular that gitstats' information is flawed. The biggest being that the 'organisation' an individual belongs to is generated from the first component of their email address. Allow the stats aren't particularly accurate, they do paint an interesting picture: Nokia is investing heavily in Qt; and it has a number of high profile "individual" contributors.
KQOAuth - OAuth library for Qt
Johan Paul has announced an OAuth-library for Qt: kQOAuth is a powerful yet easy way to integrate OAuth authentication to your Qt application. kQOAuth handles OAuth request signing, request submitting and reply parsing for you. It also provides an easy way to retrieve user authorization to protected resources with a built in HTTP server. All this is done with Qt programming in mind, so you can use Qt's signals to react to OAuth events in your own application. This also means that the library works fully asynchronously. kQOAuth is licensed under the LGPL license. OAuth is a standard authentication mechanism used by sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn. It allows third-part applications to interact on behalf of a user, without the user having to disclose their username & password, and gives them a mechanism to revoke access to applications at any time.
USB hostmode progressing
Joerg Reisenweber has posted an update on the sterling work being done on N900 USB host mode (allowing the reading, for example, of USB memory sticks and card readers). We're experimenting with PR1.3 kernel, 2 different versions. One with Sarah Newman's and Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh's and my patches, the other one a complete "rewrite from scratch" based on stock kernel and doing "the right thing" by Paul Fertser. Results are quite promising. Paul got first connects and ENUM fails (whitelist etc foo, as usual) with his shiny new version. Obviously, this is a long way from being consumer-ready (although an alpha-release is planned); but interested developers are encouraged to lend a hand.