Qt on S60 Open Source Project - Bluemapia

Sorcery-ltd — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:59:14 +0200

Do you like to work on the cutting edge of mobile technology? Are you interested in social networks or location based services using free maps? Want to get involved in an open source project on mobile phones?

If the answer to any of those questions is "yes" then maybe this post is for you.

Learn about Qt on S60, porting to Symbian OS and open source mapping solutions. Get hands-on experience with the latest Qt on S60 technology preview and help port a social mapping application while you're learning (I find you always learn more and faster when you have a real project rather than just playing with examples).

Qt on S60 is fantastic news for S60 developers, even more so since the revelation in the webinar (hopefully it'll be at that link soon anyway) today that Nokia intend to make Qt free for commercial S60 development. However, we're going to need some good examples of Qt on S60 projects on a variety of scales. I'm starting work on one of those now, incorporating the other cutting edge trend for mobile social location (N97 anyone?). Which will mean we also have an example of extending Qt with camera and GPS functionality.

Bluemapia is a location based social network for boaters. There is an existing open source client for Windows Mobile, that uses various free maps and other popular open source libraries. We're planning to port the application (and libraries) to Symbian OS/S60 and re-write the user interface using Qt. I say "we" because some engineers from Symbian (including Symbian Ambassador Lucian Piros, who you may know from the SDN discussion boards or NewLC), an experienced open source GIS developer, an experienced Qt developer and more, will be contributing to the project. If you want to learn from some experts then volunteer too and get involved!

The idea is that we combine with existing open source mobile efforts in this area and create some components that people can use to build their own (open source) location based apps that use free maps (and maybe also not-so-free maps if/when we've got some appropriate APIs and license terms).

The project will be hosted in Launchpad and to get things going quickly I'm planning a "code camp" for some of the developers in London on 17th January. If you'd like to come along to that and get involved, or can't come but would like to get involved, or just want to know more then please get in touch - either reply to this post (with a way of contacting you) or email me via the discussion boards (user name Sorcery-ltd), or just go to the code camp event site and register (if you don't have a Bantora account yet you'll have to email me first to get an invite) - places are limited, first come, first served - final numbers must be confirmed by 6th January.

Looking forward to hearing from you and working together!

Mark

P.S. Once we're done porting to S60, hopefully we can also port to maemo and other Qt supported platforms too.

Mark Wilcox's Forum Nokia Blog

Qt on S60 Open Source Project - Bluemapia