Qt Developer Network opens in beta

Published by Rafe Blandford at 11:53 UTC, July 14th 2010

Last week Qt quietly rolled out the public beta its new developer website, Qt Developer Network, which aims to provide a one-stop portal for Qt developers and consolidate resources that were previously spread across the main Qt website. It also provides a more vendor neutral destination for developers than Forum Nokia, something that could be important in helping drive adoption of the Symbian and MeeGo platforms by manufacturers other than Nokia.

The Qt Developer Network provides the usual developer portal features: blogs, a wiki, forums and FAQs. The FAQs are automatically generated, on a nightly basis, from the Qt support database. 

As you might expect, given its beta status, the site is still a work in progress. Up until last week the site was in closed testing, but is now open to all. Further details of future developments are being provided through the Qt DevNet blog and on the roadmap wiki page (e.g. coming soon: Ovi account integration, groups, eLearning content, books section and videos).

The distributed of developer resources for Symbian (and the same could apply to MeeGo in due course) across multiple sites has long been something of a sore point with developers. In terms of developers resources the centre of gravity has shifted away from Symbian towards Forum Nokia over time. This is due to Nokia de facto dominance of the Symbian ecosystem, the earlier split between platform and UI and a greater availability of resources within Nokia. The situation has improved in the last 18 months with a clearer delineation between platform developers and platform technology information (Symbian Foundation) and application development and go to market (Forum Nokia).

However, while manufacturer specific sites are inevitable in multi-vendor platforms (such as Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile), it is important to have a vendor neutral central site for key platform technologies and application development.

Qt, is set to become the dominant developer framework for both Symbian and MeeGo developers. As such the Qt Developer Network presents an important opportunity to create a neutral central developer portal. While Qt is a fully owned Nokia entity, the branding may make all the difference to other manufacturers. For example, Sony Ericsson is unlikely to link to Forum Nokia from its own developer portal, but may be prepared to link to the Qt Developer Network. 

News Discussion

Quote:

Originally Posted by revelmob Great news, but I still the only way for Nokia to survive and come on top of the smartphone applications battle is to adopt Android..competition is too tough... It's no longer 1990's, there is very little room to maneuver and time is money...and in Nokia's case a lot of money ($77billion in market cap to be precise )...

Your comment is baseless.

By that logic, Android should have closed shop two years ago, when Apple had a tremendous head start. And back then, Android had practically zero smartphones market share.

Nokia has +38% worldwide smartphones marketshare. Not building from that position (one of their last few significant advantages) but instead abandon it and join a platform with 10x smaller market share is totally and monumentally stupid at this point.

Maybe if Nokia's marketshare reaches 10%, then maybe going Android would make some sense. But right now, it would be a move that would precipitate itself into irrelevance -- becoming just another Android phone manufacturer with little control over its own destiny in terms of shaping the smartphone industry. And Nokia would have much less freedom and flexibility in building phones because they would be at the mercy of Google.

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