Ready made UI building blocks at your service - Qt Quick components for Symbian and MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan

Qt Quick has been around for a little while now, helping developers make great looking, responsive user interfaces. And it is nice to see so many applications in Ovi Store utilizing this new technology. But we want to keep taking it further and one of the ways we’re doing that is by adding ready-made UI building blocks to Qt Quick. We call these building blocks Qt Quick components!

In brief, Qt Quick components is a UI component set for Qt Quick application developers and designers. It helps to create a fresh and modern UX with added productivity. In the first phase, the Symbian and MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan platforms are covered. For more information on the history of this project so far, see the related Qt Labs postings below.

Symbian

Qt Quick components 1.0 for Symbian is available now as an update for Qt SDK, and it includes targets, documentation and example code. You can obtain Qt Quick components for Symbian in either of the following ways:

• If you have Qt SDK 1.1 installed, open Qt SDK's Maintenance tool in Qt Creator ( Help | Start Updater ) and find from "Package Manager" a “Qt Quick components for Symbian” update under "Experimental" category.
• If you don't have Qt SDK installed yet, find a online installer http://qt.nokia.com/downloads and remember to select "Custom installation" and "Qt Quick components for Symbian" under "Experimental".

Then, just import com.nokia.symbian and you have a fresh set of components at your disposal. Now developers and designers can easily start to use the Qt Creator’s application wizard and Qt Quick Designer (see the screenshot on the right). In addition to visible controls such as buttons, menus, dialogs and indicators, Qt Quick components 1.0 for Symbian provides invisible components for window and navigation handling. A full list of components is available online as a part of Qt Quick components' documentation at http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qt-components-symbian-1.0/qt-components.html

To get started with the overall UI design for Symbian, see updated Symbian Design Guidelines at Nokia Developer web site: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Resources/Library/Symbian_Design_Guidelines/

For an easy deployment, Qt Quick applications using Qt Quick components are now ready for Ovi Store delivery. Just choose a few options in Qt Creator to make your application compatible with Smart Installer. Smart Installer will ensure that all necessary modules (now including Qt Quick components) are available in consumers' Symbian^3 and Symbian Anna devices (S60 5th edition devices are not supported in the first phase)

To make your application compatible with Smart Installer, use Qt Creator’s application wizard and make sure that "Create Smart Installer Package" is checked in "Projects | Symbian Device | Create SIS package". For more information, see http://doc.qt.nokia.com/smart-installer/

A good starting point to get touch with a code and see Qt Quick components in action, is to check code examples and demos in Qt SDK or online at http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qt-components-symbian-1.0/qt-components-examples.html

MeeGo Harmattan

Two weeks back, Qt SDK was updated with the new target for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. Please note that the support for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan is not fully completed yet and maturation is ongoing. Qt Quick components for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan are included in the target and applications developed by using it are ready to the Ovi Store submission. It is highly recommended that applications are tested using the final target (when available) and verified on device with updated SW.

Nothing stops you to start development for Nokia N9 (http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/06/21/nokian9/) today! To get familiar with Nokia N9 UX Guidelines, visit in http://www.developer.nokia.com/swipe/ux/. For more information about Qt Quick components for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan, please refer to the documentation in Qt SDK. Here is a blog entry that gives an overview how you can get started: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Blogs/blog/kate-alholas-forum-nokia-blog/2011/06/23/nokia-meego-1.2-harmattan-qt-quick-components

Next Steps

It took some time to move MeeGo Harmattan components’ code back to the upstream. However, now Qt Quick components for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan is developed in the same public repository as Symbian components: http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-components/

At the Qt Contributors’ Summit in June, there was a lot of discussion about experimental sets of components for desktops and a custom set of components. It was nice to notice that there is a lot of interest around Qt Quick components in the community, so stay tuned and keep contributing to the Qt projects!

As an immediate next step we wish to have a lot of new innovative Qt Quick applications using Qt Quick components in Ovi Store!