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Beta Qt SDK – Installation Issue

May 16th, 2010

I’m back to Qt again. This time prompted by my need for a simple application that will help me learn Chinese that I wanted to write for my cellphone. I have a Nokia N79 and I tried to venture into this adventure last year, but was put off by the S60 SDK and its flavor of ‘limited C++’. However, the announcement by Nokia of their plans to support Qt as the default application development framework for their mobile devices and plans to ship the runtime with the OS has re-kindled my interest in the framework.

Anyway, this is the issue. While installing the Beta Qt SDK, it fails to create the start menu shortcuts. The screenshot of the error is shown below.QtSDKInstallError1

This may very well be because of my peculiar environment. I’m running Vista on VMWare Fusion running on a Mac. For the first couple of shortcuts, I kept trying Retry to no avail. The Nokia Qt SDK –  beta release and the Symbian subfolder are created correctly though.

When I got the error again, I tried this. I created the shortcuts manually (same name as what is being displayed in the error message) from Windows and then tried the Retry option. And it worked just fine. I have posted a comment to a Nokia developer’s blog about this, let’s hope that it’ll get propagated to the right department.

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Qt Research – Abort!

April 19th, 2010

In my previous post I had mentioned my plan to look deeper into Qt and it’s basics viz a vis MFC and wxWidgets. Alas, I have not been true to my plan and instead have digressed from this to a completely different topic.

It happened like this. I started with Qt. Downloaded it, installed it and watched couple of tutorial videos. Then I started with Qt Creator, their visual development tool, and suddenly recollected that it looks very similar to a demo video that I had seen a few years ago. Mind you this demo video that I’m talking about was shot more than 10 years ago. I am talking about the demo video of Interface Builder on NeXtStep as demoed by Steve Jobs (and I think the original creator of the tool).

So I went back to Interface Builder and started poking around with it. Spent couple of days with it after reading Objective C primer and was suitably impressed. Then came the iPad launch followed by iPhone SDK 4.0. The lack of Flash support in iPad and the rather strict licensing terms of iPhone 4.0 SDK disappointed me deeply. So I dropped Cocoa and started looking elsewhere.

Naturally, I ended up with Android. So far Android has been a revelation. Eclipse has been even more so. I particularly like the idea of Android applications being made up of multiple components each of which can be published independently for other applications to use. The lack of a visual tool to lay out the UI elements has been bit of a let down. However, I know from experience that building UI by hand is not such a difficult task, especially when the framework provides excellent layout widgets.

Not sure how long I’ll able to persist with my Android pursuit, but knowing a bit about the platform — its strengths and possibilities — will justify my efforts. At least I hope so.

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Posted in Uncategorized