MeeGo Conference 2010 was held in Dublin, Ireland, 13th to 15th of November. Cybercom attended the event both as audience and also on stage. MeeGo is an open source platform developed by Nokia and Intel that will power future embedded devices ranging from hand held devices to automotive IVI solutions.

Keynotes

During his keynote, Doug Fisher, vice president, Software and Services Group (SSG), and general manager of SSG’s Systems Software Division at Intel highlighted how MeeGo is an open platform targeting multiple device categories with the help of the open source community. He was in particular excited of the rapid development MeeGo has seen reccently. MeeGo was announced just 8 months ago, but already there are two stable releases. He also highlighted how important it is to work in never before seen open source development model for everyone to benefit – the MeeGo way of working.

The second keynote was given by Nokia’s Alberto Torres, executive vice president, MeeGo Computers. He shared the excitement of the previous keynote by Mr. Fisher. He also highlighted the importance of the Qt toolkit in MeeGo. Qt already is the only UI toolkit supported by MeeGo and this will only become even more important now that Nokia announced that Qt together with Qt Quick are the preferred UI frameworks for Nokia’s future hand held devices running MeeGo and Symbian. He also said that Nokia will announce its first MeeGo device in 2011.

The keynote session was continued by an inspiring speech by Dominique Le Foll, the CTO of Amino, who makes feature rich TVs. He shared his excitement on how they managed to create a product in 6 months using MeeGo as the platform instead of 18 months that it would normally take.

Cybercom taking the stage

Cybercom’s Marko Saukko had an interesting spot in the morning of the second day at MeeGo Conference when he, together with Harri Hakulinen from Nokia and Carsten Munk from Imogen Software presented the current state of MeeGo 1.1 Handheld UX adaptation on the Nokia N900.

The N900 hardware adaptation team is the pioneer in MeeGo ARM porting and has faced most of the ARM related problems while doing the first official MeeGo ARM port. Even though there has been a lot of different types of problems the N900 hardware adaptation team has been moving fast. Within two months the N900 hardware adaptation team was able to get N900 running with the first version of Handset UX. After this the team has managed to catch up the mainline MeeGo kernel and packages and the whole port is now available in the MeeGo ARM repositories.

The current MeeGo 1.1 stable release, called “Technology Snapshot”, for Nokia N900 includes a set of basic features of handset device, such as, phone calling, ability to sending SMS, video and audio players and photo gallery. Even though there are already a set of applications available there are still some features/applications missing from the 1.1 release. For these missing parts the upcoming MeeGo 1.2 release in April of 2011 is bringing a vast improvement.

Cybercom has been involved in the MeeGo adaptation work actively since the beginning. We have been working on many different areas of the Nokia N900 ARM port, as well as, giving our insights to the generic MeeGo development.

Other highlights

Qt

There were of course many interesting sessions around Qt. Qt is the toolkit of choice for MeeGo and the corner stone in the developer offering strategy outlined by Nokia. Thiago Macieira from Nokia presented the Qt roadmap. Qt will be modularized for easier maintenance,  integration and releasing. This is also related to the open governance project run by Thiago, that  aims at improving the process on how to involve the community in Qt development. Qt Components also one interesting project going on in Qt, that targets on delivering system UI components for Qt Quick developers on Symbian and MeeGo platforms. This work is done almost entirely in the open together with the community and is run by Henrik Hartz. We were also shown how to integrate QML language with C++ code to enable rapid UI development using C++ data models.

Qt Gestures was an interesting session because gestures are coming more and more important especially with handheld devices. Frederik Gladhorn introduced how to use gestures in Qt both in C++ and in QML. The presentation contained examples and demos about gestures. The interesting part was also the fact that Frederik’s slideshow was written fully in QML.

Cybercom already has a very strong knowledge in all of the areas mentioned above. We will continue to follow the Qt development and contribute to the projects. Alexandra Leisse, Web Community Manager of Qt at Nokia, highlighted the importance of getting involved in core Qt development and this is just what we are focusing on.

MeeGo IVI

One of the environments targeted by MeeGo is the automotive In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI). MeeGos roadmap regarding IVI and the IVI domain was presented by Rudolf Streif, director of Embedded Solutions at Linux Foundation. This is very interesting, as Mr. Streif  presented it, since in the past the IVI industry has been quite closed. MeeGo has a true potential to change all this and provide an open source version to the IVI industry that will accelerate the innovation in this domain. MeeGo has a long way to go to support the strict regulations and special requirements needed in a in-vehicular environment, but Mr. Streif was a strong believer in the open source community to deliver the necessary solutions.

Cybercom has also in this domain a very strong background and excessive knowledge. We have been working with distributed systems, Qt and CAN buses for over a decade when building for example  mining robots. We feel we have a lot to contribute and follow also the IVI development with excitement.

Conclusion

Cybercom has also attended the previous Maemo Summit events, which the MeeGo Conference descends from. To the most part the community feels the same, but everything around the event has grown so much. MeeGo is bigger than Maemo and this even showed it clearly. It was nice to see some familiar faces but even more so to meet the new ones. The conference highlighted that MeeGo targets many platforms, wants to exceed in user experience and to get the next billion users – all this with open source development and with efforts from two giant market leader.

Cybercom is there with MeeGo, building MeeGo and being part of the MeeGo community. See you at next MeeGo event!

Cybercom attended the 7th Qt Developer Days in Munich and this time we had Cybercom exhibition booth there as well. We had three attendees this year: Tommi Palonen and Marko Mattila (me) from Cybercom Finland and Ingmar Bengtsson from Cybercom Sweden.

We were quite busy during those three days because there had to be at least one person in the exhibition area all the time and at the same time we had a bunch of meetings and of course we wanted to follow all the interesting presentations too.

The atmosphere of the event was really good and we can only thank Qt Development Frameworks for organizing such a pleasant event.

I went to see as many presentations as possible while Tommi was mostly working at the exhibition area. I spent most of my time following the Qt Labs presentations such as Qt Scene Graph, Qt / 3D QML and Qt Components. I also went  to check out Alexis Menard’s presentation about the Qt GraphicsView. Good stuff, I must say.

Cybercom is a Certified Qt Partner and we received really good feedback regarding our actions related to Qt. I really hope that we are able to organize more Cybercom Developer Day events in the future too and be able to promote new technologies as we did this year.

We will also continue development of demos related on Qt. Let’s see if we can publish our demo code at some point.

Qt Quick

The main topic of the event was definitely Qt Quick. At the same time one of the main concerns from the non-mobile-world-developers was that will Qt focus too much on mobile development? I think this is a good question and something I too am a bit worried about.

For example Qt Components is clearly targeted for MeeGo and it is required to have libmeegotouch installed in order to be able to build Qt Components. I understand that Qt Components is a labs project at the moment and they had to choose one platform to start from. On the other hand, for many developers it would be nice to play with Qt Components without a dependency to MeeGoTouch. But as they stated in the Qt Components presentation, it’s just a start and the support for other platforms will come at some point too.

I think there is always a little room for criticism (the nature of Finnish people), but in the end what Trolls do, usually ends up to be something great. Good example was how well Qt / 3D integrates with existing QML engine. I’m also waiting to see what happens on the Qt scene graph side. Gunnar Sletta gave a really good presentation about how Qt graphics side will be optimized in a future and showed us how the current scene graph implementation gives a really huge boost in performance.

Cybercom Demos

We had couple of demos at the Qt Developer Days 2010 which received interested looks… This is of course always a good thing.  We presented the RdUX concept device with QML based window management and multitouch. The interesting part is that QML doesn’t really support multitouch yet and the demo worked pretty well with cool animations. But the last day the worst thing happened – RdUX corrupted its hard drive and we couldn’t demo it anymore. Luckily, it was the last day and that’s the nature of demo devices. You can checkout here our penguins to wonder what happened to the device.

We also had two other demos running on N8 and HTC devices. These applications are not demos at all, but real applications.  They were made for China Mobile some time ago and you can find a pretty good blog article about this Qt based China Mobile musics application from a Qt blog.

The Future?

In the end the Qt Developer Days 2010 was a really great event. It was bigger than before and I think it’s not going to be smaller in the future.

As a certified Qt Partner we will continue our work to become better and bigger in the Qt scene. Although we have about 10 years of experience  in developing Qt software, there is still room for improvement and learn about new things that the Trolls invent.

To make sure that Trolls remember us, we left them a memory – a “We like penguins” T-shirt.

Thank you Trolls!