Who’s Minding the Ovi Store?

Nokia has been proudly touting some impressive statistics of its Ovi store recently, and on the surface they do seem promising.  Given their global cell phone sales numbers, that shouldn’t be surprising.  Even though Nokia has hit a rough spot, the company still manages to crank out more devices per year than any competitor.

However, looking into the details exposes some disturbing aspects.

Diary of a Qt noob

As noted in a recent status filler, I plan to orient much of the upcoming content here around the MeeGo User Engagement Framework (MUEF) project.  As part of that, and for my own general interest and education, I’ll start including coverage of the Qt application development platform.

Now, the bulk of my programming background is with Visual Basic, from COM-based version 2 up to VB.Net 2008, and I’m a complete stranger to Qt.  But with the advent of MeeGo along with Qt’s evolution toward something comparable to Visual Studio, I’ve decided it’s past time to tack on some new skills.

I’ve started by downloading the Qt 4.7 beta and will proceed very slowly as I explore this new territory.  Along the way I will share my experiences, good and bad, in the hopes that other beginners may be helped.

It may be time for me to bite the bullet and get back up to speed on C++, but I also hope to learn more about Python as well.  Whatever I discover will be shared here, journal-style.

If you’re interested in following along, use this RSS feed.  I’m also open to guest articles on the subject as well as comments from the gurus.

Next: downloading and installing Qt!

Maemo rubber hits the road

I just got back from the Maemo Developer event held in Santa Clara, California December 3 and 4.  The tenor was more about developer outreach than training but that was not a bad thing at all– sessions like these are needed to cultivate interest, especially amongst commercial contributors.

The trip was made all the more… well, exciting for me because everything was last minute.  I did not know for sure I would be attending until a week or so before, then received three day notice I would be presenting on behalf of the community.  Halfway there on the plane it became clear to me (thanks to GoGo wifi and Ovi mail) after a couple of exchanges with Maemo folks that the event’s main audience would come from the business side of the software world, which meant more changes to my presentation.  By the time I got done there was so much text on the slides I tripped myself up trying to read it!

Ah, the benefit of time to practice… 😉

Opening up to Open Source

It’s funny the turns Life takes.

I started programming in the eartly 1980s, on Timex Sinclair, Commodore 64 and TRS-80 computers in short order.  In those wild days when high-level languages were really coming into their own, free and open source software seemed more readily available than retail equivalents.  Hobbyist magazines, online bulletin boards and even the fledgling internet (pre WWW) were stuffed with code just waiting for eager learners like me to take and tweak.  There wasn’t much in the way of formal free and open source protocol at the time– that evolved soon enough though.

But as I evolved myself, from hobbyist to ad hoc developer for various employers, I found myself drawn in deeper and deeper to the closed source world.  I discovered I had a liking and knack for Visual Basic and thus fell into the Microsoft development vortex.

It’s a seductive and powerful sucker, too.  It was all too easy to be “bought off” by events with (ironically) free training, free food and even giveaways of free software.  I ultimately joined a Microsoft program that dumped thousands of dollars of tools in my lap for an embarrassingly small outlay.  Resistance was futile.

Yep, I was assimilated.