I promised you daily builds of Qt for Symbian/S60 a few weeks ago, and here they are. Every night at around 02:30 new binaries will be available.
Download the latest binaries from here!
There are two types of files available. You want the latest qt-embedded-s60-opensourceYYYYMMDD-4.6.0-tp1.exe file. The other qt-embedded-s60-opensource-src-4.6.0-tp1.zip is the source package used to create the latest .exe and can mostly be ignored. The .exe contains a Windows Installer as shown below, and here is instructions on how to use it.
There are three Qt .sis files included in the .exe. Most of you (unless you work at Nokia and have an RnD phone) wants to install the qt_for_s60_selfsigned.sis together with the fluidlauncher.sis or whatever application you’re creating yourself.
Works for S60 3.1, 3.2 and 5.0. If you’re using some funky internal RnD SDK, it might work (Hint: use the the “Choose additional folder(s)” option if you’re SDK is not in devices.xml).
The code we’re building from is whatever is HEAD of http://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt/commits/4.6. In other words if we break the build, no binaries for that day – oh well. At the moment QtScript and QtWekbit are still not there – but soon my friends, soooon.
Update: As of 2009.09.29 the snapshots contains QtScript and QtWekbit as well. Yay we’re so great!.
Update2: Well, we’re not that great it seems. The .dlls gets copied to your epoc32, but they’re not inlucded in the Qt_libs sis files. Fixed now, should be correct in tomorrows snapshots.
Update3: Yepp – was fixed today 
.
Final disclaimer: This is not product quality software. It might make your phone depressed and make kittens cry. Use at your own risk.
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26 comments
I’d really like to see daily/nightly builds of Qt 4.6 (-stable?) branches for Mac OS X and Windows.
Can you write guide how to create custom installer for Qt snapshot’s?
@bastibense: I think that will happen pretty soon, now that we have “shamed” the other platforms
. But seriously we’re working on that too as far as I know.
@Sabrog: What do you mean?
Very nice, keep up the excelent progress you are making with QtS60. Qt make me start to “like” Symbian as much as that is possible for a dedicated linux developer.
@espenr: i found some scripts in Qt source directory: $QTDIR/tools/installer but i don’t understand how to configure they and what utilities need download
@SABROG: Ah I see. We’ve moved the scripts for making the installer binaries out of the Qt itself. The stuff in $QTDIR/tools/installer is really only for MinGW Windows package creation – and I don’t think we’ve verified it works lately. One of the reasons not to include it in the Qt branch itself is the license-key checker code, we can’t publish that.
At the moment the package creation tools/setup include: A Qt C++ program (src packages), several .bat files, a VMWare image, a bash script, Kubuntu, WinXP and Windows 7. All of those things are _not_ in the Qt branch at the moment. Sorry.
And for those interested on running these daily snapshots on Linux, see:
http://lizardo.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/installing-qt-for-s60-daily-snapshots-on-linux/
Comments, suggestions or ideas are welcome
I created a harness in Qt and tested in all versions from 4.4.1 right up to the 4.6.0 tech preview and observed the same results.
The conclusion is that there needs to be some serious profiling put on the antialiasing routines.
My harnesss used GDI+ as an example. I plotted long polylines using the raster engine and GDI+
Here is a typical benchmark.
Take a 1000 point Polyine with GDI+ and Qt’s DrawPolyLine routine with Antialiasing switched OFF.
GDI+ – 94 Milliseconds
Qt – 78 Milliseconds
All my tests clearly show that Qt is outperforming GDI+ in this area.
Same points but with Antialiasing switched ON
GDI – 172 milliseconds
Wait for it…
Qt – 10062 milliseconds
Thats a whopping 10 seconds. All tests where conducted without having to clip lines (I wanted that out of the equation because apparently there is a bug regarding long polylines and clipping)
May be it’s not the right place to deal with performance issues, but I do agree with stop. Building a kind of GIS app (thousands of complex overlapping polygons / polylines), I felt that vector drawing performances were somewhat disappointing, though I didn’t find out whether QGV or raster engine was responsible for this. So antialiasing might be a part of the problem…
Still, the Chips demo is impressive, but it’s not IMO a typical use case ; perhaps some benchmarks on more common cases would reveal such weak points. Anyway, Qt is really cool, keep up the good work !
@espenr: That’s great news!
1 Simple question: is it still internally using AVKON or it accesses the Window Server directly?
@detro: There is a thin layer that uses a few AVKON classes to achieve compatibility with existing S60 platforms. Without this, we wouldn’t be able to get the integration with the native look-and-feel, input methods, or screen rotation commands and that wouldn’t be acceptable since we are trying to look native on those platforms (as on every platform).
@stop: Can you put the benchmarking code you wrote somewhere? Then at least there is a possibility we (or others who feel so inclined) can profile it.
Hi,
Installed tp1 and it works. One minor thing:
During the installation of the fluidlauncher I get the message: “Component ‘QtLibs pre-release’ is missing. Continue anyway?” (translated from dutch). Does the project still looks for the tower release? When I simply continue the fluidlauncher will start just fine.
My project uses the MobilyExtensions, any change of them being updated to 4.6.0-tp1. If not, can I compile this myself?
Keep up the good work,
Charles
The latest snapshots sure did make my E71 cry
Also, the “tower” installer doesn’t seem to run in my WinXP installation inside VirtualBox (it freaks out halfway through unpacking files, and just eats up CPU for several hours); these new installers work fine. What has changed about them?
@Charles: I assume you mean the Mobility Extensions from FM. I have no idea, they’ve added that on top of Qt – better to ask them directly.
@Kelvie: No considerable difference that I know of – good to hear it works in VirtualBox now.
All: At the moment snapshots are a little bit borked again since we’re trying to get WebKit and QtScript working in them.
On a Nokia E71 (3.1) it’s freezes the phone when using a combobox.. I can’t even turn off the phone. The only way to make the phone work again is removing the battery and putting again.
@Alexis: Noted. I had similar problems on my N95 (so I won’t make a new task) – we’ve got several! showstoppers yet to fix.
@Kelvie: AFAIK it is not built with .NET library dependencies anymore. i.e. installer is built with /MT option.
Does the phonon backend work in 4.6?
(I already searched but either I am stupid, blind or that information is not to be found.)
@rainerk: Can you ask again in a day or two hehe? We’ll blog when they’re usable too.
Is it possible to use gcce-compiler with daily binaries?
Unfortunately the snapshots don’t have the proper certificate so if you app is using anything from the phone (you know it’s a phone app and you want to do it) you can’t use the snapshots, a pity given the API changes that have happened :-/
@marampa: yes – and if you fail, mail us or comment here.
@albert: at the moment to get anything Nokia signed requires _human interaction_. So that’s impossible. We could maybe set up some symbian signed stuff where you add your IMEI and the snapshot the day after works for your phone too?
When installing without source code, Qt tools binaries (qmake etc.) and header files are not installed. I would expect such behaviour, because now installer forces to install Qt sources even that i don’t need them.
Any news on phonon?
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