qutIM for Symbian - a requiem for a dream ...
I planned to talk about the process of porting qutIM to the S60 platform when the port would become more stable and complete, but alas, recent events leave me no choice. I no longer have any interest in continuing to actively develop the Symbian version - this is more like an orchestra performing on the sinking Titanic.
Who is still interested to see how we were engaged in porting qutIM'a and what came of it, welcome under the cat.
After buying the Nokia 5800 in March of that year, I decided to try my luck in programming on Qt for smartphones, put Qt sdk, swore well at its curvature and compiled a simple stopwatch. In the process, I figured out some subtleties, for example, what kind of mysterious softkeys and what to do with them. These experiments were enough for me until about April, then I was already ripe for the first attempt to compile qutIM for Symbian.
Immediately, I ran into the first serious rake: cmake, which qutIM is going to, did not support the symbian SDK and was not going to support it in the foreseeable future. At that time, I decided that it was easier to write a pro file for qutIM and quickly check what happened.
The second serious rake was that the Symbian SDK was a fossil gcc 3.4.5, which did not understand some kind of patterned magic. I had to adapt the code and, after about a week of slow experiments, this was born:
')
It is clear that it was impossible to use it: even the protocols were not loaded, for that it took a long time to deal with the linker jambs, with the tricks of downloading Qt plug-ins to S60, and so on.
In July, after passing the diploma, I returned to this issue and successfully made the first version of the gui, which even glowed in one of the topics.
It could even be used, the icq and jabber protocols worked, as well as the conference jabber. But everything slowed down, and on Qt 4.6.3 they climbed out such cute bugs
The Softkeys, which are 2 large buttons below, turned out to be too capricious, qutIM constantly fell down with them without any reason, menu items were not updated, these menus did not indicate that they were shown on the screen, and so on. Unfortunately, these glitches are still present, I had to invent some workarounds.
By August, the build scripts and plug-in ideology were altered, and it became impossible to build qutIM with qmake: the porting process stopped until January. In January, Elessar and I decided that we should try to revive the port. I started writing a symbian generator for cmake and, with a lot of effort, we managed to get it to work. The appearance of the gentoo overlay with the symbian SDK helped us a lot. Who cares, here are the sources of our ordeals. It’s clear that I didn’t even bother to generate sis files and support for Windows: I just created a stub qmake project and through it I started creating sis files.
By that time, only the horns and legs remained of the old port, and I started everything new. But due to improvements in the architecture of Kutima and the availability of a working Maemo port, in three days I managed to make a completely viable version that looks quite good in comparison with all icq and jabber clients for Symbian and, unlike them all, supports navigation with gestures .
nightly sis files are here
And now a few sad words. Until today, I planned to later integrate QtMobility into qutIM and try to make for Symbian an analogue of Maemo conversation'ov. I wanted the user to combine phone contacts and icq / jabber contacts into metacontacts and could already choose the most accessible way to send him a message, for example, through icq or if the person is not online, then via sms. There was also an idea to rank Internet access points by the degree of their high cost and automatically suggest switching to a cheaper method of communication, for example, to an open Wi-Fi.
For all this, Qt has an API that even works, but Nokia’s top management apparently decided to cut it all down. Well, I want to congratulate them, instead of giving an extra push, forcing the new platform for developers to move faster, they’ve dropped everything and are now trying to start from scratch again. Horses at the crossing do not change, it is a pity that they forget about this proverb.
Therefore, I see no reason for myself to do something serious for a dying platform, which was never able to manifest itself. Symbian had chances, but apparently the fate of OS / 2 and Silicon Graphics did not learn anything either from Nokia or its shareholders. Well, history tends to repeat.
As for the further development of qutIM for Symbian, I will only do the things that I personally need, more and more serious ideas and plans are canceled. If someone wants, in spite of everything that happened, to do the work on qutIM for Symbian, then I will certainly help with what I can. And nevertheless I believe in Intel and MeeGo and at the first opportunity I will make qutIM port on it.
Thank you all for your attention!
update. I don’t give up the development, there are still a lot of things that I want to see on my phone, it's just that the Symbian version has now become lower priority.
update 2. If you try to test sis files, do not forget to install Qt 4.7.1, there are links to ftp. But do not put them on Symbian ^ 3, for it you need to look for individual sis files. And be prepared: after installation, part of the embedded software will fall off.
Who is still interested to see how we were engaged in porting qutIM'a and what came of it, welcome under the cat.
After buying the Nokia 5800 in March of that year, I decided to try my luck in programming on Qt for smartphones, put Qt sdk, swore well at its curvature and compiled a simple stopwatch. In the process, I figured out some subtleties, for example, what kind of mysterious softkeys and what to do with them. These experiments were enough for me until about April, then I was already ripe for the first attempt to compile qutIM for Symbian.
Immediately, I ran into the first serious rake: cmake, which qutIM is going to, did not support the symbian SDK and was not going to support it in the foreseeable future. At that time, I decided that it was easier to write a pro file for qutIM and quickly check what happened.
The second serious rake was that the Symbian SDK was a fossil gcc 3.4.5, which did not understand some kind of patterned magic. I had to adapt the code and, after about a week of slow experiments, this was born:
')
It is clear that it was impossible to use it: even the protocols were not loaded, for that it took a long time to deal with the linker jambs, with the tricks of downloading Qt plug-ins to S60, and so on.
In July, after passing the diploma, I returned to this issue and successfully made the first version of the gui, which even glowed in one of the topics.
It could even be used, the icq and jabber protocols worked, as well as the conference jabber. But everything slowed down, and on Qt 4.6.3 they climbed out such cute bugs
The Softkeys, which are 2 large buttons below, turned out to be too capricious, qutIM constantly fell down with them without any reason, menu items were not updated, these menus did not indicate that they were shown on the screen, and so on. Unfortunately, these glitches are still present, I had to invent some workarounds.
By August, the build scripts and plug-in ideology were altered, and it became impossible to build qutIM with qmake: the porting process stopped until January. In January, Elessar and I decided that we should try to revive the port. I started writing a symbian generator for cmake and, with a lot of effort, we managed to get it to work. The appearance of the gentoo overlay with the symbian SDK helped us a lot. Who cares, here are the sources of our ordeals. It’s clear that I didn’t even bother to generate sis files and support for Windows: I just created a stub qmake project and through it I started creating sis files.
By that time, only the horns and legs remained of the old port, and I started everything new. But due to improvements in the architecture of Kutima and the availability of a working Maemo port, in three days I managed to make a completely viable version that looks quite good in comparison with all icq and jabber clients for Symbian and, unlike them all, supports navigation with gestures .
nightly sis files are here
And now a few sad words. Until today, I planned to later integrate QtMobility into qutIM and try to make for Symbian an analogue of Maemo conversation'ov. I wanted the user to combine phone contacts and icq / jabber contacts into metacontacts and could already choose the most accessible way to send him a message, for example, through icq or if the person is not online, then via sms. There was also an idea to rank Internet access points by the degree of their high cost and automatically suggest switching to a cheaper method of communication, for example, to an open Wi-Fi.
For all this, Qt has an API that even works, but Nokia’s top management apparently decided to cut it all down. Well, I want to congratulate them, instead of giving an extra push, forcing the new platform for developers to move faster, they’ve dropped everything and are now trying to start from scratch again. Horses at the crossing do not change, it is a pity that they forget about this proverb.
Therefore, I see no reason for myself to do something serious for a dying platform, which was never able to manifest itself. Symbian had chances, but apparently the fate of OS / 2 and Silicon Graphics did not learn anything either from Nokia or its shareholders. Well, history tends to repeat.
As for the further development of qutIM for Symbian, I will only do the things that I personally need, more and more serious ideas and plans are canceled. If someone wants, in spite of everything that happened, to do the work on qutIM for Symbian, then I will certainly help with what I can. And nevertheless I believe in Intel and MeeGo and at the first opportunity I will make qutIM port on it.
Thank you all for your attention!
update. I don’t give up the development, there are still a lot of things that I want to see on my phone, it's just that the Symbian version has now become lower priority.
update 2. If you try to test sis files, do not forget to install Qt 4.7.1, there are links to ftp. But do not put them on Symbian ^ 3, for it you need to look for individual sis files. And be prepared: after installation, part of the embedded software will fall off.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/113601/
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