Video: Nokia N900 and AR Drone with MeeGo – developing with Qt – best development platform?

Man I so totally want one of these AR Drones!

Check it out with the  powered Nokia N900. You’ve got not only a phone controlled quadropter, it sends live video feedback directly to the phone.

That’s not the cool thing. This is a project by Kate Alhola to learn MeeGo and Qt Quick whilst having fun with flying gadgets.

The original blogpost is very informative, covering things such as how to make modern apps with Qt Quick components, making MeeGo versions of iPhone applications as well as dispelling the myth that Maemo is not dead and people should still develop for it, albeit with Qt.

The best option today is to develop with maemo5 with Qt and Qt Quick and when a MeeGo handset is released, just deploy your application for it, it is that easy.

There’s also mention of a “MeeGo base device”. I don’t know if that’s N900 or a special MeeGo device for Nokia internally. Finally an interesting note on Qt as the best development platform where (cheesiness) the only limit is your imagination. Well that’s good, and hopefully more developers see it this way.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS3_aGWFBRs]

Links: how  to make modern mobile applications with qt quick components

• Kate notes how easy it is to make MeeGo versions of iPhone apps. The original AR drone Freeflight was made for iPhone. Qt Quick UI done in a day or two. UI created by engineer so looks like engineers tool and to make it good needs UI designers. This is a universal truth whether it’s for iPhone, Android or MeeGo (unless your engineer is also a great UI designer).
• C++ code integration to QML took less than a days work.
• Harmattan/Maemo 6 became MeeGo after merging with Moblin. Maemo and Moblin result was NOT imcompatible to what Maemo 6 was.
• Without changing a line of code,  Kate had compiled and run the same app in N900 with Maemo 5, MeeGo base device (first I’ve heard of this – A Nokia MeeGo base device, unless that’s also N900) and Ubuntu Lucid on Desktop.
• “as application developers you should be happy that we can provide now best application development platform where your imagination is only limit in UI creation.”

More about the AR Drone over at http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/kate-alholas-forum-nokia-blog/2010/12/23/ar-drone-with-meego

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS3_aGWFBRs]

As noted, this is part of the cross platform Augmented Reality game (hence AR drone). It’s pretty cool and as shown, the power is behind the developers, creative people who are limited only by imagination. I hope more developers see the potential of Nokia and Qt platform.

Just this morning, scobleizer made a podcast on WP7, stating that a Nokia partnership may be the only way of it getting the sales due to Nokia’s mass distribution. Like what he said about Nokia apps, he apparently did not see anyone making WP7 apps. Just iPhone and Android because that’s the only thing that exists in the world.

Well good thing for Nokia and their powerful distribution system, they can push out Symbian and MeeGo with Qt as the development platform which several other tech industry leaders (Intel, ARM, Acer, Asus, BMW, RedFlag etc) will support.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcuPdraxiRc]

forumnokia via @alextootchie

Tags: AR Drone, Maemo, MeeGo, N900, Nokia, Nseries

Category: Maemo, MeeGo, Nokia, Nseries