Category Archives: MeeGo

Qt Developer Days 2011 in Munich

We’re back from Qt Developer Days 2011 in Munich, Germany. What a great show! For those of you who werent’ there here is a small recap of what happened from our perspective. First, some pictures

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Both Marius and I were presenting in Munich. Marius dissected the code of several of our apps, and explained how QStateMachine makes your life easier. The talk is available here:

I talked about Necessitas, Qt and Qt for Android and basically explained how you publish Qt apps on the Android market. That talk is available here:

Now we gotta work to catch up on other projects!

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Cutehacks targeting Android, Symbian and more

Here is a video of two apps developed by Cutehacks: Yr.no and Fly running on Android 2.2 and Symbian. These native apps were originally written for Symbian but run great on Android as well:

Using Qt for Android (more specifically Necessitas and Ministro), the amount of code changes we had to do were minimal. This shows the power of Qt – it truly is cross-platform. Too see these apps running on MeeGo and Maemo as well – check out this video.

None of the apps above are available in Android Market yet. Be assured we’ll tell you when/if that happens :)

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Cross platform apps at MWC

Three of our apps are being shown at the Mobile World Congress this year, for several different devices. If you want to have a look at them in real life head over to the Qt booth located here.

The video below shows our apps running on a few of the many platforms supported by Qt.

As you may know, Qt has been a cross-platform toolkit from day one, and supports many more mobile platforms than just Symbian and MeeGo. Here is a list of some of the different mobile platforms Qt runs on today:

Mobile OS Support Links
Android Community Video
iOS Community Video
Windows Mobile Official Video
webOS Community Article
QNX (Blackberry Playbook) Community Video
Symbian Official Video
Maemo/MeeGo Official Video

…and there have been reports on success getting it running for Bada and Amazon Kindle as well. Go to the Qt booth to see more apps running across both desktop and mobile platforms.

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Cutehacks developing WiMP

Press coverage

The Nokia mobile platforms might have lost one music service today, but it’s soon gaining another. Today we’re announcing that Cutehacks is developing the mobile client of WiMP (by Aspiro) for the Symbian platform. We’re going to use Qt and Qt Quick, which will make it pretty easy to provide the service for any coming MeeGo handsets as well. We’re focusing on Symbian^3 at the moment, but may later extend backwards to older Symbian platforms if there is a demand.

Wimp logo

If you don’t know what WiMP is, think of it as a direct competitor to Spotify. It is basically a streaming music service that, for a monthly subscription, gives you access to all the music of the world. It’s even got Pink Floyd (which Spotify doesn’t). You can see some screenshots and read more about WiMP here. Wimp is already available on Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android – so it is high time we bring it to the Nokia platforms as well. We are very pleased to get this project and are looking forward to working together with the guys at Aspiro.

We’re hoping for a relase this half of 2011, but that is up for Aspiro to decide so stay tuned for more news :)

Also, we’ve gotten some media coverage here in Norway already. Check out these article in digi.no (norwegian / english) and amobil.no (norwegian / english). Oh, and those are Google Translate english, so don’t complain to me if it’s messed up ;)

Anways, exciting times for us here at Cutehacks!

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Cutehacks is hiring

We started Cutehacks to have a fun and interesting place to work, and so far it’s been a huge success. In fact it’s so much fun, we need more people to play with :) That is why we’re looking for experienced developers to join us in developing mobile apps for Symbian, MeeGo and Android.

Here is a small sample of the apps we’re working on at the moment or have in our pipeline:

Apps in development

We are looking for a passionate programmer who cares deeply about code, design and user interfaces.

Qualifications:

  • expert knowledge of Qt and C++
  • cross platform development experience (Windows, Linux, Mac)
  • plus: Symbian, MeeGo, Android, iOS or RIM knowledge
  • plus: talent for graphical and UI design
  • plus: knowledge in HTML and web services

Your job will be:

  • code and test
  • design and implement user experiences
  • communicate with customers
  • help build the company
  • have fun

We can offer:

  • exciting projects and interesting technical challenges
  • central offices in Oslo (Forskningsparken)
  • lunch with fresh bread , fresh coffe and good friends
  • no bureaucracy and no hierarchy
  • high degree of autonomy and freedom
  • a desk full gadgets ;)

How to apply:

Mail the following to jobs@cutehacks.com

  1. CV
  2. Code examples
  3. Cover letter

If you wonder about us and the offices, here is a video of our 1st day at work  :)

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AppWorks – app stores, apps.no, Angry Birds and HTML5

Espen Riskedal Yesterday I was presenting (covered here by mobizmag.no) at appworks.no, the first conference in Norway focusing on mobile app development. There were two scenes, lots of people, and a lot of good talks. Check out photos from the day here. (Photos: Eirik Helland Urke/Creative Commons)

I was talking about the mobile app market in Scandinavia and Europe, mostly from a business perspective. The most interesting slides are probably the ones about the mobile os web usage in Scandinavia, the size of the different app stores, and also the trends and forecasts on whats going to happen, according to the analysts, concerning app stores and mobile platforms.

I also attended three of the talks, and all of them were really interesting. Here is a small summary of them.

Small Efforts, big bucks

Sveinung Totland – apps.no

Sveinung Totland Sveinung had a really interesting talk about the different apps that apps.no had launched and how they had fared in the market. He was very frank and open about everything and I really enjoyed the talk. Our business idea is basically same as them, make own apps + consult and make apps for others, so it was really good to hear from someone that was already doing this, and succeeding. Here are the numbers:

Name Price Downloads Revenue
YR free 600000 None – but 60000 emails to spam
Kronespillet 17 NOK 67000 854250 NOK
Avinor 17 NOK 46000 586500 NOK
Kystpatruljen 17 NOK ? 0 – Enough to pay for the dev cost. Redningsselskapet gained 50% in new member boost
Gyldendals Soppguide 39 NOK ? 0 – Enough to pay for dev cost
Skattesøk 17 NOK ? Lost money – Free apps came out and there was no market

How we made the top grossing mobile game

Peter Vesterbacka – rovio.com

Peter Vesterbacka Peter from Rovio talked about their insane success with the Angry Birds game. It’s been the top selling game for the iPhone for over 5 months, thats more than anyone else – ever. They have sold, at least, 7 million copies of it on the Apple App Store for the iPhone only, more if you add iPad. They launched in December 2009, and since then have had a crazy ride.

One interesting fact is that Angry Birds is not their first game. According to Peter, they’ve done around 50 other game titles already, so this was not an overnight succuess, but took years of hard work before it really paid of. Angry Birds was “designed to be hit” – with that Peter meant that their designers had sat down and really studied what was needed to make a smash hit game for the iPhone. The character design was a bit by accident, they saw some sketches from one of their artists, and then instantly fell for the angry birds.

Angry Birds is now going to be everywhere: Nintendo DS, Playstation Portable, Windows etc. etc. For their existing ports: iPhone, Maemo, Android and Symbian, they’ve done them all in house – and they will continue with that for the other coming ports. They are 12 people right now, but have 15 open positions! :D Rovio is aiming for 100 million downloads of Angry Birds – they call it the “Tetris strategy”. And they might succeed – when they released the Android version a few days ago, they had 2-3 million downloads in as many days. Wow.

Apps vs HTML5 – what should we choose?

Nikolai Onken – uxebu.com

Nikolai Onken The last talk I attended was about HTML5 apps. Nikolai had a very enthusiastic talk about HTML5 apps, and how that was not a utopian dream, but actually a reality already. I think his talk clearly showed it is not quite there yet. The fact that for the iPhone, to use bluetooth support in an HTML5 app, you have to jailbrake it and write a platform spesific extension for PhoneGap speaks for itself.

I’ll keep an eye on HTML5 apps though, but at the moment – native is still the best way for anything but the most naive apps.

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Writing energy efficient Qt Apps – 3 tips

A few weeks ago we helped out Symbian Foundation and Richard B. by writing some Qt examples to go along with their Creating Energy Efficient Apps Using Qt article. I thought I’d show you a small video of what the examples do, and then also point you to the code itself. Check out the video first.

Basically what we say is:

  1. Make sure to turn off animations when the app is inactive
  2. Make sure to turn off sensors when they are not needed
  3. Code that uses fewer CPU cycles also uses less battery

I really recommend reading the full article – it’s a good read and it has graphs that shows the measured power consumption when running these examples.

The check out the code, go here.

To install the different examples on your Symbian^1 phone, download them here:

Note: Make sure you have Qt 4.6.3 (or later) + QtMobility installed.


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The mobile market and Qt

Last week  I sat down and wrote an article where I compared the different mobile platforms we have today, and also tried to guess where things are headed. I looked at which developer tools are available on the different platforms, and what market share the platforms themselves have in device sales. I originally just wrote it for a presentation we had at a company visit, but I uploaded it to Slideshare by chance. Within a few hours it got featured on their front page and this resulted into roughly a thousand views and lots of tweets. Check out the article below.

Here are my conclusions in brief:

  • There is no solution for writing cross platform mobile applications at the moment
  • Android is growing like crazy
  • Qt is the best solution for apps on Nokia phones
  • Qt on Android needs to happen
  • Nokia will bounce back with N8 and later MeeGo
  • App downloads will increase dramatically

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