There is a problem with this approach however. If you start a new activity the tabs (area A, B, C) all disappear and this is not always what you want. Sometimes what you want is to keep the tabbar around and have an individual backstack for each of the tabs.

Typical tab layout

I’ve published an example on github that shows how you can get the best of both worlds. It explains how to keep an individual backstack for each tab, but also how to start activities that break out of the tabs as is the traditional way on Android. The Back button still works and you can also programmatically navigate back. The behavior of back is changed to respect the backstack of each individual tab.

If you want to try it out yourself I’ve compiled an Android package for you. Navigate to http://bit.ly/stacksintabs with your Android device and install the .apk to check it out.

Navigation in the example

The design is very simple. I still use TabWidget, TabHost and TabActivity (layout here) – but instead using normal activities for each tab, I subclass FragmentActivity – and build a stack of Fragments inside each tab. The gist of the code is in the addFragment(…) function

To launch a new fragment inside a tab (area D), see the launchNewFragment() function, and to see how you break out of the tabs and launch a new activity (area E) see the function launchNewActivity(…)

The fragments and activity I use are just examples, the point is that you replace ExampleActivity and ExampleFragment with you own classes.

My initial approach at solving this problem was using Fragments exclusively, but since nested Fragments are not supported on Android I gave up.

I hope this helps some of you – it’s all available under a BSD license. The example requires API level 7 and uses the Android Support library v4. Comments and contributions are welcome. Btw: I’m also working on a comparison between QML and Android XML where I compare pros and cons, so stay tuned for more

I can totally get used to lunches like this!

My name is Henrik Hartz, and I joined Espen and Marius January 2nd this year after working 7 years at Trolltech and Nokia. For the first week and a half I have been getting busy with existing projects while Espen and Marius are pushing new frontiers – for the time being focusing on an Android project.

Aside from 50% growth, we also moved to a new office – literally across the road from the old one. The new place is a lot larger – the three of us share an office – while we have a lunch-room (with a red couch and gaming system) and extra offices to spare. We want to grow even more this year.

After moving in – the place was in a bit of a shoddy state..

discombobulated...

After a quick stop at IKEA, we got some new office furniture to get us ready for a busy New Year!

After organizing and cleaning up, we’re ready to take on the new year

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!

Update: added nice charts so you can see the results so far.

Update: the poll has ended. A total of 344 people answered our questions. Thanks to everyone that participated!

You can also play with the interactive charts here.

For the executive brief, check out the video below.

Achievements

• Formed a legal company
• Got an office and bought hardware
• Got an accountant, lawyer, designer etc.
• Published 4 Symbian apps
• Yr.no for NRK
• Telenor Faktura for Telenor
• WiMP for Aspiro
• Fly for ourselves
• Made our Symbian apps run on Maemo, MeeGo and Android as well
• Contributed a bit to Qt for Android
• Created a UI prototype on Win/Mac/Symbian for a client
• Went to Qt Developer Days, Qt Contributor Summit, MeeGo Summit, Akademy, SEE, etc.
• Consulted for ad-agencies and printing companies
• Stayed at five star hotels – for FREEEEE
• Got 3 minutes on national TV
• Got mentioned on lots of mobile sites
• Started a tech-startup-network-club-thingy
• Got tattooed
• Got paid

Three things we’ve learned

“If you set yourself goals, you will actually reach them”: When we started Cutehacks we said that an ideal project for us would be to develop the WiMP client. One year later, we actually achieved that. We’ve also worked towards getting our apps running across multiple platforms – this is also starting to happen.

“Ask and you may receive”: We’ve gotten free hardware, new projects and invitations to talks – simply by asking for it.

“The only constant is change”: Wow, this one has definitely been true for us. We didn’t see 2/11 coming – but once it did, we’ve simply had to adjust and move on.

Some advice for software startups

• Use LinkedIn
• Use Twitter
• Use YouTube
• Use Google Apps (Mail, Documents, Calendar)
• Use Github (or similar)
• Use WordPress (or similar)
• Use a professional accountant
• Use a professional designer
• Present at conferences
• Say Yes more than No
• Build up your IP
• Act professional
• Use your network
• Ask for things
• Get an office
• Always look for new projects
• Experiment with new technology
• Get signed contracts
• Always go to a meeting prepared
• KISS
• Do it

So far it’s been a fun, interesting and productive event. It’s a great venue and it’s all been extremely well organized, including working wifi (!) and free drinks. We will stay here until the end of the event on Saturday, so if you’re in Berlin and want to talk to us, give us a ping or look around for the Cutehacks logo.

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

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:

…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.

	Fly Shows flight departure and arrival times for 46 airports in Norway. Using live data from Avinor.
	Telenor Faktura Telenor Faktura gives you an overview of your mobile subscription. This application is intended for use with Telenor Norway subscriptions only.
	Yr.no Search in 8 million weather forecasts for Norway and the world from yr.no, or use GPS to find your nearest location. Contains weather forecasts, textual forecasts, meteograms and extreme weather warnings. Yr.no is a service from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and NRK.

Download and enjoy!

At the moment we have 3 apps pending in the Ovi store. During the submission process we gained some knowledge that might save you some time when you’re going through the same process. This blog post is meant as a survival guide, so I thought 28 days later was a fitting title, allthough our apps are still pending after 41 days. Here are the issues we ran into so far, and how to avoid them:

Issue #1 – Vendor vs Publisher

If you have developed an app for another company and now want to publish it through their publishing account, make sure the Vendor listed in the .sis file is the same as the Publisher name. Otherwise you’ll get an error. This is inspected manually by Ovi QA and took two weeks for them to report back. Here is the error message:

SUMMARY: The Vendor Name listed in your package file is “Cutehacks AS”
CORRECTIVE ACTION: The Vendor Name listed in your package file must match your publisher name “NRK”

There are two ways to resolve this. Either get the owner of the publisher account (the company you made it for) to tell Ovi in an email: “It’s OK – really. It’s fine!”. Or, fix the Vendor part in your .pkg script. Google it if you don’t know how.

Issue #2 – Countries vs Language

When submitting a .sis file you tell which languages it supports, and also which countries it should be published in. There is a correlation between these two, and if you haven’t guessed it right – your app will fail. To exemplify:  If you put as countries: Worldwide, and languages: American English, Norwegian – it will fail. You are not allowed to publish an app worldwide if it’s only in American English and Norwegian. Here is the error we got:

SUMMARY: Localized content must be set to its localized region
ACTUAL RESULT: American English and Norwegian are the only supported language selected by the publisher however the content is selected to be distributed Neutral
EXPECTED RESULT: Only Canada, US or Finland, Norway, Sweden, Norway, Denmark regions can be selected in the country distribution if the content is localized in American English or Norwegian.

Now this check is also done manually, and it took them two weeks to report this back to us. In other words, there is an internal list inside Ovi of which languages must be supported to be able to distribute it to certain countries. This list is not documented anywhere as far as I know. Note they make a distinction between English and American English, and actually disallow the app to be distributed to the UK, Australia, India.

Issue #3 – Smart Installer warning notice

Since our apps are using Qt, which on older phones are not yet included, they may in some cases require a download of up to 13 megs. If you don’t put a warning at the top of your app description that states this, they will fail your Qt based app. Here is the error:

ISSUE: Description for Qt Smart Installer content requires additional information
SUMMARY: Items utilizing the Qt SmartInstaller requires an additional disclaimer in the description
CORRECTIVE ACTIONS: Please add the disclaimer below to the beginning of the metadata description informing users that additional downloads may be required

Now to be fair, in two out of three cases the QA guys just added the warning note for us and we didn’t get an error – but in one case the app was simply just failed. This also took them about two weeks to notice and must also have been checked manually. The warning notice needs to read: *This item may require a one-time download of components as large as 13 MB. Use of WLAN is recommended. It needs to be translated to all the languages you support as well.

Summary and conclusion

We submitted 3 apps 41 days ago. They are all still pending:

• Two are still pending for Symbian^3 phones: Reason unknown
• One is still pending for Symbian^1 and Symbian^3: Reason unknown
• Note that no actual software bugs have been reported yet for any of the apps

All reported issues so far have been fixed within hours and then resubmitted to Ovi.