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Trying a Cute Approach to Android

Mar 29, 2011  By Johan Thelin
 in

Amidst all the chaos surrounding the Qt project, the power of open source software has shown itself. The Romanian developer Bogdan Vatra has ported Qt to Android. To avoid trademark conflicts, the result was named Necessitas.

Before looking at how to setup the tools and build an application, lets look at the system from the users' view. When downloading a Qt based application, the size matters. The classic wiggly example that has shipped with Qt since the dawn of time is only about 113kB. Animated Tiles, provided by Bogdan Vatra, requires a 153kB download.

When the user has downloaded and installed the application, it is time to run it. When started, every Qt application looks for a helper called Ministri. The job of Ministri is to provide shared Qt libraries for all Qt applications. This saves disk space and bandwidth. When starting wiggly for the first time, the user is guided to Android Market from where Ministri can be downloaded and installed for free.

Ministri now takes over and downloads the Qt libraries. After this, wiggly happily runs. It uses the native Android on-screen keyboard and even rotates with the device when I change its orientation.

In my opinion, the fun part of using Qt is not to use the applications, but to write them. To do that, download the necessitas installer. Run through it, but make sure to install in /opt/necessitas and nowhere else. You will have to chmod +x the installer to make it executable. Then follow this great setup guide to configure QtCreator. If the Qt version complains about not being properly installed, you might have to create a symbolic link to get things working.

Then it is just a matter of coding, building and deploying. Try it yourself today!

______________________

Johan Thelin is a consultant working with Qt, embedded and free
software. On-line, he is known as e8johan.

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associate android w mass murder

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 04/17/2011 - 13:53.

Is that benificial to the linux community? 100 million people were murdered by communism, those gas vans where the exhaust goes into the back of the van murdering those inside was a soviet invention. What are you guys thinking of, would you paint a svastika on a german android project?

um, you are wrong

andor's picture
Submitted by andor on Wed, 04/20/2011 - 01:22.

I see Q and T inside

What r u talking abt??This is

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 04/17/2011 - 21:51.

What r u talking abt??This is free software!!!which allows C++ enthusiasts to write C++ applications on android similar to that written in java(on android).

We <3 Android

Es Cendol's picture
Submitted by Es Cendol on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 01:41.

The communist logo on the Android's body is really "rude" and can hurt many people, i think it is better if you replace the image or remove the communist logo from it. thanks

That is not the communist

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 04/17/2011 - 21:52.

That is not the communist symbol.it is the old symbol of qt please look in to it carefully.even first i thought he same.

To us, it looks much more

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 04/23/2011 - 16:04.

To us, it looks much more like the hammer-and-sickle logo than QT's old logo. So much so that we won't be able to use the project in our shop. Too bad, it looks like something we could have used and we have a long history of financially supporting the open source projects whose stuff we use. Most mature open source projects eschew politically charged symbols and statements. Perhaps this is something this nascent project will grow past and we can reconsider using it.

Communism?

Ricardo Balcácer's picture
Submitted by Ricardo Balcácer (not verified) on Tue, 05/17/2011 - 08:21.

When Steve Ballmer affirmed that Linux is Communism he wasn't mistaken he is right, Open Source software it is a direct consequence of a socialist movement in which the means of production (computer code in this case), do not belong to any individual or institution but humanity itself, now you tell med: What can be more communist than that?

People seem to keep trying to avoid the relation, because of the bad name that propaganda build over the past 60 years. You are free to think whatever you believe is correct regarding this political and philosophical topic, you do have to accept the truth regarding what drives developers and everybody that is putting their effort on pushing open source to be the tools of choice for a mature information revolution.

Communism, Open Source and the USSR

Johan Thelin's picture
Submitted by Johan Thelin on Tue, 05/17/2011 - 08:34.

Ok, a couple of remarks here.

The USSR, and other communist dictatorships, are (imho) quite a far way from the workers-control-the-means-of-production theories. They where dictatorships with a controlled (planned) market and called themselves communists. Personally, I do not believe in communism, I just want to say that oppressing the people is not a key element in the communist theory.

Open Source, does not mean that the workers-control-the-means-of-production. It is simply a mechanism to avoid vendor lock-in and monopolies. And to be frank, monopolies and vendor lock-ins are not really a part of a free market. It is something that we see, but that we want to reduce to a minimum.

Finally, the Ministri logo. It is a play on the old Qt logo. Given that Bogdan (the author) is from Romania, a former communist dictatorship, I feel that if he wants to make that pun, he is free to do so.

Johan Thelin is a consultant working with Qt, embedded and free
software. On-line, he is known as e8johan.

You say Tomatoe I say TomatO,

Ricardo Balcácer's picture
Submitted by Ricardo Balcácer (not verified) on Mon, 06/27/2011 - 08:05.

You say Tomatoe I say TomatO, you are not denying my statement. To put Communism in a different perspective to what has been exemplified, think about it if you were put play an online game and you would have two choices: you play solo and cut throats to survive or you play cooperatively with other online members. "Communism" comes from the word "Community" people helping each other to attain a common goal. Now isn't open source tries to accomplish the same idea?

The word "communism" may stem

Johan Thelin's picture
Submitted by Johan Thelin on Mon, 06/27/2011 - 08:13.

The word "communism" may stem from "community", but the word means much more than that. Saying that doing things together is communism is not something that I can agree with. It feels a bit like "white is made up of all colors, thus all colors must be white" to me.

Johan Thelin is a consultant working with Qt, embedded and free
software. On-line, he is known as e8johan.

Actually in color theory

Ricardo Balcácer's picture
Submitted by Ricardo Balcácer (not verified) on Tue, 06/28/2011 - 14:32.

Actually in color theory white is the absence of all colors, that's why white is not considered a color nor black for that matter. Although I agree there is a much more complex concept behind the word "Communism", you are right about the fact that one cannot say that is the same as working together. I believe to have made the point clear about the contrast between individuality and cooperativeness, as proprietary and open source software is.

Thank you.

Qt-mobility

Ajay Nandakumar's picture
Submitted by Ajay Nandakumar (not verified) on Tue, 04/05/2011 - 04:07.

Hi,

Not only this the latest Qt also support mobility API's on android which allows application developers to use sensors,multimedia,camera,contacts,system info.

to git is available at
http://qt.gitorious.org/~taipan/qt-mobility/android-qt-mobility

also the latest android-lighthouse master git is required for using the mobility API's.
it can be downloaded from :
http://gitorious.org/~taipan/qt/android-lighthouse

So far mobility hasn't been as a part of the alpha version of Qt on android,but will be soon be released on the next alpha version of android.

Also this Mobility hasn't been fully developed so i request developers to contribute and also fix issues.

Licensing

Tom Potts's picture
Submitted by Tom Potts (not verified) on Thu, 03/31/2011 - 09:12.

Last time I looked QT wasn't completely free - you needed to pay to make money - is it now or is this clone still tied in to Nokia somehow?

Qt has been available under

Joel Dillon's picture
Submitted by Joel Dillon (not verified) on Thu, 03/31/2011 - 09:53.

Qt has been available under the LGPL for about two years now -

http://qt.nokia.com/about/licensing/

So no need to pay Nokia a dime, no. Even before that, you didn't need to pay to make money as such, but you did need to pay to write a closed-source application based on Qt.

Cheers

Tom Potts's picture
Submitted by Tom Potts (not verified) on Thu, 03/31/2011 - 12:21.

Now to see if I can work out how to get MuseScore on it...

not bad

Victor C.'s picture
Submitted by Victor C. (not verified) on Tue, 03/29/2011 - 16:53.

There are at least good things coming from Romania also (not just hacking and other ethnic groups!) Good job Bogdan!

Android Robot w/ Communist Logo?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 03/29/2011 - 09:26.

Why does the Android Robot have a Communist Logo on his belly?
Is this hate speech?

My impression is that it is a

Johan Thelin's picture
Submitted by Johan Thelin on Tue, 03/29/2011 - 12:12.

My impression is that it is a pun on the old Qt logo.

Johan Thelin is a consultant working with Qt, embedded and free
software. On-line, he is known as e8johan.

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