Qt Developer Days 2012, Santa Clara

It was -17°C and snowing when I left from snowy Tampere. About 24h later I was at San Francisco Airport. I did not sleep too much and I was dead tired the whole next day. Unfortunately I still needed to stay sharp for the whole day since there was important stuff to be done. In the official program it was a training day. I had registered to Effective QML -training, but after sitting there for couple of hours I realized it was not really targeted for me since pretty much all the stuff trainer covered I knew already.

We had agreed to give a hands-on demo and interview of Sailfish OS to Engadget in the afternoon so I decided to skip the training and prepare for Engadget and for the Jolla BoF -session in the evening. I think it was the right choice, since the interview and the hands-on went pretty well even though I was dead tired due to jet lag. The article is now available at Engadget.

In the evening we had a Jolla BoF session that we had agreed just couple of days before the conference. I gave demo of the UI and David talked about SDK, Mer, Nemo Mobile, and Sailfish. It was quite nice to give the UI demo, but the best part of the session was the chats with Qt people after the "official" part. People seemed genuinely curious and sympathetic towards what we do at Jolla.

The next day the conference really started.

Qt5 release candidate was obviously the big news from Qt-project and Digia. Qt5 is definitely interesting technology. Since Nokia doesn't anymore control Qt, the cross platform aspect of it is gaining more support again, even on mobile. In Digia's booth they had demos of Qt5 running on iOS, WP, Androrid, and other platforms. Official support for Android and iOS will be coming later in 5.x releases.

RIM had a strong push to motivate developers to code for BlackBerry 10. The platform is interesting and their UI seems quite nice. I think they do have same kind of thinking behind their UI choices as we do, but that is just inevitable when you try to optimize for single handed use or optimal screen estate use.

In the afternoon I attended Open Source Tablets -panel as one of the panelist and had my own presentation in the last patch of sessions. I talked about Jolla Developer Story and gave a short overview of Sailfish architecture. My slides are available here.

One great thing about Qt Developer Days presentations were that almost all had live-coding part that showed what the subject is really about. In my presentation I took an open source Google Reader -client called Grrok and ported it from N9 to Jolla Sailfish OS. Since the original app is QML/JS and utilizes MeeGo QML Components, porting it to use Jolla Components really was quite quick and easy. I haven't yet published sources of my port, but will do as soon as Jolla Components will be publicly available.

Conference diner was fun. I was still a bit jet lagged so I didn't even drink more than two beers, but I sat down with interesting people from various backgrounds and we had really good discussions. I enjoyed the food too.

In the last day I listened to David's presentation about Mer-project and couple of other interesting sessions. From the technical sessions, I found desktop Qt Components session quite impressive. I was also curious about the QtWebkit in Qt5 and it seems so promising. Can't wait for that to get it in Mer.

In the evening I ended up having diner with couple of Digia's Qt guys. Again, nice people and we ended up agreeing that we would go together to drop our luggage to airport in the following day and then go sightseeing in SF.

Sightseeing in San Francisco was great. It's a nice city and it was especially cool to take a cruise at the bay. It was 20°C and sun was shining. Perfect ending for a great trip.