Qt Dev Days 2009: Nokia Extends Qt Developer Frameworks

Nokia wants to increase the development budget for its Qt division and hire new developers, at least according to the head of Qt development and vice president at Nokia, Sebastian Nyström, at the opening keynote of the Qt Developer Days in Munich.

Nokia has lot of plans for the Qt UI developer framework. Naturally Qt should become the best and widest known -- what software untertaking doesn't want that -- and it should be available on as many different devices as possible. Nyström mentions rapid trains and coffee machines. In fact, Qt ran on the machines that gave the Dev Days participants their daily caffeine fix.

700 participants attended the conference, compared to 500 the previous year. 2009 proved to be the year of the Qt Creator IDE and the ports for the Qt Development Framework (such as the QNX and VxWorks real-time operating systems). Nyström also patted himself on the back for Qt 4.5 being released under LGPL early this year. The downloads have grown 250% in 2009 to around one million. So far the Qt framework has included about 400 contributions from the community.

During the course of 2008 Nyström became head at Qt and a Nokia VP. Previous to his five years at Nokia he had been a project lead at McKinsey. Linux Magazine Online produced a video of him at the 2008 Qt Dev Days, in which he spoke of why Nokia needs Qt and of Nokia's open source commitment, and revealed whether he had himself ever developed using Qt.