Sunday, October 23, 2011

MeeGo - Go N9!

Just got my hands on this nifty little device. I LOVE it.
Apparently the phone is selling well. Although Nokia has released no numbers on the total of Phones produced, or any numbers on how many actually have been sold yet. It is what it was meant for : a phone for geeks.

So what do you need in order to develop on a N9? On Windows, QTCreator is the best choice. Make sure you install the HARMATTAN (funny how Nokia wants users know that it is highly "experimental") extensions. That's it. This will give you a perfect RAD environment to develop apps out of the pocket in a fast and straightforward way.

On Linux, you can do the same and install QtCreator. Or, in case you feel confident enough in jiggling the penguin, you can do it the proper way and go for the Scratchbox (for those versions that actually support it):

http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/unstable/beta2/harmattan-sdk-setup.py

This will give you a total freedom; price is infinite complexity.
Typicall steps, in this case, include:

a) Locating sources of components that your application might depend upon and will be missing from the standard Harmattan repo (located in http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/pool btw)
b) Building the components
c) Build your code against them
d) Create a package : dpkg-buildpackage -D