Introduction - How it started

Stockona is a stock quote app for Maemo5/Meego Harmarttan/Meego.

I had always wanted to develop something when I got my Nokia N900 (running Maemo 5) in early 2010. Unfortunately, the combination of GTK/Hildon/C and scratchbox development environment were too complicated for me to pick up so I never started. Time passed by and a lot of (bad) things happened in Nokia, but an important milestone came, and it was the release of QtSDK as the unifying dev tool for Nokia smartphones. Especially QML was touted as great tool to ease the pain of UI creation. It looked like Nokia finally started putting the pieces together, and then came the infamous Elopcypse on Feb 11, 2011.

I am no Nokia fan, in fact I don't like the brand. It was the openess and the deep linux root of Maemo 5 that attracted me to N900 instead of Google's Nexus. As a result, I wasn't bother by the news, just thinking I would never have a chance to touch this seemly wonderful toolset. But a few months passed, I read rumors about iPhone5 and started feeling it wouldn't be the phone that I had been hoping for. Meanwhile, I witnessed the wonderful things the Maemo community did to Maemo 5, and I started thinking maybe there's still a chance that I would buy a N9. I looked at the apps I used on Maemo 5, and thought what was lacking.... a really good stock quote app was one of them. Since I was a beginner to QT/QML, I spent several weeks to evaluate how hard it would be to develop such app. Thanks to referencing Tommi Laukkanen's wonderful apps, Twimgo and Newsflow, I was able to figure out the difficult network processing part and so the project started looking like it was feasible.

So my journey with QT/QML started in May.

Thanks to the power of QML+Javascript, the prototype was done rather fast. With the feedback from the Maemo community and the progress of two-month time, Stockona has grown a lot. Most of the improvements/features were done in QML, but I also started to use QT C++ more and more. As a result, my understanding to QT/QML also grows with experience. In the meantime, I was fortunate enough to get a  N950 (running Meego Harmarttan) from the Meego community. So I started this blog thinking I would like to share the QT/QML experience I learned (probably not so much from a professional developer's mind but from a end-user/amateur's mind), document the development of Stockona on Meego Harmattan, and talk about anything related to Qt/Meego/Open source model that are relevant to the my experience.

By the way, I haven't received my N950 yet.....