Hi, I’m Salvatore Rinaldo and I work for the Symbian Foundation Apps and UI  team. A few weeks ago I spent some time trying to get Qt-Creator to work with the Symbian emulator and I wrote an article on our Wiki that explains how to do it. Given the amount of interest and positive feedback received since then, I thought it was a good idea to share this story on our blog as well.

So what did I do exactly?
I just downloaded a snapshot of Qt-Creator (I tried with version 1.2.80) from the official Qt-Creator repository and I built it using Qt 4.5.2. On my machine I had already installed the Symbian^1 SDK and Qt-4.5.2 “Tower” release. Well, after a few hours I was able to build a simple Qt application, build it and run it in the Symbian emulator, all done via Qt-Creator.

Please check the Wiki page if you’re interested in the step-by-step procedure. As you will see, there may be a few tricky bits but you shouldn’t have too many problems in reproducing the whole thing.

The article is a work in progress and I strongly encourage you to leave comments, make changes and corrections as you discover more: somebody has already tried with Qt-Creator version 1.2.90 and managed to get it all working.

By the way – before you get too excited – debugging Symbian apps from Qt-Creator won’t work yet, but I hope that this is just a matter of time.

Ok, this sounds great. So what’s so cool about it?

Well, the first cool thing is that if you are not a fan of Carbide – and I know some people are not – you can always edit your code in Qt-Creator and take advantage of all the nice features it comes with.

The second cool thing – and this is really what I think is worth noticing – is that, a few months ago, a thread on Forum Nokia clearly showed that people were interested in getting Qt-Creator to work with the Symbian tools – after all the “Qt for S60″ port had been already out there for a while and Qt-Creator is the official Qt IDE, it is multiplatform and has a long history of success in the open source world.

This is what I call the community approach: people use things, provide feedback, contribute and help filling the wishlists, too. And when their requests are reasonable, again, it’s only a matter of time.

What comes next?
If you are a developer, probably the first thing you would like to do is try the latest version of Qt-Creator (version 1.3 has been made available in the meantime), build it with Qt 4.6 Technology Preview and … update the Wiki article.

In the foreseeable future, I would like to be able to use Qt-Creator to debug as well, for example on-device debugging would be such a nice feature to integrate, wouldn’t it?

In any case, whatever comes next opens the way to a number of questions on where the Symbian tool-chain is going – of course while moving in parallel with the evolution of the platform – and how much we will benefit from the convergence towards “standard” development tools.

I can see a lot of room for community engagement and contributions … and you?