Nokia's operating system strategy remains a work in progress and with new faces at most levels of its management, we are sure to see some rebalancing of its three key platforms - Symbian^3, MeeGo and Series 40.
That makes its underestimated but critical cross-OS developer framework, Qt, even more important. The firm held a Qt developer day in Munich, Germany this week to outline the future of the platform.
It was a sign of how preoccupied observers are with the OS wars, that this briefing - potentially far more decisive for Nokia's future success than its individual operating systems - that it gained very little coverage.
Overshadowed by the WP7 launch, Nokia's VP of application and service frameworks, Sebastian Nyström, and the R&D director for Qt Lars Knoll sketched the future of their technology.
The main priority is to boost performance, which the executives admitted was the main area of developer requests. As H-Online explains, the plan is to accelerate Qt with a new feature called Qt Scene Graph, which will streamline the graphics rendering pipeline from three stages to one, fully exploiting graphics processor acceleration where available.
This will be important for games and other multimedia apps, on the rising number of mobile devices that will boast dedicated GPUs.
Another project that is near commercialization is Lighthouse, which supports similar hardware acceleration for developers of embedded devices.
Developers are also insisting on better modularization and this will see the Qt WebKit tool for rendering HTML being completely reworked - and can be implemented without updating the whole framework. There will also be full integration of gestures and tactile feedback into Qt.
As all platforms aim to make development quicker and easier, even for non-professional programmers, Nokia is doing its bit with QtQuick. This uses JavaScript-style QML (Qt Meta-Object Language), to create apps rapidly, and QML will now be included in the Qt Creator integrated development environment (IDE).
Another addition will be Qt Observer, a tool for interactive debugging of connections established between Qt tools and running apps. Nokia plans to increase its investment in Qt "significantly", though it did not quantify a sum, and said it would rebalance its efforts.
It will put less effort into supporting all flavors of Unix, a traditional aim of Qt's creator Trolltech, which was acquired by the Finnish giant. The main areas of activity will be Symbian and MeeGo, plus embedded and mobile Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.
New CTO Rich Green said the balance between MeeGo and Symbian projects would be about equal, though he refused to be drawn on when MeeGo devices would hit the market.
This article originally appeared in Rethink Wireless
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Nokia outlines future strategy for Qt