Qt for Symbian

Chapter 5. Qt-Like Mobile Extensions

Tony Torp and Frank H.P. Fitzek

This chapter gives an overview of native Symbian APIs. In contrast to Qt Mobility APIs, these APIs are not that easy to integrate without knowledge of Symbian, but on the other hand new functionalities or flexibility are introduced.

Utilizing Platform Features beyond Qt APIs

In the previous chapter we introduced Qt Mobility APIs for cross-platform development across various device types. As richly featured smart phones, Symbian devices still have many platform-specific features that Qt libraries or Qt Mobility APIs do not reach. A camera and sensors are examples of those features that exist in every latest Symbian device but are not yet covered by standard Qt APIs. When implementing mobile applications, we are typically willing to take advantage of those features. We basically have two alternative approaches to utilize them from our Qt applications. The first alternative is the native choice. We extend our application with native Symbian C++ using those native Symbian APIs that the platform offers. The drawback with this approach is that then we have to do programming on native Symbian C++, which is known to have a very steep learning curve. The other approach is to make use of prefabricated wrappers offered by Forum NokiaWiki. They are Qt-like API extensions provided for Qt on Symbian developers for easy utilization of the most important platform features beyond Qt APIs. We can use a Qt-like approach for implementing ...