So far so good – Monday was architecture, Tuesday was specific core libraries and classes. We do exercises on the computer a couple of times a day to demonstrate topics. Today we did one on creating a paint application using the Qt libs. Tricky.
I have done all successfully without too much trouble. My background in Win32 API, MFC, core products, MSVC and the two weeks of playing in the code have helped a lot conceptually. The QtCreator IDE is OK, but the instructor, Romain, a Frenchman who just started up this office recently, prefers to use Eclipse. I have been playing with the C++ toolchain in Eclipse and checking it out and trying to do the exercises using it.
8 Attendees, three from Nokia (the new owners of Qt) who are here to replace the Symbian GUI with Qt on Nokia phones. One consultant learning. Two guys from Georgia, the country, not Atlanta who use it in their product already.
The Georgians, Zurab & Zurab, and I went into SF last night and ate at the wharf and looked around, and saw the GG bridge. When we got back we split some Georgian cognac and talked about the their work on the new Nokia phone that runs Qt apps – but it has 40G of memory and is real fast. Not your average phone now, but mobile and small devices seems to be an area that Qt is really hitting hard. Romain says the consulting market is pretty good for Qt programmers.
Tomorrow and Friday we should be getting into more specific questions where I will bring up my issue list. Some of them have already been answered.
Romain highly recommended CMake, a build system for C++ projects, and has specific support for Qt apps. It handles platform and compiler changes transparently and is good for large libraries like ours. I am playing with that on a background thread – there is a Hudson plugin also.