The 2010 MeeGo Conference has just wrapped up in Dublin, and Qt was a big part of the event, with presentations and a special Qt Certification track where attendees could take the Qt Essentials exam to become a Nokia Certified Qt Developer for just 74 Euros.
In line with the surge in interest in MeeGo, we are excited to see that Brazil based Metasys Tecnologia is making waves in the IT education market with its new Metasys MeeGo student PC devices -- and the company is using Qt as its GUI and application development environment of choice to build new 'didactic' teaching applications
This Intel-powered 'classmate PC' is a portable computer designed to integrate students and teachers in a learning system filled with collaboration and information exchange. It also allows teachers to supplement and extend their classes, providing features to help control students during class.
MeeGo was designed from the start to combine the best of Moblin and Maemo into a single open source integrated platform, supporting multiple processor architectures and multiple device form factors. As initial device types were always intended to be smart phones, netbooks and tablets, it's encouraging to see more of these devices starting to emerge with Qt on board.
For a device like the Metasys MeeGo, Qt plays an important role not only by supporting federated application stores to serve the device; but also by providing the GUI framework to build an innovative youth-focused user interface optimized for social media interaction. For Metasys, close proximity to Qt framework tools was both logical and trouble free as the company's development teams have already been Qt users for some years now and have grown with the technology itself.
To underline the importance of Qt to the development of the Metasys MeeGo's user interface, the product necessitated the creation of a UI that would feature touch screen optimized usage, support for 1:1 e-learning methods and also feature an accelerometer. Because of Qt's inherent cross platform nature, support for multiple device types and pre-integrated and pre-tested functionality, Metasys MeeGo's development team was able to concentrate on feature development and leveraging the rest of the MeeGo stack to build a great product quickly.
