The big news from the CES this week was the unveiling of the Palm Pre.  It’s generated a huge amount of buzz, with almost entirely positive comment.

If the release actually goes to plan (US early 2009, with a European version to follow), the Pre is being touted as an iPhone killer, or at least the first mobile device to innovate above and beyond the standards set by the iPhone.

From the looks of it, it has a nice form factor, a good UI and a decent physical QWERTY.  As a developer though, the really interesting part is webOS.  It’s ‘based on Linux’, albeit with no more given detail than that, and applications are developed with a mix of HTML, CSS and Javascript using an SDK called Mojo.  According to early developers, the environment is very pleasant to use.

It seems there’s some confusion over webOS, perhaps partly due to the slightly misleading name.  Some people say, “it’s just web apps, Apple tried that and it didn’t work.”  Yes, it uses web technologies and keeps some data in the cloud, but it’s not simply a thin-client to a bunch of web apps; it has access to the underlying Linux too, in much the same way AIR leverages “web” technologies to create OS-hosted applications.  What will be interesting is just how much access to the underlying OS the Pre allows.  The same issue exists with AIR.  Our product Shu helps to overcome some of AIR’s limitations, giving the developer access to extra OS features, and it’s popular as a result.  With webOS, similar limitations may exist, and again may constrain developer take-up.

There’s speculation of Palm eventually removing the sandbox, but initial it seems it will be only be HTML/CSS/JS with things like file and database access.  This is a shame, as while such a stack is sufficient for your basic data-driven applications, if I wanted to do anything more complex, digital signal processing for example, I wouldn’t have a chance.  If you look at the iPhone it’s easy to see that apps other than data-driven business apps account for a significant amount of its popular appeal.

Regardless, the mix of mobile devices, cloud computing and RIAs doesn’t get much more on-the-pulse, so we’ll be following the progress of the Pre with great interest.

So Nokia have made a change to the licensing model of its QT framework.

The QT framework is a cross-platform C/C++ GUI framework developed by a Norwegian company name Trolltech which Nokia acquired last year. Anyone who has been doing cross-platform C++ applications with a GUI will have come across this framework and / or used it at some point.

However, the previous licensing model was very restrictive.

The only platform you could freely develop for was Linux – if you wanted to use QT for Windows, Mac or any other QT supported platform, you had to purchase a (not so insignificantly priced) license for each platform.
This model really locked out independent developers and small development companies as the cost was simply too great. This will surely have hampered adoption of a quite easy to use and polished framework.

And this is where Nokia’s move to the LGPL (GNU’s Lesser General Public License), an open source license, should really impact on the adoption and usage of the framework (and of course extra development!).

Personally I use and also like to contribute to the superb wxWidgets open source cross-platform GUI framework. It has great platform support, is well written, has a large community behind it, uses native controls etc etc – the list can go on.
However, QT also has many benefits too. I can imagine there will be occasions when QT would be a preferred choice, for example on embedded devices.

I certainly welcome this move and am looking forward to using QT more.