Meet Mario, the man behind the Qt app TVmatchen

Today we get to know Mario Boikov, a 35 year old software developer from Sweden. Mario picked up Qt development about two years ago, listen to his experiences and thoughts on Qt.

My name is Mario Boikov, I’m 35 years old and live in a town called Helsingborg in the southern part of Sweden. I’m working as a software consultant with focus on embedded Linux systems. I’ve been developing software for quite some time now and it started, as for many of “us”, with C64 and Amiga. In my current assignment I have the privilege of participating in a MeeGo-project. On my spare time, when I’m not in front of my computer, I enjoy spending time with my 26 months old son and watch football.

I’m a K Desktop Environment user for many years now and have always been interested in Qt. About two years ago I decided to pick up Qt development and I’m glad I did. I believe Qt is one of the best frameworks for application development. The API is rich, well documented and easy to use. There are plenty of tutorials and examples on how to use Qt which makes it very easy to pick up. Qt supports many platforms which gives the developer opportunity to target several platforms without having to learn each platform in detail.

Another great advantage is the support for other programming languages. I can choose freely between several languages such as Python, Java, C# or whatever fits me, I’m not tied to only one programming language. For example I started to learn Qt using Python and PyQt, but nowadays I actually use C++ most of the time because I like trying out new feature in new releases and it can take a while before a binding is ready.

I admit! I’m a QML-oholic and have been addicted since the early pre-releases. QML makes it so much funnier coding UIs and really makes it easy to add animation and “bling bling” to your application. I believe that QML can actually be the key to MeeGo’s success, eye-candy is very important today and QML encourages you to make fluid UIs. If you haven’t already tried it you should do it right away.

Currently I’m busy doing an application called tvmatchen on my spare time, see http://tvmatchen.blogspot.com for more information (in Swedish). Unfortunately I can’t release it as open source (due to an agreement with the content provider) but you can download the application for free from Ovi Store. Basically the application shows match schedules for sports. The idea came up a while ago when I was watching a football game and having a beer with my brother. I told him that I was thinking of creating a website with TV schedules for football matches so I could quickly check what’s on. He told me to check out http://tvmatchen.nu and see if that was what I was looking for, and it was. So instead of wasting my time doing something that was already done I decided to try creating a Qt-application for the service targeting the N8 because that was the only device, known to me, supporting Qt out of the box. The funny thing is that I had never done any development for Symbian before but thanks to Qt I only had to spend about 30 minutes before my app was running on the N8. That just shows how powerful Qt is.

QtSDK for Linux doesn’t include the Symbian tool chain (only support for Windows) so I do a lot of testing in the simulator and when I need to try out something on the device I use the remote compiler service which I think is really cool. By installing a plug in you enable QtCreator to use the remote compiler service. The plug in allows you to send the code to a server at Nokia, the server compiles the code and returns the compilation output and the installable sis file. I works quite well but I would like to see Symbian tool chain support included with the QtSDK for Linux. I’ve seen some blogs on how to install the tool chain in Linux but I’m too lazy Most of all, I really would like to see a MeeGo-device released soon so I can enjoy Qt development targeting a mobile device running Linux.

Thanks for reading.