Russell Beattie

Last year I whipped up a quick little mobile widget called QLauncher, which could be used on the home screen of S60 phones like the N97 or 5800 to quickly launch a web search box with various services as options. It used S60's Web Runtime Toolkit - or WRT - which is essentially a wrapper around the internal Webkit based browser the phone uses.

When I switched away to my N900 based on Maemo (now MeeGo), the one thing (besides Google Maps) that I really missed was my little QLauncher app. Well, the Qt guys just launched their new Qt Web Runtime application framework for Maemo so finally I can get my QLauncher back!

It turns out that the other .wgz widget file that S60 uses is slightly different from the W3C standard, which uses a config.xml file rather than an info.plist file, among some other small differences. The Qt guys seem to have used the W3C version - or at least are using the .wgt filename extension the standard config. So I just went in and tweaked that stuff, threw it on my phone and *poof* it worked! W00t!

You can download the N900 Qt WRT version of Q Launcher here.

You'll need to first install the Qt WRT stuff which is now in the Maemo Extras-Devel repository (assuming you have the latest firmware, etc. and can run the rest of the Qt packages... good luck with that). Just do "apt-get install qtwrt".

I *love* development for mobile phones using web tools like HTML, CSS and Javascript. (This is part of the reason I think Palm's WebOS is so cool as well.) I'm especially getting into Javascript development lately and I love it. I'll have to explore the Qt WRT API a bit and see what other stuff I can delve into as it makes a lot of the native phone functionality accessible from Javascript.

-Russ