Today I posted a note to QtCentre regarding upcoming closing of the contest registration period and I’d like to write a few words of comment and thoughts regarding the contest.
First of all I am surprised by the total lack of entries in the “Mobile Application”. Given the fact that you can win a magnificent device (belive me, I played with it last year) worth probably about $1000 (Trolltech sells it for $700 but it’s less than the Greenphone market value) that can actually run your application (assuming you don’t already have such a device) I expected a flood of entries in this category (I’d take part in the competition myself if I could).
Second of all right after the contest has been announced there has been a little wave of comments suggesting some kind of con or enourmously strict rules of the contest (for example look here). I will only say that such aqusations are unfair. You can read my detailed opinion directly on Dot.
Third of all I’m surprised only three entries have been submitted to the “Development Tool” category. Knowing that at least three IDE projects exist for Qt4 (and not all entries in the category are IDE applications) and there are surely more initiatives related to development (wizards, documentation tools, parsers, frontends, etc.) it is weird that none of them entered the competition.
Fourth of all while organizing the competition we managed to extend our contacts in Qt world. At last I don’t feel like walking blindly in Qt world, so this is an obvious benefit of the whole initiative for me. Hopefully one day Qt community may benefit from that.
There are still almost two weeks remaining for people to register their apps so hopefully all my worries will prove wrong, but for now all makes me wonder why the situation looks like this. I don’t think it’s because of poor prizes as, you must admit, these are great and honestly I don’t know if sponsors will be willing to donate such great prizes next year (if we decide to organize it) if they’re not satisfied with the interest in the event this year.
The bottom line is – if you have written a Qt4 application that doesn’t violate rules of engagement (it’s open source and portable), enter the competition. You don’t lose anything and you can gain quite much.
