Finally I managed to get most of the diplomas and gifts for the QtCentre Programming Contest mailed out. A few are still to be sent, because of some stupid mistakes we made. Anyway you should start receiving them. And if anyone still hasn’t received one of the prizes he won, let us know by email.

Sorry it all took so long, but we’ve learned a lot, so if we decide to start the second edition, we’ll organize ourselves much better this time.

Should we do the second edition? I’d like to know peoples’ comments on that…

Oh, by the way – we have announced the results of the Qt Centre Programming Contest.

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.

Anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of QtCentre – exactly one year ago on a cold winter morning QtCentre was announced to public. It was created as a result of transfer and ongoing negligence of the new owner of QtForum. As the situation over year didn’t change – the site is still dying and is trashed with spam, I see that we’ve made the right decision.

After a year of activity QtCentre is already half the size of QtForum in postcount and about the same size in usercount (the usercount on QtForum is invalid due to a merge with the user database from kde-forum.org about 18 months ago). Apart from the forum itself we have published a wiki, which already has about a hundred articles (many of them are class stubs, so you’re welcome to fill them in), many thanks go to JPN for active contibution to the wiki.

Contest

For the last few months I have been less active on the forum, but now without a reason. Apart from other things which were occupying my attention, I was taking part in preparations for the QtCentre Programming Contest. I’m happy to follow the announcements on QtCentre and other sites and inform, that the contest has started today! You can find all the information about it on its website. Feel invited to enter the competition and win very nice prizes. The contest will be judged by representatives from all organising parties – the top-notch Qt programmers and engineers.

Hopefully I’ll have more time now to focus on my PhD studies