This summer has been filled with many exciting advances for the Stage Manager Simulator and one very frustrating obstacle. Jadabri Interactive, which has done all of the programming for the simulator, has been adding features throughout the summer. But we have been waiting on the latest release of developer tools called Qt, created by Nokia. Qt 5.0 went into an Alpha development phase at the beginning of the year with plans to go into Beta by May. So we decided after the interest we generated at USITT at the end of March to incorporate version 5.0 as it offered several features we wanted and we didn't want to change so much of the programming architecture once we started distributing the simulator.
Unfortunately, the May deadline for the Beta release came and went, as did the June deadlines and the early July deadline. And, as part of the Alpha phase, certain elements are 'turned off' while they are being developed. One of those elements is video playback. As the hundreds of people who stopped at our USITT saw, the video playback in Qt 4.x worked great. But everything we have built since USITT is currently being delayed until the software at least moves to Beta phase. The good news for our fans is that we have not been idle - a lot of features we had planned to put on our "SM Simulator 2.0" are now part of the software.
We learned this weekend that the Finnish company Digia, which had earlier acquired part of Qt, has purchased all software rights from Nokia. It is now clear that the delays we have faced were business-related as it did not make sense for Nokia to launch a major revision just as the project was about to be sold. And the silver-lining is that Digia is very keen to make Qt attractive to programmers, as noted in this article. The other exciting news is that Digia would like to improve Qt's mobile device offerings. We are focused solely on releasing the simulator later this year, but who knows what version 2.0 might be offer for operating systems....
Within just a few weeks of Qt going into Beta, our simulator will go start its Alpha and Beta testing
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