Trolltech announced that Valgrind won first prize and Synergy and Vim won second prizes in its inaugural Qt Open Source Development Awards honoring the best open-source development tools. In other news, Trolltech announced first quarter earnings of about $11 million US.

Linked to its Linux-compatible Qt cross-platform application development framework, which was recently rev'd to version 4.4, the awards were given to “the most effective, easy to use, and enjoyable open source tools in the market,” says Trolltech. The awards were judged by Trolltech's team of Qt and Qtopia developers, as well as by Qt support engineers.

Valgrind, (pronounced “val grinned”) is a Linux-compatible programming toolsuite for memory debugging, thread debugging, time profiling and space profiling. It won the first prize of $3,000 US, with 28 per cent of the vote. The judges valued Valgrind's ability to streamline debugging by automatically detecting memory management and threading errors. In a recent Timesys LinuxLink podcast Valgrind was praised for its support of extension by user plugins.

The runners-up were each awarded $1,000 US. Synergy won 20 per cent of the votes for its Linux-based utility for sharing a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems. Vim, which won 17 per cent of the vote, of course hardly needs an introduction. It is the more feature-rich version of the vi (“visual”) text editor available on virtually every system with a unix-like operating system.

Stated Lars Knoll, Trolltech's VP of engineering, “Open source tools have contributed to make the new release of Qt 4.4 more powerful than ever. They make our working lives easier, more efficient and more fun!”

Trolltech Qt 4.4 architecture
(Click to enlarge)

Primed for Takeover

On May 9th, Trolltech announced financial results for the first quarter 2008, reporting earnings of NOK (Norwegian Krone) 55.6 million, or about $11 million US. The revenues represented a year-over-year growth of 15.5 percent, says Trolltech. The earnings were tied to “a positive sales trend” from sales of Qt and Qtopia.

Announced a few days before the earnings release, Qt 4.4 adds the open source Webkit browser engine, Phonon multimedia framework, and Qt Concurrency threads library for multicore. It also adds support for Windows CE and Windows Mobile as build targets.

According to Trolltech, its previously announced acquisition by Nokia is on schedule for completion by the end of the second quarter.

More information on Trolltech's Qt Open Source Development Awards should be available here

In other awards news, the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) that oversees the Google Android phone spec, yesterday announced 46 winners out of 1,788 submissions for the first round of the Android Developer Challenge. Each winner earns $25,000, with the chance to compete for awards of $275,000 and $100,000 in later rounds.

 
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