The news that Canonical is working on a version of Ubuntu for the smartphone drew excitement from industry-watchers around the world. However, if you've actually downloaded the trial version onto your own smartphone, you might have hit a wall: all is not tried and tested.

The good news is that, although the actual Ubuntu phone OS is still in incubation, the QML Toolkit, which is used to build apps for the new system, is available for users who want to experiment with developing for the Ubuntu Phone. This article shows how to get started with the QML Toolkit development environment. The instructions are largely based on the work of Canonical developer David Planella, who is responsible for efforts around the new Ubuntu phone apps and has a website [1] dedicated to encouraging QML development (see the box titled "What is QML").

This article describes how you can use Qt Creator to set up a development environment for QML. I won't delve into the code itself. (You'll find several good online tutorials on QML coding.) The prerequisite is that you use at least Ubuntu 12.10, because the components for "Quantal Quetzal" are required. (Some developers have reported success with installing the Quantal packages on Ubuntu 12.04 [2], but I have not tested this alternative.

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