Qt for Mac

infiniti99 writes: "Looks like Trolltech made a port of their popular cross-platform GUI toolkit, Qt, (not to be confused with the QuickTime movie player) for the Mac. Here is a link to the announcement. There are a couple of screenshots and a demo application is available. Good stuff! Will this further solidify Qt's position as the de facto way to develop cross-platform applications?"

Comments

Re:story title

[DCMonkey]

It may be "just another *nix", but it is not just another X.

fltk

[joss]

http://www.fltk.org has fewer features, doesn't support mac (just unix/win32), has fewer widgets, and yet is still better than QT. I like QT, it's my second favorite toolkit, but fltk (once you get used to it) is more productive than QT. Given a complex UI with about 30 separate user screens, multiple tabbed dialogs, etc etc, you get a working application considerably faster with QT.
You get this with less code, and it runs faster, and you don't have to run through some weird code
conversion program.

It's faster, more elegant, free (LGPL), has better OpenGL support, but isn't well known, and is less feature rich.

Re:fltk

[MSBob]

I've used fltk for three and a half years. It's a widget toolkit for a product I used to be involved in developing. FLTK is nice and simple but its architecture is flawed in a couple of ways. Foremostly its keyboard event handling system makes decent keyboard support problematic (FLTK doesn't have a notion of keyboard focus). Also they use way too many static variables to ever have a chance of making the code thread safe. FLTK is excellent for smaller apps but I wouldn't pick it up again for development of anything substantial. Having said that it's still an impressive effort and Bill Siptzak is a bloody genius.

hmmmm...

[psykelus]

Will this further solidify Qt's position as the de facto way to develop cross-platform applications?

wow, if I'd said that in a post, it'd be modded down as 'troll'

Re:Java -- more real than you think

[scrytch]

> Many people (many slashdotters included) seem to discount the possbility of using Java for real cross-platform desktop apps

Because Java is not cross platform. It is a platform, just happens to be a virtual one. And frankly, it still stinks for GUI apps: it looks different than everything else (even the windows "theme" of swing is just still slightly wrong), it doesn't even support wheel mice. Drag-and-drop interoperability with the rest of the system is nonexistent (doing it at all is highly baroque).

As for speed... compare the responsiveness of the interface of LimeWire compared to BearShare. And do try that "hardware is cheap" argument when you get put in charge of purchasing ... however long you manage to keep that position.

I'd no more write a GUI app in Java than I would in Perl.
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story title

[Phexro]

should be "qt for mac os x". which really isn't all that great - os x is just another *nix.

qt for os 9, a year or two ago, might have been interesting news.

this isn't.
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Don't need Qt's "painter" but ...

[crovira]

I think if it comes with a set of PARTs and APIs that I can use in generating GUI code based on object models, I'll give it a spin.

All real-world systems I've worked on so far (government accounting, enterprise modeling, payroll/HR, loan, banking systems etc,) have weighed in at 700 to 1,200 window layouts and you don't maintain those "by hand" you regenerate the schema and GUI code when the underlying model changes.

Any system you "paint" is too expensive to maintain other than as an in-house product.

Re:Who needs it?

[TWR]

MacOS X sports native GUI support for Java. I've only heard good about it, never tried it though, anyone have experience?

I've got some experience. I have a small (80K) client-side Java app, written in Swing, which tracks my Fantasy Baseball league. It runs well under OS 9's Java (with Swing 1.1.1 installed) and under various Win32 JDKs. Under OS X's Java, one table has its TableHeader smooshed out of existance (and I'm not hard-coding widget heights; I'm using the proper layout managers). Performance is also notably slower. There are several tables with large number of rows (>500) and redraw rates on them are not fast.

Here's the surreal bit. The same machine running the same .jar file within the Classic environment or Mac OS 9.1 is much faster. You can actually have both running at the same time, by using two different launchers.

So Java on Mac OS X has a ways to go still. But having JDK 1.3 present makes up for a heck of a lot of sins.

-jon

Re:bah -- qt the "de facto" standard?

[Arandir]

No, you don't have to pay royalties. Period. Just pay the professional edition. Once. No royalties, no additional payments, no nothing. It's actually freer in some ways than the GPL/QPL version, because you have zero restrictions upon your own code.

Re:QT is the best gui toolkit out there

[dimator]

I wish I had mod points.

The majority of the slashdot community has given nothing but ill-will and flames to all things Qt. It seems everytime there's a positive article about Qt, there's a dozen requisite GTK zealots that start whining: "bla bla bla license bla bla bla GPL bla bla bla I hate C++"

Now, there's complaints like this about how you can't use Qt for shareware. Are you fucking kidding me? Is everyone that desperate to complain about this product? Will trolltech ever catch a break here? I think not. (How's that saying go, about closed minds?)


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Re:Possibly for somethings, not all though.

[dimator]

An 1 year MSDN subscription is cheaper than a Qt developer license, and you get a lot more for your money in terms of tools, documentation, libraries, compilers, etc.

Consider the source! Microsoft has made a habit of bundling software at a lower cost. Do you think MSDN is a better value because it was designed to be so, or because it's got Microsoft's billions behind it (meaning, it's OK if it loses money, whereas Trolltech has to make money on it's only real product). Secondly, I don't remember if MSDN tools run/build on *nix and now the Mac, so maybe you can get back to me on that.

In fact, as far as I am concerned, the only reason Qt is as nice as it is is because of the enormous contributions of the KDE project

What contributions are those? I don't recall any examples of KDE code (which would be GPL) getting back into the early Qt (which were not GPL). This is slashdot, you have to support your claims.

10 years ago, a C++ cross platform GUI library may have been a big deal, these days, they are a dime a dozen.

Please, complete the following, with toolkits that are as featureful and mature as Qt:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

Altogether, I don't think Qt is a good value for commercial projects.

http://www.trolltech.com/references/customers/. It seems AT&T, NASA, Ford, IBM, and Intel, among others, disagree with you.

I also think it was a poor choice for the KDE project

Is there an argument behind this, or just the claim? Can this argument even be defended? Do you know if the requirements of the KDE project could be met by anyone else?

(I'm sorry if the flamethrower was on full-blast, but one thing I can't stand is groundless, unsubstantiated claims by zealots.)


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Importance of and list of x-plat frameworks

[goingware]

You can find a list of application frameworks, many of which are cross-platform and many of which are open source, at the GUI Toolkit, Framework Page.

Their forwarding link at http://www.theoffice.net/guitool seems to be down but the original at Geocities is still up.

Please also read my essay on why it is important to write cross-platform code - with quotes from Judge Jackson on why Microsoft felt it was important enough to put a stop to cross-platform development that it broke the law.

My favorite cross-platform application framework is ZooLib, written by my friend Andy Green and his clients Learning in Motion. It allows you to write a single C++ sourcebase and deliver multithreaded native executables for Mac OS, BeOS, Windows and Linux/XWindows.

Mike

Re:Cross platform?

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Are there any developers out there really developing cross platform products that target Macs? In a similar vein, Mac enthusiasts like to focu on aesthetics, but cross-platform development needs to forego this aspect of useability in favor of LCD functionality.

I'm leading the development of Audacity, a cross-platform audio editor, for Linux, Windows, and MacOS (both 8/9 and X), using wxWindows. MacOS is a very important platform for me - I love Linux, and I've advertised Audacity on a number of Linux sites, but we still get more MacOS downloads than Linux (and far more Windows downloads than either of those). A year ago, when I started this project, Qt wasn't an option. I think I'd still choose wxWindows, but Qt is definitely looking better.

I'd also disagree with the statement that cross-platform apps have to target the LCD. In Audacity, all of the audio I/O code is written natively for each platform and supports some special features on each one. wxWindows fills in a lot of features that are missing on one or more platforms, for example providing a tree control and file dialog on Linux, but allowing you to use the native ones on Windows. Also, the Linux version of Audacity supports a lot of command-line options that just aren't available for Windows and MacOS, but the MacOS version lets you drag and drop files onto the application, for example.

Also, there are plenty of other cross-platform apps that target MacOS, both 9 and X. How about Mozilla?

WxWindows is the de facto cross platform Standard.

[Xiphoid Process]

Sorry, but clearly wxWindows is the clear choice for developing cross platform applications. Part of why wxWindows is so nice is because it uses the native widgets of the platform it runs on. Therefore its look and feel is flawless next to other platform dependant apps. This is the toolkit that AbiSource uses to develope AbiWord.

Just so i'm not completely off topic, I think its great that both of the leading toolkits (Qt, gtk) for unix are becoming more and more cross platform. It can only help to bring native apps to linux.

Re:You Linux-loving morons, here's some reality

[OCatenac]

Keep thinking that. Even Microsoft is starting to wake up to the reality that Windows on a desktop PC is becoming less and less important. Why do you think they brought out C# (aka Project Cool aka Java Killer) and they've started this whole .NET initiative? They're trying to find some way to extend their monopoly to the web.

Furthermore Microsoft is starting to realize that people aren't upgrading at the furious rate they used to. This is why Microsoft is seriously considering trying to shaft all those folks who buy their OS by forcing them to pay a monthly fee in order to use it. Personally, I'll be glad when this happens because it will make a free OS that much more appealing to a lot of people. Having to pay a Microsoft tax won't go over well.

Onorio Catenacci

--
"And that's the world in a nutshell -- an appropriate receptacle."

Nitpick

[infiniti99]

The Qt license is a one-time fee per-developer (not per-machine). It only is a yearly fee if you want support.

Java -- more real than you think

[HaiLHaiL]

Many people (many slashdotters included) seem to discount the possbility of using Java for real cross-platform desktop apps... I wouldn't be so quick to do so, however. Look at apps like LimeWire, Sun's Forte Java IDE, and the number of sourceforge projects done in Java (though admittedly many of these aren't desktop apps). Hardware is cheap right now, eliminating Java's biggest drawback as a language (speed). Many people are now learning programming with Java (like I did), and it has many appeals as a language, cross-platform ability being only one of them. Java's a desktop contender, and will only grow as such.

Now if only Sun would actually open Java's source...

QT is the best gui toolkit out there

[MSBob]

And Slashdot is a lame forum. Actually it's slashdot's readership that's lame (99% of it anyway).

Qt is unparalleled if you're looking for developing cross platform applications. The class hierarchy is sensibly laid out, the widget are feature complete out of the box and simple to extend if you have to, it sports full internationalization including rtl based languages under all platforms, it is almost as fast as native toolkits, allows for a very good emulation of look and feel of various platforms, uses the signal slot mechanism, offers full proper keyboard focus handling, offers a choice of gui builders, offers clean unambigious API. QT is so astonishingly good it makes all other cross platform toolkits look bleak. I challenge all the morons here to name ONE toolkit that has all the features of QT. The rule is you're only allowed to mention existing features. Not 'planned features' or 'anticipated features' cuz there's a lot of them in GTK. But it ain't there yet.

Those who had to write anything bigger than a single dialog based utility come to appreciate its power. But there are not a lot of them hanging out on slashdot.

Possibly for somethings, not all though.

[TheAwfulTruth]

I've had to pass on qt for cross platform development because they steadfastly refuse to believe in the concept of shareware. You are allowed by the qt lisence to either give your software away for free or sell it (For any amount from 1 dollar to a million) by paying them a tremendously high yearly commercial fee. Their own page discounts the shareware market as too small to be bothered with. I think a quick look at winfiles or tucows will prove them wrong. Low cost software is a huge market, qt refuses to be a part of it. Personally I'm hoping they come around, it used to not even be available for free software. wxWindows is pretty good for windows/linux ports, but it's Mac port is way lagging. So in short. Free software? Yes, Large expensive packages? Yes. Cheap shareware type software? Not yet.