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Qt Released For OS X
AxsDeny writes: "It looks like Macslash is also reporting this, but Trolltech is now offering Qt for OS X. Long live cross platform development." Doesn't look like there's a Free version, but there is a non-commerical license called the "Qt Academic License," which "Allows schools and universities to acquire and use Qt for free in relevant courses."
To a good article at Kuro5hin.
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I've been using the Win32 Qt 3.0 for a while, and I have to say that I've vastly enjoyed it. Trolltech earns my vote for one of the best companies I've worked with so far.
:P
Don't flame them too much for charging money for stuff- everyone has to earn a living somehow
EOM
MacOS X really is the best of all worlds. You have the stability reliability and scalability of Unix/Mach with the familiar ease-of-use of the mac. Too bad the clunky old PC still seems to rule the roost with the general public :-(
I've always been impressed with cross-platform initiatives. Especially the ECAs big project to get Eggplant code on every system available. Including embedded devices!
Eggplants!
Ace
...No not about the mystery press conference tomorrow where Steve Jobs will turn on the Reality Distortion Field and shock us with his "pssst, It's not a Mac" new product. No, I am talking about the native port of Tcl/Tk applications on Mac OS X!!!
You know I am going to end up with whatever Steve Jobs shows off tomorrow. I already have a closet full of Netwons, QuickTake Digital Cameras, Power CDs and exploding PowerBook 5300 batteries for home defense.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I just have to point out that Qt really is the most excellent toolkit I've ever used, for any platform (and the fact that it runs on all major platforms is a huge bonus). It's sanely designed and it really is a pleasure to use. I'm not a big fan of C++, generally preferring C for most stuff, but Qt makes using C++ more than worth it.
:)
I just can't comprehend why anybody uses GTK these days
Fully carbonized! That means (?) you can develop a program in a mixed Linux/OS X environment, and get Aqua look and feel in OS X. I think it is time to learn Qt ;)
The article kind of glazed over the technical details here... but is this a port of Qt that just wraps around the native MacOSX widgets or does it re-implement everything with an aqua-ish look and feel? Didn't Apple object to the Mozilla port which had an aqua-like but not true Aqua interface?
While this is good for porting, unless it's ported as a true "localized toolkit" then it's not of much use. Take for example, GTK+ which works under MacOS X. Without an X server running to display everything on, it won't do much good.
What would really be icing on the cake is a translator of sorts, or porting the toolkit directly to MacOS X so that the same functions, etc. would transparently call MacOS X/Quartz functions.
Remember, Quartz/Aqua isn't X.
Remember, Carbon is for porting old OS 9 apps easily to OS X. It is based on C. Cocoa is the "real deal" for OS X, and is based on C++. It just seems more logical that they would port QT to Cocoa, not Carbon.
... I just wish they didn't charge so _much_. Never having been a free software zealot, I don't mind paying for software that's truly useful, as this certainly is. But as a starving student, I just can't pay the kind of prices they're charging. I didn't see anything in their academic license section about prices available to individual students. The excellent student prices available on Metrowerks products are one of the main reasons I've stuck with CodeWarrior as my primary dev environment for so long, even though I haven't been wild about their more recent releases in a number of other ways.
...
It would be great if TrollTech learned this lesson. Remember, today's poor CS students are tomorrow's pro developers
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
This is great because it means a whole load of great apps can now be ported to run native on Macs.
Technically yes, but legally no. Many common apps that use Qt are under the GNU GPL and may not be linked with non-free libraries nor compiled with non-free headers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yeah, my bad... It is Objective C, not C++
The wxWindows folks also have a Macintosh port that I believe also uses CARBON. From what I understand they are doing a great job. For python people, wxPython is just fantastic.
When I looked into their licensing in general (for possible work use) I noticed that if any project was ever touched by any free version of Qt, it could never be later realeased commercially by purchasing a Qt license at a later date.
This one limitation might be a severe one for those who care about complying with licenses. Read the whole thing carefully before proceding. And get your lawyer to check things for you.
You know when you have to dig this deep into the site to find the pricing information, it's going to hurt when you get there.
http://www.trolltech.com/purchase/qtpricing.html
US$1550 for one professional license, US$1950 for one enterprise license?
I believe all the people that say QT3 is the bees' knees, but yikes. Guess I won't be experiencing that coolness for myself.
(Wistfully remembering the days when Think C was $99, and the early CodeWarriors were around $199)
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I've got a biggish Win32 program and wonder about moving it to Qt. How big an effort?
:)
Qt is quite a bit different from MFC, and I think porting would be more effort than simply rewriting it in Qt.
Any performance hits / gotchas?
Not really... don't pay any attention to the AC trolls who bitch and moan about moc (Qt's preprocessor)... it lets you do some really neat stuff that you simply can't do with normal callbacks. As for performance, I haven't noticed any speed hits using Qt as opposed to MFC.
Any features that we'll lose?
Nope. Anything that Qt doesn't support is EXTREMELY easy to add yourself... Qt is designed in such a way that subclassing a widget to add new features is a breeze, so you can make any widget do anything you want.
Qt also provides tons of utility classes, which make it simple to do stuff like asynchronous socket/file i/o and so on. It rocks.
Want to stop being dependent on MS before they collapse!
Heheh. Good plan
This is a complete shameless plug for my application, but it is also a great example of how good of a crossplatform library Qt is.
Check out JabberCentral and you will see my client, "Psi", has both a Windows and Linux version. The programs are identical (all features are the same). By use of QSettings, application settings are stored in the registry on Windows and in a "dot" file on *nix. And the look&feel matches the OS.
The best part? All it took was a simple recompile. One source tree sure makes life easy.
-Justin
Dumbass. How about YOU get a clue?
Reminds me of "Hey, the first one is on me, buddy." Seriously, working in the commercial world, these academic licenses are really tiring: companies get students hooked on some piece of software in the hope that they will then enter the workforce and demand that their employers buy their overpriced commercial software, even when good open source alternatives are available. I hope more and more employers will refuse to fall into this trap: someone who has experience with a costly commercial package where a free alternative is available simply lacks the relevant experience for the job and needs to be retrained.
Matlab is a huge offender in the engineering world (almost free for students, thousands of dollars in the real world). Qt doesn't seem much different.
My message to universities (as well as open source developers): if you want a cross-platform C++ toolkit, use wxWindows or FLTK; they are good enough. And if you think it needs improvements, make those improvements student projects and contribute them.
I think it's fine for Trolltech to straddle the fence:
Simple, right? Wrong. Add operating systems to the equation. Now it's:
Trolltech could make everyone's lives easier if they'd just forget about the operating system. Would I like to see Windows go Open Source? Sure. Would I like to see Apple open more of OS X than Darwin? Certainly. Is it going to happen? Not bloody likely. Are Trolltech's licensing terms going to change anything? Not bloody likely.
I just feel like Trolltech is robbing Peter to pay Paul. They're trying very hard to encourage adoption of Open Source operating systems. Unfortunately, their choice of licensing terms actively discourages cross-platform Open Source applications.
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I ran the volano benchmark on my G4 466 and it ran 20% faster than the IBM JDK running on my Dual CPU PIII 800.
I have found java on OSX to be outstanding. I am a java programmer and use it for dev all day, though we deploy to linux boxes.
We might see that happening in the near future now that Qt is available for Mac.
Qt has always worked between Windows/Unix, but big application companies (like say, Adobe) care more about Windows/Mac. AFAIK, Photoshop has two codebases, one for Windows and one for Mac. With Qt 3.0 they could reduce it to just one. Even though their original intention might be to just have Windows/Mac versions, this would place them "one compile away" from having a Linux version. They may or may not go the Linux route at first, but the option would be obviously there.
Who knows, maybe this will actually happen.
However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include ... the operating system"
I have written more about this operating system loophole in the GNU GPL. Some software publishers might claim, and some courts would believe, that Qt qualifies as an "operating system" under which other applications can run. It certainly is a "platform."
Will I retire or break 10K?