Slashdot Mirror
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.
Best Slashdot Co
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 :-(
...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
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?
... 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.
Actually Cocoa is based on Objective C, which is an object oriented language based on C, but is significantly different than C++. There's also Objective C++, but I don't know anything about it.
You can write a GPL app and link it to non-free applications. What you cannot do is link to a GLPed library and release it with a non-free (well, non GPL) license. If the library is written under the LGPL you -can- link a non-GPL application to the LGPL library though.
If your above stated take on the license was true it would be impossible to write a GPLed application for any OS which isn't GPLed from the ground up. You can write a GPL app for Win32 or Solaris, right? Last I checked their standard C library wasn't GPL.
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
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.
This is completely untrue. Objective C++ was included in MacOS 10.1. I'm using it as we speak. It allows you to mix Objective-C and C++ code freely in a single source code file. It works just as it should. It takes much longer to compile, though. Something about pre-processed headers, I think.