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Qt/Mac KDE Call for Help

Posted by pudge on from the mmm-pie dept.

aqsalter writes "Benjamin Reed of Fink fame is calling for help porting KDE to Mac using Qt/Mac. Interested parties should swarm the KDE-Darwin mailing list. KWrite for Mac here we come!"

5 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Re:But....why? by gdarklighter · · Score: 5, Informative

    If I understand correctly, the effort is not to port the GUI itself, but applications that use the kdelibs and arts libraries (i.e. koffice, konqueror, etc).

  2. Re:But....why? by Matthias+Wiesmann · · Score: 4, Informative
    Didn't Apple do much of the work already, when they ported the Konquerer renderer into Safari?
    Not really, what they did for Safari was basically a small library that emulates the few QT controls used in the Konqueror rendering framework - I think this library is called Quack.

    Porting KDE is another beast altogether, we are not talking about a few controls and widgets. We are talking about application design frameworks. This means:

    • Handle inter-application data transfers: clipboard, drag-drop, services. Both framework use different internal formats (rich text, images, sounds, urls) so you have to convert things on the fly.
    • Link KDE application on OS X services for printing, file-management, filename mapping, icons, etc...
    • Link KDE application settings like internationalisation, appearances, user preferences to the OS X system.
    • Handle application level events and scripting - i.e make it possible for KDE application to understand apple-events like quit, open, print, but also OSAX scripting.
    All those things require a tremendous amount of work.
  3. Re:But....why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    No. There's no KDE library code in KHTML. There was some QT code, unfortunately, but Apple's programmers wrote a little shim library that presents an identical interface to QT's foundation classes (strings and whatnot) to get around that. This library is now part of KHTML. So the QT dependencies are slowly being removed. That's a good thing.

  4. Re:But....why? by iMacGuy · · Score: 3, Informative

    The library is actually called "KWQ", and it's a bridge between things like QString and the Cocoa stuff that does the same thing. WebKit handles the UI, I think.

    At the beginning, I think the idea is just to get the apps running on QT/Mac effectively.
    (KDE already links into OSX's printing, since that uses the open-source CUPS, although it still uses its own GUI.)

    --
    Why won't slashdot let me change my terrible username :(
  5. Re:But....why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Use Eudora. It's better.