What to Expect From Qt 4

An anonymous reader writes "A presentation given by Matthias Ettrich (director of Qt development, author of LyX, and founder of the KDE project), was given to the annual KDE Developer's Conference in Nove Hardy, Czech Republic. In this presentation, Matthias details what's going to be new in Qt 4.0, which will be used as a base for the next version of KDE after 3.2. Apparently, Qt 4.0 will not only include faster startup times and lighter memory usage, but will have sweeping architectural changes, including a splitting of Qt's GUI classes and non-GUI classes."

Comments

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Coventry]

Remember, QT is a library, and trolltech makes their money from it. I'm pretty sure that all that will be needed for most apps using current QT is a recompile with the new tools (QT has a tool used as part of the Make process). To use the new features might require changes to code, but thats a different story - you're already changing your code to add new features.

GTK - nyed!

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

Most of the applicatons you presented as GTK apps do not use GTK widgets:

Openoffice/Staroffice does not use GTK at all (in fact the first SO port to Linux was done by Matthias Kalle Dallheimer, a KDE founder...)

Mplayer has an optional GTK gui, which is hardly used by anyone. It also has at least two KDE guis. Not a very good GTK app.

XMMS has it's own GUI, GTK is basically used for the file dialog, which is arguably not the most impressive part of GTK.

Mozilla/Netscape uses XUL, it's own toolkit, again no GTK widgets are used, just some basic drawing routines.

This leaves GIMP (functional, but ugly) and GAIM (never used it, AOL is not my thing) for GTK.

Re:Why turn KDE into Gnome?

[IamTheRealMike]

I guess you'll be pleased to hear that GNOME 2 remains fully backwards compatible throughout the 2.x cycle - in the history of the project, it's broken compatability in a major way only once, compared to KDEs 2 times (though 2->3 was extremely trivial for 99% of apps).

Mono is entirely irrelevant - it's not related to the GNOME project other than having Miguel/Ximian involved, and you are certainly not forced to use it to write GNOME apps.

Basically, I think you're misinformed - if you write an app for GTK2/GNOME2, it will continue to work for quite a long time, until the next major revision (which is going to be needed simply in order to properly sync KDE and GNOME around standards eventually anyway). So, I don't know what you're complaining about really.....

Re:Trolltech and Canopy/SCO

[be-fan]

Dipshit.

A 5.7% stake hardly makes TT a "Canopy puppet."

Hint: Look at Canopy's website. Note that TT is listed under "Portfolio Companies." Understand that this in no way means that they are controlled by Canopy group. Hell, Microsoft owned about as much of Apple after their $150 million investment. Did that make Apple a Microsoft puppet?