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Qt 4 Beta 1 Available for Download
scc writes "Get it here. Trolltech's press release gives the details, including the projected release date: late first quarter 2005. Qt is the cross-platform GUI framework at the heart of KDE. At the same time, Trolltech released under the GPL Qtopia 2.1, an implementation of their GUI framework for Linux-based PDAs."
I think Qt is great, I use it for most of my projects, the only annoying thing is that the Windows version isn't free. There are free Linux and Mac versions released under the GPL, but no Windows version. \
The whole point of Qt is to make it easier to have software run on multiple OS's, but I can't test any of my stuff on Windows. Oh well, still kick ass software.
I'm especially happy about Arthur and the new Qt Designer, we will finally have an accelerated OpenGL? desxtop and all will be smooth due to double buffering.
My only gripe is that the performance is still not great, but that should be expected with debugging code and all.
Trolltech is doing great work.
Qt designer and assistent apparently can be embedded into kdeveloper, visual studio etc.
Other improvements include
a new paint engine
a new text rendering engine
new containers (which are lighter than the STL ones)
better support for multithreading
a new docking architecture
and last but not least better performance and smaller memory footprint.
Please login to access my lawn
So basically your saying that they shouldn't be allowed to make money off Qt, but you should be allowed to make money off your software that uses it? Nice.
Qt has done more for C++ than any other single project. Kudos to the Trolls.
This is very true. Qt makes C++ programming fun by avoiding the STL completely. And by God, how I hate the STL!
It costs a lot of money to develop commercial software with Qt (and by extension KDE) because they use the full GPL license (as opposed to something more reasonable like the LGPL) for the Qt library to extort money from developers. Trolltech effectively control any possible commercial software market for KDE (or anything that uses Qt).
So what if you have to buy a licence for commercial development? If you're out to make money on your software then you deserve to pay. Show me another cross-platform development suite as flexable and powerful as Qt that's free. Go on, I'll wait right here till you get back.
But naturally, Trolltech are benign lovable types, aren't they? Sure they are... except they are part-owned by SCO and Canopy -- the Linux IP grab and sue specialists. Avoid Qt. It's poisonous to free software.
If you're going to troll, at least take the time to write something with fewer holes in it. Trolltech is partially owned by Canopy but not SCO. Big deal. If you were to discover that the Unibomber owned 5% of Nabisco, would you really avoid eating thier crackers? Qt ( and Trolltech ) are great friends to FOSS.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
I thought that was QuickTime for a second there. Then I realised that Quicktime is at 6.5.
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
Trolltech said that the reason why there's no GPL version of Qt/win32 is because Windows is not a free platform. On the other hand, they do have GPL versions for closed source unices, like HPUX. What's the deal with that?!
Anyways, Qt 4 is going to be a magnitude slower than Qt 3. Don't expect your old pentium to run KDE 4 with decent speed.
Oh, and the new designer is horrible. I want MDI back!
Newbies who might not read the heading properly or actually go to the link itself http://www.trolltech.com/products/index.html might think /. was in a timewarp, circa 1997, releasing the beta for Quicktime 4!!!!
aahhh back in the days of Macromedia Director 4...just a web application developer and instructor in Toronto, ON Canada
This would not be connected to the success of the Opie Project, would it?
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
Show me another cross-platform development suite as flexable and powerful as Qt that's free.
Look no further!
Granted, it's got its own set of quirks and whatnot, but I love it.
Having programmed in both Qt/C++ and Java/Swing for several years I can say that Qt kicks Swing's butt for ease of programming, speed and simply a better looking interface. The subset of C++ that Qt employs can be quickly mastered by any programmer - professional or novice. KDE is proof of that. When you are thinking about a cross-platform GUI think twice before going with Swing. It may be free - but you get exactly what you pay for.
Hear, fucking, hear!
Although to be fair, I haven't touched it since before the name change. But, on the other hand, I was using since around v. 1.67.
On the other, other hand, I really do like the slot model in qt.
The article at KDE.news
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
Show me another cross-platform development suite as flexable and powerful as Qt that's free.
WxWidgets.
Java.
GTK.
C#.
Sorry, SCO owns a chunk of Trolltech ...
l
http://www.trolltech.com/newsroom/investors.htm
And Canopy (who owns SCO) has a seat on the board of Directors currently occupied by Ralph Yarro (Darl Macbride's boss).
Bzzt, thank you for trying. WxWidgets is GTK underneath, neither are up to the standard of Qt. Java and c# are languages.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
No he said flexible and powerful, neither can be applied to WxWidgets. Quirks does not cover it.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
Is this really true ?!? I will eat those blood soaked terrorist crackers no more !
Don't be ridiculous.
The elegance of Qt far surpasses that of WxWindows, and Qt offers many more powerful classes than WxWindows does (containers, database connection, etc.).
GTK+ may be a contender, but is there a native Mac OS X version? Additionally, last I checked, which was admittedly awhile back, the documentation was terrible and the support for the Windows port was sub-par. Additionally, since much of today's programming is OO, Qt is probably a more sensible choice for many programmers.
C# may offer some powerful functionality, but from my understanding, there is no cross-platform GUI toolkit. Windows Forms for windows, GTK# for *nix, etc...
Java, IMO, is the only one that matches (and surpasses) Qt, from that list. Personally, I like both Java and Qt, and pick whichever is more appropriate for the project I'm working on.
Bzzt. Gtkmm follows STL style conventions so will be infinitly more familiar to C++ programmers than QT. A C++ developer, familiar with neither QT nor GTK will be more productive with Gtkmm than QT because of this.
Small capitalized "open source"? You get the source when you buy it. About "Open Source", only the Window low-level parts are not available under GPL.
*pssst* Don't feed the trolls!
Your inability to figure out how to approriately use the framework does not make wxWidgets non-powerful. But hey, feel free to complain anyway.
Any specific problems, or are you just a QT fanboy who wants to make noise?
QT is released under the GPL on Linux and OS X. People claim it isn't free because use to it was ONLY under the QPL, but now you can use it under either license for non-commercial use. If you want to make money off of it do the honest thing and pay them for using their product, and you will be able to license it under any license you wish.
The Open Source edition is dual licensed, yes: QPL and GPL. The commercial edition has only one license.
He said "port' which is what I've been wondering about. If Qt's as modular as I think it is, what's stopping someone from adding the code to hook into the GDI layer on Windows? For me, it's lack of interest as I don't need Qt under Windows for any of my GPL licensed projects (Fltk does well enough for what I'm needing...) and my preferred platform is Linux. I'm just wondering why there's not someone out there with the needs or desire to do this act.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
No he said flexible and powerful, neither can be applied to WxWidgets.
Of course you'd say that, being a KDE Developer and all. Great way to advertise, by spreading FUD about the competition.
I guess the Microsoft approach to advertising is spreading to the KDE team now. Nice.
In the case of the aforementioned one on here, yes, don't feed them. In the case of Troll Tech, the people who came up with Qt, one should find a way to feed these folks wherever possible (incl. buying copies of the commercial product when feasible...).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Until its BSD licensed its not truely free.. you are still heavly restricted on its use..
Im not trying to start a bsd/gpl flame war here.. just my personal feeling. I also dont have a problem with them being 100% commercial either.. its their toolkit.. their choice..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
more powerful classes than WxWindows does (containers, database connection, etc.)
Are you using wxWidgets 1.0 or something? wxWidgets has had container and database classes for some time now.
You may want to look through the manual sometime. Scroll down.
Pay no attention to leonscape . He's probably still bitter that his website got infected by the Santy worm. Classy.
I've been using GTK for a while and gotten to like it. I'd like to know what does QT have to offer that GTK doesn't.
Cheers,
Adolfo
Don't forget that it costs a lot of money to develop Qt with this quality.
usable does not mean powerful. Try a dictionary if you have vocabulary issues.
Then do a feature comparison between qt and wxwidgets. I'm not dissing wxwidgets, it's a good toolkit anyway - qt simply does more, or the same thing a lot easier.
Trolltech is a Canopy supported company, same as SCO. Tell them to put their stuff where the sun don't shine.
"If you were to discover that the Unibomber owned 5% of Nabisco" ....
mmmm Nabisco hackers
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
So presumably you think glibc should be GPLed and the FSF should charge for commercial software to use it?
I hear QT is good stuff. This isn't a slam on QT in particular.
However, I'm still waiting for the day when mainstream GUI libraries catch up to where BeOS was ten years ago, and put drawing in a separate thread from everything else.
There is absolutely no reason why GUI applications need to become sluggish when they are doing something computationally intensive. There's no reason that an application should stop posting redraws every time it makes a blocking call (like, for example, doing file i/o).
My eyes were opened to this shortcoming of "modern" GUI libraries by an entry in Bram's diary a while ago.
usable does not mean powerful. Try a dictionary if you have vocabulary issues.
If you can't use something properly, how can you fully exploit the power of it? Clearly you didn't give it much thought, or you'd see the connection. Do you put such narrow-mindedness into your programming too? Scary.
But thanks for the failed attempt to look like you know what you're talking about.
If movie trailers were largely in divx instead of QT, QT would be worthless!
I seriously doubt anyone released a commercial application based on the Windows Qt free edition, and how can you possibly know how many people used in in-house? And can Trolltech even restrict that? I think that argument is very much in question.
Let's face it trolltech loves to crow about being a free software company, supporters of free software, yet when it comes time to "put up or shut up" they whine and pout like britney spears...yet they happily use free software to further their cause and pay the people who wrote it NOTHING.
Youe post was mildly interesting, but ignores what I consider to be a decent reason for not releasing a free Qt/Win...Windows is not free.
My gut feeling is they should pull their Mac version and license it for less than the windows version.
And keep things free for the free O/S. This would be a more logical argument from my perspective.
Finally, I think Qt is doomed. Within a matter of a couple more years Eclipse and the SDL will be rock solid and native on a number of platforms...including Windows, Mac and Linux. So that will be the end of Qt and TrollTech. Truly free software, from people who do not whine and cry, will win the day.
GTK IDE. If I read it right, there is you kdevelop 'alternative' for GTK projects. Though I believe you could do the same thing with kdevelop, so I don't know why you'd need something else, unless you wern't running KDE.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
The Qt framework definitely proves that C++ is head and shoulders above Java. All that C++ needs now is garbage collection, and we can forget about Java!
I suggest Qt to be names the official standard C++ library, and the governments around the world to pay Trolltech with a large annual amount of money so as that Trolltech can work for the next version. It's a pity that such good software is not the C++ standard!
Yes, and furthermore, the employees of TrollTech who developed Qt, one of the nicest GUI toolkits in existence, should quit their jobs, give away all of their belongings, don simple clothing made of scratchy wool, and wander about the landscape begging for scraps of food and handing out handwritten copies of the GPL.
That's D. With garbage collection, interfaces, etc. 'D' looks very promising. Without the overhead of JIT compiled languages, I think it's worth looking at seriously.
(Don't get me wrong here, I love Java / C / C++ and all others, but C/C++ has some deficiencies that can not be over looked -- Just remember -- The right tools for the right job.)
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/
Glibc doesn't give free software an advantage since there are plenty of equivalently functional libraries around. With Qt that's not the case.
I am trolling
Bzzt. Academics may say that, anyone who's actually tried to program with them knows different.
I am trolling
WxWidgets is getting there, but it's not yet as powerful as Qt. I can still write a similar program ~1.2x as fast with Qt. That may just be me, but I feel I've made an equivalent effort to learn both.
I am trolling
KDE does not allow Qt into KDE either. It just uses Qt, because at the time (and arguably now) qt was the only library suitable for making a user-friendly desktop environment. It's not about money-grabbing, it's about pragmatism.
I am trolling
QT is a cutie! ...
get it? "kiu - tee"! get it??
thank you, thank you..
Show me the money
I, for one, refuse to use anything that requires QT,
You're the fanboy. Like the grandparent, I've tried wxwidgets, nice attempt. Sadly the implementation is poorly documented, inconsistent across different platforms and lacking features in its core widgets. No comparison to Qt, not suitable for commercial applications, sorry "fanboy".
You almost seem to be implying that somebody has hired you to program? "Scary".
When you learn to consider the benefit of a well-tested and feature-complete toolkit in a rational manner, please let us know.
So what's wrong with being a KDE developer? Surely that gives the poster a reasonable idea of what constitutes a flexible and powerful C++ toolkit?
What productive software have you contributed to recently? None? Okay, Merry Christmas lame hypocrite.
As nice as a C# library containing all of Qt's features would be, Qt# is poorly maintained and has little supporting code. Hardly suitable for any application of any significance, sorry.
Quick, put on your tin-foil hat, Trolltech might be trying to raid your house to steal your Christmas presents!
Of course all those heathens producing "commercial software" will burn in hell, so it doesn't matter, right? Jees, wait til you get a real job and a family.
Merry Christmas, little Troll!
Doesn't give free software an advantage?
Specious reasoning at it's best. If I want to watch something chase its tail, I'll just watch my dog, thanks. Try harder.
KDE does not allow Qt into KDE either.
Qt is part of the KDE platform. You are simply playing with words -- like most people who try to defend Trolltech's licensing. As for what "Qt was"... we are talking about what "KDE does now". They won't allow any other GPLed libraries into their platform. Fact.
just try saying "D compiler" and you know it will fall appart :p
D looks nice...
but will people use it?
Uh no, he is perfectly correct. Free software works perfectly well when it is compiled and linked against non-Free C libraries. Free software gains no advantage from being able to use Glibc over any other C library (E.g. the BSD libc, uClibc, Newlib etc.)
If you had said Readline instead of Glibc you might have had a point that Free software can gain an advantage, but a) You didn't say Readline b) That wasn't your original point anyway. So we can only conclude that you're an idiot.
>All that C++ needs now is garbage collection, and we can forget about Java!
The thing that is really important is called reflection. Without it tools like Hibernate, Struts, Tapestry, Spring, Hivemind, probably EJB and many more wouldn't be possible. Garbage Collection is just a nice touch.
fork a version of qt that was free for use in windows?Just curious
Qt provides full reflection.
I don't understand why I was modded as 'troll'. I made a sincere comment of how Qt is so good that it should be made a standard. Anybody have any ideas???
And dont forget that Trolltech allows developers to effortlessly port Qt app's from *nix mac for free (but NOT to windows). And of course it also allows those who have purchased a windows license to port to Mac/aqua & nix for free.
It should be noted that you cannot port from unix & mac to windows without purchasing a pricey license for the windows library. This is bad for free software, but good for linux and mac. It forces free software written for mac/linux to *stay* mac/linux (making those platforms more appealing).
As an example, for the hell of it, I ported 100k+ lines of my companies software from UNIX to MacOSX. It took about 30 minutes. The UI looked amazing in Aqua, compared to the UNIX and windows versions. Naturally the platform-specific C backend exploded when executed in OSX and rendered the software unsuable, but it still looked good. Not bad for a half hour!
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
No, there's a very important distinction. The KDE people want KDE itself to remain LGPL - something which your (presuming you are grandparent) previous post would suggest you support. That's the reason they don't allow GPL libraries into KDE, and also why they're careful to keep KDE and Qt distinct. The idea is that propriety projects can still use KDE - they'll just have to buy a license for Qt.
I am trolling
If you had said Readline instead of Glibc you might have had a point that Free software can gain an advantage, but a) You didn't say Readline b) That wasn't your original point anyway. So we can only conclude that you're an idiot.
Duh... arguments about Qt offering something that no other toolkit does are entirely specious. It doesn't -- and furthermore it doesn't justify the use of the GPL *and* selling commercial licenses. The FSF can get away with making an argument about furthering free software with GPL libraries... Trolltech fucking can't.
As I said, if I want to watch an dopey creature chase its tail, I'll watch my dog. I don't need to come to slashdot and watch clueless sheep like you.
No-one who has ever actually tried to port an app between Unix/Mac/Windows with Qt would describe it as effortless.
Even Java can be hard work between those platforms. Qt solves a few problems (mostly the low-hanging fruit), but it introduces its own set of troubles.
I don't eat Nabisco crackers because they are cruel to elves.
There's a wxWidgets wrapper for the CIL called wxNet, and there's work on a QT wrapper as well from the KDE people using that smoke stuff they've been working on IIRC, so they both are (or will soon be) accessable to C# and other CIL-based languages.
;)
GTK's only a UNIX toolkit. On window's it's painfully slow, and on Mac OS X it requires a X Server (and thus, IMHO, is not really available for Mac OS X). Of course, that said, thanks to portable.NET you can use System.WindowForms on UNIX-like OS, Windows and Mac OS. Obligatory link to their screenshots from all those platforms, but I believe that the Mac OS X support requires a X server as well.. =\
No, I don't have anything useful to add to the conversation, why do you ask?
Academics are far from the only ones who hold this view.
No, there's a very important distinction.
Again, you are playing games with words and attempting to confuse the issue. The same thing happens whenver this comes up with KDE/Qt supporters. They try to bury the issue in bullshit and false distinctions. There is no distriction... not for a developer. The GPL spreads to any app using KDE stuff, and Qt is part of the KDE platform. Fact. Twisted logic about Qt being "separate" is just smoke and mirrors.
The KDE people want KDE itself to remain LGPL - something which your (presuming you are grandparent) previous post would suggest you support. That's the reason they don't allow GPL libraries into KDE, and also why they're careful to keep KDE and Qt distinct. The idea is that propriety projects can still use KDE - they'll just have to buy a license for Qt.
Of course the KDE people want their libraries to remain LGPL -- because it would otherwise not function as a loss leader for TrollTech, and many of the core developers for KDE are Trolltech employees. The point is that anyone making claims about "quid pro quo" or Qt being somehow "more free" (because it encourages more GPL software) than the LGPLed GTK (for example) are engaging in pure hypocrisy, nonsense and Orwellian double-think.
but you can't browse the web in Boost, nor can you compose an email in Boost, nor can you create a spreadsheet in Boost. But this is all possible with Qt and KDE. Boost is not a reason to choose a development language. It is nice set of utilities to assist in the development of something that you already started writing for other reasons.
Blah blah blah... C++ is so ugly ... blah blah blah ... _MY_LANGUAGE_ is better ... blah blah blah ... if this happened and that happened then _MY_LANGUAGE_ would have kicked ass ... blah blah blah.
Yawn.
Gee, I guess the millions of lines of C++ code in the thousands of KDE apps were all written by morons that could not see the elegance of your alternative. C++ programmers are a pragmatic bunch - they use what works today instead of what promises to work tomorrow. And you can't argue with the results.
It's called a "joke". Maybe you've heard of them before?
Why bother.
The book "C++ GUI programming with QT3" comes with a non commercial windows edition and Borland C++ 5 (free) or Borland C++ 6 trial edition. Also has the mac os x and *nix versions. You could also use cygwin and the QT ports for it. Well worth the price for the book....
Danger Will Robinson! You are now entering a condescending Unix user zone!
Pay who? That's the critical point. I don't necessarily mind people having to pay to write commercial software, it's just that I have a problem with who the money goes towards. If an application is written for KDE then Trolltech gets the money for it - the KDE team gets nothing.
I'm uncomfortable with trolltech being the gateway for all commercial software on Linux. That's a powerful position, and I'll bet they know it.
sheesh.