Trolltech Releases Qt 4.0

lypanov writes "Trolltech has released Qt 4.0 both under commercial and GPL licenses for X11, Mac OS X and MS Windows. It is the first time that a MS Windows GPL edition is available. To celebrate the release Trolltech employees have created a song and a music video (Bittorrent download, Ogg Theora version). Read the Qt 4 Overview and the online Qt Reference Documentation for more information. You can download Qt from ftp.trolltech.com or from one of its mirrors. Work on KDE 4 has already started with making a development branch of KDE compile and run with Qt 4."

Comments

KDE4 for Windows?

[swimin]

Will the KDE library be available for windows now?

QT is a cutie

[Dancin_Santa]

I've worked with my fair share of windowing APIs and QT's OO approach to the problem is very well done. On the one extreme we have the heavy MFC which has grown out of control into a mammoth mess. wxwindows, pretty much a clone of MFC, shares the same issues as MFC. WTL seems hopeful, if only anyone was using it and it had any sort of support.

The Win32 and Gnome APIs are written in C, so though they are fast, they doesn't get any of the programming benefits of Object Orientation.

Thought it has a funny macro kludges in certain places, the QT API is absolutely a joy to work with.

Nice icons, too!

[BandwidthHog]

The guy who did most of the icons for the new Qt Tools is one of us. He's a pretty cool dude, once you get past the ego and the constant attempts at world domination.

Wow, lypanov, nice article

[Mitchell Mebane]

I mean, you must've gone to an awful lot of work to copy that blurb verbatim from the Dot.
</sarcasm>

Re:QT: Good but Expensive

[Jeremi]

Developers (not all, just many) are too stuck up if they cannot fathom paying $5000 for a tool which will take care of just about every tedious problem with their GUI program.

I wouldn't use the rather inflammatory phrase "stuck up", but it basically comes down to a business decision: is it less expensive to pay TrollTech a multi-thousand dollar fee, or to get the necessary functions implemented without using Qt? For my company, the Qt was by far the cheaper, better option. Our Qt license paid for itself in the first year. We now have an app that runs well on every major platform, that was straightforward to write and is easy to maintain. Using a cheaper, less well-designed GUI toolkit would probably have doubled our development time, and coding our own portable GUI toolkit from scratch would have made things ten times harder. (of course making our app GPL would have given us the best of both worlds... but I couldn't quite convince management of that ;^))

(Not associated with TrollTech, just a satisfied customer)

Both the founders are married and have great wives

[Prien715]

From here:

Haavard Nord, Trolltech's CEO, and Eirik Eng, Trolltech's President, had been working together with various cross-platform GUI tools back in 1991. We were both very disappointed in their quality and were sure we could do it much better. Haavard went on to write his Masters thesis on GUI design, while I wrote a C++ GUI toolkit for a Norwegian company. In 1993 he called me up and suggested that we should join forces and use our experience in GUI design to write the toolkit that would be the king of toolkits. We had no customers, no funding and a lot of enthusiasm. Luckily we were both married to wives who had full-time jobs. We used some savings to rent a small office and hacked away for a year while our wives fed and cared for us.

Personally, I find the entire thing rather neat and almost romantic. If you told your spouse/sig. other "I'm gonna go work on something and make absolutely no money for a year and you're going to support me...do you mind?" (s)he'd probably say something along the lines of "hell no" or go packing. The company name comes from a dream one of the cofounders had about their wife as well.

I dunno. I don't see that many couples that're close or stable enough to do that.

There's more important things "chicks" can have than a "hot" body. Like...helping you realize your dreams?

Re:Sure, why not

[SorcererX]

Personally I think of (obligatory dictionary quote): Troll \Troll\, n. [Icel. troll. Cf. Droll, Trull.] (Scand. Myth.) A supernatural being, often represented as of diminutive size, but sometimes as a giant, and fabled to inhabit caves, hills, and like places; a witch. This usage of the term "troll" predates the internet term "troll" by atleast 200 years, and is still the most common usage of the word in Scandinavia.