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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."
Will the KDE library be available for windows now?
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.
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.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
1) QT doesn't suck
2) QT is GPL'd, not LGPL'd, so whoever wishes to use it in closed-source software must buy a license to do so. This means TrolTech can afford to continue developing it full time, while still getting it well-used in open-source projects.
3) The commercial license is very affordable.
4) QT is very cross-platform.
5) QT is very full featured, but still fast and light.
6) QT includes a very nice GUI designer.
Trolltech does have income. There are many businesses that won't touch the GPL with a 10 foot pole.
There are also Qtopia Pda and Phone Editions.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
http://www.qtopia.net/modules/xoopsfaq/index.php?
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
The company I work for has over a dozen enterprise-level licenses. We do it solely for the support. For us, it's essentially the same as using GPL code and contracting a 3rd company for fulltime support. Also, if Trolltech ever bit the dust, we've got the source code.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
It get my vote for "most disturbing dance video ever".
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
"Oh, uhm... would not time be better spent at kde.org fixing the many bugs in KDE 3?"
What makes you think they won't? Migrating to a new version of the Qt framework doesn't require rewriting all of the underlying logic, therefore allowing for bug fixes in a major portion of application code. Not to mention, there are plans for another release in the 3.x series (development can happen in parallel). Also, you should be happy to know that the things you complain about, kicker and kdesktop, are slated to undergo a major overhaul for the KDE4 release.
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)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Trolltech sounds so...dubious. I mean, when I think of Trolltech, I think of spyware.
They're from Norway, dude. Anything with 'Troll' in it is popular there. They even named one of their biggest oil-fields "Troll".
So since Norwegians like trolls, obviously they don't call annoying people on the internet 'trolls'. They usually call them 'americans'.
If you don't make enough money from your commercial software business to afford a one-time expense of $2000 (the light version includes everything you need in a toolkit), you have no business writing commercial software. I mean, that's only about two weeks of one developer's salary. You'll spend about 5 times that in lost productivity if you use VC++ alone. The $3000 version includes XML, databases, networking, and a ton of other stuff which is definitely worth it if you need it. Not to mention you get full source code.
what is the difference between mingw and a cygwin installed gcc/g++ environment ?
MingW is a native windows app that doesn't require the cygwin dll and creates exes that are standalone in windows.
I was quoted out of context in my autobiography...
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?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.