Cross-Platform Development For Windows and OS X

An anonymous reader writes to let us know about an article in RegDeveloper detailing the use of Qt, Trolltech's cross-platform C++ toolkit, for development across Windows and Mac OS X. From the article: "QT not only goes across desktops but onto embedded devices as well. So any app you write with Qt will port to an embedded device with a frame buffer running Trolltech's embedded version of QT, called QtopiaCore."

Comments

First things first

[Anonymous Coward]

Its Qt and not QT which means Quicktime.

Better alternative

[DraconPern]

This is blatant slashvertisement. Qt's controls are all emulated, it's like using Java Swing when you can use SWT instead. Further more, it requires you to use non-standard c++ syntax together with a 'qt preprocessor'. The better choice is wxWidgets. It supports platforms, more compilers, has native controls, and it is open source.

Re:Better alternative

[molnarcs]

The commercial license is a bit rediculous, though.

Why? It seems pretty popular (Adobe, Skype, Google, Opera, etc..) Trolltech's modell is an excellent example of how you can make money on free software. QT - free for free software development, pay for it if you develop commercial software. Which means they have a good revenue stream to pay some of the best coders on earth to enhance QT, which in term, serves the community (being the basis of some of the best free software apps, like scribus for instance). Nice. (oh, and as a bonus, those who pay also get some of the best support services in the industry - check trolltech's customer satisfaction :))

Re:Better alternative

[tonigonenstein]

Yep. Which is what permits it to use a signal-slot mechanism which spanks wxWidgets and any other C++ system out there. No more crashes due to dangling pointers, yay!

libsigc++ (used in gtkmm) gives you typesafe slots/signals in ISO C++, no need to invent your own language. (No granted this wasn't possible at the time QT was originally designed).

Re:And this is news?

[1iar_parad0x]

It's not a news article, it's more of an overview for programmers. Actually, it's pretty well written, just not a 'headline'. Incidentally, I hadn't heard about the KDE/GNOME stuff until recently. I only ran across Qt when I was looking for an OSS (or just free) RAD tool.

Re:What about the GUIs?

[molnarcs]

They work like native apps (check the comments below the article), and as far as I know, they can use native widgets as well. Skype and Opera are also written in QT (the interface) - do they look like native enough on windows or MacOS X? I've seen the windows versions of these only, they look like... well, windows programs (so consistency is not a problem, they just blend in fine the rest of the application stack on windows ;))

Re:What about the GUIs?

[Mercano]

If you use these things, do the programs look native to the operating system or do they look like Java?

Java apps should look like native apps, at least, if the developer thinks they should. Its not to hard. Either use AWT for your GUI which will use native widgets (though shoots for the least common denominator at times), or use swing and have it emulate native controls (more or less) by calling UIManager.setLookAndFeel( UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName() ); early on in your code. Granted, neither is perfect, but they don't stick out like swings default (why?) Metal look and feel.