[theolein]

trolltech has released Qt for Mac. Now for those of you who really want to port applications to and from Win, Linux and OSX you can!

[Angus_D]

Yes, if you have lots of money to through away! And also note that this is just a public beta, not a final version, AFAIK.

[BusErrorDev]

Well, Qt *IS* GPL.... if your application is too. If you have a commercial application, it's $1500 per developer. Metrowerks asks for $15 000 (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) for windows powerplant!

With Qt, nothing stops you from making a closed source -- free -- application too..

I think it is a terrific API myself, way ahead of PowerPlant, for example; and I did *years* of PowerPlant. Qt, IMO, is vastly superior in design.

Of course, the fact you have an universal API between X11/Win32 and OSX means it feels 'heavier' than PowerPlant for some things (by heavier I mean more remove from the 'native' API; carbon in this case), and the pre-pre-compiled c++ (Qt has a pre-pre-processor, called 'moc' that basicaly adds syntax constructs to your class declarations) helps a lot with objects interraction, but on the other can lead to a real mess if one is not careful about architecture.

Overrall, its definitly an API to watch for, especialy because it means some great programs are just a recompile away (Konqueror, a lean & cool web browser, as well as many KDE apps)

[BusErrorDev]

Well, Qt *IS* GPL.... if your application is too. If you have a commercial application, it's $1500 per developer. Metrowerks asks for $15 000 (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) for windows powerplant!

With Qt, nothing stops you from making a closed source -- free -- application too..

I think it is a terrific API myself, way ahead of PowerPlant, for example; and I did *years* of PowerPlant. Qt, IMO, is vastly superior in design.

Of course, the fact you have an universal API between X11/Win32 and OSX means it feels 'heavier' than PowerPlant for some things (by heavier I mean more remove from the 'native' API; carbon in this case), and the pre-pre-compiled c++ (Qt has a pre-pre-processor, called 'moc' that basicaly adds syntax constructs to your class declarations) helps a lot with objects interraction, but on the other can lead to a real mess if one is not careful about architecture.

Overrall, its definitly an API to watch for, especialy because it means some great programs are just a recompile away (Konqueror, a lean & cool web browser, as well as many KDE apps)

[John Nicholas]

Would it be fair to compare this to Swing? In Java you use swing to draw buttons, lists and drawing panels and they draw on any platform in the way users expect for that platform. Qt is using C++ but it seems to fulfill the same function. Or is it doing more?

[Apocalypse]

As far as I know, Swing is VERY SLOW. This is because it is a completely cross-platform, interpreted windowing system and widget collection. I actually remember hearing that the OS X implementation of Swing was damn fast since they just remapped it to Quartz. (feel free to correct me on any of this)

Swing would allow fully cross-platform applications but they are damn slow and many developers seem to have something against Java.
Jeff.

[BusErrorDev]

Qt provides the HI wrapups, true, but it's also much more. It provides wrappers for almost everything else, and has lots of unique features itself.
It has a 'designer' program that allows to draw windows, dialogs etc and generate c++ for the view (that your code then inherit)

The HI is drawn kinda like Swing for that matter, you can have a 'windows theme' even on OSX if you want it, but it also have the full set of OSX widgets.

The Beta I tried (on OS 10.1) is far from perfect, but most of the features are already there.

Have a look at their website <http://www.trolltech.com>

[Kristoff]

Originally posted by Apocalypse:
<STRONG>As far as I know, Swing is VERY SLOW. This is because it is a completely cross-platform, interpreted windowing system and widget collection. I actually remember hearing that the OS X implementation of Swing was damn fast since they just remapped it to Quartz. (feel free to correct me on any of this)

Swing would allow fully cross-platform applications but they are damn slow and many developers seem to have something against Java.
Jeff.</STRONG>

Swing is not THAT slow.
You make it sound unusable. It is actually fast enough in its current version to work quite well. Apple has hardware accelerated thier Swing implementation in 10.1.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by Kristoff:
<STRONG> Swing is not THAT slow.
You make it sound unusable. </STRONG>

It *IS* unusable.