[Interest] Qt 4.8.x and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion - my experience

[Till Oliver Knoll]

Hello,

I did a *very* quick test of my Qt application, compiled against Qt
4.8.1 (coming from the "Qt SDK" which unfortunatelly still doesn't
seem to provide an up-to-date Qt 4.8.2) after upgrading from Lion to
Mountain Lion (on some "I don't care what happens but I'm curious to
see" MacBook Pro - my actual work iMac is still running Snow Leopard
;))

First thing I noticed that the command line tools (gcc, ...) were
gone: Qt Creator complained about a "missing toolchain" (or
something). So after starting up XCode 4.4, in some download dialog",
you can download the "Command Line Tools". After restarting Qt Creator
the compilation worked again, gcc was picked up automatically again.

I got the usual "This platform is not supported" warning coming from
some Qt header, but apart from that everything compiled and linked
fine (against the usual QtCore, QtGui and the "QtXml" (?). But no
QtWebKit, for instance).

Quickly starting the application (based on QGraphicsScene/View) and
testing some touch-based graphics rotations/drawing everything worked
fine - still with the same quirks as before
(https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-15663 for instance -
the "raster" painter does solve this issue, but has still worse issues
elsewhere: e.g https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-22043)


But apart from that everything seems to work "as before" (on Lion). I
did not yet test any "App Store" related issues. So I guess it is
merely a matter of incrementing the "supported platform" in said Qt
header for now... ;)


Off course there are still plenty of OS X specific issues to be implemented:

  https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-21606

For me the next two things to tackle would be

1. 	Lion scrollbars support

To make a Qt application visually more "Mac like" again :)

2. 	HighDPI Display support

Probably not just for Mac, but in general an upcoming "hot topic"

3.     Fullscreen support

That is pretty easy to do actually: in my application I already did
this with a couple of platform-specific (Objective-C) lines... see
again https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-22043
(attachement contains example code).

"Autosave" support probably doesn't make much sense, as Qt does not
offer an equivalent of NSDocument class (yet)? And that would be a
pre-requisite for "App termination" support.


Cheers, Oliver