[Qt-interest] Is Qt the best choice for cross-platform desktop GUI applications? Mac OS X (Cocoa, Aqua)? KDE, GNOME, Windows 7

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 04/13/2010 12:07 AM, Elfen wrote:
> My top 3 ideas are:
> 1) Qt, C++, Qt Creator (or Visual Studio / gcc / etc)
> 2) Swing, Java, Eclipse (or NetBeans, or IntelliJ)
> 3) SWT, Java, Eclipse (or NetBeans, or IntelliJ) (JFace rather than SWT?)
>
> Some ideas that get honorable mention:
> A) multiple native GUI toolkits (Windows, WPF, Expression Blend) (Mac OS
> X, Cocoa, Interface Builder) (GNOME, GTK+) (KDE, Qt)
> B) REAL Studio (formerly REALBasic)
> C) GTK#, C# and .NET, Mono
>
> An absolute minimum is to have very correct native visual style for the
> widgets (Mac OS X - Cocoa Aqua ?) (Windows - not sure if it's Windows
> Forms or WPF ?) (GNOME - GTK+ ?) (KDE - Qt ?).  Beyond that, it should
> do things like dialogs where the position of the (OK, Cancel) buttons is
> correct (for Windows 7, Mac OS X, GNOME, KDE), which I know Qt at least
> tries to do.  Probably a native app should use different defaults
> shortcuts for each OS.
> [...]

Having developed a few apps with Java, there's one thing I didn't like 
about it: look&feel.  It's just looks monstrous, and that is annoying as 
hell for users.  On Linux for example, the widgets are anything but 
native, and font rendering is bugged (in some cases there wasn't even 
font anti-aliasing.)  On Windows it was similar, widgets that have 
nothing to do with how Windows widgets should look like.  I think OS X 
is the only system that tries to solve that issue.  Another problem is 
application start-up time, which is slow an all platforms.  So for me, 
Java is a no-no for applications that aren't web-based.

With Qt, there's only one thing I don't like:  OS X support looks a bit 
half-assed.  For example, starting the application on Linux and Windows, 
opening dialogs, and in general interacting with the application is very 
snappy and fluid.  On OS X it's another story.  The app takes a very 
long time to load, opening dialogs is also very slow, and font rendering 
seems broken (there's no kerning, meaning ugly spaced characters in text).

Since however I expect OS X support to improve over time, and it works 
*very, very* well on Windows and Linux, Qt is the way to go for me.