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

[Jason H]

Qt sucks. Never use it ;-) I hope you weren't expecting a biased answer on at Qt list. :-)

Given your list, I can tell you this:
Qt runs on more platforms than there are JavaVMs.
Java seems to be going the way of COBOL.
GTk, Qt and .Net are the only platforms going forward.
Qt has QtScript for scripting.
Qt has multiple language bindings. (Python a favorite of mine)

Qt does have some weak spots:
No SOAP support
Crappy font rendering many places (printouts, OSX)
No read/write support of XML without major pain (I have it working, but took much love)
OSX seems to be the 'weakest' officially supported platform.
Lack of developers who are familiar with it

Qt does have some strengths:
Me (and everyone else here, and on #qt) :-)
Clear, navigable docs
Permissive licensing.
Clean, text-book OOP design.
Probably the best x-platform ever devised outside of a virtual machine.

And I thought Carbon was the future of OSX or did I get that confused?







________________________________
From: Elfen <pem.accounts.spam at gmail.com>
To: qt-interest at trolltech.com
Sent: Mon, April 12, 2010 5:07:59 PM
Subject: [Qt-interest] Is Qt the best choice for cross-platform desktop GUI applications? Mac OS X (Cocoa, Aqua)? KDE, GNOME, Windows 7

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.

I saw that Apple supports Swing, and that SWT has a native widget focus.  However, I don't know how well they compare to Qt (especially on Mac OS X) for these things.

I may have ruled out REAL Studio too soon, but I'm not enthused about that path unless it's really a lot better than the other choices (such as Qt, Swing, SWT)

My first cross-platform GUI desktop application is just a simple specialized object based image drawing utility (you can open a png image and draw objects on it, like rectangles or polygons, and resize / move / delete / copy etc these objects).

Specific examples / comparisons are especially helpful.  Please only reply if you have relevant experience and/or knowledge.

thank you for info / leads


      
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