[Qt-interest] Many have not aware about this letter, Its for all who relies on Nokia

[Oliver.Knoll at comit.ch]

On 2011-02-11 Pmqt71 pmqt71 wrote:

> ...
> let me make a distinction : Qt is not tied to mobile phones, Qt is a framework for
> cross platform development. So it will survive for its true nature.

Let's all hope for the best here!
 
> In actual use, IMHO, Qt is not a valid framework for mobile apps: how many Qt
> apps do we have for mobiles?

Let me rephrase that question a little bit: "How many apps would there have been (or will be, let's stay optimistic for a while ;) if MeeGo saw the light of life, Qt would have been ported to Android and iPhone later on and thousands of Qt developers, coming from desktop development or newly into mobile development, would write Qt apps for not just one, but all mobile devices (with the same code)?"

> My little experience with Qt for mobiles was not a success: the WinCE version is a
> 16 Mb CAB file!! 

Let's agree on the fact that WinCE itself was indeed not a real success. But no one here is talking "WinCE" anymore ;)

> It contains the Qt runtime, of course, and I could buy a license to
> make a static build. But I'll never do it, I'm shipping a free app, why to pay Nokia to
> develop for free???
> I simply will move my project to a free platform!

Well, we were talking "MeeGo" so far - wasn't this supposed to be a "free platform"?

> Porting Qt to WP7 is a nonsense. They already have a framework, they
> already have tools, good tools. 

Agreed. I very much enjoyed developing Qt apps with Visual Studio (I am now using Qt Creator ;) And C# is certainly a nice language, same goes for their frameworks, but...

> Do you consider Qt Creator better than
> Visual Studio? Do you consider Qt Creator better than Visual C++ Express
> (free) Edition? Can we compete?

...that is and never was the question! For me as a developer it is important whether I want to tie a bond forever with a certain platform... or whether I can easily port that application to other platforms. So it is "cross-platform vs single-platform", not "Tool A vs Tool B".

But as to answer your question: when it comes to Qt development I think it is a BIG advantage having the same IDE and tools on all Linux, Mac and Windows platforms. And again, you don't like Qt Creator, you *buy* yourself a Visual Studio license and use the Qt integration with it. But I prefer the "slick design" of Qt Creator: I want to have code-completion, some more refactoring tools would be nice, a source control system integration and a good debugger integration. I agree there a lots of features that I would still like to see within Qt Creator, but the current set of features is absolutely enough for doing confortable Qt desktop app development! (And we did not even mention Qt Designer yet! ;)


As for the actual topic - Windows 7 "vs" Qt "vs" MeeGo - I just hope that some people at Nokia realize what an investment they and lots of developers and companies have in/with Qt and this technology will be driven onwards, in whatever way (even a Window 7 port would be nice, even though the current statements from Nokia clearly talk a different language).


Cheers, Oliver
--
Oliver Knoll
Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH
COMIT AG - ++41 79 520 95 22