Trolltech Releases Qt 4.0 413
lypanov writes "Trolltech has released Qt 4.0 both under commercial and GPL licenses for X11, Mac OS X and MS Windows. It is the first time that a MS Windows GPL edition is available. To celebrate the release Trolltech employees have created a song and a music video (Bittorrent download, Ogg Theora version). Read the Qt 4 Overview and the online Qt Reference Documentation for more information. You can download Qt from ftp.trolltech.com or from one of its mirrors. Work on KDE 4 has already started with making a development branch of KDE compile and run with Qt 4."
KDE4 for Windows? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wierd name (Score:3, Interesting)
QT is a cutie (Score:5, Interesting)
The Win32 and Gnome APIs are written in C, so though they are fast, they doesn't get any of the programming benefits of Object Orientation.
Thought it has a funny macro kludges in certain places, the QT API is absolutely a joy to work with.
Nice icons, too! (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, lypanov, nice article (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, you must've gone to an awful lot of work to copy that blurb verbatim from the Dot [kde.org].
</sarcasm>
Re:QT: Good but Expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
It is for a small time shop. But even carpenters purchase tools which are much more expensive than that. Shit, sewing machines are much more expensive than $5,000 for a good one.
Developers (not all, just many) are too stuck up if they cannot fathom paying $5000 for a tool which will take care of just about every tedious problem with their GUI program. And leave time for the real work (the application idea and implementation)
The fact that you can now rapidly prototype an application using QT and Python in a matter of hours on programs which may take days to produce is worth the money right there (but honestly just download the GPL version for proof of concept if you are afraid to pay for it)
There are other features which are outrageously worth the money. Not everyone will use them. QT is not for every developer. But honestly, what kind of snob are you that $5000 is an expensive tool for your professional career in which you get paid above the average grade of laborers who must purchase more expensive tools?
Re:QT: Good but Expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't use the rather inflammatory phrase "stuck up", but it basically comes down to a business decision: is it less expensive to pay TrollTech a multi-thousand dollar fee, or to get the necessary functions implemented without using Qt? For my company, the Qt was by far the cheaper, better option. Our Qt license paid for itself in the first year. We now have an app [lcsaudio.com] that runs well on every major platform, that was straightforward to write and is easy to maintain. Using a cheaper, less well-designed GUI toolkit would probably have doubled our development time, and coding our own portable GUI toolkit from scratch would have made things ten times harder. (of course making our app GPL would have given us the best of both worlds... but I couldn't quite convince management of that
(Not associated with TrollTech, just a satisfied customer)
Both the founders are married and have great wives (Score:5, Interesting)
Haavard Nord, Trolltech's CEO, and Eirik Eng, Trolltech's President, had been working together with various cross-platform GUI tools back in 1991. We were both very disappointed in their quality and were sure we could do it much better. Haavard went on to write his Masters thesis on GUI design, while I wrote a C++ GUI toolkit for a Norwegian company. In 1993 he called me up and suggested that we should join forces and use our experience in GUI design to write the toolkit that would be the king of toolkits. We had no customers, no funding and a lot of enthusiasm. Luckily we were both married to wives who had full-time jobs. We used some savings to rent a small office and hacked away for a year while our wives fed and cared for us.
Personally, I find the entire thing rather neat and almost romantic. If you told your spouse/sig. other "I'm gonna go work on something and make absolutely no money for a year and you're going to support me...do you mind?" (s)he'd probably say something along the lines of "hell no" or go packing. The company name comes from a dream one of the cofounders had about their wife as well.
I dunno. I don't see that many couples that're close or stable enough to do that.
There's more important things "chicks" can have than a "hot" body. Like...helping you realize your dreams?
Re:Sure, why not (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:international input (Score:2, Interesting)
Try the "Compose" key of your X-Windows system. It's usually Shift+RWin, but it can be changed in your kbd section of xorg.conf using Option "XkbOptions" "compose:rwin" for example.
Use Compose ' e to get é, Compose s s to get ß, Compose / o to get ø, etc.
you can press each key separately, you don't have to hold each one down. It's much easier then remembing ALT+ASCII code combinations.
Re:Sure, why not (Score:3, Interesting)
Fortuitous time to learn a windowing model? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:QT: Good but Expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
Another satisfied user/customer here. I even convinced my bosses to buy a commercial Windows license for 3.1 a couple years ago (which I'm still using, btw). The rest of my colleagues are using Borland's C++ Builder, though I am more productive with Qt/KDevelop than they are with Builder (with one possible exception).
Unfortunately, the entirety of Builder costs about as much as just the Qt license. Considering that, for my Windows-only counterparts, the cost of the Qt libraries alone equals or exceeds the cost of a Builder integrated Editor + Compiler + Debugger + GUI library, the Qt-as-a-standard argument was stillborn.
It made no sense to pay for Qt, and then have to spend an equal amount of additional money for a development environment where half its features would go unused. Despite the fact that Builder's GUI system is horrendously primitive compared to Qt, the very well integrated system that Builder provides outweighed everything else.
On the bright side, my productivity with Qt+KDevelop is high enough that they let me continue using it for all my applications. I think they're also hedging their bets that I will eventually arrive at a day when I've rewritten all our in-house stuff to be Linux enabled, therefore allowing us to give Microsoft the Great Big Middle Finger.