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GUI Software KDE

Qt 4 Beta 1 Available for Download 196

Posted by michael from the cutie-for-download dept.
scc writes "Get it here. Trolltech's press release gives the details, including the projected release date: late first quarter 2005. Qt is the cross-platform GUI framework at the heart of KDE. At the same time, Trolltech released under the GPL Qtopia 2.1, an implementation of their GUI framework for Linux-based PDAs."
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Qt 4 Beta 1 Available for Download More

Qt 4 Beta 1 Available for Download

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  • No Free Windows Version (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:56AM (#11176295)
    I think Qt is great, I use it for most of my projects, the only annoying thing is that the Windows version isn't free. There are free Linux and Mac versions released under the GPL, but no Windows version. \

    The whole point of Qt is to make it easier to have software run on multiple OS's, but I can't test any of my stuff on Windows. Oh well, still kick ass software.
    • Since the Linux version is GPL'ed, what stops people from porting that to Windows and releasing it under the GPL? Sure, it would be a lot of work, but it could be done if enough people committed themselves to it. I wonder if Trolltech would try to stop it.
    • The whole point of Qt is to make it easier to have software run on multiple OS's, but I can't test any of my stuff on Windows. Oh well, still kick ass software.

      Actually, the whole point of Qt from the perspective of TrollTech is to make money to feed their families (and, I guess, to allow them to buy US$50,000 kittens if they so choose). Providing free Mac/Linux implementations was a strategic business decision towards that goal.

      Note: I'm a big Qt fan, and this should be taken as an endorsement rather t
    • Actually there is a version of the GPL QT ported to Win32. In fact its been out for quite a while.

      The Windows version of the ultra excellent lyx editor used it for their windows port in fact. See: http://www.home.zonnet.nl/rareitsma/lyx/ [zonnet.nl]

      Here is the home for the Win32 port of the GPL QT:
      http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/qt3-win32/compil e-mingw.php [sourceforge.net]

      Its part of the cygwin project, BUT they have instructions for doing a native compile with other native Windows compilers such as Borland, Microsoft C++ et

    • Re:No Free Windows Version (Score:5, Interesting)

      by computerme ( 655703 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @11:08AM (#11176630)
      oh for petes sake!

      Can you at least to a simple google search to find out why this is not so??!

      Its not like its been brought up on slashdot EVERY SINGLE TIME QT IS MENTIONED....

      Short answer for the kids that ride the short yellow bus:

      They had a free version for windows.

      It was supposed to be used for only apps that were free and not for a commercial entity such as an in house enterprise app or commercial app.

      But guess what? Nearly no one on the windows side followed the rules and Trolltech lost $$$$$$$$.

      So blame your windows buddies.

      They are to blame. Not trolltech.

      If you make or save money on an app you build for a commercial entity, YOU should pay for it.

      Don't agree with me or Troltech?

      Don't USE IT!

      Simple.
      • Ok, I am a Windows developer and I would like to know a bit more about Qt. Then I look in possibility to learn , and see no "educational" (free) license for Windows. And even if they have it, I look on the price of license for Windows toolkit, and it is insanely high for one-man shop.

        Guess not Qt for me.
    • there is a "non-commercial" version available for the win32 platform.
      it has no (direct) cost and distributed apps are royalty free.
      i dont think that it is available for download, but it is included in with the book "c++ gui programming with qt3"

      http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0131 240722/qid=1103913660/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl 14/002-4430584-6064036?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 [amazon.com] amazon

  • Nice to see things coming along... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by exigentsky ( 771810 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @09:56AM (#11176297)
    I'm especially happy about Arthur and the new Qt Designer, we will finally have an accelerated OpenGL? desxtop and all will be smooth due to double buffering.

    My only gripe is that the performance is still not great, but that should be expected with debugging code and all.

    Trolltech is doing great work.
    • OpenGL and double buffering are mutually exclusive. One can implement double buffering in software. OpenGL compatability allows drivers to be written that throws all that drawing stuff to a seperate cpu, namely the one on your video card.

      • OpenGL and double buffering are mutually exclusive.

        Uhm... Then how come I've been using these functions? They must be figments of my imagination! When I compile my source the code fairies must have magically removed them! It's the only viable explanation.

        SDL_GL_SetAttribute(SDL_GL_DOUBLEBUFFER,1);

        SDL_GL_SwapBuffers();

        • You don't need double buffering to implement opengl and vice versa. The original statement was about OpenGL bringing double buffering. Most modern graphical applications already double buffer w/o OpenGL. Just like I can do OpenGL, or emulate it, w/o double buffering and get the flicker effect. But most card makers who implement 3d, including OpenGL like interfaces, are smarter than that when they write drivers.

  • more info here (Score:5, Informative)

    by carnivore302 ( 708545 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @10:02AM (#11176319) Journal
    The press release is a bit light on details of what to expect from this release. here [trolltech.com] is a link that describes some of the features of the final qt4 version.

    Qt designer and assistent apparently can be embedded into kdeveloper, visual studio etc.

    Other improvements include

    a new paint engine

    a new text rendering engine

    new containers (which are lighter than the STL ones)

    better support for multithreading

    a new docking architecture

    and last but not least better performance and smaller memory footprint.

    • Re:more info here (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Does the improvements to Qt include totally ignoring backwards compatability, forcing every application developer to re-write large portions of their code for the fourth time just to keep in step with the whims of Trolltech and their ever changing APIs?

      Boy am I looking forward to KDE 4, when once again we all get to load yet another multi-megabyte Qt library and half our applications stop working because no-one ships Qt 3 libraries any more. Yay.

      • Re:more info here (Score:2, Insightful)

        by karstux ( 681641 )
        I'd rather have broken backwards compatibility than eternal stagnation: in the computer world, that's usually the price of progress.

        Also, what's stopping you to distribute the Qt2 or Qt3 libraries with your program? Yes, it probably bloats the package, but the possibility is there.

        • Re:more info here (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @11:54AM (#11176842) Homepage
          Also, what's stopping you to distribute the Qt2 or Qt3 libraries with your program? Yes, it probably bloats the package, but the possibility is there.


          For what it's worth, I just statically link the Qt library into my app [lcscanada.com], and it works well. True, it adds a few megabytes to the executable size, but anyone can just download the .zip file, unzip it, and run the app -- there are never any problems with missing or misplaced .dll or .so files, no DLL hell (i.e. library version mismatch problems), no installer scripts, no setting of load-paths necessary. I think the gain in simplicity and improved user-experience is worth the extra download size.

          • Thank you. I wish everybody would do that. I don't care about an extra 10M of RAM or HD space. I just don't give a shit. But I don't want to fuck around for an hour dealing with install problems.

            --HC

      • Re:more info here (Score:4, Informative)

        by twener ( 603089 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @11:04AM (#11176605)
        > Does the improvements to Qt include totally ignoring backwards compatability

        You can compile in compatibility mode, there is a porting tool in work, and there is also a Qt 3 compability lib for now obsolete classes.

        > I looking forward to KDE 4, when once again we all get to load yet another multi-megabyte Qt library

        Qt 4 is broken down into smaller libraries: libQtCore (1,1MB), libQtGUI (4,5MB), lib Qt Network (0.2 MB), lib QtOpenGL (0.15 MB), libQtSQL (0.2MB), libQtXML (0.3 MB) and optional libQt3Compat (3 MB)

    • still more info here (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mitchell Mebane ( 594797 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @10:40AM (#11176487) Homepage Journal
      The article at KDE.news [kde.org]

  • Qt saved C++ (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24, 2004 @10:07AM (#11176346)
    Qt has done more for C++ than any other single project. Kudos to the Trolls.

    • Qt beats Java/Swing hands down (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Having programmed in both Qt/C++ and Java/Swing for several years I can say that Qt kicks Swing's butt for ease of programming, speed and simply a better looking interface. The subset of C++ that Qt employs can be quickly mastered by any programmer - professional or novice. KDE is proof of that. When you are thinking about a cross-platform GUI think twice before going with Swing. It may be free - but you get exactly what you pay for.

    • Re:Qt saved C++ (Score:4, Interesting)

      by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Friday December 24, 2004 @10:57AM (#11176573) Homepage
      Really? More than Boost [boost.org]? A few of their libraries will be in the next C++ standard.
      • Yeah. Boost is really nice, but it's not a reason in and of itself to use C++. It's the kind of thing you might look for once you've already started your C++ project. Qt, on the other hand, is the kind of decision you might make very early on, right around the same time as "what language will this be in".

    • Re:Qt saved C++ (Score:3, Interesting)

      by glennrrr ( 592457 )
      I don't think that's very much of a good thing. C++ is a horrible kludge of a language, and Qt tries to salvage it with it's signals/slots preprocessing and other hacks. Everyplace I've ever worked in C++, people spent a huge amount of time implementing clever hacks to add features to C++ which other languages have for free. They had legacy code (MFC) or skills and were willing to spend upwards of a third of the development time grafting things into C++ rather than switch. We should be grateful that Trollt

  • Newbies who might not read the heading properly or actually go to the link itself http://www.trolltech.com/products/index.html [trolltech.com] might think /. was in a timewarp, circa 1997, releasing the beta for Quicktime 4!!!!

    aahhh back in the days of Macromedia Director 4...
  • This would not be connected to the success of the Opie Project [handhelds.org], would it?
  • I've been using GTK for a while and gotten to like it. I'd like to know what does QT have to offer that GTK doesn't.

    Cheers,
    Adolfo

    • Re:I don't intend to start a flame war! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 24, 2004 @11:43AM (#11176786)
      Pulled this from the newsgroups...and it covers most diffenences between GTk and QT:::

      - Qt is C++ based but it uses C++ in its own way because of its cross-platform
      nature (through a special preprocessor)
      - GTK is C based but it uses its own "object oriented" approach.
      - Qt can rely on QtDesigner and KDevelop that, together, make up a real IDE
      (similar to Visual Studio)
      - GTK must rely on Glade only, that is a GUI builder equivalent to QtDesigner.
      There is nothing like KDevelop for GTK (AFAIK).
      - Qt runs (with recompilation) on Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows (all
      versions)
      - GTK runs on Linux. There is a porting of the old GTK1.2 for Windows. A
      Porting for Mac OS X is under development (AFAIK)
      - Qt has internal support for scripting (QAS)
      - Should you need to add scripting capabilities to a GTK application, you have
      to embed your own engine (Python, LUA...)
      - Qt has integrated data-aware widget for data-centric applications.
      - GTK has a separate project (gnome-db) for data-aware widgtes
      - Qt-based applications and the KDE desktop "talks" each other via DCOP
      - GTK applications and Gnome "talks" each other via CORBA
      - Qt has exhaustive bindings for Python and a few other language (maybe Perl
      and Scheme)
      - GTK has exhaustive bindings for C++ (GTKmm), Python (PyGTK) and Ruby. There
      are less complete bindings for Perl, Scheme, Lua and so on. Have a look at
      www.gtk.org for a complete listing of the available bindings and their
      development status.
      - Qt has exhaustive documentation and a lot of examples form Trolltech and the
      KDE team
      - GTK has exhaustive documentation and a lot of examples from GTK team
      - Qt is freeware on Linux only
      - GTK is always freeware (but it is not completely available on Windows and
      MacOS X)

      Should you need to develop x-platform applications, have a look at wxWindows
      (and wxPython) as well. The Linux implementation of wxWindows relies on GTK+
      but wxWindows can run on Windows (all versions) as well, thanks to MFC, and
      on MacOS (all versions), thanks to a specific GUI engine.
      • GTK IDE. [sourceforge.net] If I read it right, there is you kdevelop 'alternative' for GTK projects. Though I believe you could do the same thing with kdevelop, so I don't know why you'd need something else, unless you wern't running KDE.

      • - GTK runs on Linux. There is a porting of the old GTK1.2 for Windows. A Porting for Mac OS X is under development (AFAIK)

        There is also a windows port of GTK 2.x. For example developer packages are available here [gimp.org], an installer for Glade is avaiable from here [sourceforge.net] and an installer for the Python bindings for GTK for Windows is available here [ucl.ac.be].

      • Qt is GPL for X11 Unices (incl. Linux) and Mac OS X.
        There is an unofficial, but incomplete GPLed Windows port: http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/qt3-win32/featur es.php [sourceforge.net]
      • - Qt runs (with recompilation) on Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows (all versions)
        - GTK runs on Linux. There is a porting of the old GTK1.2 for Windows. A Porting for Mac OS X is under development (AFAIK)

        where did you hear this nonsense. Gimp2 and others for Windows. Gimp relies on GTK2. Gnome parts are the ones not ported, not Gtk
    • I personally think it looks nicer. That's subjective, of course. And that's not to say it looks more like windows. There is a "Ximian version" of openoffice available which can incorporate Qt widgets. It makes the interface much nicer. Some credit goes to the KDE folks though.
    • Just try programming in it. Write an mp3 player or something (that's how I learnt). I found I enjoyed it a lot more than doing the same thing in GTK, and just found it simpler. But it's your choice.

  • if only GUI libraries were really multithreaded (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CoughDropAddict ( 40792 ) on Friday December 24, 2004 @12:09PM (#11176921) Homepage
    I hear QT is good stuff. This isn't a slam on QT in particular.

    However, I'm still waiting for the day when mainstream GUI libraries catch up to where BeOS was ten years ago, and put drawing in a separate thread from everything else.

    There is absolutely no reason why GUI applications need to become sluggish when they are doing something computationally intensive. There's no reason that an application should stop posting redraws every time it makes a blocking call (like, for example, doing file i/o).

    My eyes were opened to this shortcoming of "modern" GUI libraries by an entry in Bram's diary [advogato.org] a while ago.
    • Nothing against the opinion, I shared it for a time, but it's not really the problem that needs to be solved. Threading is not a magic bullet. In fact, most modern UI toolkits are rather well designed in this respect if the coder knows what they're doing.

      But, let's assume you put everything in 2 threads, drawing and logic for ease of discussion.

      The drawing thread, at best, will be the same as always because all you logic goes faster than it's refresh time. If not, it redraws when only half a layout is don
  • The Qt framework definitely proves that C++ is head and shoulders above Java. All that C++ needs now is garbage collection, and we can forget about Java!

    I suggest Qt to be names the official standard C++ library, and the governments around the world to pay Trolltech with a large annual amount of money so as that Trolltech can work for the next version. It's a pity that such good software is not the C++ standard!

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