OSNews

there is "simple kde" http://www.simplekde.org/ and kde meta ebuilds in gentoo, but this is still kde; xfce4 is not gnome.

Thanks for the info, I've been looking for something like this for an old laptop I have.

It would not be a great project. If you want something like XFCE for QT just install the gtk-qt theme and enjoy XFCE with QT as best as possible. Look, there is no way in hell to achieve toolkit purity and you should forget about it fast, duplicating everything that GTK has because somebody wants it in QT or vice versa has given us nothing but lots of half done and unmaintained apps.
There is no platform where toolkit purity exists.

P.S. How in hell do you jump from QT4 is good to I want XFCE in QT? Please don’t start spaming us about it every time a QT, GTK, KDE, Gnome or XFCE article pops up, OK?

> I wish there was a QT based lightweight DE ...

It's your lucky day: it's being coded :-)
Find it out yourself on: http://www.mockup.org/
Qt4 based, of course ;-D

There is...it's called KDE Light (based on Openbox and fbpanel) and it comes bundled with PocketLinux. Find out all about it below:

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pocket

It’s been available from the beginning for anybody with a brain.

http://www.trolltech.com/download/qt/windows.html

so when will we see the promised gpl qt4 for windows?

Right here. http://www.trolltech.com/download/qt/windows.html

It's been out for months. I've started to use it for every new project I do, it can't be beat, even if you're not going for cross-platform support.

> I've started to use it for every new project I do, it can't be beat, even if you're not going for cross-platform support.

I'm doing that too! I really love database support and the new network functionality. And.. did I mentioned threads? Of course not, 'cause QThreads are really nicer to use!
I've already coded 3 apps using the Windows version and 'qmake' as the build manager. I was really surprised when I got the linux executables typing anything but 'qmake' followed by 'make'...
Trolltech IS Gold !!

Hey man, have you been in a cave for some months ? :-) Qt4 GPL for Windows was released months ago and Qt 4.0.1 too!
The base package also fetches Mingw32 from the net so you will have a really nice "gcc+qt4+make+qmake" environment ready to create all the OpenSource windows software you would like to create :-)

Go grab it!!!
> ftp://ftp.trolltech.com/qt/source/qt-win-opensource-4.0.1-mingw.ex...
and keep your eyes open for Qt4.1: native svg rendering and pdf printing..
> ftp://ftp.trolltech.com/qt/snapshots/

H-o-r-n-y stuff!!!! :-)

"H-o-r-n-y stuff!!!! :-)"

The word "horny" isn't used in english quite the same way "geil" is used in German There is no second meaning of "cool" it only has the meaning of "wants sex."

Of course your IP seems to be Italian.. maybe from Südtirol?

Not that it matters, you just have a creative way of expressing yourself

Me too.

There is a reason there is no component market for Qt.
There is a reason there is no great adoption by commercial software vendors.

So if there's no market, why is Trolltech still around? Obviously there is a market, since they are making money from it.

On Windows, Qt is full of bugs

Examples? I haven't found a single bug in Qt yet. I'm sure there are some, but not any obvious ones. And I do some pretty unusual stuff with Qt.

There is no sample code.
There is plenty. This will get you started: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/examples.html

Trolltech wants to charge you money -- every year -- for access to sample code that tech support cooks up.

No. The money is for tech support and you automatically get new releases. You don't need to pay if you don't want to.

That means for 95% of the desktops out there, Qt is crap.

Do you have any experience with this, or are you simply talking about things you know nothing about?

For Windows (and Mac), the design of Qt is compromised. Qt 4.1 is still fixing things that should have been done right in 4.0. And you cannot build something that is as nice as a native app.

Examples? Any backup for your ludicrous claims? No? Didn't think so.

I've done two projects in Qt that I can compare to an MFC application on Windows. For equal functionality, the Qt version required about 30% less code in the first case, and over 40% less code in the second case. I don't know about you, but anything that lets me get more done with less code is good in my books.

The linux desktop marketshare isn't really going anywhere, so there still isn't much of a demand for high quality crossplatform tools.

Crossplatform isn't just interesing for usual desktops applications.

Your customer might be running some kind of Unix or Linux on a server and a mix of Windows and Linux on the workstations and using crossplatform libaries and tools allows the software vendor to share a lot of code between those targets.

As a matter of fact having the option for a Linux client can give you an advantage over competitors as the customer is then free to switch client platforms if they see advantages in doing that.

C++ desktop programming is quickly coming to an end.

That's an interesting statement, and it certainly fits into the hype generated by Sun (Java) and Microsoft (C#) but I just don't see it. Which major applications for the windows desktop are written in Java? I can only think of two, Azureus and Eclipse. Eclipse doesn't really count since it's just an IDE for Java, and most people I know prefer native bittorrent applications like BitComet over Azureus.
What about C#? I can't think of anything I use day to day other than Paint.NET. Paint.NET is a decent application, but it is ridiculously memory hungry for the limited features it has.

The vast, vast majority of desktop applications are still done in C++. Perhaps this will slowly change, but I don't think the change is going nearly as quickly as you believe.

You forgot to quote properly. I said besides the shrinkwrapped market. Most software is inhouse and new client side projects aren't being done in C++.

The vast, vast majority of desktop applications are still done in C++. Perhaps this will slowly change, but I don't think the change is going nearly as quickly as you believe.

Maybe in the KDE world and the shrinkwrapped world, but not in other places.

Maybe in the KDE world and the shrinkwrapped world, but not in other places.

You haven't looked hard enough ;-).

C++ desktop programming is quickly coming to an end.

No. The vast majority of all applications in the world today are still C++ and if you look at any jobs rating, it's still there. .Net has yet to get off the ground at all.

It's like cutting a slice of bread with a chainsaw.

C++ and Qt must be a pretty versatile chainsaw then.

I think this is evident with Trolltech now doing a Java bindings themselves.

That expands their market somewhat, but it's hardly evidence of no one using C++.

The linux desktop marketshare isn't really going anywhere, so there still isn't much of a demand for high quality crossplatform tools.

I'm sure Trolltech's accountants will be surprised (or pleased?) to hear that.

The Qt license probably would have hurt KDE if the linux desktop had taken off

No actually, it's the exact opposite. The reason why people complain about having to pay anything for Qt is because there is no real Linux desktop market. If and when that market takes off people are going to want proper development tools. Either way, your usual licensing argument loses.

New inhouse client apps aren't being done in C++.

Care to provide evidence for this? Look at some skills ratings, the top languages in demand are consistantly C++ and Java. This is for all development jobs, which by your own statement is mostly in-house.
C++ works with Qt, and official Java bindings are in the works. That covers the two major players.

You fail to comprehend as usual. Trolltech just sells a library - they don't sell development tools that Windows users are used to.

No, they don't. But there are some IDE's for Linux that you can use with C++/Qt. KDevelop and Eclipse with the C development tools come to mind. They aren't as sophisticated as Visual Studio, but they work.
Anyways, there's nothing stopping you from developing Qt applications with Visual Studio. In fact, that's my day job.

Actually, VS2005 will have some free edition.

You're thinking of the Express editions, and no, they're not free. They will be sold for $50 each.

New inhouse client apps aren't being done in C++.

I'm not talking about diddy in-house applications. I'm talking about the vast majority of software produced.

Easy to cut off your leg too. Most people realized a long time ago that you don't need the power and pitfalls of C++ for your average desktop application

I'm talking about C++ with Qt. Large difference.

I never claimed that no one is using C++

Nice cop-out.

The desktop is just one of Trolltech's market. It seems that Qtopia is or will be the real revenue generator.

Nice cop-out. Qt makes money.

You fail to comprehend as usual. Trolltech just sells a library - they don't sell development tools that Windows users are used to.

Well they do. They sell Designer which integrates with something like KDevelop. It's the library and framework that really matters.

As to the other point, Linux not taking off on the desktop helps KDE relative to Gnome because there just isn't the demand for cheap tools that windows developers are used too.

No, this is something you just cannot understand for the life of you. For a start, the Windows development tools that most people buy aren't cheap so Qt is in the general ball-park. Next, any cheap development tools produced for Gnome are never going to be up to scratch because the framework just isn't there. When there's demand people will pay for good development tools and toolkits. Anything below that standard when there isn't demand and they're not going to go for it. Anything below that kind of standard when there is demand and they still aren't going to go for it.

But Trolltech is trying to buck the trend of just giving away the libraries/sdks and selling the IDEs.

Judging from the quality of IDEs out there they've got a pretty good shot at it. All they have to do is fund some Qt integration and make sure any IDE is up to scratch. It's the framework where the real work goes.

Actually, VS2005 will have some free edition.

So I get a full Enterprise edition I can use like with Qt? But this is the usual bastardised express version that does so little that people pay for professional and enterprise anyway.

Stupid. Trolltech is norwegian, it's big in the mobile market, and some other.

but hey, i'm no programmer and i can't see for myself.

Luckily, I AM a programmer, and I have experience with a lot of toolkits*, and I can reasure you that Qt is undeniably one of the best toolkits out there.

People complain about price, people complain about licensing, and people just outright lie about what Qt is to make it look bad. But in the end, you have to look at the price for Qt (currently $3300 US for one platform) and ask yourself the question:

"How does a company not only survive, but thrive, on the sale of a relatively expensive toolkit when there are lots of free alternatives out there?"

The answer is that the quality of Qt is such that even that high price is worth it. This is not bias on my part, this is simple economics and can't be argued against.

* AWT/Swing, Gtk#, MFC, WinAPI, wxWidgets, Windows.Forms, SWT

Qt is technical good, but not an option to Windows only programers

Companies like Adobe have bought licences for Windows only products.

Companies like Adobe have bought licences for Windows only products

For one single product and they had never make money of it, they were just trying it. and obviosly didn't work out, Adobe have all the money to affort those misstakes.

For one single product and they had never make money of it, they were just trying it.

The posting I was replying to claimed it wasn't an option. Clearly several companies have a different opinion, otherwise they wouldn't have gotten through the evaluation phase.

and obviosly didn't work out

Ah, I though the Adobe product is still available. Didn't know they have removed it already.

You can be sure TrollTech is having a hard time

Yeah, they are having such a hard time that they have 4000 paying customers, they are opening new offices in California, China, and Australia - apart from their home in Norway, and in the last year they made a 13.4 million dollars profit in sales.

I wish I had a hard time like this too!

Where is the link that probes your comments?

The keynote by Trolltech President and Co-Founder Eirik Chambe-Eng at aKademy 2005.

Link?

http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Trolltech+Keynote+Talk

is the first result if you used Google.
There are also video and audio available.

Speaking as a Delphi developer, I can tell you that Qt is superior in several areas:


1) Better containers (templates, Java and STL style iterators, the "foreach" keyword).

2) Better threading classes (Delphi's doesn't work in a library for example, and doesn't come with a built in semaphore class)

3) Better form resizeability, and it's easier to designer resizeable forms (particularly with regard to changing font sizes)

4) A nicer way of linking events with event-handlers (though Delphi's is pretty nice)

5) The signal/slot system can be used in your own business logic to good effect.

6) A thread-safe GUI since version 4

7) Makes C++ as easy to code as Java, with out any of the performance limitations of the JVM (such as start-up time and total memory usage). Qt code is significantly easier to understand than C++ Builder code.


And that's just off the top of my head. What Qt lacks is a decent IDE. A lot of customers that would otherwise buy the product are turned off by this (no-one wants to muck about installing command-line stuff any more). If they extended Qt Designer with a generic editor and debugger, with hooks to GCC (which runs on Windows using Cygwin - see the Bloodshed IDE) and Java, they'd really be on a winner.

What Qt lacks is a decent IDE.

You're right. Right now I'm developing Qt apps using Visual studio as the editor and compiling from the command line, but this is certainly not ideal. Also, Intellisense sometimes chokes on Qt libraries.
I suspect that if I bought the commercial version with the visual studio integration, it would work a lot more smoothly. I'm dissapointed in Dev-Cpp though for not working out of the box with Qt.

What's wrong with charging money for a good product, especially if used for commercial purposes? QT is as good as it is because Trolltech paid their developers from revenue received.

There's nothing wrong, but when the price of a single license is to exagerated don't spect it to be the product of choice, with better and cheaper options out there.

Mmm, cheaper I know that there are cheap even free toolkit available, but better?
Which toolkit are you thinking about? In which respect it is better?

Somehow I doubt that Trolltech's client pays for Qt without having doing their research, so for them Qt is 'the best', YMMV of course.

PS: I've used Swing a long time ago and at this time it was a buggy as hell, slow POS. This may have changed in the meantime, of course, but I would advise anybody considering Swing to have a look at Sun's bugparade before to see if there are still those horrible bugs remaining (at this time Sun was *very* slow to fix Swing, it took years to have fix for bugs with several thousands of votes).

If Google Earth is a Qt app and Qt apps are crossplatform requiring only a recompile and this being Google who internally uses Linux, MySQL and Python - why on Earth is Google Earth then not available for Linux?

Do you have $3,300 dls to buy a Qt license?

No. I use the open source version because my apps are open source (or proprietary in-house).

But an application developer can pay for the license, because by using Qt, he will save time developing his program, and therefore he will safe money overall. He spends $3300 up front, but requires a month less in development time, so he saves the equivalent of a month's wage for as many developers as he has.

If you've never used Qt, you won't understand or believe this, but it's the truth. I'm in the fairly unique position of having developed two applications with the same feature set, but one using MFC and one with Qt. The Qt version required less code (and less time) to implement, plain and simple.

So, you don't really understand the problem from a single software developer point of view and you are just trying to justify TrollTech at any cost

That's because fanboys like you are not single developers. I've seen lots of single developers, and small development companies, that spend several times more on Microsoft and Java development tools than Qt would have cost them.

Don't presume to talk on this subject unless you're in business for yourself. If you're simply sitting there infront of your keyboard and feel as if you might want to create some crap shareware some day, you don't count.

How about JUCE?

http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juce/

License is (£399 = $705 / £699 = $1235)+VAT for commercial licenses for one/multiple products respectively. It's GPL'ed, it's got a lively forum, the guy who wrote it used it to write Tracktion

http://www.mackie.com/products/tracktion2/

- certainly a commercial quality application.

One could write a desktop like KDE or commercial, cross-platform apps in this, at a fraction of the cost of a QT-license. And it looks the same on all platforms!

...ooh...right. That's the problem. It looks identical on all platforms, not native.

We, of course, all know that iTunes, Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop Album and Express, Cubase, Logic, Ahead Nero, the windows calculator, Ad-Aware, ZoneAlarm, RealPlayer, Finale, Sibelius, SoundDiver, ICQ, Messenger, Opera, Reason, Blender, etc. and all these other not-so-popular apps use STANDARD widgets for everything.

I haven't bought the license for JUCE yet, but already I have received personal answers from the developer on all questions relating to his framework, although he IS a busy man.

So, question is, what does the extra $3300-$705 = $2595 buy me? Support, I guess. And more time for the developers to improve features, nicer rooms for them to work in, maybe nicer keyboards to type on. Do I want to pay that much money? No. Should somebody else be allowed to?

Yes, most certainly. It is not and never was my business.

-Mike

Edited 2005-11-05 14:32

Excuse me, but in my world, developers cost more or less 500€ a day. That means that if I think I can save by using QT 6 days of work, it is a good investment.

Excuse me, but in my world, developers cost more or less 500€ a day.

Excuse me, but in poor countries there's no chance a developer spend so much money on a expensive Qt license, and there's is where GTK is beter welcome. Qt is for richter like adove and Google, but for the people GTK is the choice.

So, you're not the target, and ?
Why should they care, it is not a non-profit organization, their target is big companies.
Don't tell me QT is the only choice you have ?

Excuse me, but in poor countries there's no chance a developer spend so much money on a expensive Qt license

If you can't afford a Qt license, or indeed, any other type of license, then any software you sell isn't going to make very much or sell at all and you're not going to make a any kind of a living out of it. Yes, in a developing country.

Harmony gave up the ghost around the time Qt 2.2 was released in 2000. "Incomplete" is putting it mildly. Frankly you'd have to start from scratch, and even then the pay-off would be poor. Qt is free everywhere for free software, and you pay Trolltech if you want your users to pay you. Sounds fair to me. If it doesn't sound fair to you, there's always GTK and wxWindows. On Linux the XFCE Foundation Classes are a nice OOP wrapper around GTK.

What is not clear about the license?

If you write GPL code, then you can use Qt for free. If you write proprietary code, then you have to pay for Qt.

From the 1 QT app that I am forced to use on OS X

Could you name this app?

1) MDI interface

This has nothing to do with Qt. The application's developer decided to go for MDI. Perhaps a poor design decision, but it has absolutely nothing to do with what toolkit is being used.

The rest I can't comment on because I don't know which application you're talking about.

This makes the platform dependent code small while gaining actual platform specific widgets that works as expected.

Not really. If you're developing any application that makes use of a GUI, network, threads, databases, etc, then you need either a cross platform library, or a lot of platform specific code. The UI is the most important part, imagine maintaining a UI in MFC, GTK, and Cocoa/Carbon. It would be hell.
If your program is mostly algorithmic in nature, and has a small UI then it is feasible, but that does not describe most programs written today.