With the third major release of the Qt 3 series last Wednesday, Trolltech CEO Haavard Nord graciously took some time to talk with OfB about Qt, the Linux desktop, Mac OS X 64-bit computing and more. Read the interview at OfB.biz. Ours is here.
A Talk about Qt 3.3
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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In addition to being faster and smaller, Qt 4 will also offer an interface to Sun’s ATK framework, which will mean a unified accessibility API for Qt-based and GTK+-based applications.
When I inquired about the next generation Qt, he explained that Trolltech is focusing on cleaning up the code base and improving performance. “We expect Qt to be 20-30% faster; use 20-30% less memory.”
That is great news for my k6-2 450
🙂
That’s called marketing
Eh? Are you implying that Qt really won’t be faster, that its just market-speak? Because Trolltech has a pretty good record with Qt. Historically, Qt has been getting faster, not slower. And given all the things Qt3 does that Qt2 doesn’t, its only about 4MB larger.
The performance increase b/w KDE 3.1 and 3.2 is tremendous–(and I’m very hard to please).
Since the KDE folks kept their word on the code clean-up/speed boost… I’m banking on the promises for Qt4 to follow suit.
Hats off to trolltech for such a powerful & competitive toolkit!
Do you think someone will ever promise the opposite?
I know I’ve moaned about this before, but why do they keep on harping about Mac OS X support, when they can’t get the look right? I’m not just talking about the new Panther elements, but just getting the look of existing components right. Case in point, the text in a QPushButton still isn’t correctly aligned vertically. The text is a little too low.
Qt is a great toolkit. Its actually growing on me, and I’m beginning to use it more than Java now. Speed isn’t really an issue with Qt apps, at least on OS X.
I’d rather they spend time fixing the way widgets look. These are small changes, and it shouldn’t take the guy they have working with Apple too long to fix (especially the text alignment bug).
QT looks good, but it’s only an option for either Open Source/KDE or corporations.
Even if I wanted to make a free program, I would have to pay $2490 unless I released the source.
They would need to come up with a license though that allows for comercial distribution with a low up front per developer fee ($150?, max of five lisences), a per copy sold royalty (5-10%), and to keep big commercial devs from switching from thier more expensive lisences, would require that each version of the software released be made available under an osi license after 18-24 months of initial release. Newer versions would could still be comercially though.
Who knows, it might work out for them better than what they have now, which is pretty good indeed.
I have a question in regards to developing a KDE application for a business. Say I wanted to develop a closed-source application that uses KDE libs.
I don’t really have a problem purchasing a Qt license, but is that enough and still be in compliance?
The KDE libraries (package kdelibs) are all LGPL, so your Qt license is enough.