A few weeks ago, Ars published part one in a series called "From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X". In this series, Peter Bright details why he believes "Windows is dying, Windows applications suck, and Microsoft is too blinkered to fix any of it". Part one dealt with the history of both Windows and the Mac OS, and part two deals with .Net, the different types of programmers, and Windows Vista.
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Member since:2006-01-03
At one moment I seriously considered moving to Qt, I've even read the C++ GUI Programming with Qt book. There's one thing that stopped me in the end: the lack of 3rd party components. I couldn't find any.
It doesn't matter if you prefer .NET, Delphi or MFC, there are a dozen high quality visual component vendors out there, and 100s of freeware ones. For example, a fancy tree view, a collapsible panel, report builders, shell controls that look like Windows Explorer, charting, image viewer, just to mention a few.
I was unable to find anything for Qt.
I still think Qt is fantastic if your GUI is simple and basic, and when portability is important. But if you want to get the most out of a platform, nothing can beat a native front end + portable back-end combination.
Member since:2006-01-16
Member since:
2005-11-02
The OP is correct. QT, and by extension KDE, has a very nice, clean API. I can't compare it to MacOS X as I am not familiar with theirs, but let me say this: If you're programming on Windows and don't want to deal with the platform nonsense, you can escape a lot of it by using QT. You gain some portability in the bargain.
But probably the article's author would not find QT a useful answer. His complaints mention win32 often, but he's not so much complaining about the strange/horrid GUI APIs as he is about the platform as a whole (e.g. file locations).