When Google released its Chrome web browser not too long ago, it of course emphasised that the browser was an open source product. The browser contains 24 parts originating from 3rd parties, and to some surprise, one of those parts comes from one of Google's biggest enemies - Microsoft.
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Member since:2008-03-17
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-11-10
Member since:2006-11-19
Actually QT doesn't really use native widgets, it sort of does, but not really. Take a look through the source code, QT handles all of its own messaging and most if its own drawing. Essentially, each widget is connected to something like a peer, kind of like Java Swing. It is horribly complex.
Thats the reason why QT applications look absolutely God awful on the Mac and usually pretty bad on Windows (especially when compared with a true native WPF app on Windows or a Cocoa app on OSX).
And yes, I know that there is a beta version of QT that uses Cocoa, but I took a look at the source, and it does the exact same thing. It still most of its own drawing, it just draws to a Cocoa window instead of a Carbon window.
There is a reason why Apple ditched the bottom end of WebKit which was QT to a very light platform abstraction layer. There is a reason why most decent cross platform applications use the real native toolkit on each platform and not some library like QT. QT is really only truly native on Unix where QT and GTK ARE the toolkits.
Edited 2008-09-16 15:56 UTC
Member since:2006-03-23
Member since:2005-07-06
That's interesting. I always thought native just meant it was compiled for that OS and now Wine type layer was in use. If not using native widgit's means it's not native doesn't that mean Google Chrome, Nero, WMP11, etc are not native either?
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2007-03-14
Member since:2007-08-11
Er, yes it is. If its not native on windows, then its not native on Linux, OSX or any other OS either.
Member since:2006-02-11
Member since:
2005-06-29
No you wouldn't. Google has stated that they want to offer fully native versions for each platform, and Qt, while a very good platform, is NOT native to Windows and OS X.