Submitted by “Nokia has announced the availability of the first Qt 4.6 beta release. Version 4.6 represents a significant milestone, the first release since Nokia’s acquisition of Trolltech, the company that originally created Qt. The open source C++ application development toolkit has evolved considerably under Nokia’s stewardship and has undergone noteworthy technical and licensing changes.”
Excellent toolkit. Among, if not the, the very best. Only…too bad its C++
Really great that it is C++!
There are Java bindings if that’s more your cup-of-tea. (See QT Jambi on the QT site)
Well there is a lot of active work going on with Qt language bindings at the momeent. We have two Pythons (PyQt and PySide), QtRuby, PerlQt, Qyoto (C#), Common Lisp, Lua, and finally two QtScripts (a Qt Labs one and one based on the ‘Smoke’ libraries).
I have to disagree with you and have to say “fortunately it is C++” and in relation to “excellent” toolkit, I will probably be flamed for this but have you tried their QTDesigner? *It’s joke!* I’ve used Visual C++, C++ Builder, wxDev-C++ and QTDesigner (as a GUI designer) and I felt very restrained esepcially because I can’t adjust those stupid windows that take 99% of the space + things not behaving as expected.
From the article it mentions that the new version of QT is supported on s60, Maemo 5 and maemo 6. maemo 6? Maemo 5 hasn’t been released yet! Its so tantalizingly torturous to have all of these nokia stores about the n900 and maemo as if they were out for decades and old hat by now. I want it now! I’m not sure if there was ever a piece of hardware I wanted more, but knew I would never actually buy due to price. Its the most awesome thing I will never buy, since the neogeo.
I wonder if nokia gives a discount to employees. I also wonder if they are hiring.
I used to work for Nokia. You can forget about employees discounts.
Its probably best for them I don’t apply, anyways. I think I was the last one to apply to Be, before it died. Plus, they’d probably make me program in erlang. Which would be cool, but I don’t think the erlang programmers would be allowed near the mobile hardware.
They tend to have “developer program” for these devices, where you can apply for one at reduced rate if you meet some criteria (and are likely to make progs for it).
They definitely are hiring, these days you can’t go to a tech website without hitting their job ads for maemo developers.
Interesting… Very Interesting…
I was really worried when Nokia bought QT, but the truth is they are doing one hell of a good job with it.
I used to support Qt everywhere in online and offline discussions as one of the best, if not the best, examples of code in the C++ land. But now, I have changed my mind. Qt is officially bloatware and a step back for C++, for the following reasons:
1) the use of the archaic signals & slots system. Not type safe, since it relies on string parsing, and it requires a lot of upfront design (if you forget to make one of your methods a slot, then you can not connect it to a signal). Using strings for signals & slots does not in any way help in the design of the Qt Designer, because there are many other designers that use typesafe signals and slots systems and they don’t have any issues. The signals and slots system is also incompatible with the official C++ lambda functions in the upcoming C++0x.
2) the layout system is horrible. Instead of a simple system of boxes, you have a myriad of options, including using layout classes, using widgets for layout, using size hints, preferable sizes, resizing policies etc.
3) the Model-View-Controller system is unnecessary and introduces extreme bloat in the library. In Qt 3, things were simple. In Qt 4, there are tons of abstract base classes, interfaces and models to learn.
4) Each class has hundreds of methods. It’s very difficult to learn.
5) Qt does not use smart pointers. This makes it painful to integrate with other libraries.
6) The Designer is unintuitive, to say the least.
7) if you don’t use the IDE extensions, you are pretty much screwed. You have to use the MOC by hand. The MOC sucks, as it is quite unnecessary, and the same things it does can be done with plain C++.
Unfortunately, for all the above disadvantages, Qt remains the only serious option for development of professional applications. The other frameworks (wxWidgets, MFC, etc) are inferior, by all accounts.