Qt 5.3 has been released. The main focus for this release was performance, stability and usability. Nevertheless, Qt 5.3 has also gotten a fair amount of new features that help make developers' lives easier.
Qt is a cross-platform application and UI framework for developers using C++ or QML, a CSS & JavaScript like language.
Among the highlights of the 5.3 release are:
- Support for new platforms (Windows 8.1, WinRT, QNX)
- QQuickWidget a widget attempting to cross the gap between the new Qt Quick interfaces and traditional QWidget-based interfaces
- Compiled Qt Quick (only available in Enterprise version, sadly
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(Score: 3, Funny) by kaszz on Tuesday May 20 2014, @11:57AM
Does it come with free rebate on computer capacity upgrades? :P
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 20 2014, @05:37PM
It should require less computer capacity than 5.2.1 did...
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by RaffArundel on Tuesday May 20 2014, @12:03PM
Who wrote that summary?
You provided useful information, and that cannot be allowed!
Okay, more seriously - I always wanted to check out Qt, but got burned on "cross platform" actually meaning "looks equally ass" across platforms. Anyone here actually use it? What has been your experience actually porting to different platforms?
(Score: 3, Informative) by ticho on Tuesday May 20 2014, @12:25PM
That's exactly why I included the sentence - even though I am familiar with Qt, not everyone is. :)
I am writing an application in Qt (primarily for Linux), and so far, compilation for Windows was very easy, once I got the cross-compile toolchain working. The resulting app looked pretty much like a native application on Windows 7 would (ugly, of course, but natively ugly). No ifdefs needed so far. Of course, the application is in very early phase, only a simple window with a top menu bar, a toolbar and few tree views.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday May 20 2014, @06:08PM
Well the sentence isn't exactly true.
Anything that can be done in one closed syntactical language can be done in another, and there is nothing special about calling one set of low-level APIs as opposed to calling another one.
You can pretty much build a bridge module from Windows API calls to QT and avoid a great deal of code conversion.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by ticho on Thursday May 22 2014, @12:43PM
You can complain to owners of qt-project.org site, I swiped the sentence directly from there. :)
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Tuesday May 20 2014, @12:30PM
I agree, I have heard of it, but had no idea what it was.
Very useful information indeed.
(Score: 3, Informative) by dannagle on Tuesday May 20 2014, @12:34PM
I've written a significant amount of software using Qt. I started with Qt4.8 on through Qt5.2. As for the desktop, the apps look and feel decently native. They perform well. All the code libraries are great. It is cross-platform, and I have had to do very little #ifdef to get it to do what I want. I have not had any complaints that my apps do not feel native.
As for mobile, I was not pleased at all. It felt very weird. I decided to rewrite my Android app to be pure native. Qt app on iOS felt very awkward. I was using QWidgets using Qt5.2. I have not done much with QtQuick. Maybe that would work better on mobile.
(Score: 4, Informative) by ticho on Tuesday May 20 2014, @01:06PM
Yes, Qt Quick is meant primarily for mobile (and other embedded) use. I don't like it for desktop, though - it doesn't look native at all, you have to invent your own CSS themes which would give your application specific look - that's something not usually wanted for a desktop app.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nishi.b on Tuesday May 20 2014, @01:38PM
I used it since Qt3, and for me it is one of the best designed and documented widget sets (compared to GTK for example).
Now I mostly use it from the Python bindings (PyQt or PySide), and develop software than runs on Linux/Windows/Mac OS X.
I just draw the interface in Qt Designer and write the code using it in Python or C++.
The look aspect may vary (under KDE it obviously looks native as KDE uses Qt, Windows I had not complaints, Mac OS X some menus where not shown as they belonged to a "subwindow" and some buttons did not look native).
I love the signal/slot design (you connect signals - such as 'button.clicked' to any function you want).
Now there is a lot more than widgets in Qt, I just began to look into QML (which is designed for mobile interfaces), the concurrency library (higher level than pthread) and even the Qt Multimedia library to play sound in a portable way.
The documentation is really good (see http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/index.html [qt-project.org] ).
(Score: 5, Informative) by forkazoo on Tuesday May 20 2014, @04:16PM
It's an excellent API, but some wrinkles are inevitable. I am doing some odd multicontext OpenGL stuff in my current app, and it works on Linux and Windows, but not OS-X, so I'll need to do some digging to see what is actually going wrong there. My UI design is based on having a menubar in each window, as is common on Windows. That's obviously not a native design on OS-X. I could have written some more code to do it "properly" but my design would seem a bit odd, and less consistent between platforms if I had a bunch of window-specific menus that got stuffed in the OS-X global menu bar. That's down to a design decision on my part though, not an API problem.
Likewise, my app builds some shared libraries as part of the build process. OS-X is pickier than Linux about library deoendencies, and Windows requires import vs. export nonsense. So, porting a tangled web of interdependent shared libs from Linux to everywhere would be potentially a lot of work. Again, not an API issue, just a limitation resulting from the realities of different platforms.
If you try to go all the way to building a single code base that includes desktop + mobile, it'll obviously seem even further from home on some of your platforms.
But as far as a simple widgets app on a desktop platform, it'll generally look sane all over.
My biggest complaint right now with Qt is that they are still dealing with the fallout of inventing QML. Qt 4.5 was a really elegant API. Qt 5.X much less so, and still having growing pains. They ripped a bunch of OpenGL stuff out of the main widgets GUI API and deprecated all their "QGL*" classes. But, they still haven't actually replaced them all with the new "QOpenGL*" classes. So, QGLContext is deprecated and you should use the new QOpenGLContext, which is fine, except that QGLWidget hasn't yet been replaced by the new QOpenGLWidget, and the old class doesn't know what to do with the new context class, and it's all a bit shitty wading through how to wire the new and the old. Supposedly they'll finally have QOpenGLWidget in 5.4. My guess is that 5.5 will be about as sane as useable 4.5 was.
There is also the matter of Python bindings, if you care about that sort of thing. Around 4.5, there was PyQt. It was good. Well, it was the only choice. It was unfortunately made by a 3rd party under annoying licensing terms, so Nokia invented PySide. Which was just as good, but under more liberal terms, maintained by the actual Qt developers. It was a whole new world of goodness. Then, it was basically left to rot. PySide hasn't really been updated for Qt 5, and it still doesn't work with Python 3. So, you have to choose between the annoying license and being beholden to a 3rd party, or being stuck with old technology being beholden to a first party who demonstratedly doesn't give a damn.
Also, stay away from all the media player API's unless you are trying to write yet another movie player app. If you are needing frame accurate access, and care about color space, or doing anything even vaguely removed from just playing a video, look elsewhere.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday May 20 2014, @05:36PM
I don't know how it works as a framework but i have used products made with QT like QTweb [qtweb.net] and it looks nice across multiple platforms so in that respect i'd say mission accomplished.
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(Score: -1) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 20 2014, @12:38PM
What does that mean specifically?
(Score: 3, Funny) by ticho on Tuesday May 20 2014, @01:25PM
I don't know, maybe it's compatibility with USA? :)
(Score: 1) by Yog-Yogguth on Thursday May 22 2014, @04:56PM
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/usability [reference.com]
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