Qt/Mac Application Developer Contest

whitefael writes "Trolltech is sponsoring a contest in order to increase the number of Qt/Mac applications available and to award the best commercially developed and free Qt-based applications on the Mac. The prize? A screaming Power Mac G5! The top ten will be announced at Apple's World Wide Developer (WWDC) Conference 2004, June 28-July 2. The top two from each category will also receive iPods. Anyone out there interested? You have until May 7, 2004 to enter."

I so wish...

[Currawong]

...that Open Office, The Gimp, Bluefish, Abiword, axyftp and some of the G and K apps were fully OSX native (GUI native as well, not just only usable in X11.app) - there's so much that open source apps and Qt/Mac could bring to the Mac world in this way.

Re:I so wish...

[Llywelyn]

Part of the problem with this is that the ports brought over, while they are integrated with Aqua and much nicer than working with them through X11, still aren't pretty and still need work. I'm concerned that "Aquafication" will stop after it starts running, but that's only where the "fun" begins.

Take LyX/Mac as an example of this. I installed LyX/Mac earlier today to check it out, though I admit I was skeptical and have a strong preference for TeXShop and iTeXMac going into this. It's *significantly* nicer than using LyX through X11--its nice and clean, I can copy-and-paste out of it (but not into it), and its antialiased and gives good results.

It isn't, however, fully integrated.

The remaining issues range from major mechanical things such as paste to Cocoa-specific features such as services or the native built-in spell check that are nice to have around, to minor things like the icons reminding me of windows or that the command keys don't appear in the menus.

I think that this is a good program and I applaud it and it may see some use (though paste not working may be a deal killer for me on this particular app), and I really like that Qt/Mac is there and makes this an easier process but it is not going to be a panacea in getting software ported to Aqua.

Kinda unfair this contest...

[BibelBiber]

Unfair because the winner seems to be obvious. Take a close look at what this Ranger Rick has done so far: Ricks Blog on Qt/Mac [befunk.com]
That guy has almost completed porting KDE to Mac OS X. That is really cool stuff.

He and his companios really deserve the G5 and iPods and whatever else is to win :-)

Re:I so wish...

[WillAdams]

::applause::

I first heard of LyX when someone asked if it could be made to run in NeXTstep, and was immediately quite impressed and taken by the concept (What You See Is What You Mean document processor, see www.lyx.org for details).

I'd _really_ like to see such things as Services handled within QT though, so that decently coded apps would automagically, ``just work'', as they do with the Cocoa toolkit. I suspect this would really require effort by Apple along the lines of their work on khtml for Safari --- I've argued that Apple should jump off the MS Office document bandwagon for a long while, and using LyX as the basis for a document processor would be a great way to do that.

William