Trolltech Plans GPL Release For Qt/Mac 110
michae1m writes "Trolltech today announced that Qt/Mac will be released under the GPL (GNU General Public License) at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2003 in San Francisco on June 23rd (http://www.trolltech.com/newsroom/announcements/0 0000129.html). For some screenshots check out dot.kde.org/1055852609. This means many X11 Qt apps will be easily rebuilt for OS X without requiring X11, very cool."
Re:does that mean (Score:3, Funny)
Not only is it good for Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
*That's* what's been missing from Open Source and it's arriving not a moment too soon.
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Good point, except that the ui for the mac and for linux are likely to still be a bit different. Things like the "master" menu bar, and the dock are unique to mac, and so the version a mac user uses will likely still be different than the x version...
That said, things can only get better...
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
...and in apple, there are designated places where one expects to find things like "Quit", and "Preferences", that are likely different on other platforms. I think apple did this on purpose, but it makes writing cross-platorm gui apps annoying because the mac version will always be a bit different. I mean you might get around it with compiler directives, or something like that, but it has to be considered.
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
In a lot of ways, I wonder why frameworks don't deal with a meta-structure and then arrange menus to fit the platform. Admitially, a lot of resources are unique to a platform (icons of different sizes), but everyone has "preferences", customize the toolbar, copy / paste, find, program specific, application level (quit), and file level (open, close, etc.). Assign location at a "higher level" and let the framework do it jobs for the machine.
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:2)
Not that OS X is terrible, but the UI is NOT as good as OS 7 through 9... for no obvious reason. (I suspect internal rivalry between traditional Apple factions and NeXT factions).
The OS X finder feels clunky, and very much as if was designed by someone working from a marketing features list, someone who didn't really grok the traditional Mac user experience.
Candy-colored buttons on the window that give you clue, othe
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
An example, on Mac OS X hints I saw how to create a software airport bridge that turns on at logon. The fellow was a unix hacker and got stock libraries, recompiled them and tweaked until he was happy. I look at that and say, hmmm, why not just run a login applescript to do the same thing (even if the app is not normally scriptable, UI scripting is out and you can script just about anything now).
I suspect that a lot of the features that were marked missing in 10.0 are no longer missing at 10.2. I expect the list to grow shorter as time goes on and 10.3 etc are released. At the same time I expect that UI advances like the services menu will improve and provide an overall *better* experience than classic MACOS. So where are we? I agree that we're overall better but even the down side isn't as gloomy as you paint. Apple has to wow with new product as it backfills bringing over old classic OS features it couldn't get to in time for 10.0. This slows the process down but it's a temporary price for an astounding OS transition.
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, they did, but the short answer is that Apple has been doing it longer than anybody else. Any time somebody creates a new windows-and-mouse interface, you have to ask yourself, "Why did they choose to be different from the Mac way here?" Often the answer is, "To be like Windows," but that just raises the question of why did Microsoft choose to be different from the Mac?
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:2)
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that QT is not the wrong answer but rather the right answer to a question you aren't considering. There's likely to be a market for it for people who want Mac programs and QT software to reside on the same machine. Not having to have the overhead of X11 is a real plus and should be viewed that way.
It can't provide NSUserDefaults... (Score:2)
Cocoa is being reimplemented on top of Carbon; the work began in Jaguar, and while it probably won't be quite finished in Panther, it should be a lot closer. I see this as a Good Thing, because it gives them the opportunity to add Carbon's greater variety of controls to Cocoa, while forcing them to patch the gaping OS-integration holes currently in Ca
Re:It can't provide NSUserDefaults... (Score:2)
Untrue. Both Cocoa and Carbon are built "on top" of a layer called "Core Foundation" - that's the "CF" in CFUserDefaults, CFString, CFDictionary, and many other low-level constructs.
Still true... (Score:3, Interesting)
That is true. But CoreFoundation only goes so far; there are still certain things, such as most UI controls, which are still implemented using two totally different codebases for Cocoa and Carbon. Apple is working on unifying these; that is what I meant when I said that Cocoa is being reimplemented on top of Carbon. In the pro
Re:Still true... (Score:1, Informative)
Wrong again. HIView is essentially interchangeable with NSView, modulo a few minor tweaks. HIView is part of HIToolbox which is not part of Carbon. It replaces, in fact, Carbon's Control Manager.
HIToolbox is to AppKit as CoreFoundation is to Foundation: a lower-level programming toolkit on which the higher-level interfaces are based. M
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:2)
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:2)
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:2, Interesting)
It hasn't been missing, it's just been something Mac users wanted. Yes in that sense Open Source is missing a lot, but that is part of its advantage. When it is missing something and people want it, it gets written.
However I will admit that it is exciting to see how things pan out when a creative Mac user brings a native GIMP port to the Mac. The lack of a Mac interface (whatever that is really meant to mean) by design s
Re:Not only is it good for Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
The mac community is the art critic of the computer world. It's not that something is not written and so you supply the service. It doesn't work that way. The OSS community is about having an itch and then scratching it. The mac community is about scratching it *in the right way* so that it's done quickly, efficiently, and with the minimum possibility of infection. It doesn't change your feature set so much as change every implementation of the feature se
How ironic... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How ironic... (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody.
IS trolltech IP still owned by SCO? (Score:3, Insightful)
see this article [forbes.com] in Forbes. They point out that SCO's parent comapny has twice before bought small compaines (e.g. SCO) then sued larger ones for the IP. For example they sued Microsoft and won. They sued another company that settled. Now they are suing IBM and will probably win even if no one in the linux world can beleive it. They owned troll t
Re:How ironic... (Score:2)
Still, they clearly didn't want to license Qt itself for whatever reason, and they don't want to make Safari free software, again for no real apparant reason, so this release of Qt means little for Safari anyway.
Re:How ironic... (Score:2)
The reql question is... (Score:1, Interesting)
Sorry... I have flashbacks of compling QT and had to come back the next day. That thing takes forever to compile.
On a positive note, any sort of cross-platform libs are most definitely a plus. Maybe this will be a sign to other projects of mac support(native gtk for my lil Mac:-) I really hate loading up X11... especially since my problem with linux was X.
Yeah Baby! (Score:3, Interesting)
Several of these [gimp.org] applications [ethereal.com] are used daily by our engineering team.
Having a native (or at least X11-free) version of these tools is a real bonus for us; but in particular, it's a bonus for the less sophisticated users that would benefit from using applications as though they were OS/X native applications.
Think about CEO or tech support people who don't (won't) want to run X11 just in order to look at that packet trace or 'jiggle that SNMP MIB'.
I, for one, look forward to this, and will happily help port a few key applications to the Darwin / OS X platform.
This, and portage all in one week! Good News For All!
Re:Yeah Baby! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yeah Baby! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah Baby! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yeah Baby! (Score:2)
Re:Yeah Baby! (Score:1)
What's more exciting... (Score:5, Interesting)
On a side note, I've been waiting for a good C++ development library for Mac OS X. Cocoa is nice, but I'm not so good with Obj C yet, and QT may be just the thing I'm looking for. It'll work on Windows and Linux as well, so that's an added bonus. I'd also like to see Cocoa bindings for C++
Re:What's more exciting... (Score:5, Informative)
Trust me. I speak the truth. You can become a freaking EXPERT in Objective C in a few days or a few hours, depending on how good at C you are. If you know C--the language, not all the fiddly little calls that make up the standard library--then you can be up to speed with Objective C in a matter of hours.
The best part is that you can forget practically everything about the C standard library when you're programming with Cocoa. You simply don't need it. The worst, the absolute mother-loving worst, is socket programming. Casting structs to other kinds of structs, converting from host order to network order... ugh.
Here's the code to establish a socket-based server in Cocoa:
NSSocketPort* socketPort = [[NSSocketPort alloc] initWithTCPPort:SOMETHING];
NSFileHandle* listeningSocket = [[NSFileHandle alloc] initWithFileDescriptor:[socketPort socket]];
[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(acceptConnection:) name:NSFileHandleConnectionAcceptedNotification object:nil];
[listeningSocket acceptConnectionInBackgroundAndNotify];
That's it. And here's the extra code to advertise that service with Rendezvous:
NSNetService* service = [[NSNetService alloc] initWithDomain:@"" type:@"_SOMETHING._tcp." name:@"SOMETHING" port:portNumber];
[service setDelegate:self];
[service publish];
Woo.
Re:What's more exciting... (Score:1)
I'm still learning the Cocoa standard library for Mac OS X.
Re:What's more exciting... (Score:3, Funny)
You make it sound like being more intuitive than STL is difficult...
Re:What's more exciting... (Score:2)
Re:What's more exciting... (Score:1, Insightful)
A better criticism would have been that ObjC supports dynamic dispatch which in a liberal sense allows run time introspection, manipulation and use of methods an object provides. Java provides the same power with the reflection API. And dynamic dispatch is something dylan advocates like to brag about.
Raw C++ doesn't provide dynamic dispatch capabilites, and neither does libsig being C++ based. But Qt use the meta object compiler (moc) and Q_OBJECT t
Re:What's more exciting... (Score:2)
What about the Objective C++ compiler? I thought the whole idea was that you could make Cocoa calls (written in Objective C) from inside your C++ objects.
Re:What's more exciting... (Score:2)
Note that this will use SOCKS if available, and integrate with your main loop.
Personally, I find the C version far more r
Re:What's more exciting... (Score:2)
Object remoting is rarely used. And you can obviously do that as well if you like using sunrpc or CORBA.
Re:What's more exciting... (Score:5, Informative)
If you really want C++, you can also go for Carbon. It's possible to use Carbon Events and nibs for a semi-current development approach which utilizes Mac OS X's full capabilities.
Re:What's more exciting... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What's more exciting... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What's more exciting... (Score:2)
Re:What's more exciting... (Score:2)
The C++ standard is big. Really big. I'm sure that had Qt's engineers thought about the problem, they would have been able to use templates in new and interesting ways to get the same effect.
Use wxWindows !!! (Score:1)
Qt may be good, but is native only in Linux, and in windows wx is way better (you have the source, it's not dual-licensed like qt).
And the socket based server is a childs play in wxWindows too (event driven sockets). See the sockets sample.
This unifies OSX with Linux/BSD/Solaris (Score:5, Interesting)
QT has given Linux alot. KDE became so big that GNOME had to be created as a free alternative before QT/X11 became GPLed. Now the Apple port will not only help apple applications, they will help Linux applications giving them more weight. Theres suddenly another big reason to shift your entire software project to QT despite any costs.
My only gripe is the really high license cost for a student. Ive built several applications in win32 but cant use them afer the 30 days. They relied heavily on printing so I couldnt port them to Linux. I even offered developers with the license to compile them for me for a small fee. I hope Trolltech sees this and if they really want to hide their code from pirates, provide a compilation service at a much lower cost for projects with low earning potential or value. I dont mind being the Toronto office manager of compilation services at all. Will even code for food(hey its 2003, not 1998)
Re:This unifies OSX with Linux/BSD/Solaris (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.trolltech.com/download/qt/noncomm.ht
Re:This unifies OSX with Linux/BSD/Solaris (Score:4, Interesting)
I sent TrollTech an email asking if the 3.x version of QT was going to be released for Non-Commercial use. The answer was basically no as that is how we make our money and we can't kill the goose that is laying the golden egg.
Now that begs the question of will the shutdown non-commercial for Linux if it becomes a big player on the desktop? I know that they say that they won't do that, but they were big into the non-commercial license for MS-Windows when it released.
Re:This unifies OSX with Linux/BSD/Solaris (Score:1)
And, obviously, if it comes to it they will.
Qt apps don't BEHAVE like Mac apps! (Score:2, Funny)
Apple and KDE (Score:4, Interesting)
There will, of course, be X11 seamlessly integrated into the OS, and KDE apps will run, in beautiful native Aqua, just as any other Aqua app, with an icon in the dock (maybe blocky à la Classic, but still).
Geeks will of course adore it, and as professed by Apple's marketing for OS X [apple.com], geeks are one of their target user bases.
It will be very interesting to see what happens to GTK now. I was just really starting to love some of GNOME's eye candy, but QT/Mac has the edge, I feel.
iqu
Re:Apple and KDE (Score:3, Insightful)
GTK > QT for commercial development. The reason is cost. GTK is LGPL, so you can link commercial stuff to it without a problem. QT is GPL, so you need to get a licence to use it commercially.
The Mac is a very commercial oriented platform, just like windows, so commercial development may well decide GTK is the way to go.
Re:Apple and KDE (Score:1)
It's like lgpl but it puts absolutely no restrictions on redistribution of binaries, commercially or otherwise.
That's even more free.
Re:Apple and KDE (Score:2)
KOffice vs. MS Office v. X (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite a few people wondered why Apple went with KHTML instead of Gecko in developing a new browser and I think the answer was proabably because of the companies involved - Trolltech is not AOL/Netscape -, and that KHTML is much more lightweight than geckko could ever be, thereby giving Apple the same ability to offer developers the same HTML rendering API on the Mac as MS has done with IE on Windows. Apple could very well be considering doing the same thing with KOffice.
KOffice is way behind OpenOffice in terms of maturity and features, but KHTML was also behind Gecko in terms of standards support until Apple developers started adding to it. I think Apple's developers would very well be capable of adding the features to KOffice that it lacked, including MS Office document support. They might do this in a manner similar to what they've done with KHTML and webcore: creating "Office" i.e. word processing, spreadsheet and presentation API's, giving these back to the community and creating a closed product ala Safari that would be based on them.
This is wild speculation, but many people have wondered why Apple has done almost nothing Appleworks since OSX entered the scene. I don't think it was only fear of MS cutting off Office for the Mac that prompted this.
Re:KOffice vs. MS Office v. X (Score:2)
KHTML was not written by Trolltech but is dependant on the Qt toolkit.
Re:KOffice vs. MS Office v. X (Score:3, Insightful)
Arg! Arg! Arg! (Score:5, Funny)
And now I discover it was completely unnecessary!
Arg!
( on the other hand, it's been a good experience. cocoa is a beautiful API, and rewriting the backend in pure c++/stl has actually improved it, since the stl is really, *really* quite good. )
Re:Arg! Arg! Arg! (Score:2, Funny)
Jammin' (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing that bears thinking about, however, is whether this release will drive the world of free software to be more and more Mac driven, and at least somewhat less Linux driven. It's fairly apparent that Safari is the driving force behind KHTML now -- with this release, will OSX become the driving force behind other elements of KDE? What will this mean for Linux?
Re:Jammin' (Score:2)
The vast majority of free software is written on Linux and then ported to other platforms. If you think being able to run KDE/Qt on a Mac will change this, then I'd point you towards the presence of KDE on Windows - how many new developers did that bring to KDE? AFAIK none.
It's fairly apparent that Safari is the driving forc
Can anyone tell me... (Score:1)
Re:Can anyone tell me... (Score:3, Informative)
I could be wrong ... (Score:1)
Now I get it ! (Score:2, Interesting)
I assume that OS X 1.3 will now be released under the GPL as well.
Only on Slashdot... (Score:1)
KOffice (Score:1)
I hope it will be as fast as it is on KDE... Who will want to have mac OpenOffice when you can have koffice? I do not really want to wait 5 mins for OpenOffice to launch. and it is soo ugly...
totally free.. (Score:2)