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Ask HN: Time to give up on Qt?

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41–50 of 72 posts

Re: Ask HN: Time to give up on Qt?

#41

It's time to give up _cross-platform_. Doesn't work well with the increasingly different UX concepts of different platforms anyway. The only viable cross-platform is the web.

I''m sure Autodesk, Virtualbox, Google Earth, Mathematica, VLC, Transmission, Scribus, Skype, etc, etc would be very interested to hear how unviable they are.

Re: Ask HN: Time to give up on Qt?

#42

It's time to give up _cross-platform_. Doesn't work well with the increasingly different UX concepts of different platforms anyway. The only viable cross-platform is the web.

The thing is, C++ is hard

Developing interfaces in html/js even factoring the added IE crap is a breeze compared to C++ development. Even with Qt sanding a lot of rough patches

Not that C++ per se is too complicated, rather, building an interface in C++ and doing "a desktop application" with it is a complex task, something that the web model was made to do

Now, for something like a headless application, C++ is fine (and of course it's harder than Python, but not a lot with STL, etc)

Re: Ask HN: Time to give up on Qt?

#43
post #41

It's time to give up _cross-platform_. Doesn't work well with the increasingly different UX concepts of different platforms anyway. The only viable cross-platform is the web.

I''m sure Autodesk, Virtualbox, Google Earth, Mathematica, VLC, Transmission, Scribus, Skype, etc, etc would be very interested to hear how unviable they are.

All of them were started in the past, when desktop programming was still considered a good thing.

Re: Ask HN: Time to give up on Qt?

#45

I was interested to see the claim that the dropbox client uses wxWidgets (actually wxPython) on this page: http://www.wxwidgets.org/

Looking at /Applications/Dropbox.app on my Mac, I do indeed see Python 2.5 in there, so it seems they are indeed using Python.

I don't see any obvious sign of wxPython in there, though. Nothing with "wx" in the name, for example.

Re: Ask HN: Time to give up on Qt?

#46

It's time to give up _cross-platform_. Doesn't work well with the increasingly different UX concepts of different platforms anyway. The only viable cross-platform is the web.

What is your cross-platform development experience and on what do you base your grandiose assertion?

I must ask because this just looks like webapp kool-aid. I am increasing my own investment in webdev and I still completely disagree with you.

Re: Ask HN: Time to give up on Qt?

#47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I''m sure Autodesk, Virtualbox, Google Earth, Mathematica, VLC, Transmission, Scribus, Skype, etc, etc would be very interested to hear how unviable they are.

All of them were started in the past, when desktop programming was still considered a good thing.

Please provide some proof when making such extraordinary remarks. Given their requirements, these companies would have to be insane to try to build their apps with web technologies. Are you really suggesting that they do CAD and VOIP using JavaScript?!

Re: Ask HN: Time to give up on Qt?

#48
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I''m sure Autodesk, Virtualbox, Google Earth, Mathematica, VLC, Transmission, Scribus, Skype, etc, etc would be very interested to hear how unviable they are.

All of them were started in the past, when desktop programming was still considered a good thing.

Native apps, be they desktop or mobile, still very much have their place. The iPhone is irrefutable proof of this. Right in the middle of the golden age of the web, Apple has built a ground breaking native app platform that has taken the world by storm. So much so that even web apps like Google+ and Facebook find themselves in an arms race to provide the best native clients.

Re: Ask HN: Time to give up on Qt?

#49

It's time to give up _cross-platform_. Doesn't work well with the increasingly different UX concepts of different platforms anyway. The only viable cross-platform is the web.

The thing is, C++ is hard Developing interfaces in html/js even factoring the added IE crap is a breeze compared to C++ development. Even with Qt sanding a lot of rough patches Not that C++ per se is too complicated, rather, building an interface in C++ and doing "a desktop application" with it is a complex task, something that the web model was made to do Now, for something like a headless application, C++ is fine (…

Hence QML. Right now I'm developing a desktop application with the interface done with QML and the main app in C++, and I would say the interface development is easy, as is connecting it to the C++.

The caveat at present is that the standard desktop widgets are not yet fully available from QML (see [1] for a recent update). For most of my application this doesn't matter (I haven't decided how I'll do the settings dialog yet), but for enterprise apps it quite likely does.

[1] http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2012/06/06/desktop-components-for-q...

Re: Ask HN: Time to give up on Qt?

#50
Qt is not going anywhere. I recently attended Akademy and the current QtCore maintainer, Thiago Macieira, showed some interesting stats: over 40% of the commits in the past few months (IIRC) came from non Nokia people.
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