Re: Strong language about Cocoa and Qt.
Re: Strong language about Cocoa and Qt.
- Subject: Re: Strong language about Cocoa and Qt.
- From: Keith Bauer <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 23:12:42 +1200
I just have a few points I haven't seen here, related to why we use Qt,
and in what ways each technology is better than the other.
First, Qt _is_ the native toolkit for a platform -- Linux/KDE -- that
is, some vast proportion of Linux desktops. It may be substandard on
Mac OS X and Windows, but at least it's available for those platforms.
As a non-Windows-user, it looks pretty good on Windows to me. The Mac
OS X port is horrible ;)
Second, Qt Designer is a still a piece of junk. Every day we use it we
curse it, and wonder if we couldn't get away with Cocoa after all.
Unfortunately, Windows is a necessity. To be fair, it has a much
harder job than IB, since the interfaces have to work on multiple
platforms, but it still does a shockingly bad job.
Third, Qt's design is much simpler than Cocoa's. It's much easier to
get started, because there are many fewer interactions to understand.
Once you get beyond Qt Hello World, though, you start to realize why
Cocoa works the way it does. We frequently find ourselves asking "why
doesn't this work like Cocoa?!". The lack of a decent table/tree view
is an almost-fatal flaw in the toolkit.
Fourth, Trolltech's developer support is _much_ better than Apple's.
Paying money certainly helps, I'm sure, but I don't think even
Premier/Select members get the kind of treatment from Apple we've had
from Trolltech. Important bugs are usually patched for us within a
couple of days, and we always get an acknowledgement of a bug report
and updates on fixes and workarounds.
Fifth, C++ is a really bad language to write these kinds of programs
in. A significant proportion of Qt is devoted to hacking around C++'s
lack of dynamism. Why waste so much effort when you could start with a
programming language suitable for the task?
Hope that's not too much noise-to-signal,
Keith
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