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> Following the acquisition, Digia plans to quickly enable Qt on Android, iOS and Windows 8 platforms. Gods have finally heard my prayers. What have they been

by densh 14y ago

> Following the acquisition, Digia plans to quickly enable Qt on Android, iOS and Windows 8 platforms. Gods have finally heard my prayers. What have they been waiting for all this years?

masklinn 14y ago
> What have they been waiting for all this years? Nokia bought Trolltech in early-to-mid 2008 (initial offer announced in January, purchase finalized in June). The iPhone SDK had been announced in October 2007 and been made available in February, Android 1.0 would only be released in September (though the beta had started in November 2007), the Windows 7 RTM would only happen in 2009 and W7P in 2010 so the Windows world was still "old windows" (on which regular Qt worked) and Windows Mobile 6. One can easily assume that, as soon as the deal was announced and likely to go through, Trolltech had little reason to work on porting Qt to non-nokia platforms (out of the 2 months or so they'd have had for the Android beta, and negative 2 months for iOS). And once Trolltech/Qt was part of Nokia, why would Nokia fund Qt/Android or Qt/iOS? The original plan was to build Nokia's own "next-generation platform" Maemo with it after all. As to third parties, they did attempt porting Qt (ultimately fizzling out, for the most part): * qt-iphone (Qt/Cocoa Touch) http://www.qt-iphone.com/Introduction.html http://www.qt-iphone.com/Introduction.html * Necessitas (Qt/Android) http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/necessitas/ http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/necessitas/
- skrebbel 14y ago
  > And once Trolltech/Qt was part of Nokia, why would Nokia fund Qt/Android or Qt/iOS? Actually, I expected they'd do exactly that, and was disappointed when they didn't. It's basically the same reason why Sun created Java. They made Java so that software developers could make software that ran on Windows and Linux. Oh eh, and on Sun computers. Which were very much losing the server OS wars at the time. You might say that Java didn't save Sun, but I like to think that maybe instead Java postponed its demise by many years. I think the same could've happened with Nokia. If Nokia sponsored the best way to make fast, snappy, great apps, in little time, that work comfortably and with a native feel on iOS and Android (oh eh, and also Nokia's current OS hobby), people'd churn out Nokia versions of their apps without much extra work. This might've significantly increased the app ecosystem for Nokia phones, which might have made more people buy the phones. A lot of people (and very much not just the geeks) do care that their favourite apps are supported and decent on a particular handset. I never understood why they didn't do this. At the time when many developers were still a bit nervous about learning Objective-C just to support one single platform, a good, company-supported Qt-for-all-phones could've made Qt the leading app toolkit by far. Qt sure had the head start, Nokia sure had the resources, and the Qt team sure had the skills. Sad.
- shurane 14y ago
  Were you following Qt closely, to know about all these Qt attempts? It's a shame that Qt on other platforms didn't work out... It would be a nice alternative to HTML5 and iOS and Android defaults.
isani 14y ago
I wonder if native UI rendering APIs will be available for these platforms. Will this be a simple wrapper and compile with few native hooks, like Flash on iOS? Or will they take a more integrated approach?
- veeti 14y ago
  Qt without native UI isn't Qt. I am very interested to see how they will manage to handle the difference in UI concepts between the three mobile platforms.
  - pilif 14y ago
    I might be slightly out of date, but IMHO Qt has always only emulated the look and feel of the platform it was running on by painting all their widgets on their own. While the themes were certainly very good (much better, than, say Java/Swing's "native" themes), Qt apps still left that uncanny-valley feeling.
    - veeti 14y ago
      Out of all the cross-platform toolkits Qt is the absolute best. For example, the Windows themes are literally flawless. It also takes into account so many things that other toolkits don't: native (file picker) dialogs, proper button order, paddings, etc.
      - infinite8s 14y ago
        That's because on Windows and OS X, Qt uses the operating system to paint native widgets, and uses the corresponding helper dialogs provided by the system.
    - maggit 14y ago
      I can verify that your information is out of date. The widgets are to varying degrees actually native or drawn with OS functionality for drawing native widgets. However, this is not all it takes to escape the uncanny-valley feeling. For example, the dialog layout still has to be correct, and lots of developers don't make the effort to achieve this.
akandiah 14y ago
It's been possible to write Qt applications for Android for a while now: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/28/necessitas/ http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/28/necessitas/
- shadowmint 14y ago
  Have you actually tried using that? Its really hard to get running. Supporting android and allowing cross platform QT based applications would be an amazing step in the right direction for QT, and quite frankly, android. Yes please!
mtgx 14y ago
Well the fact that Nokia bought it and did nothing with it for a few years certainly didn't help.
- dkersten 14y ago
  Nokia did excellent work on Qt 4.x, QtQuick/QML and QtCreator/QtSDK as well as a lot of the work for the upcoming Qt 5. Saying they did nothing with it for a few years isn't at all true and is not a fair statement as they did a lot of great work on Qt. Not to mention that they were the ones who released it under the LGPL! Having said that, I'm both extremely happy and excited that Digia have bought Qt entirely and that they plan to support both iOS and Android, something I've been wishing would be supported for a couple of years now but didn't see as something that could happen under Nokia's ownership.

by densh 14y ago

> Following the acquisition, Digia plans to quickly enable Qt on Android, iOS and Windows 8 platforms. Gods have finally heard my prayers. What have they been waiting for all this years?

masklinn 14y ago

> What have they been waiting for all this years? Nokia bought Trolltech in early-to-mid 2008 (initial offer announced in January, purchase finalized in June). The iPhone SDK had been announced in October 2007 and been made available in February, Android 1.0 would only be released in September (though the beta had started in November 2007), the Windows 7 RTM would only happen in 2009 and W7P in 2010 so the Windows world was still "old windows" (on which regular Qt worked) and Windows Mobile 6. One can easily assume that, as soon as the deal was announced and likely to go through, Trolltech had little reason to work on porting Qt to non-nokia platforms (out of the 2 months or so they'd have had for the Android beta, and negative 2 months for iOS). And once Trolltech/Qt was part of Nokia, why would Nokia fund Qt/Android or Qt/iOS? The original plan was to build Nokia's own "next-generation platform" Maemo with it after all. As to third parties, they did attempt porting Qt (ultimately fizzling out, for the most part): * qt-iphone (Qt/Cocoa Touch) http://www.qt-iphone.com/Introduction.html http://www.qt-iphone.com/Introduction.html * Necessitas (Qt/Android) http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/necessitas/ http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/necessitas/

skrebbel 14y ago
> And once Trolltech/Qt was part of Nokia, why would Nokia fund Qt/Android or Qt/iOS? Actually, I expected they'd do exactly that, and was disappointed when they didn't. It's basically the same reason why Sun created Java. They made Java so that software developers could make software that ran on Windows and Linux. Oh eh, and on Sun computers. Which were very much losing the server OS wars at the time. You might say that Java didn't save Sun, but I like to think that maybe instead Java postponed its demise by many years. I think the same could've happened with Nokia. If Nokia sponsored the best way to make fast, snappy, great apps, in little time, that work comfortably and with a native feel on iOS and Android (oh eh, and also Nokia's current OS hobby), people'd churn out Nokia versions of their apps without much extra work. This might've significantly increased the app ecosystem for Nokia phones, which might have made more people buy the phones. A lot of people (and very much not just the geeks) do care that their favourite apps are supported and decent on a particular handset. I never understood why they didn't do this. At the time when many developers were still a bit nervous about learning Objective-C just to support one single platform, a good, company-supported Qt-for-all-phones could've made Qt the leading app toolkit by far. Qt sure had the head start, Nokia sure had the resources, and the Qt team sure had the skills. Sad.
shurane 14y ago
Were you following Qt closely, to know about all these Qt attempts? It's a shame that Qt on other platforms didn't work out... It would be a nice alternative to HTML5 and iOS and Android defaults.

isani 14y ago

I wonder if native UI rendering APIs will be available for these platforms. Will this be a simple wrapper and compile with few native hooks, like Flash on iOS? Or will they take a more integrated approach?

veeti 14y ago
Qt without native UI isn't Qt. I am very interested to see how they will manage to handle the difference in UI concepts between the three mobile platforms.
- pilif 14y ago
  I might be slightly out of date, but IMHO Qt has always only emulated the look and feel of the platform it was running on by painting all their widgets on their own. While the themes were certainly very good (much better, than, say Java/Swing's "native" themes), Qt apps still left that uncanny-valley feeling.
  - veeti 14y ago
    Out of all the cross-platform toolkits Qt is the absolute best. For example, the Windows themes are literally flawless. It also takes into account so many things that other toolkits don't: native (file picker) dialogs, proper button order, paddings, etc.
    - infinite8s 14y ago
      That's because on Windows and OS X, Qt uses the operating system to paint native widgets, and uses the corresponding helper dialogs provided by the system.
  - maggit 14y ago
    I can verify that your information is out of date. The widgets are to varying degrees actually native or drawn with OS functionality for drawing native widgets. However, this is not all it takes to escape the uncanny-valley feeling. For example, the dialog layout still has to be correct, and lots of developers don't make the effort to achieve this.

akandiah 14y ago

It's been possible to write Qt applications for Android for a while now: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/28/necessitas/ http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/28/necessitas/

shadowmint 14y ago
Have you actually tried using that? Its really hard to get running. Supporting android and allowing cross platform QT based applications would be an amazing step in the right direction for QT, and quite frankly, android. Yes please!

mtgx 14y ago

Well the fact that Nokia bought it and did nothing with it for a few years certainly didn't help.

dkersten 14y ago
Nokia did excellent work on Qt 4.x, QtQuick/QML and QtCreator/QtSDK as well as a lot of the work for the upcoming Qt 5. Saying they did nothing with it for a few years isn't at all true and is not a fair statement as they did a lot of great work on Qt. Not to mention that they were the ones who released it under the LGPL! Having said that, I'm both extremely happy and excited that Digia have bought Qt entirely and that they plan to support both iOS and Android, something I've been wishing would be supported for a couple of years now but didn't see as something that could happen under Nokia's ownership.