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Nobody on OS X wants a Qt app. If you have any solid competition in the market from a company willing to produce a native app, you'll lose to them. No wonder y

by pbsdp 13y ago

Nobody on OS X wants a Qt app. If you have any solid competition in the market from a company willing to produce a native app, you'll lose to them. No wonder you're having issues on OS X.

MatthewPhillips 13y ago
Not all customers are design snobs. Some buy things because it does the task well.
- veeti 13y ago
  A better user interface _is_ "doing the task well". Functionality and design are not exclusive from each other.
  - MatthewPhillips 13y ago
    There's a massive amount of software that exists outside of note-taking apps where the customer will be more than happy to put up with different-looking buttons because the value the software provides is so high. There are many software categories where visual-design decisions are not the only competition advantage.
    - spellboots 13y ago
      Design is far more than just visual, and your dismissal of design as "different looking buttons" suggests that you don't really understand design very well.
      - dman 13y ago
        Implying that a well designed application cannot be made in any UI toolkit save one also doesnt show a good understanding of design.
        spellboots 13y ago
        I don't think anyone was, least of all me. In any case, I'll bite: Different UI toolkits make doing certain things hard, certain things easy, and some things damn near impossible without large effort on the part of the developer. So when the parent commenter says "Nobody on OS X wants a Qt app", I'd argue that yes, although you can make a "well designed QT app", it's much harder to make a "well designed OS X app" with QT. Why will it be less likely to be a well designed OS X app? Because it will be different to a Cocoa app made with interface builder, in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways. Sure you can code around these and make adjustments, but the level of effort and investment to get to the stage of if you'd just built it with a more suited tool for the job (Cocoa / Interface Builder on OS X) is quite high. This is why there is some truth the the admittedly generalised statement made above that "Nobody on OS X wants a Qt app".
        dman 13y ago
        I think a more useful statement is that "Nobody on OSX wants a poorly designed app because the platform has a high standard for design". It is possible to design well designed apps without using Cocoa - see Sublime Text.
        nsxwolf 13y ago
        Yes, but Sublime's UI consists almost entirely of a gigantic text window and the OS X menu bar.
joezydeco 13y ago
Mathematica on OS X uses Qt, I've never seen a complaint about it vs. using Cocoa.
- pbsdp 13y ago
  I have. It used to use X11, I saw even more complaints then. There aren't any competitors, however, so people use Mathematica. I use high-end expensive that are Qt-only too, but I would gladly switch if there were other options, because Qt is buggy, uses non-intuitive non-standard UI, exhibits poor performance due to impedance mismatches between the Mac and Qt event/threading models, and ultimately decreases overall utility of the UX.
  - berkut 13y ago
    Can you give me an example of the "non-intuitive non-standard UI"? This may well be true, but it's quite possible it's just the developer was lazy and didn't do all the effort to make it look native. Edit: in fact, I'll give an example: VirtualBox - it does look crap on OS X, but that's because the developers obviously didn't make any effort to make it look native. They've got icons in tabs pane buttons and huge toolbar buttons along the top (which isn't a unified toolbar btw - which would make it look more native), which goes completely against the way OS X apps tend to look.
    - pbsdp 13y ago
      VirtualBox, IDA Pro, Google Earth (in fact, everything from Google that uses Qt), EAGLE (PCB software), OpenSCAD, QGIS ... I've literally never been fooled by a Qt app -- a Mac user can spot that hot mess from a mile away. It's not just a matter of visual layout and UX, although that matters and always falls somewhere between subtly or completely wrong. The controls also tend to lag at weird times, behave slightly strangely, demonstrate unusual font metrics, etc. The apps tend to exhibit bugs related to menu bar event handling, window management, on and on, and crash more than any other apps I use daily. This isn't a huge surprise given that Cocoa is designed to be the first and only gatekeeper between events, the OS, UI controls, and Cocoa's main event loop, and most of what makes Mac apps a Mac app has to do with the APIs and integration that you lose first-class access to once you deploy Qt -- that includes 'simple' things like UI layout metrics, which Qt has to re-implement. I abandoned almost all those Qt apps on my list above. I even dropped EAGLE, despite being "native", in favor of Altera on Windows, which I paid a hefty premium for in no small part because it wasn't a pile of broken UX, Windows or not. I still use IDA Pro, but the minute http://www.hopperapp.com/ http://www.hopperapp.com/ can replace my IDA Pro usage, I'll switch in a heartbeat.
dman 13y ago
Yes because the UI toolkit is the ultimate differentiator when it comes to all products.
berkut 13y ago
In fact they do: Phil Schiller himself on 10th June at the WWDC keynote mentioned that we've ported Mari to OS X, and he was extremely impressed with it and the fact that we've ported it. It's heavily Qt-based, and doesn't really follow any Apple design guidelines. But it's the best 3D texture painting app in the world for high-end work.

by pbsdp 13y ago

Nobody on OS X wants a Qt app. If you have any solid competition in the market from a company willing to produce a native app, you'll lose to them. No wonder you're having issues on OS X.

MatthewPhillips 13y ago

Not all customers are design snobs. Some buy things because it does the task well.

veeti 13y ago
A better user interface _is_ "doing the task well". Functionality and design are not exclusive from each other.
- MatthewPhillips 13y ago
  There's a massive amount of software that exists outside of note-taking apps where the customer will be more than happy to put up with different-looking buttons because the value the software provides is so high. There are many software categories where visual-design decisions are not the only competition advantage.
  - spellboots 13y ago
    Design is far more than just visual, and your dismissal of design as "different looking buttons" suggests that you don't really understand design very well.
    - dman 13y ago
      Implying that a well designed application cannot be made in any UI toolkit save one also doesnt show a good understanding of design.
      - spellboots 13y ago
        I don't think anyone was, least of all me. In any case, I'll bite: Different UI toolkits make doing certain things hard, certain things easy, and some things damn near impossible without large effort on the part of the developer. So when the parent commenter says "Nobody on OS X wants a Qt app", I'd argue that yes, although you can make a "well designed QT app", it's much harder to make a "well designed OS X app" with QT. Why will it be less likely to be a well designed OS X app? Because it will be different to a Cocoa app made with interface builder, in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways. Sure you can code around these and make adjustments, but the level of effort and investment to get to the stage of if you'd just built it with a more suited tool for the job (Cocoa / Interface Builder on OS X) is quite high. This is why there is some truth the the admittedly generalised statement made above that "Nobody on OS X wants a Qt app".
        dman 13y ago
        I think a more useful statement is that "Nobody on OSX wants a poorly designed app because the platform has a high standard for design". It is possible to design well designed apps without using Cocoa - see Sublime Text.
        nsxwolf 13y ago
        Yes, but Sublime's UI consists almost entirely of a gigantic text window and the OS X menu bar.

joezydeco 13y ago

Mathematica on OS X uses Qt, I've never seen a complaint about it vs. using Cocoa.

pbsdp 13y ago
I have. It used to use X11, I saw even more complaints then. There aren't any competitors, however, so people use Mathematica. I use high-end expensive that are Qt-only too, but I would gladly switch if there were other options, because Qt is buggy, uses non-intuitive non-standard UI, exhibits poor performance due to impedance mismatches between the Mac and Qt event/threading models, and ultimately decreases overall utility of the UX.
- berkut 13y ago
  Can you give me an example of the "non-intuitive non-standard UI"? This may well be true, but it's quite possible it's just the developer was lazy and didn't do all the effort to make it look native. Edit: in fact, I'll give an example: VirtualBox - it does look crap on OS X, but that's because the developers obviously didn't make any effort to make it look native. They've got icons in tabs pane buttons and huge toolbar buttons along the top (which isn't a unified toolbar btw - which would make it look more native), which goes completely against the way OS X apps tend to look.
  - pbsdp 13y ago
    VirtualBox, IDA Pro, Google Earth (in fact, everything from Google that uses Qt), EAGLE (PCB software), OpenSCAD, QGIS ... I've literally never been fooled by a Qt app -- a Mac user can spot that hot mess from a mile away. It's not just a matter of visual layout and UX, although that matters and always falls somewhere between subtly or completely wrong. The controls also tend to lag at weird times, behave slightly strangely, demonstrate unusual font metrics, etc. The apps tend to exhibit bugs related to menu bar event handling, window management, on and on, and crash more than any other apps I use daily. This isn't a huge surprise given that Cocoa is designed to be the first and only gatekeeper between events, the OS, UI controls, and Cocoa's main event loop, and most of what makes Mac apps a Mac app has to do with the APIs and integration that you lose first-class access to once you deploy Qt -- that includes 'simple' things like UI layout metrics, which Qt has to re-implement. I abandoned almost all those Qt apps on my list above. I even dropped EAGLE, despite being "native", in favor of Altera on Windows, which I paid a hefty premium for in no small part because it wasn't a pile of broken UX, Windows or not. I still use IDA Pro, but the minute http://www.hopperapp.com/ http://www.hopperapp.com/ can replace my IDA Pro usage, I'll switch in a heartbeat.

dman 13y ago

Yes because the UI toolkit is the ultimate differentiator when it comes to all products.

berkut 13y ago

In fact they do: Phil Schiller himself on 10th June at the WWDC keynote mentioned that we've ported Mari to OS X, and he was extremely impressed with it and the fact that we've ported it. It's heavily Qt-based, and doesn't really follow any Apple design guidelines. But it's the best 3D texture painting app in the world for high-end work.