The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website

http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2014/09/16/the-qt-company-introduces-a-unified-website-and-20e25-monthly-indie-mobile-package/

by emilsedgh • 12 years ago

198 145 12 years ago

blog.qt.digia.com

stevelaz9• 12 years ago

This++ I've used Qt for desktop apps as well as apps on Embedded Linux. I've even used it with a Lua wrapper API that made development even easier. Is it a bit bloated? Yes. But unless you are very constrained for memory and flash space it should fit in your embedded system. They also have a way for you to select which components you want to compile for your target, allowing you to control how much of the bloat you actually use. :)

tldr; I like Qt, and I'll use it again.

ColinCera2• 12 years ago

Which "Lua wrapper API" did you use?

stevelaz9• 12 years ago

I used lqt from https://github.com/mkottman/lqt. It worked out great for the project at the time.

gavanwoolery• 12 years ago

I've moved back and forth between QT and raw C++ a couple times. QT might be "bloated", but so will your proprietary program if you create something non-trivial (i.e. a cross-platform application with networking support, threads, font rendering, etc). The bloat has never bothered me that much, but what did bug me was when Digia took over and kind of mangled the code base a bit. It broke a lot of my code, I got frustrated and could not easily find the old version of QT to work with. I think this is a move in the right direction at least...

joshvm2• 12 years ago

I've run high performance code on QT without any problems. The DLL bloat is a bit annoying though there are ways to reduce the size of them. However, QT makes threading and concurrency so simple (and cross platform) that I wouldn't go with anything else.

We just switched our system to Linux to avoid Windows' awful file IO and the code compiled (as expected) without a single change. Love it.

0xFFC• 12 years ago

the problem is not this . the main problem with Qt is , it is not standard C++ library (or framework or toolkit or whatever you name it). All the moc crap ! made it useless .(yes I know , with hacking(or with little changing) it you can use it with other library like boost or anything . but in my mind this is not right way to do thing !

for example look at which one google chose for chrome in linux (before aura).Google chose gtk++ (which is much inferior than Qt in any ways , and as far as I am aware Qt licence was not issue with chrome) , but it is standard !

brongondwana• 12 years ago

gawd; a tl;dr for a single paragraph. Talk about constrained for memory and flash space and a way to select which components you want to compile...

iamtew• 12 years ago

Could someone explain this for me please? It's not really clear from the website, but is this any different from the Qt project? http://qt-project.org/

milliams9• 12 years ago

http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2014/09/16/the-qt-company-intr... should explain it.

untothebreach• 12 years ago

This blog post explains it: http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2014/09/16/the-qt-company-intr...

groovy2shoes• 12 years ago

Previously, there was the community-run Qt Project, as well as the commercial Qt (qt.digia.com). Those two projects are now merged. The announcement is here: http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2014/09/16/the-qt-company-intr...

gpvos• 12 years ago

Three people replied with the same link. It is clear that that link should replace the originally posted link.

milliams9• 12 years ago

It was posted an hour before at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8324111

It had a less exciting title though.

bshimmin• 12 years ago

800,000+ developers seems like an awful lot. I work mostly on the web - do I just not move in the right circles to meet these Qt developers?

selmnoo• 12 years ago

That seems about right to me. Qt is very popular among people making physical products on embedded systems and such. The last 3 places I worked at all used and loved Qt.

checker• 12 years ago

I just started using PySide which is a Qt wrapper for Python. So far it's been very good. I chose it because I can get familiar with Qt and eventually I may use it in my C++ projects too.

Qworg• 12 years ago

If you do web work, you likely won't meet anyone doing Qt. I've used it for robot and industrial machine UIs.

ColinCera2• 12 years ago

Almost all Linux developers have used Qt, because KDE, and Qt has been around a long time; a significant percentage of all C++ programmers have used Qt on one project or another.

acdha• 12 years ago

Linux developers who write GUI apps. The many people who write server apps are unlikely to have more than user experience.

malkia2• 12 years ago

Autodesk Maya, Motion Builder, p4v and many others

stevelaz9• 12 years ago

Although I use git these days and wouldn't go back to P4 if you paid me. I still sometimes use p4merge for my difftool and I always thought they did a great job with their client UI with Qt. So, yay for p4 and Qt.

jeroen94704• 12 years ago

It is the blind spot of the Web/Silicon Valley/Startup world that not all programming is web programming. While the Googles and Facebooks of this world get all the press, there is a stupendous number of developers working on good old-fashioned desktop applications and embedded software. That is the world where Qt is very popular.

In fact, it is my opinion that Qt is the one thing that keeps C++ relevant these days (http://weblog.jeroen.ws/blog/2012/11/19/how-relevant-is-c-pl...).

pjmlp3• 12 years ago

There are lots of things that keep C++ relevant, not only Qt.

vram224• 12 years ago

It is the blind spot of the Web/Silicon Valley/Startup world that not all programming is web programming. ... there is a stupendous number of developers working on good old-fashioned desktop applications and embedded software.

I've always thought that myself. It would be interesting if there were some statistics on that.

thegeomaster• 12 years ago

This is exactly my train of thought. But a lot of these developers don't really mind not getting the press---these jobs do pay really well. As far as I know, for instance, C++ game engine developers or people who write powerful, scalable web servers for in-house use make quite a lot of money nowadays. It's a completely different life than the engineers working in risky, fragile startups in return for a high possible payout, but who has it better here is debatable... and a matter of personal opinion, I guess.

Still, writing about Dropbox or Facebook or Stripe or whatever is now hot is way more interesting for the journalists. However, there's no doubt that the guy who wrote nginx or the Unity team (the game engine, not the Ubuntu GUI) made a hell of an impact on the industry, too. It's just that it takes more technical expertise to actually appreciate what these guys have done. That's the reason why most of the people know Steve Wozniak (if at all) as "that guy who worked for Jobs." Not that Facebook or Dropbox or Stripe or Jobs don't deserve the praise, it's just that they've built their empires on technology that also does.

72deluxe5• 12 years ago

Not thought about that, but I suppose desktop apps are where C++ is truly relevant. I am not sure that it is entirely Qt keeping it relevant though!

I see the desktop applications being swallowed up by C# at the moment.

tellarin• 12 years ago

Guess web is not its circle. ;)

I've used in software for multiplatform oil and gas data analysis and visualisation. I've left the company many years ago, but they still use it heavily.

maelys2• 12 years ago

I think different frameworks are more popular in different spheres, and yes - I don't really see Qt as being one of the most common frameworks mentioned for web work.

That said, I wrote the backend to provide HTML5 video over websockets using Qt for my company.

heeen5• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_that_uses_Qt

http://developer.blackberry.com/native/documentation/core/po...

https://www.openwebosproject.org/docs/architecture

plus many specialized niche applications that don't get a lot of press.

lmm• 12 years ago

Qt is a GUI framework - it's useless on the web (well, except as a way to learn good UI practice). It's probably the best non-web UI framework I've ever used, on any platform, in any language (its Python support in particular is superb). If I were to write another native desktop application I can't think of anything I'd rather use.

thejdude• 12 years ago

AFAIK Qt is much more than a GUI framework, and even modular these days, so you could leave out the GUI parts if you want. So you can use all kinds of Qt libs for different things, probably even for building a web server.

Whether you WANT to write a web app in C++ is an entirely different matter, of course.

shortsightedsid• 12 years ago

I'm one of those 800000+ devs. I like QT with it's Slots and Signals!

I've used it mainly on embedded platforms for UI.

72deluxe5• 12 years ago

Isn't signals and slots just a neat way of doing function pointers, the same as every other GUI toolkit that has callbacks?

(Having said that, it was a simple concept and easy to grasp)

shmerl4• 12 years ago

Probably not. If you would have interacted with any mobile or desktop Linux developers (especially KDE ones) you would have met more of those who use Qt.

3327• 12 years ago

Guys please ditch the carousel terrible way to convey information when the initial and first piece of information I am trying to absorb is moving around.

revx• 12 years ago

+1. The carousel switched faster than I could read all the text.

CognitiveLens• 12 years ago

The site/message is good, but I'm not sure I would ever promote any in-flight entertainment system as a great example of a development framework in action. Almost every one I've used has been among the slowest, clunkiest, crashiest, most unresponsive, poorly designed "modern" UIs I've ever used.

In order to avoid being entirely critical, however, Qt does serve a role that few other dev platforms do, and although I suspect there are better alternatives, I'm glad that there is still strong support for it!

flaie• 12 years ago

I had the chance to fly with Delta this summer, the electronics had been updated in my flight, and the UI was great and felt "responsive" in a certain way, let's say 5 times better than before.

stevelaz9• 12 years ago

The problem you have there is not only one of outdated hardware, but also an issue of software certification and other software red-tape in that industry. A friend of mine was working on one of those systems in the past (IIRC, they used Qt) and it takes a long time for that stuff to get released...

pestaa2• 12 years ago

Better alternatives? Please elaborate on your suspicion.

fuzzythinker5• 12 years ago

$149/mo to develop on desktop OSes, that is too steep. It pretty much rules out all but big publishers.

EDIT: Downvoters, please read and answer my replies below before doing so.

milliams9• 12 years ago

It's LGPL as well.

maelys2• 12 years ago

That's within the same price point as other leading IDEs.

Plus, as a commercial company you can still use it for free provided that you abide by the LGPL.

fuzzythinker5• 12 years ago

However, I am not able to distribute my apps through public application stores, as marked in the pricing table. Which makes that not really an option.

Also, that pricing tables states only "Mobile application stores". There should be another row for "Desktop application stores" that covers desktop applications, no?

FYI:

Minor site styling bug: http://www.qt.io/download/ 's "Search" bar is too low when scrolled.

Footer text is way too dark to be readable. Default text color should be current highlighted color, while hover should be whiter.

Erwin• 12 years ago

It's actually $215 for 1 platform, $295 for all 3. Per developer.

That's low compared to the old one which was something like $3k for one platform, $5k for multiple.

If you cannot make $215/month with your software, how can you pay anyone a salary?

If you are non-professional, why not use the open source edition and add value with support?

fuzzythinker5• 12 years ago

Why do you assume I'm paying someone a salary? I don't even make enough to cover my expenses (just started going indie). For someone like me, $149/mo is way too steep no matter what other options are. It just tells me qt is not an option for me.

As stated in other reply, open source option not an option as it states I can't publish it in app stores.

xamolxix• 12 years ago

If you are non-professional, why not use the open source edition and add value with support?

It might be me as I am not a native English speaker but I think "non-commercial" is more accurate than "non-professional" as people can write free software rather professionally and they often do.

kohanz• 12 years ago

It would be nice if they had an option for startups, a la MS & BizSpark.

heeen5• 12 years ago

Except you don't have to pay anything if you don't plan to modify Qt itself, which you most likely don't need to do, and even then you just have to release the source to your modification to comply with LGPL.

fuzzythinker5• 12 years ago

Not if I want to publish to app stores, as stated in the pricing table that I can't via the LGPL option.

drivingmenuts• 12 years ago

Personally, I'd prefer a one and done purchase. This pay-by-the month crap is getting out of hand.

Sure, the monthly rent goes to paying for bug-fixes, etc., but those should be in there anyway. It's like buying a car then finding out it still needs an engine tuning and the right wheels to run properly, when they should have shipped with the car.

Sir_Cmpwn• 12 years ago

Is there a good way to get into Qt? Some getting started blog posts for devs would be very useful, but I've always thought that the Qt learning curve starts with good intentions and then goes vertical. Does anyone have some resources to share?

milliams9• 12 years ago

It depends on what you want to use it for (Qt covers a lot of use-cases) but http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/qtexamplesandtutorials.html is probably a good start.

zanny3• 12 years ago

qmlbook.org, the examples in Creator, the blog the OP post is from has a lot of tutorials on new features as they come out (http://blog.qt.digia.com/).

vram224• 12 years ago

Try this:

http://www.qtrac.eu/marksummerfield.html

He has books for C++ with Qt.

dugmartin2• 12 years ago

Note for those looking for commercial pricing - it is sort of hidden under the top buttons in the download page:

http://www.qt.io/download/

That said, just having a publicly listed price anywhere feels like a big step forward for Qt. In the past there was just a "Contact Sales" form with whispered mentions across forums about real pricing. I think this dissuaded a lot of indie devs from trying out Qt.

I'm not sure why this new site doesn't just have a page called "Pricing" that explains what the monthly pricing means. Answer questions like "Do the tools lock out if the subscription is cancelled or do my rights to published statically linked Qt apps get cancelled?" and "Do I have to pay each month to keep those rights even if there is no active development on an app?".

My guess is that Qt must make a bulk of their revenue on enterprise sales and are reticent to open up a self serve sales process (highlighted by the squeeze page they put up when you click the 30 day trial download button). It is a shame because I think Qt could enable a lot of great apps.

milliams9• 12 years ago

It's also strange that the open-source version doesn't have "Full rights to modify source codes". This is clearly an error.

DSMan1952762• 12 years ago

I think the catch is that, being GPL licensed, any distribution of the software with modified source would be required to be open-sourced. With there commercial license you wouldn't have to release your code. (Though they list GPL, LGPLv2.1, and LGPLv3, you may or may not depending which license it actually is under and how you compile and run your program).

How exactly did they get around the GPL to offer a commercial license anyway? I would have presumed that people doing open-source work on Qt would have submitted their work under only the GPL, and re-licensing that code should be illegal since they didn't write it.

blub5• 12 years ago

They had desktop pricing for quite a while displayed. It used to be 349$/mo/dev for all three major platforms if I recall correctly.

hartcw• 12 years ago

The way the license information is presented is a little misleading. The Community edition is described as for 'Open Source & Hobby Projects', giving the impression that its not possible to release a commercial product using that. Thats not true of course, its LGPL licensed and so can be used for commercial software as long as the license obligations are adherred to.

The desktop app I sell uses Qt, against the LGPL license. I would probably pay for the commercial license from them if it was more reasonably priced, but $295 per month to distribute on Mac and Windows is just too much to swallow.

dugmartin2• 12 years ago

I missed that subhead and I agree. As long as you dynamically link against the library it's perfectly fine to use it for commercial apps.

vram224• 12 years ago

Thats not true of course, its LGPL licensed and so can be used for commercial software as long as the license obligations are adherred to.

What are those obligations? Can you summarize or give a link? Thanks.

blub5• 12 years ago

Wow, did I get this right that they have an indie mobile offering now for 20 EUR (without VAT)? This would be fantastic! It used to be 130 EUR.

milliams9• 12 years ago

per month, yes.

orng• 12 years ago

How does that work? Do you have to continue to pay the license the entire time that you app is commercially available or is it only during development?

aceperry• 12 years ago

I love Qt, good to see them promoting it more.

codebeaker• 12 years ago

Is there a modern book which targets a current QT? Last time I was looking (and on Google just now) I wasn't able to find a book that took someone from never having used QT to shipping something.

km3k• 12 years ago

I've been looking for this too, but most books like this are older and focus on Qt 3 or 4, not Qt 5.

shmerl4• 12 years ago

I guess it was changing too rapidly. I'm waiting for such book as well.

candl• 12 years ago

There's one available online: http://qmlbook.org/ As the name says, it covers basically just QML, but QML is an important foundation of modern QT5 so I guess the book is very nice to have.

zanny3• 12 years ago

The docs site has a lot of tutorials, and Creator comes with a huge examples portfolio. Each example also has a small book about it.

sz4kerto• 12 years ago

Does anyone have experience with Xamarin AND Qt as well? I am curious how do they compare for cross-platform mobile app development.

blub5• 12 years ago

I only have experience with Qt, and can tell you that a problem with the current version is the difficulty in getting a native look on mobile. If you want a custom UI, QML is great, but Digia really need to offer native-looking UI components. They will do this for widget-based UIs on Android in the next version I believe, but no word on iOS.

Other than that it's quite nice.

mwcampbell2• 12 years ago

Native UI goes far beyond the look. Another concern is accessibility, especially for blind users. Non-native UIs can be accessible, but only if the toolkit implements each platform's accessibility API, and gets the implementation right, which seems to be very difficult. (For example, last time I checked, Qt's implementation of the relevant accessibility APIs on Windows was deficient enough that the TeamTalk voice chat client offers a "classic" MFC-based client specifically for blind users.)

mwcampbell2• 12 years ago

I don't have direct experience with either Qt on mobile platforms or Xamarin, so I can't provide exactly what you asked for. But I can provide a considered opinion.

I strongly recommend Xamarin over Qt, because even if you use Xamarin.Forms, you'll be using the actual native UI on each platform, not a mere approximation. So your app will be more true to the native look and feel of each platform. Moreover, it will be accessible to users with disabilities, especially blind users, as long as you don't implement any custom widgets of your own. (If you do need to implement custom widgets, you'll need to implement each platform's accessibility APIs as well.) True, these users are a minority, but if you can make your app work for them without considerable extra effort on your part just by building on the right foundation, then that's a win-win situation.

Qt may offer the promise of "write once, run anywhere," but IMO, that should be more like, "write once, be inferior everywhere."

switchbak2• 12 years ago

I was under the impression that I could use the (L)GPL version and deploy to various app stores - I wouldn't get support though.

But this article describes "deployment rights", which one would apparently not have access to if using the open source version. A quick google revealed no additional information on this.

Does anyone have any concrete info on deploying mobile Qt apps to app stores with the open source version?

FigBug3• 12 years ago

LGPL requires that the user be able to replace the LGPL portion with an updated / modified version. This is usually accomplished with dynamic linking. Since the iOS store requires apps to be signed and disallows dynamic linking, there is no way for the user to modify the LGPL portion. I assume other app stores are similar.

GPL is disallowed for similar reasons, no way for the end user to recompile and app from the app store and run it on their device.

pushedx• 12 years ago

I can make available the source for an iPhone app that could be compiled with XCode.

How is this in violation of the GPL?

switchbak2• 12 years ago

I believe Qt does offer a shared library for Qt that can be shared/upgraded across multiple apps. I wonder if that's enough to allow one to deploy on Android (iOS is obviously a no-go).

I have an early prototype in Qt that's not going to be a big bread winner, but it'd be nice to be able to release it and get some feedback (even if that means that they have to install the shared Qt package too). I'd probably just bail on the idea if I had to pay much of anything, especially monthly.

jo_2• 12 years ago

Does Qt still do that thing where they reimplement a lot of the C++ standard components like Vector? I remember years ago having problems with their reimplementation and wonder how much that's changed.

FigBug3• 12 years ago

Yup, QList, QVector, QString. There are a lot of reimplementations. I tend to find them a lot easier to use than the C++ counterparts. What type of problems were you having?

heeen5• 12 years ago

QString is a proper unicode-aware string with conversions to many character codecs. It doesn't really compare to std::string.

joshvm2• 12 years ago

I agree. QList is great, it's got very straightforward methods and it's more than fast enough.

jo_2• 12 years ago

Nothing impossible -- just integration with the standard library algorithms and some older source code I don't want to modify. It's less difficulty and more a matter of laziness.

blub5• 12 years ago

The "QTL" still exists, yes. One can use the STL in their code and convert when interacting with the Qt framework (for a price paid in performance)

eduardordm• 12 years ago

Yes, keep in mind that some platforms where QT runs do not have the library implemented, have suboptimal performance or is missing functionality. Also, binary compatibility is a big plus on QT.

A nice read about it: http://blog.codeimproved.net/posts/qtl-stl.html

superfunc• 12 years ago

Yeah. iirc, most of their data structures are COW which can be nice, depending on what your looking for. And, as others have mentioned, they often have a simpler, if less generic, API to them.

skrebbel• 12 years ago

Yeps. It sucks when integrating libraries that use the STL, but otherwise they're actually much nicer in many ways. Simpler to use, at the cost of one extra pointer dereference - worth the reduced complexity and error-prone-ness, in many cases.

pjmlp3• 12 years ago

Yes they do. This is what happens when you need to support a myriad of compilers and OS, with different levels of language support and bugs.

general_failure• 12 years ago

$25 per month is a steal!

dharma1• 12 years ago

On a related note, we are hiring a front end engineer to work on Ubuntu phone and desktop. Stack is Qt,QML, JS and possibly some html5. Could work for a QML dev or a web dev who wants to learn Qt. London based position - email me at jouni.helminen@canonical.com

ryanmelt• 12 years ago

For all the ruby devs on HN: check out the ruby bindings to qt at http://github.com/ryanmelt/qtbindings. Makes developing GUI apps in ruby really easy. Be sure to checkout the large set of example apps to get started.

rurounijones2• 12 years ago

I have always looked upon these kinds of projects with interest until it comes to the packaging.

Let us say I create a really super-duper ruby qtbindings application. Is there any way for me to easily package it as a .msi / .dmg / .deb for distribution?

I have messed around with ocra, monkeybars etc and they have never worked or require arcane and undocumented hacks.

Packaging for distribution is the biggest challenge for desktop ruby apps I think.

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