
Qt 5.1 Released With Android and iOS Technology Previews - emwa
http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/07/03/qt-5-1-released/
======
shadowmint
Great work! Nice seeing QT actually trying to be relevant again, now it's
escaped the clutches of Nokia.

Here's hoping that Google doesn't decide to depreciate the native apis on
android now there are a few options to write apps that don't involve using
their crazy lock-in java api.

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ge0rg
Very impressive work, especially with the mobile integration! I hope this will
become the next generation of multi-platform development tools, combining
performance and flexibility.

However, the Android demo apps are 16MB and 23MB in size, respectively. For
the larger one (Introduction to Qt5) the uncompressed sizes are: 9MB of data,
26MB native code, 134KB of dalvik code.

This looks like a major burden for low-end devices, even though I must admit
the demo is looking great (and performs rather fluently on my HTC Vision,
running Android 4.2.2).

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icefox
When silly puzzle games have hundreds of MB of assets it is okay, but this is
a lot? Users don't seem to care or all of the "lets recompile our flash junk"
that eats 500MB+ wouldn't do as well as they are doing. If app size matters it
is usually the assets that need to be trimmed first.

What would be nice if in the app stores they showed how much space your app
would you and let you sort on that, give some sort of incentive to reduce your
size.

~~~
mehrzad
No need to get upset at GP. A lot of low-end Android phones have little
internal storage and installing to SD is not a default thing. I'd be that most
Android apps are under 15MB and a lot of apps that I use are under 3.

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stevelaz
This is awesome. Congrats to the Qt team for a what looks like an excellent
release! I can't wait to get my fingers dirty with this.

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frozenport
Also improved opengl and opengl binaries.

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programminggeek
Well that's cute.

~~~
programminggeek
It's really hard to make a play on words on the internet.

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pbsdp
"I wish my apps were written using a poorly integrated non-native toolkit"
said no actual user, _ever._

Nobody wants a Qt-based application _port_ , for most of the same reason
nobody wanted a (Java) Swing-based _port_. They don't want ports, they want
native apps.

The only people who want to provide Qt-based apps are developers that want to
put themselves ahead of their users.

[edit] Perhaps downvoters can reference a cross-platform widget toolkit that
was successful in the market? So far, Java, Qt, WxWidgets, and Gtk have not
succeeded as cross-platform GUI libraries. Are there any break-out successes
I'm missing?

Otherwise, I don't see what the complaint is, so perhaps you can elucidate
_and_ downvote.

~~~
mpyne
First off, Qt _is_ native for quite a few Linux GUI desktops. So there's no
"port" for those.

But even beyond that, the toolkit you're referring to (QtWidgets) is only one
part of Qt itself. In fact I rather doubt you'd ever use it for an Android
application, preferring instead QtCore plus the declarative U/I handling.

Much of Qt is code you would otherwise be writing /anyways/, only they did it
for you, did it right, and even documented it with examples of how to use
properly. For instance, event loops, abstract I/O, Unicode string handling,
concurrency, atomics primitives, networking support (including integration
into aforementioned event loops and abstract I/O), and much more.

As a side effect of coding to a thoughtful, _high-level_ API you happen to
make cross-platform development _easier_ , but that's hardly the only reason
to use Qt.

Either way the fact that you don't instantly recognize Qt apps when you see
them is proof positive, as they are out there in much higher numbers than you
seem to realize...

~~~
coldtea
> _First off, Qt is native for quite a few Linux GUI desktops. So there 's no
> "port" for those._

That's because Linux has no "native" GUI. It's a hodgepodge of GUI toolkits.

That said, the de facto standard on Linux desktop has been GTK. It's what the
major players, that is the most popular distros, support by default.

So QT is only "native" (in the look & feel sense that we're discussing here,
not in the runs directly on the machine sense) if you target some marginal
distros. Which kind of defeats the whole argument.

> _Much of Qt is code you would otherwise be writing /anyways/_

Not if you used Google's native SDK.

> _Either way the fact that you don 't instantly recognize Qt apps when you
> see them is proof positive, as they are out there in much higher numbers
> than you seem to realize..._

Huh? Who said you don't recognize them? On the Mac they stick out like a sore
thumb.

~~~
mpyne
> It's what the major players, that is the most popular distros, support by
> default.

You know in the context of everything that's been going on, I really didn't
think the "No True Scotsman" for the night was going to be about GTK+.

Sure, if you slice and dice your definitions enough to "toolkit supported by
default if I don't run the headless install of distros which coldtea defines
as 'major'" then you might come away with GTK+ as a standard toolkit.

But even that wouldn't exclude Qt as a standard toolkit. It gets picked up by
the package manager just the same on all major distros, except possibly for
Fedora

Apparently everything else is "Marginal" in your book? I'm sorry you seem to
take it so personally that you had to whip out the e-penis and establish the
supremacy of your chosen toolkit (and the Google native SDK??), but by all
means let me step back and stay quiet so you can flex.

~~~
coldtea
> _Sure, if you slice and dice your definitions enough to "toolkit supported
> by default if I don't run the headless install of distros which coldtea
> defines as 'major'" then you might come away with GTK+ as a standard
> toolkit._

That _I_ "define as major"? You do know that Linux distributions follow a
popularity power law distribution, right? With a few, like Ubuntu, RedHat, etc
at the top. This has nothing to do with "subjective opinion".

Don't see why you brought up the "headless install" in the play either --
since just before you said about QT being a native GUI toolkit. QT is not
native in a "headless install" either, so those are beside the point.

> _Apparently everything else is "Marginal" in your book?_

My book again? For one, Linux desktop use is marginal in itself, registering
as just a 1% blip. Second, of that, there are popular and marginal
distributions. If you don't like marginal, I doubt you'd like Wikipedia's
term, which is "fringe".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution#Popular_dist...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution#Popular_distributions)

It was a discussion about GUI toolkits, and you made it into a BS ad hominem
attack -- as if usage statistics is something unknown that I pulled out of my
ass. In short, your argument is bad, and you should feel bad.

