Qt which recently announced they were changing their licensing to allow LGPL, has now come out of the beta phase. Details of the release were publicised the other day.

Quote: Qt Solutions provide platform and industry-specific components and tools; components and tools that integrate Qt with specific third-party products; and cutting-edge components too new to be included directly in releases of the Qt framework. This first batch of releases available under the LGPL include: * MML Widget * Pie Menu * SOAP * State Machine Framework (New!) * Animation Framework * Window Menu * Locked File * Thumb Wheel

Will this now become the de facto standard for cross platform applications in games such as editors instead of using C# in combination of C++? edit: Just on going to download the new version I see they are offering torrent downloads in addition to a direct download, which I feel is a smart move and would ask anyone who is going to download it to consider using this method. Do not forget to seed you leeches :)

Quote: Original post by CmpDev
Will this now become the de facto standard for cross platform applications in games such as editors instead of using C# in combination of C++?

Probably not. Microsoft has more marketing dollars to spend on software than Nokia does, since it's all Microsoft does and Nokia is primarily a hardware manufacturer.

Look for Qt to become more dominant on Linux and as the de facto cross-platform library, however, since the only thing going for its main rival, gtk, is that it's written in C and the C bigots love that. gtk is certainly a beast to use. C# doesn't really play in that space since its "cross platform" nature is in practice significantly inadequate.

I would venture that Qt will become more popular on Windows than it was in the past. It's an excellent, mature toolkit that allows very rapid application development.

Quote: Original post by CmpDev
Qt which recently announced they were changing their licensing to allow LGPL, has now come out of the beta phase. Details of the release were publicised the other day.

Quote: Qt Solutions provide platform and industry-specific components and tools; components and tools that integrate Qt with specific third-party products; and cutting-edge components too new to be included directly in releases of the Qt framework. This first batch of releases available under the LGPL include:

* MML Widget
* Pie Menu
* SOAP
* State Machine Framework (New!)
* Animation Framework
* Window Menu
* Locked File
* Thumb Wheel

Will this now become the de facto standard for cross platform applications in games such as editors instead of using C# in combination of C++?

When John Carmack announced that Doom 5 was developed using tools written using Qt, that's when you'd probably start seeing some influx of followers.

I'm not convinced that C# is the standard for cross platform tools development. Mono is doing a very good job of things on the linux side, but mono + gtk# on the Mac looks absolutely terrible. Not to mention the 90MB mono framework download.

I was a happy C# user, had a great experience porting the software to linux, then we tried the Mac, and it was a mess. Now for cross-platform apps, especially tool style apps, I'd recommend Qt, PyQt and Python.

Quote: Original post by tstrimp
Not to mention the 90MB mono framework download.

What about it?

Quote: Original post by capn_midnight
What about it?

I suppose for some applications this isn't much of a problem, but when the actual application is less then 1MB, it's a bit much to require a 90MB framework to run it. .NET 2.0 redistributable on windows is 22MB. The python port of the application is compiled as an executable with pyqt and qt libraries is under 20MB zipped.

Quote: Original post by tstrimp
I suppose for some applications this isn't much of a problem, but when the actual application is less then 1MB, it's a bit much to require a 90MB framework to run it. .NET 2.0 redistributable on windows is 22MB. The python port of the application is compiled as an executable with pyqt and qt libraries is under 20MB zipped.

I don't think it's that big of a deal. For one thing, I think 90MB is going to be a small fraction of whatever a full game comes out to be, with binaries and assets. For another, you only download it once, subsequent applications that require it won't need you to install it again, so it averages out. Yes, Mono could probably do some work to cut down their footprint, but this isn't 1998 anymore, 90MB isn't that much.