Qt 5.1 Adds Android and iOS Support 81
colinneagle writes "This week, the team at Digia rolled out the first alpha release of Qt 5.1, which is slated to have the first round of support for Android and iOS, with full support coming in 5.2. The goal is to make 5.1 completely usable for building complete, shippable apps for both mobile platforms. That means Qt can now be used to build native, smooth applications on Linux, Windows, Android, iOS, MacOS X and even BlackBerry 10, all with an excellent integrated development environment – QtCreator. Coming with version 5.1 is also something called 'Qt Quick Controls' — which is a set of nice, reusable user interface controls. Currently, it is focused on Desktop applications, but is expanding to add touchscreen-specific features. And, importantly, this release also brings 'Qt Sensors' into play. 'Qt Sensors' are pretty much exactly what they sound like — access to hardware sensors on devices where they are available, with built-in motion gesture recognition. Definitely a big plus for Android and iOS applications."
Lots of great new stuff! (Score:5, Interesting)
Digia and the Qt Project has been exploding with great new work.
Qt 5.1 is adding initial support for Qt Quick Controls [digia.com] formerly "Desktop Components". These are packaged Qt Quick controls such as sliders and tables with skins for each of the different platforms.
The Qt Project has just recently started shipping the Qt Installer Framework [digia.com] which is a cross-platform installer framework (that is used by the Qt installers). After managing multiple installers on different platforms for my own open source work, I'm really looking forward to digging into this.
Another huge project is the new Qt Build System or qbs [digia.com]. This is a replacement for QMake and I'm really excited to see how it shapes up against CMake.
With the recent advancements in the C++ standard and Qt, it is a very exciting time to be a C++ developer.
Re:Not native (Score:5, Interesting)
A particular developer's inability to use Qt properly to create native-looking apps on each platform, that's hardly Qt's fault. You can get the native printing icon if that's what you want, but this developer clearly didn't bother to do it properly. Creating cross-platform apps isn't magic. That's what Java wanted to do, but it's just plain impossible. You are going to have to occasionally be aware of the quirks on each platform you're targeting. An occasional #ifdef OSX or whatever is going to be necessary if you want your app to look great. Qt doesn't purport to allow you to write your code on one platform and magically having it look fantastic on all the other platforms. It *does* purport to allow you do that by spending a little time to tweak things. Nothing you mentioned isn't fixable using Qt. But it can't do everything for you because the platforms are different, by definition.