Qt4.5 vs Cocoa for native Mac UI

Question

I've been developing for Windows and *nix platforms for quite some time, and am looking to move into Mac development. I am tossing up between using ObjC/Cocoa and C++/Qt4.5.

The C++/moc semantics make more sense to me, and improving knowledge in Qt seems like a sensible thing to do given that you end up with a skill set that covers more platforms.

Am I likely to handicap my applications by skipping Cocoa?

The sample Qt applications look pretty Mac-native to me, but they are quite simple so potentially don't tell the whole story. Are there other pros to the Xcode way that Qt doesn't have, such as packaging, deployment, etc.?

Answer 1

Since posting this, i've been learning the Cocoa / Objective-C way, and have been quite impressed. Despite what I initially thought was quite a quirky syntax, Objc appears to be a very effective language for implementing UI code, and the XCode sugar - things like Core Data and bindings - make short work of all of the boring bits.

I spent a while with the QT examples and documentation before digging into cocoa, and tend to agree with what has been said above w.r.t being slightly behind the curve and less 'aqua-ish' - albeit from a fairly trivial inspection. If I absolutely had to be build a cross-platform app i'd probably use QT rather than trying to separate out the UI code, as it seems like it would provide close-enough visuals, but for mac only purposes, Cocoa seems like a definite win.

Thanks all for your responses, they've all been very helpful!

Answer 2

DO NOT use Qt for a Mac app. You will get no hardware acceleration for 2D rendering, and you will not be able to deliver ADA compliance.

Answer 3

Depending on what kind of apps you want to write, another contender is REALbasic now called Xojo.

The move from C++ is pretty easy (I have 15 years C++ experience) and the framework and IDE extremely productive. You have the added bonus of being able to deploy to Linux and Windows with trivial effort. Their framework compiles to native code and uses native widgets so you don't have an emulated look and feel.

The big reason for learning Cocoa and coding in Objective-C is if you want to hone your iPhone skills or are chasing a really fancy user experience. If you wanted to rival the cutting edge of WPF development then I'd recommend Cocoa.

Answer 4

I'm currently developing both with QT (actually PyQT, but it makes no difference to your question) and native Cocoa app. For me it's no brainer, I'd chose Cocoa. It's really worth time to explore Cocoa in general, there are many great concepts within the Cocoa framework, and Objective-C 2.0 as well.

Answer 5

Obviously, the best option is to use a cross platform suite that supports native widgets. With QT4 you can build your base user interface. Then just add native support for your specific target platform.

Sure, Cocoa has a lot of fancy stuff (and you can still use them trough QT4), but let me be clear. I see a lot of fancy Apps on the AppStore, pretty ones, but most of then are just crap, expensive.. what ever. I really missed my Kate text editor, my okular viewer, my krita drawing software... those are just better than the commercial and expensive alternatives and are free. so i just tweak the source code a little bit too have a REAL native and great experience.

What if i have to use a linux app on my main computer with is a mac os x? or windows? or whatever? only?

For example, why on earth i have to buy a expensive ,fancy but far less featured image editor software for my mac like pixelmator when i can use a full featured real image manipulation software like Gimp? YES Gimp is gtk2 based which is a pain on any platform, specially on Mac because is really ugly. Gimp should be ported to QT4. Inkscape should be ported to QT4 too, and it would feel so great.

Is so simple to do.. gosh! http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7-snapshot/demos-macmainwindow.html Even you can add support for the the new native lion fullscreen feature, unified title and toolbar menus, etc

I , as a user, i really care about efficient, featured, good and cross platform apps, i don't really care about developer's convenience or laziness .

Answer 6

Here's an easy way to answer it:

If you were developing a Windows app with .NET or MFC, would you handicap your applications by using Qt? If the answer to that is yes, then the situation is likely to be the same on the Mac.

A few negatives I can think of off the top of my head:

• Licensing
• Qt apps, while good, are not completely a native UI experience and there's things a native UI designer can do in Cocoa which boggle the mind. While I can't be sure that all the same functionality isn't available in Qt, I doubt it.
• Qt is always a little behind. If Microsoft or Apple come out with a great new technology, you have to wait for the Qt developers to update Qt.

However, with all that said, only you can determine the business value of using Qt. If you think cross-platform development is going to be a major part of your development, then Qt might be worth it, despite the issues mentioned.