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

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.