IBM, Adobe and Windows love Qt but Mozilla Bails

In breaking news, convicted French hacker Philippe Fremy has been accused of spreading malicious rumours regarding an alleged stab at Qt and companion PyQt by the highly regarded IBM developerWorks. But the concerted effort at dragging people's names through the mud does not end there. Emotions ran high when it was noted that the peeps at Slashdot couldn't leave IBM's rumoured courtship of Qtopia alone.

To make matters worse, the phones were buzzing non-stop regarding Adobe's not-so-cute love interest. Microsoft-lover Adam Treat was the first to dish out the dirt with highly dubious claims regarding an alleged Photoshop Album.

We were further sickened to learn of another Microsoft connection traced back to last December. There is now concrete proof that underground cult KDE on Cygwin is engaging a truly unholy pursuit in a rather foolish attempt at cloning.

With a tear in his eye, Hanno Müller reported that the reptilian Mozilla finally "couldn't take it no more" and gracefully stumbled away from the whole mess. This ugly dragon was rather touchingly reported to have shed crocodile tears over the incident.

Tabloid reporter yours truly has been working around the clock to bring you these shocking updates regarding the highly controversial lifestyle of the troll cutie.

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Comments

by Rodion (not verified)

April 1st isn't for another month by my calendar. Has someone been sipping too much whiskey, or is my humor meter just set too high?

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

if adobe wished it.... but I don't belive they will do.

It's only natural for them to do it. Maybe they already did internally. This will be interesting if they decide to use Qt for their other products. Look at Acrobat Reader it works on both Linux and Windows, so that could help them and better integration with KDE.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

Yes, let's hope they like QT a lot and decide to port all their programs to it, then it will be mostly a matter of recompiling the code for linux :)

by OUSpirit (not verified)

AFAICT, Acrobat Reader for Linux is written in Motif (or something similar). It's not a Qt app... Also, don't forget that although KDE is based on Qt, the fact that an app is written in Qt doesn't necessarily mean it will integrate with KDE well.

by David Johnson (not verified)

"the fact that an app is written in Qt doesn't necessarily mean it will integrate with KDE well."

The first question you need to ask is what needs to be integrated? For most end-user applications, very little is needed. The only thing I can think of that I would like to see in terms of acroread and integration is drag-and-drop. But that's standardized now, so there's no need to make it a KDE application to get it.

The "look-and-feel" is a different beast entirely, so I won't discuss it here.

Look and feel can be integrated too. The KDE styles allow that and KControl is smart about qtrc.

by Guenter Schwann (not verified)

Sone more:
* The filedialog. It's a very common task to open/save files. But Qt / KDE filedialogs are very different (look&feel, shortcuts, bookmarks, preview...).
* Many common icons are differnt (open, save, copy, paste,...).
* Qt's printer-dialog is very simple compared to KDE's one.
* more dialogs...

Those are visible differences, every user sees. And with this differences Qt-applications do not seem to be "integrated" to your system.

ciao

by Manfred Tremmel (not verified)

Adobe uses a lot of energy to do Windows and Mac versions of there Software. I think the primary goal is to reduce the effort. A secondary object is to have Linux/Unix-versions available, when Adobe thinks it's time to sell them.

by Peter Kasting (not verified)

Um... what is this story about? Can we re-summarize in a way that requires me to traverse maybe one link? And written in a comprehensible manner? As it is it looks like someone's very poor attempt at a joke.

by anon (not verified)

It's Qt news. Qt is the toolkit used by KDE.

by confused (not verified)

The language is colorful indeed, but I'm very confused.
It looks like there might be something of interest in
there, but I'm not sure I want to invest the effort to
click through _19_ links to try to figure it out.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

I just broke it up into paragraphs for each story point.

Figure it out.

Please stop complaining doggonit. :-)

by Roberto Alsina (not verified)

I like it. This ain't Cnet.com.com.com. And that is a good thing.

by Damon (not verified)

Stupidity?
Ok, folks calm down.
I think the problem here is that this news article
is also read by an international/non-english-speaking audience
which perhaps doesn't completely understand the subtle humour /
irony and is therefore somewhat confused.
Well, I liked it and I think it's important that we all don't
take this too seriously. We are not M$ after all so we can
be a bit more relaxed... ;-)
If this article isn't for you - just
ignore it.
Especially the part about the relationship and "divorce"
of the two dinosaurs was quite a good idea and made my LOL.
Keep up the good work.

by anon (not verified)

I agree. Well put!

by Roberto Alsina (not verified)

And why is this response attached to my post?

by Damon (not verified)

Oh - sorry for that. It shouldn't be. But I hope everyone can
make the connection...

by confused (not verified)

Ok, maybe this should have been "from the QT spreading
like wildfire departmetn" ...the paragraphs do help...
sorry for the grumble :-)

Qt being used by Adobe is pretty big news...

by reihal (not verified)

I'm not complaining. More stuff like this, you have a talent for it.

by anon (not verified)

"Qt rocks. Lots of people are starting to give it more and more attention. But not Mozilla."

I think that's about it.

Expanded version (see links in story for more):
- IBM is rumored to be exploring/investing more in Qt.
- Adobe apparently based their Photo Album on it.
- Qt-Win32 is cooking along as part of the KDE on Windows project.
- Mozilla dropped the Qt native port because of a lack of maintenance (it hasn't kept up with the rest of Mozilla since 0.9.9 apparently)

by David Walser (not verified)

Thank you for translating this story from Stupidish to English.

by anon (not verified)

You dont have to be a brain surgeon to understand that story.

by Stof (not verified)

Yeah, you only have to be from Mars.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Then John Gray should be your saviour!

by Tony (not verified)

Stupidish ;) I like it a lot.

Tony

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Bah! What you people need is a dot.kde.org for dummies. :P

by annma (not verified)

LOL
I got it all on first time, I love the style! :)) Excellent piece of writing which changes from the usual flat news we always read. I was laughing at each click.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Oh, thanks annma!

Ah yes, gotta love the UK tabloids... :-)

by Corba the Geek (not verified)

Hmm.. It is only "funny" if you know what the stories are already, and you happen to be called Beavis or Butthead. Even now I'm still not sure if I have got everything:

- Article comparing MFC to QT
- Article on using QT with Python
- IBM using QT in embedded development platform
- Adobe using QT for one of their apps.
- Port of the GPL version of QT to Windows is making progress
- Support for building mozilla against QT is finally removed after being unmaintained (and broken) for some time.

by Stof (not verified)

Isn't that the whole point?
Two words: average users.

Average users are unwilling to learn, have difficulty finding the Start-button, and can barely use Internet Explorer. Surely you don't expect the people that KDE is targeting to understand language like that, do you?
Before you know it, you will be flooded by "the KDE community is full of elitists"-trolls again.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Oh whatever, whine whine whine. One article and it is the end of KDE as we know it?

Relax. I didn't lose any information, you've just got to click to find it. And the people who don't understand it, they don't care about Qt anyway right? GNOME posts messages like these all the time. Maybe mine was a little too subtle, but at least some people got it. :-)

It's called multi-level humour and I just used the tabloid style as a vehicle... obviously many people didn't even recognise the outrageous tabloid style... it's quite an institution in the US/UK/etc.

Enjoy.

by fault (not verified)

The Qt version of Mozilla was dropped because.. well, there wasn't enough developer interest to keep it maintained. There were calls for people to maintain it, but I guess nobody stepped up to the plate.

Oh well, at least two of the three "alternative" browsers use Qt.. Opera and Konq/Safari.

by anon (not verified)

People did step up according to the bug report but they were in a hurry to remove it.

by Peter Kasting (not verified)

Try again. They asked for a maintainer; they got a few people willing to get it to build again. That's not close to the same thing.

by Anon (not verified)

You're wrong again.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178987

Offers were made to be maintainer.

by Chakie (not verified)

Why was there such panic to get it removed? Why couldn't it be left in there to "brew" a bit and get patches applied by the new contributors so that it would reach a stage where it compiles? It definitely will never be brought up to the same state as the other ports again as it was nuked into orbit.

by ey (not verified)

Eh, I thought Apple commented out all the Qt code in Safari?

by Schugy (not verified)

It hasn't to be fully functional but give us the proof that it starts faster, looks nicer, is easier to develop and that it runs on all platforms that are already supported.

Well, how would my Mozilla look like with AA-fonts, Skypilot Classic Theme in QT, kdeprint-management...

The code is open but perhaps it is too big to make facts on your own ;-)

Damn, opera is always under construction (crashes,java1.4) while I think that konqueror is really usable now in 3.1. (Just tell my why Java + Konqueror works correctly only in KDE and not in my icewm [seperate applet windows])

Loading klipper or any other qt-app after a fresh boot may take 20 seconds to load all libs and services but after that it's very fast and I have all other apps in 3 seconds.

Even my Moneyplex uses qt statically but I think it looks to much like windows without kde-support :-)

Keep up that great work ;-)

by Kevin Puetz (not verified)

actually, to whatever extent it wasn't buggy, the QT mozilla would look and behave exactly the same as the glib/xlib one. Mozilla uses it's own widget set (for reasons both good and bad) and the QT port didn't change that, it just used QT to make the implementation of that widget set portable. However, this forgoes most of the good reasons to like QT, so I'm not surprised nobody was interested.

by somekool (not verified)

Hey !

is it ready for the mass ? does my grand-parent could install kmail on windows 2000 on their own ?

by Tooth Fary (not verified)

Which one? Your fathers or your mothers father?

TF

by somekool (not verified)

I'm sorry, I hoped you understand

by Dave Brondsema (not verified)

The current status is that Qt 2.3 is being ported. It's partially functional and when it's done, Qt3 will be ported (hopefully this will be easy once Qt 2.3 is done). I believe after that, efforts to port KDE and KDE apps will begin.

by somekool (not verified)

thanks for the information.

i tried to install it recently but kde fails to run.
system was not able to find qt-2-3.dll
and i didnt find any lib path.
well well.

it would be fun to move most of my friend to KMail on Windows and once is done, it will be easier to move them to Linux(KDE)
many of us hate their email client

by Standards Police (not verified)

Jus tried,
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.kde.org

It worked when I first tried it with the new homepage, so it must have been some recent changes. Please make it standard again. I like to shove it in the face of my friends who say good looking web pages cannot be done with standards only.

Thanks,
S.P.

by azza-bazoo (not verified)

Looking at the validator output, the problem's only a minor gah-we've-used-the-wrong-ID issue, so it should get fixed sometime soon.

But if you still want something to shove in your friend's faces, there's always www.wired.com or www.redhat.com among others ...

by Standards Police (not verified)

Well, I've used this site as an example way too many times before, and it looks prettier now and no longer passes the validator test. See what I mean?
I can understand the web master making a mistake, or simply not caring about standards that much, but he owe us, - "we", the ones who shoved kde homepage down our friends throats, as an example of nice web pages development, promoting the kde web page and kde itself as we did that -, the right to keep on doing it!

Let's hope it does get fixed soon.
S.P.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Please mail the problems to [email protected]

by Christoph Cullmann (not verified)

fixed ;)
Please keep in mind the page is maintained by volunteers, there can sometimes be some bug in the code, but that will be fixed in a very short timespan normally :)
Simply tell your friends: here, the page looks good, validates well the most time and if not, it gets fixed ;)