Qt Creator on the Mac
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Hi,
I'm considering buying a Mac and I'm wondering what the current state of things is like for using Qt Creator on the Mac. Anyone out there using on the Mac, or possibly using Parallels on the Mac to use Qt Creator on a Windows virtual machine? I'd really appreciate your feedback.
Thanks
Brian
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So I made roughly your decision last year and bought an MBA. The main purpose of the MBA is to serve as a mac; so I haven't loaded it with GNU like things (i.e. brew, macports, etc...)
Qt creator works just fine. I do develop with it.
I like the hardware a lot (despite the lack of a second mouse button).
However some things I find terribly annoying: Namely the keyboard configuration is just bloody wrong, and I've found no reliable way to fix it yet. I don't feel I should pay for a third party application to re-map the bloody keyboard.
Unless you grow up on a mac, the use of the option key in place of control is frustrating. Alt-tab doesn't work like windows or KDE - it cycles open applications, not open windows. There is no home/end key until you change the qt-creator configuration, and then home/end is missing in most applications, replaced with annoying top of file / end of file. Where the hell is the insert key?
I think Mavericks is not reliable on the MBA when compared with my linux setups (and even my 7 year old thinkpad). I've been told that re-installing the machine from scratch will help; but I'm calling BS on that. Its drivers are not as reliable. There is a blatant opengl bug that causes firefox to lock the machine up until you disable hardware acceleration, and as of 10.9.4 this is unaddressed. Since its something to do with the VM implementation in the OS one has to ask WTF is apple doing? 10.8.5 was more reliable. The bottom line is that I need to reboot the MBA once a week, whereas the thinkpad was up for months consistently; as is my desktop running ubuntu 12.04.
There are positives though:
The use of screens are pretty good: I can slide a full screen app on/off of the screen with a three finger drag - which isn't too bad. It reminds me of my Amiga days; except that the amiga allowed me to see both screens split at the same time - OSX does not let you do this.
I use virtual box and run windows, and several ubuntu installations on it - all work fine as I'd expect.
As far as a laptop goes, its pretty good: Excellent battery life, fast disk, boots very quickly. Closing the lid works (unlike many windows laptops I've seen). External monitors plug in and just work, as I'd expect.
Just the idea that I'm not permitted to configure the keyboard / mouse AS I'D LIKE really pisses me off.
Hope this helps.
-bms20
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Thanks bms20, good info ...
I'm wondering, do you run the mac version of Qt Creator or do you run it from one of your virtual box machines? I noticed that there may be some debugging issues with lldb on the mac. Not sure if those are a thing of the past or if I can expect problems.
Basically, I just want to use it as a mac too but it would be nice to be able to go mobile with my Qt development. For now all my development work is on my Fedora desktop.
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Hi,
Also, one thing to keep in mind: if you want to target iOS you can only do it from OS X.
Both iOS and Android development are working nicely.
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Ah, good to know! Based on one of the Digia Blog posts it looks like lldb is fairly well supported now. I think I'm going to pull the trigger, oh boy!
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Brian:
I use Qt creator on osx, ubuntu (both native and virtualbox on my mba), and windows (likewise native/ vbox+mba). All work fine, just be aware of the keyboard awkwardness.
I also use pycharm extensively on all platforms as well - also works great, but I have put a little effort into configuring both creator and pycharm to have somewhat related keymaps.
-bms20