Screw this!

Homer JS

I'm really disappointed by Qt. And I mean with everything that has to do with Qt. No learning resources WHATSOEVER (documentation does NOT count as a leraning resource. It's not meant to learn programming or a new platform). Qt forums is like the gayest forums I've ever seen! You barely get two answers in a week (sometimes none), both of which are questions about your problem or vague comments about what you should do without the slightest intention to help you solve the problem.
[beeeeeeep]

Thank You for nothing.

[Edit by andreyc]: This post was reported for the language. I beeped some words but keep the thread because it provides useful info and the links.

Resurrection

Try this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2D1942A4688E9D63

SysTech

Hum... I've not seen your questions and being new myself I probably would not have answered simply because I might tell you the wrong thing to do.

I have to disagree. In my experience Qt forums are pretty darned good. If you want a truly wonderful question asking experience (NOT) trying asking some questions on StackOverflow.

I'll take a look and see if I have any clue about your questions.

SysTech

Well... I've taken a look at a few of your questions and it seems you have quite a few answers most if not all them either ask you for more data or offer some things to try.

So I don't really see what you are so upset about.

kenchan

So what do you expect for Free @Homer JS???
Or did you spend some money on a commercial license and are upset because of that???

Anyway we don't get paid to answer your questions here so take it or leave it as you please. However I don't see the need to swear at everyone!!

Homer JS

Thnx for the try @Resurrection but I've seen those videos (Actually I always search the web for something before asking, ALWAYS because it's faster to read an answer to an already asked question than to wait for answer). The problem with those tutorials is that they're made for/with Qt 4.8 while I use Qt 5.4 and practically noone of the examples he (or everyone using something less than Qt 5.2 ) gives do work.

@SysTech Exactly which answer requires more data ? Besides Geist who tried to help, not just me but a lot of other people noone else cares around here!

@kenchan StackOverflow is free too. Qt is also free but that doesn't mean it has to SUCK.

p3co bq. Really ? To what extent have you tried Qt ?

I didn't get the chance to try it out to any extent, except some basic things like hellor world and stuff! There's no way to learn it. No books, no tutorials, no examples...nothing, nada.

bq. Did you take any efforts to find any Qt related books ?

This lameass question doesn't even deserve an answer.

bq. Doesn’t seems like from looking at the responses you received in your posts. And what do you expect ? Someone to sit by your side whole day and answer the questions instantly. Sorry Sir that’s not possible in any forum I guess. People visiting and answering the questions are from different timezones and help people in their freetime. So as kenchan suggested you must buy a commercial license if you want instant answers.

Fack Your paid license. I'm a student, I can get Visual Studio (software of a couple thousand bucks) for free. Why should I have to pay for Qt.

All I'm saying is: if peeps wanna keep Qt open source (which I like and respect very much) they should try to get new programmers to learn and use it. Noone (new to programming) would (will) invest their time trying to learn from docummentation and outdated tutorials. I understand that people gotta work, take care of family and stuff but it can't be that hard to do some tutorials (for example here, on this forum somewhere). There's been two years since Qt 5 was released and still no way for new students to learn it. I understand that Qt 4 and Qt 5 may have their similarities but for someone new it's not rational to go learn an outdated platform (Qt4) just to get back and learn Qt 5 again.

Chris Kawa

You don't like a library. That's fine, but there is no reason to disrespect other people becouse of that.

The official examples are part of the documentation so yes, in case of Qt documentation is a resource for learning (and personally I find it excellent).
If you can't live with that then there are many community wikis, youtube channels, a whole "online book":http://qmlbook.org/ and tutorials. I will sound like a jerk but seriously - if you can't find resources for Qt then you should face the fact that you are not very good at using search engines. Can't help you with that.

As for the forum consider few aspects:

You are not entitled to answers. You can ask and someone might be kind enough to answer. That's it. How many questions of others have you answered?
It's a users forum. People here share the knowledge and experience they have. It's not a support hotline and no one is obligated to help you. It's your responsibility to ask a question in a manner that will attract others. It's not their fault if they can't or don't know how to help.
If someone asks you a followup question or suggest something to check and you don't answer to that then don't expect them to be interested in the thread. Remember - it's your problem they try to help with.
Usually, when the first few responses ask for details or shoot blindly for things to check it indicates that your question was vague or you provided no details on the problem or the steps you took to resolve it. Very few people will spend time wondering what you meant or did at particular point. Asking questions the right way is as hard as answering them if not harder.
Qt 5.4 came out just now, so how can you expect everything in the internet to be up to date? And how can you expect users to have instant expertise on it?
You seem to be interested in Android development. This is a fairly new (in comparison) branch of Qt and the toolchain and support tools are still rough (again, in comparison) and evolving. Few people here have excelling expertise in the field as we all learn along. This is why you might have more brainstorming instead of straight solutions to your problems in that particular field.
There's no rule or schedule on when a particular person reads your question so I can't imagine how can you be upset at response times. I mean it's not like someone is actively monitoring you for questions. In my personal experience there are 2-3 threads a day I follow that get resolved in a matter of hours. This just strengthens my belief that your questions are either very particular or not well formulated.
It's an international multi-culture community. Have you considered that for a large portion of users December is a holiday season and things do slow down?
My social skills are not top notch but I'm fairly sure this kind of language and name calling will not make too many people willing to help you with anything.

Homer JS

Well first of all thank for taking the time to respond, You could have just ignored this which would have been even worst.
There's some points I'd like to make here:

as for your question how many questions I've answered the answer to this is quite obvious. None. Because I'm a noob here, If I had the knowledge to answer questions I wouldn't be asking things like how to set up Qt for android ar basic things like connecting Qt Qml with C++.
You say, beside other things, that Qt documentation is a resrouce for learning and I agree it can be used as a learning resource but documentation is NOT a learning resource on itself. I (and I'm not that stupid) can't learn a thing from the documentation. There are some examples that I am certain are very good for those who already know earlier versions of Qt but they're worthless to someone new to Qt.

3)You say there are wikis, youtube channels...etc. There's NOTHING like that. Not on Qt 5 except a guy called Joseph who has some great youtube tutorials on QML. Like I said earlier it's not right to tell people there's a lot of resources on Qt 4 so go learn Qt 4 first then you can come back and learn the new/ different things of Qt 5. (I'm not talking about you personally here but for Trolltech and Qt in general).

You Criticize my way(method) of asking questions by saying (amongst other things) they're not clear and not in a manner that would attract other people to answer well I say if my questions are good enough for StackOverflow ( a site about programming in general and I get answeres there) they should be good enough for a Qt only forum too.
Again, like I asked earlier, what answeres asked for clarification or said that my question was to vague or not well formulated? I'd say none.
Besides I'm not saying the responses come too late, I'm saying that they don't come at all or even if they come they (usually) don't explain a thing.

6)Yes, I know December is a holiday season, here where I live too. But it was the same thing 3-4 weeks ago.

Chris Kawa

You don't have to answer. That's perfectly fine. Expecting others to do so always when you need it is not fine.
1. Stop using words like "nothing", "null" etc. That is clearly not true. I'm not pulling stuff out of my ass. What about the book I linked to? Or any of the links you were given in the answers or any of these? Are they not Qt 5.x materials targeted at beginners? They cover pretty much everything from how to install Qt, needed kits and SDKs/NDKs, connect a device, build and run an app. How is that nothing???
  http://qmlbook.org/
  http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/androidgs.html
  http://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-mobile-app-tutorial.html
  http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/gettingstartedqml.html
  http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmlapplications.html
  http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtqml-index.html
  https://qt-project.org/wiki/Category:Developing_with_Qt::Qt-5
  http://youtu.be/WFGRr0DV3oM
  https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=qt+5+android+tutorial
  I found like 50 more in the first minute of search but I'm not gonna copy/paste internet here.
  Granted they are not all Qt 5.4 but still 5.x. As I said. It's a fresh release so give it a month or two before complaining.
Somebody answered to you on SO and not here, so somebody there knew the answer and here not. What's your point?
Fair enough. I admit I just glanced at your posts. Sometimes others don't know answers to your questions. Yes, that will happen often throughout your life. Deal with it instead of blaming others.

The problem here is your demanding posture. You are not entitled to anything. You are using a software library for free and the license clearly states it is provided "as is". The community here is a friendly bunch that use their spare time to help others. They don't owe you anything.

What's your point? You can't find a step by step tutorial you like on a specific detailed topic you have in mind? How is that anybody's fault? Hundreds if not thousands of people develop with Qt so clearly it's not impossible to learn and grow in this environment.

koahnig

There are not too many differences between Qt 4 and Qt 5.
It is rather evolution than a revolution seen from outside. There is probably the issue. There is probably for most authors no real incentive to write another book of Qt.
Within the documentation there is a "tutorial/example section":http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtexamplesandtutorials.html which shall help.
Most of those examples have their origin in Qt4 but they are adopted to Qt5.

Homer JS

bq. You don’t have to answer. That’s perfectly fine. Expecting others to do so always when you need it is not fine.

It's not fine expecting an answer when I have a problem and need an answer? Why? How? If I this forums policy is something like we don't care about your questions/problems, we might answer how and when us pleases to or not, then this should be stated somewhere for people to understand this and go somewhere else, where it is fine to expect an answer when you need it.

bq. What about the book I linked to? Or any of the links you were given in the answers or any of these? Are they not Qt 5.x materials targeted at beginners?

Absolutely not. These links are not targeted at Qt beginners they're targeted at Qt 5 beginners. There's a huge difference between these two, you know. (why you assume that I didn't do research on my own even though I pointed out at least a couple of times that the opposite is true is beyond me, but anyway). The book you linked has some nice things on it but the most important chapters(the ones that people might have difficulties grasping) are not yet written. Which makes it pretty much useless for someone wanting to learn something more than "hello em effin world".

bq. As I said. It’s a fresh release so give it a month or two before complaining.

I'm not complaining about Qt at all, I find it great, if I didn't like I wouldn't have wasted a minute trying to learn it or even write this. I'm coplaining about the scarce learning resources about Qt 5 in general.

bq. 4) Somebody answered to you on SO and not here, so somebody there knew the answer and here not. What’s your point?

I think my point on this one was pretty clear over there. You were blaming the (not)answers on my bad way of asking questions whereas I told You that if those questions would have been that bad or vague explained like You said SO would have closed(removed) them, none of them got removed or even downvoted once. So clearly the questions were clear enough. (I copied them from here to SO or the other way round btw.)

bq. 5) Fair enough. I admit I just glanced at your posts. Sometimes others don’t know answers to your questions. Yes, that will happen often throughout your life. Deal with it instead of blaming others.

I don't blame anyone here or anywhere else. I only blame Qt (trolltech or whatever) for not caring if new pople get involved with Qt.

bq. The community here is a friendly bunch that use their spare time to help others. They don’t owe you anything.

I didn't saythe community here ows me something. BUT Qt does owe me, not me personally but me as a potential Qt developer. If Qt strategy is: we provide you with something free so we don't care if you can menage to learn it or not. We don't owe you anything unless you pay for a license, you ain't getting any learning material or any help to make your "entrance" to Qt easier then it's not gonna get much attention and things like Java and C#, .NET or whatever gonna make it obsolete.

bq. What’s your point? You can’t find a step by step tutorial you like on a specific detailed topic you have in mind? How is that anybody’s fault? Hundreds if not thousands of people develop with Qt so clearly it’s not impossible to learn and grow in this environment.

My point actually is pretty simple and clear. There's no resource that explains(book, video, whatever...), to a newbie the way Qt works, not some examples like those in the documentations that say: "do this, write this and you'll get this out", without taking the time to explain what exactlly is happening. For example, how (and more important why) a slot or a signal works, when it doesn't, when and how should they be used and very important when and how they should NOT be used, things like this.

Of course there are a lot of people developing in Qt, people who learned earlier versions of it (for which there may wery well be enough learning resources, can't say nothing about that) and found the way into Qt 5 pretty simple of course, because they had a lot of knowledge about Qt and just needed to learn the new stuff.

@koahnig Thank You very much. But the thing is that You might find it easy, ex. to adopt a Qt 4 example to Qt5 but for a newbie like me there's no way to know how Qt5 differs from Qt4 because I don't know Qt4 to begin with. I've seen examples made with/for Qt5.2 that didn't work in Qt5.4. While I menaged somehow to make them run it was impossible for me to learn something from it. If an examples take you hours just to make it run then it's not gonna help you (me in this case) to learn anything.

Examples, tutorials..., point is to make learning easier and not to force you look around for hours just to make it run first and then study the way it works.

Again, all I'm saying is that them at Qt should try and do something to get the young ones to learn and use it in the future. The way this can be done is through making learning resources easy accessible, easy to follow which clearly is not the case with Qt5.

Maybe this annoys someone. I apologize and assure You this wasn't my intetion. It's a good thing that it's a written post and who doesn't like it can just ignor it.

Have a nice one.

SysTech

@Homer,

Your last post above asks a key question:

How does Qt work?

Well I'm not really sure many people could answer that question as a whole. I mean the framework is very complex and alone the linkage of slots and signals is probably beyond the scope of even the most advanced training.

I think even if you shelled out for a commercial license and posted your first question:

Tell me how Qt works

You'd probably not get that much help.

I'd say you'd run into this with just about anything... MS C#, other C++ environments and GUI frameworks. It would take a lot to know how any of these work!

So my suggestion is learn by doing. If you want to understand slots/signals then write some test apps that use them and play around. Do the same for other things you have questions about within Qt.

By taking this approach I think when you do have a question for the forum you can say:

Hey I've got this test program... it does this right but this wrong... help...

And you'll probably get a pretty good response.

Cheers and happy new year!

koahnig

[quote author="Homer JS" date="1419893967"]

@koahnig Thank You very much. But the thing is that You might find it easy, ex. to adopt a Qt 4 example to Qt5 but for a newbie like me there's no way to know how Qt5 differs from Qt4 because I don't know Qt4 to begin with. I've seen examples made with/for Qt5.2 that didn't work in Qt5.4. While I menaged somehow to make them run it was impossible for me to learn something from it. If an examples take you hours just to make it run then it's not gonna help you (me in this case) to learn anything.

Examples, tutorials..., point is to make learning easier and not to force you look around for hours just to make it run first and then study the way it works.

Again, all I'm saying is that them at Qt should try and do something to get the young ones to learn and use it in the future. The way this can be done is through making learning resources easy accessible, easy to follow which clearly is not the case with Qt5.

Maybe this annoys someone. I apologize and assure You this wasn't my intetion. It's a good thing that it's a written post and who doesn't like it can just ignor it.

Have a nice one.[/quote]

The point is that most programs written for Qt 4 can be simply compiled in Qt 5. Therefore, there are no adatations from Qt 4 to Qt 5 really required.
I have started with Qt4.2, I believe, a while ago. I was not keen to start migrating to Qt 5 because of the typical reasons you find. When Qt5.1 came out, I decided to change.

In my case the only major difference was to add in my .pro files:
@
TEMPLATE = app
TARGET = bliblablo

QT += gui
greaterThan(QT_MAJOR_VERSION, 4): QT += widgets
@

If you want to stay in Qt only you could add only:
@
TEMPLATE = app
TARGET = bliblablo

QT += gui
QT += widgets
@
and I was done for most things.

That is the reason why I am stating that the change is very easy.

Another thing was about QFtp which was already deprecated under Qt 4. In Qt 5 I had to download a part from Git and add to my projects.

I am doing things mainly in the core module and network module. For other sections I would assume it is similar.

To downgrade from Qt 5 to Qt 4 is a different story since Qt 5 has new features which are obviously not present in Qt 4.

The examples found in Qt 5 documentation have been adapted to required differences. E.g. I have seen that fortune client server examples have changed. However, my Qt 4 based Tcp implementation did not have to be adapted at all.

One thing for sure you cannot sit down and say I am learning Qt now and in 3 weeks I know everything. In my opinion there is no way to do so.
However, when you concentrate on different aspects as you might need for a project, it is most likely possible. However, it depends on your requirement.

Wishing you the best for the remaining holiday season and "Einen Guten Rutsch ins Neue Jahr".

SysTech

Hi Homer,

I see this thread is still bubbling.

I have a general question... You say you are a noob which is fine. We all start some where. But how many other frameworks/libraries have you tried?

I've been programming in many different languages as an employed programmer since 1976. That's coming up on 39 years.

Sure my first couple jobs were like feeding paper to the printer or reordering the punch cards because they got dropped but soon enough I found myself in front of a boss asking me the hard question: Can you do it? and if I let you do it which tools will you need?

The first time you face this you shake a bit because no one wants to fail but if you are committed you "byte" and dig in.

The point of all of this is several times in my career I committed to a library or framework only to hugely regret it later and more than just once I ate some of my own money/time to fix the problem.

In the very early 80's Digital Research had a C compiler. I was asked to do a project in C with full input screens and printed reported on an IBM PC. Digital Research was the "big guys!" M$ was still fiddling with Basic and DOS.

Timidly I squeaked that we should perhaps do this project in Unix as soon Santa Clara would have Unix out for the PC. It turns out my boss hated Unix with a passion and frowned at me and was about to say, "Ok out.. get me..." and I backed down and said, ok ok... I'll do it.

The choice was DR C. We ordered the compiler at something crazy like $700 and when it came (on 5 1/4 floppies) I anxiously fired it up. Soon digging through K&R I began to have problems even the first day. Things just didn't work. So after a week I called DR and got a hold of a support girl who was very nice and she said, "Give me your address". (no really easy to use email yet.... everything was server bang server bang and often "emails" took days to get through.)

A few days later a diskette arrived an on the disk was the "bug list" for DR C. Basically as you read down this list it said mostly things like:

int open( char *filename );

Bug: This function always returns a -1. Solution: Do not use this function.

53 or so pages of this or that function didn't work, don't use this function. I was "screwed" as your thread suggests. Virtually everything didn't work! The compiler could print to the console and do some limited math and that was about it. I have 6 months to make a small product and if I didn't get it down I was probably back to sorting punch cards somewhere.

I worked more nights, most weekends and about a week after getting the first floppy I got a second one. It was an assembler and the girl had had written a note and said "for all the functions that don't work you can use the assembler to code up a replacement."

I'd studied assembly and knew enough to be pretty scared. I was gonna need some help. I was ok in assembly but not great. About that time I literally ran into... meaning I crashed my bike into a girl and a guy at U of W. After the initial shouting match I found out they were students in the computer engineering department. The girl was specializing in fault tolerant computing the guy... well he could have done anything he wanted! He handled a computer like I'd grown up with a pencil. He was studying to "build" computers.

I bought them dinner then nervously introduced them to my boss who said he'd pay them $100 a week and no more. So out of my pocket I chipped in another $100 and we had a deal.

Some of you might look down upon me and wonder why I used my own money. It was my first project, I needed to succeed. For many nights I sat side-by-side with the guy as we hand coded in assembler fix ups for the faulty library. I learned more in 3 weeks with that guy than I'd learned in all of my schooling and he wanted to do nothing more than build computers. Programming was like a required evil. We even wrote our own overlay manager to get past the 64k limit. Yes you read that right... 64K. Not MB....

The point of this long long tale is the library/compiler sucked but we made the project work. Later I had some more problems with commercial libraries and frameworks from well advertised vendors, Borland being one of them. Watch another.. But really when I look back on everything the BIGGEST issue was lack of documentation. When you dug hard enough you'd find some strange little tweak to get you though.

This is one area where Qt rules. You have documentation on almost everything in the framework as well as the source! With a little debugging, reading, forum posting, and thinking you have probably one of the better combinations I've ever run across!

Just compare MSDN to Qt! I mean in Visual Studio you click on something hit F1 you get one of the worst laid out pages, usually, ever. After reading table after table of almost meaningless declarations, methods and properties you get to a very very very small piece of sample code some of which simply does not compile!

With Qt there are not only example programs covering most of the key areas but the documentation is just right there with text, some samples and yes there are the tables of methods, properties etc. I don't think you can get away from that.

But after reading the Qt help if you still don't get it a web search almost always turns up someone with the same problem! If that doesn't work the forum here really is FAR FAR better than most other forums including stack overflow.

Here at least people talk to you and there is no down vote button if someone is feeling edgy that day and your ether bits containing your stupid question have crossed into their perfect domain and trashed their day. While I search and use stack overflow I would NEVER post to it. I tried once and was run out of town.

So Homer if you find a better framework, with better support, more documentation, more examples and help then more power to you.

Asperamanca

I learned a lot about Qt by running the examples, taking out whatever I needed an plug it into my own code. Then I would read up on the docs what exactly those classes and methods did. In some cases (much later) I would step through the source code and see what they really did in rare corner cases. If I had a specific question, and couldn't research it, I would post in the forums - and would get answers more often than not.

I fail to see the problem. There's a lot of material to learn from.