I'm planning some Symbian related development on S60 3.1 platform. It seems like generally available language options are Python and C++. However Nokia's official forum seems very much tilted towards C++.
I want to know what are the advantages and disadvantages of using Python for S60 over Symbian C++? And is it even possible to do Python programming for S60 3.1 platform?
PyS60 is good when you need to prototype something simple fast. If you try to develop a full application with it though, you'll most likely find yourself sooner or later wanting to use features that are available in Symbian C++ but not in PyS60 without writing bindings (in C++) for it. Also you'll need to deal with the right version of PyS60 runtime being available, and some of them aren't backwards compatible.
If you go for the Symbian C++ route, you can embed a python interpreter in it too.
C++ is very, very fast, and the Qt library is for C++. If you're programming on a mobile phone, Python will be very slow and you'll have to spend ages writing bindings for it.
I answer this as a user.
PyS60 is slow and not so much app and sample to start with.
C++ is good, native, fast, but if you mind deevelop app for most device (current N-series), you will not want to go with Qt, I have a N78 and tested Qt in N82 too, it's slow (more than Python, sadly but true)
PyS60 has a very limited API. Applications written using it are slow, hard to deploy (since you have to install the runtime first) and cannot be posted on the Ovi store. If you're looking for an easy way to write simple Symbian apps take a look at Nokia WRT.
If you don't mind C++ try the recently released Qt SDK 1.0. It's really powerful, future proof and will soon be supported by the Ovi store.
What is the purpose of your programming? Are you planning distribute your app through Ovi Store? If so, you should use a tool that could be tested and signed by Symbian Signed.
What does it mean? As far as I know, they don't provide such functionality for Python. So you have to choose native Symbian C++ or Qt.
By the way, Qt signing procedure is not quite clear for now. It seems Ovi Store and Symbian Signed are only allow Qt apps for a certain devices (Nokia X6, Nokia N97 mini, maybe some other). I suppose it is a subject for a change, and quite fast change, but you should consider this too.
When 3rd edition Feature Pack 1 ran the latest phones on the market, the main runtime people were using to program them was J2ME (http://www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/Java/). I know the title pits C++ against Python, but have you considered Java? It was much easier than native Symbian C++. The performance is good.
-jk
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I've been looking at a lot of different options for creating a GUI windows application. Win32, Windows forms, MFC to name a few. I know my C++ well, I just need some advice on where I should start learning some GUI for windows. Thanks!
Qt has helpful tutorials. Easy to learn. Open source. Many resources on the web!
MFC is quite a dated technology now; The kinds of books/tutorials available for it are similarly aging. QT is becoming far more widely used and is likely a much better starting point from a learning perspective.
There are of course plenty of other alternatives beyond C++; C# and .NET are good choices if you are specifically interested in development on Windows. C++ programmers tend to find their feet in C# quite quickly, although any new language/environment does of course have an extra learning curve
I would look into Qt, OpenGL and SDL (Simple Directmedia Layer).
Qt provides an easy way to build GUIs, I would (loosely) compare it to Java's Swing.
OpenGL and SDL are more about plain graphics, both being used in various games and applications.
I use MFC commercially and I'd have to say for strictly GUI/Windows apps, you might want to look at C# (either Winforms and/or WPF). MFC is getting pretty dated. You can get a lot more done in the same amount of time with C#. Sure it might run a tiny bit slower, but for UI apps, I think programmer time is much more important metric than execution time.
If you want to use C++ for UI, maybe have a look at Qt. It is continually updated/enhanced and is not limited to a single platform like MFC is.
Good luck!
It is as helpful to develop a windows based applications! their are many open sources and Ides to develop windows applications.
One of them are Visual Studios, it is an IDE ie..(Integrated Development Environment) developed by Microsoft for both windows and web based applications development.As it has an advantage that an individual should be proficient in any programming language that he/she knows about.This IDE is integrated with the .net framework which have the capability to manage the code and compile with the help of Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL)and CLR common language at Run-time.The type checking is handled by Common type Specification for all Programming languages.JIT compiler is a compiler to execute to semi finished code and turns to code in to bytes.The main languages are handled by these IDE are C++,VC++,C#,Visual Basic,F#,J#..etc
I have read a few articles in the cross-platform tag. However, as I'm starting a fresh application (mostly a terminal/console app), I'm wondering about the easiest way to make it cross-platform (i.e. working for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows). I have thought about the following:
adding various macro/tags in my code to build different binary executables for each operating system
use Qt platform to develop a cross-functional app (although the GUI and platform component would add more development time as I'm not familiar with Qt)
Your thoughts? Thanks in advance for your contribution!
Edit: Sounds like there are a lot of popular responses on Java and Qt. What are the tradeoffs between these two while we're at it?
Do not go the first way. You'll encounter a lot of problems that are already solved for you by numerous tools.
Qt is an excellent choice if you definitely want C++. In fact, it will speed up development even if you aren't familiar with it, as it has excellent documentation and is easy to use. The good part about it is that it isn't just a GUI framework, but also networking, XML, I/O and lots of other stuff you'll probably need.
If not necessary C++, I'd go with Java. C++ is far too low level language for most applications. Debugging memory management and corrupt stacks can be a nightmare.
To your edited question:
The obvious one: Java has garbage collection, C++ doesn't. It means no memory leaks in Java (unless you count possible bugs in JVM), no need to worry about dangling pointers and such.
Another obvious one: it is extremely easy to use platform-dependent code in C++ using #ifdefs. In Java it is a real pain. There is JNI but it isn't easy to use at all.
Java has very extensive support of exceptions. While C++ has exceptions too, Qt doesn't use them, and some things that generate exceptions in Java will leave you with corrupt memory and crashes in C++ (think buffer overflows).
"Write once, run everywhere." Recompiling C++ program for many platforms can be daunting. Java programs don't need to be recompiled.
It is open to debate, but I think Java has more extensive and well-defined library. The abstraction level is generally higher, the interfaces are cleaner. And it supports more useful things, like XML schemas and such. I can't think of a feature that is present in Qt, but absent in Java. Maybe multimedia or something, I'm not sure.
Both languages are very fast nowadays, so performance is usually not an issue, but Java can be a real memory hog. Not extremely important on modern hardware too, but still.
The least obvious one: C++ can be more portable than Java. One example is FreeBSD OS which had very poor support for Java some time ago (don't know if it is still the case). C++/Qt works perfectly there. If you plan on supporting a wide range of Unix systems, C++ may be a better choice.
Use Java. As much bashing as it gets/used to get, it's the best thing to get stuff working across any platform. Sure, you will still need to handle external OS related functions you may be using, but it's much better than using anything else.
Apart from Java, there are a few things you can run on the JVM - JRuby, Jython, Scala come to mind.
You could also write with the scripting languages directly( Ruby, Python, etc ).
C/C++ is best left for applications that demand complete memory control and high controllability.
I'd go with the QT (or some other framework) option. If you went with the first you'd find it considerably harder. After all, you have to know what to put into the various conditionally compiled sections for all the platforms you're targeting.
I would suggest using a technology designed for cross-platform application development. Here are two technologies I know of that -- as long as you read the documentation and use the features properly -- you can build the application to run on all 3 platforms:
Java
XULRunner (Mozilla's Development Platform)
Of course, there is always the web. I mostly use web applications not just for their portability, but also because they run on my Windows PC, my Ubuntu computer, and my Mac.
We mainly build web applications because the web is the future. Local applications are viewed in my organization as mostly outdated, unless there is of course some feature or technology the web doesn't yet support that holds that application back from being fully web-based.
I would also suggest Github's electron which allows to build cross platform desktop applications using NodeJs and the Google's Chromium. The only drawback for this method is that an electron application run much slower than a native C++ application due to the abstraction layers between Javascript and native C++.
If you're making a console app, you should be able to use the same source for all three platforms if you stick to the functions defined in the POSIX libraries. Setting up your build environment is the most complicated part, especially if you want to be able to build for multiple platforms out of the same source tree.
I'd say if you really want to use C++, QT is the easiest way for cross-platform application, I found myself using QT when I need an UI even though QT has a large set of library which makes pretty much everything easier in C++.
If you don't want to use QT then you need a good design and a lot of abstraction to make cross-platfform application.
However I'm using more and more Python bindinq to QT for medium size application.
If you are working on a console application and you know a bit of python, you might find Python scripting much more comfortable than C++. It keeps the time comsuming stuff away to be able to focus on your application.
I've been coding on C++/Linux for 10+ years.
I am switching to do Mac development.
My development involves GUI components.
Is my only choice to learn Cocoa/Objective-C, or is there a way to wrap Cocoa and use it from C++ land?
Thanks!
Yes, you need to learn Objective-C. Besides, you wouldn't gain much if you didn't need to. It's not the language that's hard to learn but the Cocoa framework (not because it's inherently hard but because it's so huge).
You could use Carbon, but that's deprecated.
As Ole says, Objective-C is not hard to learn if you have a C++ background - and you can mix the languages if you use Objective-C++ (which can be useful, but usually best to partition the code that uses different languages - so use Objective-C/ Cocoa for the GUI layer and C++ for the core logic. I do it this way in my iPhone game, vConqr).
If you've done GUI work in C++ I think you'll appreciate why Objective-C was chosen for Cocoa. It's very nice for event driven designs and has a number of abstractions that are a natural fit. As you get into more abstract areas, though, especially if you use a lot of containers and algorithms, you'll probably start to find the limitations a little annoying. But give it time - there are other useful abstractions that are not immediately obvious (dynamic typing, key/ value coding and other forms of reflection, categories...).
You might also find this stackoverflow question useful.
No, I don't think you need to learn Objective-C. You can use Qt framework to develop applications on Mac using C++.
If you are only going to work on Mac apps, then learn Objective-C and the Cocoa frameworks. Cocoa apps can pick up new features "for free" in newer Mac OS X releases, and will be more future-proof than a cross-platform app framework like Qt.
There are so many aspects to Cocoa frameworks (collectively) that you would be best served by sticking to the native app framework to serve your customers (end users). That is really what matters, not the short term inconvenience of learning a new language or framework (which comes with the job, adapt or die).
Pretty soon you will be as frustrated with Xcode as the rest of us.
I use WxWindows on the Mac for my tool development. Took a little bit of working but I got my Jam based c++ pipeline that I use on windows working perfectly. The only thing you need to remember to get it all correctly working is to create the proper application rules... easy to get working as a jam rule.
As mentioned in a few of the other answers, there are a number of cross platform GUI libraries that support mac. Such as Qt and WxWindows. You can use any of them, I personally have only used Qt and found it quite pleasurable to work with after coming from Java and C toolkits.
In order to use the native GUI libraries, you can use Python as well (PyObjC). Java is also able to make native looking apps in OS X.
I have been writing C++ Console/CMD-line applications for about a year now and would like to get into windows GUI apps. For those of you who have taken this road before, what advice/tips can you give me. Ex: good readings, tutorials, approach tactics, etc...
I know this is a really broad question, but i really don't know how/where to start, thus not knowing how to ask this question properly.
I highly recommend the use of the Qt Libraries for several reasons:
The Framework is freely available for Windows, Linux, MacOS X, and a couple of mobile systems. Since version 4.5 the license is LGPL, which basically means that you can use Qt even in commercial applications.
The design of Qt is out-standing, e.g. they use modern design patterns and a very consistent interface design (I don't know many other libraries that use object-oriented ideas in such perfection). Using Qt is the same as using Boost: it will improve your own programming skills, because they use such beautiful concepts!
They are bloody fast, for instance in rendering (due to the different back-end for OpenGL, DirectX, etc.). Just have a look on this video and you see what can easily be done with Qt but is hard to achieve with native Windows, Mac, or Linux programming.
They have a really great documentation, with tons of tutorials and a very good reference. You can start learning Qt easily with the given docs! The documentation is also available online, so have a look and see by yourself.
As mentioned before, Qt is cross-platform; you have one source-base that works on all the important operating systems. Why will you limit yourself to Windows, when you can also have Mac and Linux "for free"?
Qt is so much more than "just" the user interface; they also offer network and database functionality, OpenGL bindings, a full-working web-browser control (based on WebKit), a multimedia playback library, and much much much more.
Honestly, I wasted a couple of years by developing software natively for Windows, while I could have been so much more productive.
For C++ you have two choices, Native or Managed.
For native development, my team (at Microsoft, in Windows) uses the Windows Template Library. It works very well for us.
You should learn the basics of Win32 and how Windowing works. The canonical tome is Programming Windows®
For Managed development you can use C++ with Windows Forms. However, windows forms has been supplanted by Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
Here is a good site that can get you up to speed.
This tutorial is useful
You can use Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition for your tools (they are free).
My best advice for Windows C++ GUI programming is don't do Windows C++ GUI programming.
I realize that is an extremely uninformative/smartass response if it's not qualified, so I'll note that you don't state that you need to do C++ Windows GUI programming, but that you "Would like to get into Windows GUI apps." If that is the case, and you don't have a very specific reason to use C++ (i.e. gigantic existing legacy codebase written in MFC or a bunch of C++ code that you want to build a front-end for but would be a pain to expose to .NET code), then it is going to be a lot easier and more productive to go the .NET route and start learning Windows Forms or better yet WPF using C# or another .NET language of your choice.
If you do need to go C++, then I would second the recommendations for 3rd party toolkits like Qt or wxWidgets, as the state of C/C++ GUI programming tools from Microsoft is now abysmal.
Most windowing libraries and technologies use similar idioms. Pick one and learn it.
The Windows Template Library is a very nice veneer for Microsoft Windows while sticking with C++.
For cross platform C++ windowing toolkits (they work on Microsoft Windows as well as other platforms) you can try QT or wxWidgets.
Well, for the Windows GUI, get used to referencing the MSDN a lot, assuming you want to deal with the API directly.
My favorite resource for learning the basics was theForger's tutorial, but there are hundreds of books and other sites out there.
I guess an important place to start is your toolkit. You tagged this visualc++, so I assume you are looking at that, however remember there are other toolkits like Qt.
I would suggest starting at Microsoft's tutorials.
+1 for Qt. I would put documentation at the top of my list of requirements for a GUI system. Qt has great docs and there's a huge community behind it. Also there are several books about it. Good docs are extremely important if you are working alone with no other team members to rely on. Alternatives are wxWidgets, MFC, WTL, FLTK and many more. They all have pros and cons. Eg FLTK is small and only provides GUI whereas Qt and wxWidgets also include networking, database access etc. Qt seems to have the most momentum at the moment after the Nokia buyout eg the release of Qt Creator which enables you to develop apps outside of Visual Studio.
It has been so long since I worked with C++ on Windows GUI, my word is always avoid C++ in Windows GUI unless you have a very good reason, I mean a good darn reason, if you need some performance C# is more than enough for 90% of the cases, and if you need more power write your performance critical thing in a C++ dll, and call it from a Windows Forms or WPF application.
It will save you hell of a lot time.
Still my opinion, if you have another I totally respect that
The first question is that do you want to develop Free, Open Source, for personal use or Commercial applications in C++?
If you want to develop for personal use! Then you can go with some good C++ Toolkit, Framework or API.
If you want to develop an GUI application that will be open source or free. Then you can go with C++ Toolkits, Frameworks or API's that have the GPL or any open source license that fits your needs.
Even you can develop Commercial applications with open source toolkits, frameworks or API's that have LGPL license.
The second question is that do you want to develop for the Windows, Mac, Unix or Linux? or these all, even for the mobile platform?
If you have a Windows user, as I am, and want to develop only for the Windows, I mean not for the cross platform, you can go with Win32 API, although, learning Win32 API is harder but it gives you the complete control over the machine. Believe me that no other tool would you provide the complete control over the machine. If you dislike Win32 API, for any reason, you can go with MFC, which is another technology from Microsoft, but is not free, old and has less attention now a days. If you decide to develop with .NET platform, you have C++/CLI, an extension to C++ language for developing .NET applications. .NET gives you the type safety, OOP and a built in garbage collector, provides you the all API's related to Windows and x86 or x64 machine in one package.
.NET has its own world! Microsoft has decided to port .NET to other operating systems too, Mono project is an example... You can develop nearly all kinds of applications using .NET.
If you want to develop C++ GUI applications for the cross platform, then Qt, WxWidgets and U++ are available for your help. You can write once and deploy anywhere with these libraries. Many open source IDE's and compliers are also available to develop C++ applications with ease. Note that if you do not want to develop for the cross platform, any cross platform library would be overhead and unavoidable increase in size of the executables.
Is your C++ knowledge is good enough to program software systems?
In fact, if your knowledge of C++ is not enough deep and you do not understand programming methods like OOP, Encupsolation, Classes, Interfaces, Types, Programming Patterns and so on, you can not use any toolkit with full potencial.
Do not forget that every Toolkit, Framework or API is implemented in some programming language. If you do understand the language very well, you can use the toolkit very well. I think, you would understand my point.
Put aside WPF or VC++ or Qt, You can also try out several libraries such as :
OpenFrameworks
Processing
...
there's an active project for developing Gui with Openframeworks here:
http://www.syedrezaali.com/blog/?p=2172
Are you familiar with Microsoft Visual Studio and .NET technologies? Since you want to develop for Windows platforms why don't you start by taking a look at Microsoft Visual C++ Express Edition.? Explore a little with the available tools from MS and search for some tutorials.
We are in 2020 but the question is still pertinent. I agree with Qt users, it's a great framework.
However, there is also C++Builder that offers you design GUI visually at design-time. C++Builder application can be built on both VCL (Windows only) and FireMonkey (cross-platorm) frameworks. Clang compiler can produce both 32 and 64-bits native executables. Community edition of C++Builder is free. Delphi integration is seamless: C++Builder project can include Delphi files directly and use any existing Delphi component packages and libraries.
On my side job as programmer, I am to write a program in C++ to convert audio files from/to various formats. Probably, this will involve building a simple GUI.
Will it be a great effort to build seperate GUIs for Mac and Windows using Cocoa and WinForms instead of a cross-platform toolkit like Qt or GTK? (I will have to maintain a seperate Windows-version and Mac-Version anyway)
The GUI will probably be very simple and only need very basic functionality.
I always felt that native GUIs feel far more intuitive than its cross-platform brethren...
If you have the expertise, use native frontends, it'll effectively double the job you have to do for UI but from my experience non-native UI is a little bit clunkier than their native counterparts.
Have you looked at wxWidgets? Cross platform native controls.
I would agree that if possible, native front-ends are the way to go. I've not used wxWidgets recently, and I've heard it's come a long way, but back when it was wxWindows, we built an app with it that was spec'd to be built in X/Motif. When we finished the effort and delivered it, the customer said it did not look enough like X/Motif, and we had to re-work the entire UI at our expense... Joel Spolsky wrote a good article on this, but I can't remember the title. What he did say, IIRC, was the problem with Java and some other cross-platform UI was that "your dog barks at my app" - it's the little inconsistencies that annoy folks.
Cross-platform toolkits, more or less, all make the incorrect assumption that the difference between platforms is a matter of button placement and widget styling. In some cases you can get away with this - a Qt app will feel fairly native on both Windows (where UI conventions are very lax) and on Linux, particularly a KDE environment. In general, you can move between Linux and Windows relatively easily; conventions are similar, and the Windows community is lax about them.
Mac is the hard one. Its UI is built around an entirely different paradigm than either Windows or most Linux environments.
But in general, in a native app it's easier to speak the native language of the platform in more ways than just widget style.
Yes.
But seriously, it depends on your goals. I agree that the native UI libraries, with a bunch of effort put into them, will give vastly better results, but for lots of apps, a very basic UI is sufficient and a lot less effort if you take one of the existing cross platform frameworks.
Maybe starting with the CLI and getting functionality working makes the most sense for an audio conversion application.
I'm going to write my own cross platform application GUI layer for this soon.
Depending on the complexity of your application this can be a fraction of what is required for QT, GTK or FOX.
Reason is that we see a tendency that the platform vendors (Apple first) tries to design there system so that it looks unique. This makes it much harder for QT, GTK, FOX and other platform tools to constantly keep in sync with the latest widgets.
When the underlaying technique becomes more and more the same the OS vendors have no option then branding on look and feel of the platform.
wxWidgets used standard c++ syntax and preprocessor thus make you easily alter from plain C or C++. And will produce very native look where is appear, be it on GTK, X11, MS-Windows or Mac.
It's mature since 20yrs of 1rst release, has complete documentation with easy navigating, and supported by large community arround the world.
Coding in your favorite IDE or use prominent Eclipse-IDE and wxFormBuilder as GUI designer. Build wx library and IDE/Toolchain setup could be found on this link: http://yasriady.blogspot.co.id/2016/01/raspberry-pi-toolchain.html
Develop your application in Linux desktop and also provided compiler for Raspberry Pi2 (target application tested work smootly on Raspbian Jessie) ............