Qt Revisited

I managed to find some time to play with Qt this weekend. Firstly, I am rather impressed by the new IDE: While not quite as good as eclipse in terms of editing it seems more stable and uses FAR less memory. It is definately more user friendly than my visual studio 2003 and has a nice auto-complete feature that seems to actually work.

The new widgets and libraries are great if a little large and its pretty quick to whip something together. A nice touch in the IDE is the ability to just drag and drop signals to slots right on the visual layout of the form.

Qt 4.5

As my raytracer is getting more and more complex with lots of dynamic options and movement controls trying to remember keypresses from a command window to turn things off and on is getting increasingly difficult.

The time has come to build a proper interface for the rendering window. Now as I dont want to spend too much time developing this from scratch I thought I'd have another look at Qt (pronounced cute). Its been quite a while and a good few versions since I last used it, and am pleasently surprised at the improvements and additions. As it does offer openGL widget / rendering it is the perfect library to use for my raytracer.  Using openGL and Qt still gives me the option of going cross-platform on the raytracer and as the memory handling / page locked mem is faster on linux this could give a few more fps :)

In short, if you are looking at a C++ friendly interface designer you could do a lot worse than using the new Qt. (http://www.qtsoftware.com/)