QtCreator ...

I do software development for living... C++ development with Qt to be exact. I like the Qt framework, which makes writing C++ applications as much fun as writing e.g. Java or C# applications.

The biggest problem always was to find the right IDE to do Qt development. On Linux one doesn't have to look any further than KDevelop 3.5.3, but what to do on other platforms? Finally we decided to buy a Visual Studio license, because the Trolls did offer plugins that do allow development of Qt applications with it.

Now there is another player in the game. The Trolls did release a technical preview of QtCreator. The IDE even in it's alpha state does make a good impression. All projects we maintain to load and build in the IDE. It has some nice features, which allow you to specify different Qt versions for debug and release build. Why would anyone want to do that you ask? Well I always keep my commercial Qt license stuff under lib in my home directory. That way it doesn't interfere with the version installed in the system. The problem is now if you try to debug UI applications. What did work just like that under openSuSE, caused quite some headache under Kubuntu. If you did run your application under gdb and used any of the system dialogs like file open etc. the application did just hang. If you were lucky then you would be able to do the next step maybe after a few minutes or so. This is of course not acceptable for professional SW development.

At some point I found that I would not have any debugging problems when using the Qt libraries installed in the system be Kubuntu. So that is the reason why I use the system libraries for development and debugging, and my commercial licensed libraries for the release build. This does work perfectly for me, and now QtCreator does support me in working like that - great!

On the other hand there are some things one has to get used to... in QtCreator there is no such thing as a default toolbar with standard toolbar actions like file open/save etc. They decided to keep the UI plain and simple, so you need to start using keyboard shortcuts more often than you did in the past. But doesn't that make you even more efficient? Using the keyboard is most of the time much more efficient than using the mouse.

At this point I'm not sure wether I should stick with my lovely and reliable KDevelop, or try some projects using QtCreator. Maybe I'm going to use both ...