Re: Preview build of our new client (only for the adventurous!)

Quote from: tlan on June 20, 2011, 10:10:49 PM

Quote from: allbitcoin on June 20, 2011, 08:32:21 PM

The long term goal is to have native clients for all major platforms. We started with Windows as it is the one platform that needed a more secure client the most. Sadly Windows doesn't have the best choice of UI APIs after we elminated Qt for various reasons. A pure win32 interface is being worked on and will yield a much leaner client, though it will take a lot more time.

Care to elaborate on why you ditched Qt? Also, why did you go with Forms and not WPF when you decided to do .Net, and not use Qt in .Net?

--
Thomas

Few reasons (in no particular order):

Distribution size and ease. Qt DLLs are pretty weighty - the basic set (Core, Gui, Network) come in at over 11 megs on top of our download. Admittedly .Net is an order of magnitude bigger, but on most PCs the runtime is already there. Also the oneclick deployment platform automatically deals with the dependencies.
Qt is probably as good a cross-platform UI toolkit as one could hope for, but Qt apps still fall short of the native experience. We've gone with .Net for now for speed of development but the long term plan is to have a light, snappy native Win32 client with as few dependencies as possible (a single, small EXE that can live on a USB drive would be ideal).
Licensing - Qt would cost extra.
There's already a Qt client project, we didn't want to duplicate efforts unnecessarily.