 Hey everybody, it's Brian, and this is our first Qt programming video. Now, when I say Qt, I don't mean it's good looking. That's actually what we're going to be covering. It's called Qt. It's spelled Qt, but it's pronounced Qt. And when you search Google, you'll see a lot of information out here. Now, what is Qt programming? Well, let's actually go to Qt.nokia.com. This used to be troll tech software or just Qt.com, but it was bought by Nokia. Nokia makes a lot of phones, if you don't know what Nokia is. Now, Qt programming has a bit of a background on it, and I don't want to get into it too much. If you're really interested, go buy a good book. It's called the C++ GUI programming with Qt 4. Second edition by Prentice Hall. There's also an advanced book that's also very good. Advanced Qt programming, creating software with C++ and Qt 4. Basically, in a nutshell, what you need to know about Qt is that it is a cross-platform framework. Similar to Java, in the sense that it's cross-platform. What you write will run in Windows, Linux, Unix, pretty much anything you want out there. I think you should go to the website and really explore and see what this can do for you. Now, if you go to the downloads, you'll notice there's two options. We're going to explain what these two mean real quick. Commercial, that's if you're developing commercial application. You're a big company, you're going to develop this software that's going to change the world, and well, you need to pay Nokia for this. Now, I pause because I know some of you are going, I don't want to pay anything. Well, you don't have to. There's the LGPL license. This means that you can royalty-free distribute your applications created in Qt. And the only thing you would have to do is share your changes to the Qt framework. So if you actually modify the Qt framework, you have to share those changes. But your source code, excuse me, your source code remains closed source or open source. However, you want to do it. Qt used to get a lot of flak for its licensing. The licensing used to be much stricter. It used to either be open source or commercial. And if it was open source, any software you wrote had to be open source. That's all changed. LGPL allows you to close source your application and not pay a dime. But if you make a change to the Qt framework, you have to share that change with the rest of the world. Okay, now I assume you're going to use the LGPL framework. I am going to use the same thing. It's the exact same thing as the commercial framework. You just don't pay anything. It's just a little legal mumbo jumbo you got to deal with. Now I know I'm going to get some nasty grams saying, you know, that's not what LGPL is, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know what? For the scope of this tutorial, that's what LGPL means. If you write software, LGPL. If you write commercial software, choose commercial. That's all you need to know. All right, moving right along. The Qt SDK, what is an SDK? Software Development Kit is what an SDK means. It is a complete development environment. So whatever you've used for your C++ tutorials, go ahead and throw that right out the window. We're going to actually use the Qt Creator IDE version 2.01. If you're viewing this several months or years from now, you'll notice the version numbers 4.70 and 2.01. I don't think that Qt's going to get dated very fast. I know some frameworks do, but I think Qt's going to be around for a long time. And I don't think it's going to change at the core level. It's a very good framework. Anyways, moving right along. Go ahead and choose your download. You'll notice you got it for Windows, Linux 3264, and Mac. I'm running on Windows. I may actually do some of these tutorials in Linux. The basics of how this works is you can write your source code in one operating system. Take it to another operating system, recompile it, and it'll run without any problems. For example, you can take your Windows source code, throw it into a Mac, recompile it, and it just runs. That's the only catch is that you have to recompile it. Now, this is not like Java in the sense where Java, you compile it once and it just runs anywhere. There's no virtual machine here. You have to distribute the Qt binaries. And we'll go over all this. This is all in C++. There's no hidden voodoo behind the scenes. But go ahead and download the Qt SDK for Windows or whatever you're using. You're pretty hefty size. Read the fine print if you really want to. There is a Visual Studio add-in. I've never used this. I've never really had a chance to really get with it. But if you love with Visual Studio, use the add-in by all means. I personally like the Qt Creator IDE. And the source code is fully available. So you can actually download the full source code for Qt Creator or any of the Qt products. So go ahead and download that. And once you get it installed, here's Qt Creator. And notice we are using version 2.0.1. I kind of apologize for the little cramped screen. I have to make these videos kind of small in order to upload them. I'll give you a very quick tour of those. Here's the welcome window. And it comes with a ton of examples. I mean, a massive amount of examples. And there's even more examples online. It comes with tip of the day. You can go back and forth. Here's the editor we'll get into. This is where your projects would be. Your open documents. And here's where your source code will be. We haven't opened anything. Design. You can actually design your own windows. It's actually very neat. Debugging, help screens. The help is actually very, very good. A lot of people even question buying a book because you have full tutorials, full everything right here in the IDE. It's a very robust system. And then you've got debugging and compilation and all sorts of stuff, build issues, searches. I mean, you name it. This IDE does just about everything you need. So for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to be using Qt Creator version 2.01. So this is Brian. I thank you for watching. I hope you found this video educational and entertaining. And I look forward to going over this topic with you.