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Archive for January, 2011

Apple OSX App Store and Qt Applications

January 12th, 2011 Comments off
Mac OSX App StoreIf you use Qt to build your application for Mac OSX – you must have heard about the new OSX App Store that just opened in January, 2011.
The App store resembles the app store used for iOS devices hoping to bring the similar, streamlined experience, to the end-user. For us developers – this is great news … as long as we make our software so it doesn’t break the rules that Apple set forth.
In particular, there are certain steps one needs to perform to create a package compatible for submission to the app store and the application itself needs to follow certain guidelines. Files cannot be written to certain folders, UI must have a consistent OSX look and so on …
We are not sure yet what that means for Qt based applications, but we are willing to give it a shot.
Our music notation product – Scorecerer has a desktop application that is built on top of Qt and it runs on OSX and Windows. We have built a free version of Scorecerer (Scorecerer Lite) and submitted it to the OSX app store. We are still waiting for the verdict and will soon know if Qt applications can or cannot be included in the OSX app store.
There seems to be a big debate going on in various forums, but most seem to simply speculate and paint Apple as “evil” without even trying to submit their app. Once we have the verdict – we will share it here with you so you will know for sure.
If Scorecerer Lite gets approved and published on the OSX app store – I will post the exact steps on how to prepare and submit your Qt app to the app store. Make sure you check our blog often for the latest news on this.
In the meantime we can only wait and hope that Qt libraries themselves do not break some of the Apple’s rules.
UPDATE: Today we got a rejection email from Apple. The list of reasons is long and we could address most of the issues, but there is one related to Qt itself
The application is creating files or writing to the following locations:
~/Library/Preferences/com.trolltech.plist
This is obviously done by Qt itself and as long as it is there – we will not be able to submit to the app store. We will try to see if there is a solution to this problem, but in the mean time – your Qt application will be rejected because of this!
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