Qt/Mac is Mac OS X Native

Aqua

This is a critical piece of Mac OS X (documentation can be found at http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html). It is a huge topic, but the most important guidelines for GUI design are probably these:

• Aqua look

  As with Cocoa/Carbon, Qt/Mac provides widgets that look like those described in the Human Interface Descriptions. Qt/Mac's widgets use Appearance Manager on Mac OS X 10.2 and the new HIThemes on Mac OS X 10.3 and higher to implement the look, in other words we use Apple's own API's for doing the rendering.

• Aqua feel

  This is a bit more subjective, but certainly Qt/Mac strives to provide the same feel as any Mac OS X application (and we consider situations where it doesn't achieve this to be bugs). Of course Qt has other concerns to bear in mind, especially remaining cross-platform. Some "baggage" that Qt carries is in an effort to provide a widget on a platform for which an equivelant doesn't exist, or so that a single API can be used to do something, even if the API doesn't make entire sense for a specific widget.

• Aqua guides

  This is the most subjective, but there are many suggestions and guidelines in the Aqua style guidelines. This is the area where Qt/Mac is of least assistance. The decisions that must be made to conform (widget sizes, widget layouts with respect to other widgets, window margins, placement of OK and Cancel, etc) must be made based on the user experience demanded by your application. If your user base is small or mostly comes from the Windows or Unix worlds, these are minor issues much less important than trying to make a mass market product. Qt/Mac is fully API compatible with Qt/Windows and Qt/X11, but Mac OS X is a significantly different platform to Windows and some special considerations must be made based on your audience.

    qmake -spec macx-xcode project.pro