Two things have repeatedly made Qt harder to suggest: licensing confusion and the lack of an obvious first development environment. Qt 4.5 improved both.

Qt is now available under the LGPL as well as its existing licenses. That gives more applications a straightforward way to use the library while keeping their own licensing choices, provided they comply with the LGPL’s requirements. It is not a declaration that licenses no longer need reading. It merely makes the common case less theatrical.

Qt Creator 1.0 supplies the other missing front door. It understands Qt projects, code navigation, building and debugging without trying to become an operating system disguised as an editor. I opened an existing project and was productive quickly, despite initially searching for several commands where my usual editor keeps them.

Creator is still young, and experienced users with carefully constructed environments may not gain much. I am not abandoning my editor after one pleasant afternoon. For newcomers, however, a focused tool removes a pile of setup from the first experiment.

I strongly prefer this combination: a capable cross-platform toolkit with a less restrictive entry point and an IDE that teaches its normal workflow. Neither guarantees good applications. They simply let people reach the part where application design can go wrong, which is where programmers traditionally demonstrate real creativity.