Very new Qt user (couple of questions at end of message)

[profoX]

I wasn't that keen on Qt because I had heard about the need to write impure C++ that gets run through a processor before the compiler sees it. The use of macros and global variables dissuaded me too.

It's a necessary trade-off for cool things like introspection. The preprocessor (meta-object compiler) works great. Don't be scared of it

I was surprised to see the tr() function wrapping a string literal. For internationalisation I would've expected to see an integral value referencing an entry in a string table. I'm keen to see how the i18n works. Can anyone tell me in a nutshell?

You'll often use Qt Linguist to create the actual translations. Qt Linguist will extract all the tr() (and some other to-be-translated strings like strings in your .ui files) and give you an interface for translating your apps. Linguist is quite useful. It automatically detects which strings have changed or were added at a later time, for example. It also matches your wording to previous strings. Translations also support arguments etc. See the Linguist manual for more info - it is a very complete manual http://doc.trolltech.com/4.5/linguist-manual.html

My application will be using a number of double-buffered OpenGL windows. I've seen there's a number of OpenGL examples. What essentially needs to be done to make a window drawable with OpenGL?

You basically just have to create a widget which inherits from QGLWidget, and that's it OpenGL initialization should then take place in a reimplemented initGL() function and painting should happen in a reimplemented paintGL() function - although you can also do very cool stuff like mix QPainter's 2D painting API with OpenGL and render it all with OpenGL acceleration (see the overpainting example) or use the QGraphicsView with a QGLWidget viewport to render it all in OpenGL automatically. Qt provides very advanced features for these kinds of things actually -- it also just so happens that I started porting the NeHe tutorials to Qt 4, so if you want to see how to start with OpenGL stuff in Qt, you could take a look at it if you want - http://wesley.vidiqatch.org/03-08-20...apter-1-and-2/