title: Best Practices for "Cross-Platform" Development with Qt
body: <p>According to <a href="http://qt.nokia.com" rel="noreferrer">qt.nokia.com</a>, Qt is a "cross-platform application and UI framework", allowing you to "write code once to target multiple platforms".  The Qt SDK is a "complete development environment" containing "the tools you need to build cross-platform applications with Qt in a single install".  Qt Creator is a "cross-platform IDE" that "runs on Windows, Linux/X11, and Mac OS X desktop operating systems, and allows developers to create applications for multiple desktop and mobile device platforms."</p>
  
  <p>The magic words "cross compilation" are not mentioned explicitly those website blurbs.  Nevertheless, a naive reader might be forgiven for inferring that you can download the Qt SDK (including Qt Creator) for whatever host system you are using for development, create a project, and write some code from which you could <em>easily</em> generate executables for Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.  By "easily" I have in mind something like ticking some checkboxes in a build settings dialog, and pressing the "Build" button.</p>
  
  <p>I'm still looking for those checkboxes!  Meanwhile, I have found various posts, here and elsewhere, about installing a cross-compiler, installing additional binaries, rewriting your qmake file, etc. From the marketing, I sort of expected that cross-compilation would already be fully and directly supported with an "out-of-the-box" installation of the IDE and SDK tools. Am I missing something obvious?</p>
  
  <p>If not, I have development machines available with all three operating systems. Should I just install Qt Creator on all three platforms?  If I do that, can I expect to be able to take a Qt project (or maybe just the source code) that I have developed using Qt Creator for, say, Windows, copy it over to my Mac or Linux machine, and build it there using the version of Qt Creator for that platform, without running into some major issues?  Might that even be the best practice for using Qt to create executables for mutiple platforms, vs. installing cross-compilation tools on a single development host?</p>