State of Qt Creator and Qt in general
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Hi, is it just me or does it seem that the current state of Qt and Qt Creator is some sort of lo-fi version of what it used to be?
Qt Creator now has crappy graphics, and looks really messy on a standard Ubuntu install.
Not to talk about the project site and download page. That things would stall a bit ok, but why the drop in quality?Sorry, I'm just a bit disappointed the way things seem to go.
Would like to know your opinion or if it's just me.
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The past few months Creator did change significantly, and I suspect the main reason for this is the usage of QML - not only did text rendering change for the worse, but also the responsiveness of the application - I guess to most users will midrange systems it will not make that much of a difference, but I have a very high end machine and I am used to everything being snappy and quick, and the last few iterations of Creator are anything but snappy, there are a few cases where it literally hangs for a while, when first starting it, and when opening a project - the older versions were much less laggy.
And I am sure plenty of users will deny to have such problems, but let me remind that personal standards are relative and vary, the hanging I speak of will not be that obvious to people who consider such things to be normal.
Visual studio is a much, much larger and heavier application yet it is much more responsive. Who knows, maybe Creator doesn't get a long with powerful workstations... Or maybe it is the interpreting and binding of QML that is to blame...
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@utcenter thanks I figured the same, so I'm not paraniod. ;-) At the moment I even think about reinstalling the Nokia SDK.
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[quote author="utcenter" date="1358448199"]...[/quote]You do know that QtCreator is based on QtWidgets, not QtQuick, don't you?
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Have you tried the Qt Creator 2.6.1 stand-alone packages? Those are still build against Qt 4 and thus are a great way to check whether something is an issue in Creator or in Qt 5:-) Unfortunately there are some rather annoying issues in Qt 5.0.0 (e.g. the UI freezing on X11 in some hard to reproduce conditions). This is annoying, but I kind of expect some quirks to lurk in x.0.0 releases and I am confident that most of the really annoying issues will be fixed in Qt 5.0.1.
I really doubt that you can blame any of your issues on Qt Quick... Creator is -- with the exception of the welcome screen -- a pure Qt Widgets application.
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[quote author="Lukas Geyer" date="1358450633"][quote author="utcenter" date="1358448199"]...[/quote]You do know that QtCreator is based on QtWidgets, not QtQuick, don't you?
[/quote]
Based does not mean exclusively using, does it?
As I said, the previous version of Creator were very responsive, the glitches coincided with the implementation of the new "introductory menu", which if I am not mistaken is indeed QML.
And I can't tell for sure if it IS the cause, it just happened about the same time, maybe it is just a coincidence, I am not intimately familiar with the changes in Creator that are not visible on the surface, like the QML additions.
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utcenter: Go to Tools>Plugins and disable the welcome screen and you are back to the pure Qt Widget experience:-) Actually the QML designer might still get loaded and that one has some QML in it, too... so also disable anything QML related. I doubt you are going to use that anytime soon. Afterwards nothing should drag QML into your computer's memory.
I would really appreciate if you could take the time to try out a creator build against Qt 4, with the standalone packages being the easiest way to get one.
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Actually I am currently working to abstract logic so it can be used in QML, I never swore to never use QML and will likely begin using it in production. There is this misconception I am a QML hater, which our dear friend Lukas worked hard to establish, by in the majority of my cases, QML is a nice fit to my requirements. I am not against QML and I will use it as a front end to some of my apps, I am against neglecting C++ and the modern GUI capabilities of the native API in favor of QML.
I take it that you don't have this problem where Creator freezes for 4-5 seconds when you open a project? Because I have it, on a 4.5Ghz i7 3770k with 16 gigs of ram and a 520 mb\sec SSD. There is plenty of memory to spare, my guess is that loading/interpreting/JITting/binding is to blame.
I will try to disable the welcome screen and the designer, I don't use both anyway. BTW the funky fonts are only on the welcome screen, the rest of the UI is just fine e.g. the QWidget part ;)
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I must have misread your post then (I got the impression that you consider that QtCreator is based on QtQuick now and this is the cause for the performance and stability problems; my response was indeed equally clumsily worded).
I honestly still fail to see how the Welcome plugin (or the Designer), or rather the use of QtQuick in there, should cause this kind of problems (apart from the broken font rendering), but I'm intrigued to see if it actually does (and why).
~On a sidenote: I actually don't know why you in particular obviously feel offended repeatedly, but be certain this is inadvertent. Noone has the intention to discredit you, and I haven't done anything in this regard. We disagree, not out of a motivation, but out of a different opinion or knowledge. So I ask you to stop alleging this argument, because it is simply untrue. If you feel wronged or a further need for discussion please "contact":http://qt-project.org/email/11813 me.~
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utcenter: It does freeze for a moment when opening Qmake projects for me, too, while parsing the project data. How long it freezes depends on the project size.
I agree that it should not do so, but I would not call that a critical issue. That it does the same thing repeatedly when editing settings in Project mode is much more annoying to me and I keep poking my coworker to finally fix that;-)
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[quote author="Tobias Hunger" date="1358497467"]... I keep poking my coworker to finally fix that;-)[/quote]As you are poking anyway - do you mind poking for "QTCREATORBUG-8320":https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTCREATORBUG-8320 as well - or at least tell me how I can help? This can be quite nasty now and then. ;-)
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The bug is assigned to somebody able to handle it, I'll poke him when I am in the office the next time.
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What I meant was more about the esthetics...
!http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/8971/screenshotqtcreator.png(Qt Creator: before - after)! -
Just offload parsing to another thread, how hard could it be? And while on the subject - using a dark theme makes the code folding icons really hard to see. And the lightbulb that appears when a method's parameters are being changed is a little too small and hard to click on, and if you miss it, it disappears instantaneously, shouldn't that like... stay for as long as the declaration and definition are different?
I disabled the welcome screen - there is a slight improvement in startup, but the synchronous parsing still takes its toll upon project loading or even starting a blank one.
On a side note, recently I encountered abysmal UI performance in 3DS MAX, turns out the very same thread does the 3D rendering and GUI rendering, so the moment you have a more complex project and frame rates drop to below 1, the entire UI and thus the entire application becomes unusable. To think in the year of 2013 an industry leading software company would know better...
And @Lukas - don't worry you haven't offended me the slightest, you were never offensive, just irritating ;)